The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (30 page)

Burbage and Heminges frown over Brakenbury’s speech.

‘I can’t make much of him,’ Heminges says.

‘“Princes have but their titles for their glories,

An outward honour for an inward toil;

And, for unfelt imaginations,

They often feel a world of restless cares:

So that, betwixt their titles and low names,

There’s nothing differs but the outward fame.”

‘It’s merely an obliging sentiment on behalf of royalties.’

‘To be sure it is,’ Will says. ‘We want to perform at Court, don’t we? And always be first there? So, I put in something that will please. Grant you, it’s a pudding principle. But think you this – Brakenbury may in truth be like Richard: acting, all the time.’ He remembers Jack Towne deep in ale, himself hanging young and aching on his words. ‘Like all of us.’

He writes the wooing scene again, and again: it’s a disaster and they postpone rehearsal, filling out the later acts. But it has to be done.

A hard thing to carry, all agree: for the lady Anne to be wooed by a man who killed her loved ones, to go from hate to love. The boy-actor struggles.

‘Stage-minutes,’ Will says. ‘The audience knows they are not as real minutes. We make them forget how time works. In truth the wooing would be over a stretch of time, it would be sewn in with other things, but in a play we must forgo. And in that there’s a sort of truth. Have you been in love?’ The boy shakes his head, awkward; but he is sixteen, he must have been. ‘When you fell in love, there was no one moment when it happened. And that is true of the most poetical love that ever struck a man all of a heap. For there is no such thing as a moment. Call it a second, or an instant, if you like. Now cut it in half – for there is naught in creation so small it cannot be divided. So now the moment is two – so which was the moment of love? Both, part one, part t’other? It can’t be. A moment exists only when we look back at it. All in the heart and mind is flux and process, so it hardly signifies which moment we show in how the lady changes, so long as it convinces.’

‘And that’s just it,’ says Heminges, kind, tactful, right. ‘It doesn’t convince.’

‘Anyone would suppose, Will,’ says Burbage, not always tactful, ‘that
you
’ve never loved – or else you’ve forgot it.’

‘Give me half an hour.’

He works furiously in the next-door tavern. Comes back with the sheets still ink-wet.

‘“Your beauty was the cause of that effect;

Your beauty: which did haunt me in my sleep

To undertake the death of all the world,

So might I live one hour in your sweet bosom.”’

Better, better. Burbage makes it throb. Looks quizzically at Will. ‘A pretty question it raises – if a man can speak so beautifully when feigning, how may we tell a true lover?’

A pretty question, about what means the true, the real. The things Will is trying to make, as he thinks and works and writes, eating, going to stool, giving his laundry to the washerwoman to take down to Thames-side.

‘What do you look at, sir?’

‘Your pardon – your hands, they must pain you.’

‘Nay, not now. The lee-soap does that, you see.’ She chuckles, stretching the red porcine fingers. ‘Makes the clothes good but mars me.’

Nashe, looking over his shoulder in the Mermaid. ‘Why do you write so fast?’

‘To stop myself feeling sick.’

‘What you write turns you sick?’

‘The fact of it.’ His script is crabbed, the pen is never easy in his hand.

‘And when it’s acted?’

‘Oh, then it will be no longer mine. Thank God.’

The Lady Anne is wooed.

‘“Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears.”’

The boy-actor responds to it well, melting, torn. ‘“I would I knew thy heart.” Now she is truly feeling, yes?’

‘Yes,’ says Will. That is to say, she is acting what she feels.

Create the real. The wood where he and Anne came together, that was real: yet also they created it. Where is that wood now? Existing in some moment or half-moment? Nothing that is made can ever cease to be.

Will goes to see Gilbert. Fond, dutiful, but bored. In the kitchen Gilbert spits into the fire and talks of prices. Upstairs an Italian merchant is calling on Gilbert’s master and lamenting long and beautifully a shipment of rare cloths lost at sea. I see them, in my dreams I see them go down and down. Will thinks of his work, of his Richard, like a little secret thought of a lover: thinks of Clarence’s dream.
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wracks; A thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon.
‘Aye, I tell thee, Will, another poor harvest and we are done for.’
Some lay in dead men’s skulls …

Home, sleeping, drowning in dream, he wakes to the sound of the watch crying the hour – or is it someone crying murder, murder? Or a gallant in jest, rapping his sword on the floors of rooms built crutched over the street? Oh, to be a lively capering self, taking on all the world, a Richard uncurbed. He suddenly remembers Wilson, his enemy in the Queen’s Men, muttering one day, ‘Ah, the gentle-Shakespeare act.’ If we only knew about each other. ‘Leave the world for me to bustle in,’ says Richard. And walking home from the theatre, with patterns in his mind echoing the patterns of lighted windows, Will lets himself think of everyone in the city, in the world, taking sick and dying. All dead. Now you could go in all these, rummage, know all of people’s lives. And how many, in truth, would you manage to pity?

‘He does these things,’ Will says, looking over Burbage’s costume, ‘because he can. He has a mind to imagine, and leaps after it. Such is humanity. What have we mortals ever thought of that we have refrained to try out? Torture engines. Never a one that man’s mind has balked at and said, “I have thought of this, but dare not build, or put it to use.” Put yourself in killing mood, my Rick. “Well, I’ll go hide the body in some hole.”’

‘Regular, there, your murderers are eloquent in their verse.’ Burbage turns over the crumpled pages of his part one last nervous time, fiddles with his wig. ‘You know they will not applaud your parade of ghosts, Will.’

‘Who?’

‘The high critical sort. The sort to cry down your learning, to lament the profuse lines too gorgeous dressed, to cry balance, sir, decorum, think o’ the ancients.’

‘Then I’ll take the applause of others. Won’t you?’

Burbage booms a laugh, cuffing him. ‘Your Richard is the very devil, and I love him.’

Is he, Will demands of himself, alive? That’s all. In the first performance of
Richard III,
his own proud, shameful, desperate work, Will plays King Edward, one of his typical parts – noble, a little ineffectual, soon leaving the stage to the vitality of wicked Crookback. Alive, that’s all that matters, alive as these people in the audience cracking nuts and peeping over shoulders, ugly, handsome, infinite. They don’t gape as they do at a Marlowe play: they look as if they are at home, forgetting where they are, on the edge of the bed just woken, themselves.

Richard – his king, his play, his man – is a triumph. They laugh and weep and shout: they palpitate with the story to its headlong conclusion. They do what the thing did to him when it went through him, and which is now only an odd dead echo of a sensation.

‘Ha, we stormed them, Lord, we conquered, what think you?’ cries Burbage afterwards, hump coming undone, clapping his great hands. Will is trembling and thinking … well, thinking of the next one. He pats Burbage’s back – and indubitably solid and fleshy as Burbage is, still the man seems a little less real now: a little less of him. The first indication that magic thins out the world. That this has a cost.

*   *   *

It begins with the plague.

Where the plague begins no one knows, though there are plenty of opinions. It is a miasma that settles from the upper air, having its origin in malign stars. It is brewed up by the villainous poor, living filthily hugger-mugger like and with pigs. It comes as a righteous punishment for greed, sin, luxury. For being Protestant. For being insufficiently Protestant.

Sometimes it goes away for years. Then it rises up suddenly and starts lopping lives, like a boy swiping dandelion-heads. London worst, but anywhere. A town is going quietly along, then it is burying a tenth of its population.

Anne: she can remember clearly the outbreak in Stratford when she was a girl. Her father stayed away from the town, even though he needed to send goods to market. Better lose money than bring that here. He urged Anne to pray for the poor souls of Stratford. She did, but she was frightened too; and she prayed that the poor souls of Stratford keep away from her. Bartholomew, she remembers, did a horrible imitation of a plague victim, staring and drooling. He said it sent them mad as well as making their flesh rot, and they were likely to seize you and kiss your lips so you would take the contagion. Only much later does she realise that the year of the Stratford plague was the year Will was born. His survival was then against the odds, which must mean something.

Will home – sun, and plague, earlier this time – but then she has stopped counting the summers now. He managed to visit in Lent too, but it’s not that. Counting suggests counting down, a tally to be struck across: some limit. But Will the London player, the part-husband, that is the reality.

There have been plenty of beautiful times. The arrival, that is always one, with the children cascading through the house at the first sound of his voice. Presents for them. Always presents. And then simpler moments like the first meal together. Even simpler, walking through the town with him, arm in arm, in the evening quiet, the sound of their footsteps on the bridge, honk and drabbling splash of waterfowl. Talking. Seeing him wash the travel off with pump and pail. You could still count his ribs.

It’s just this – knowing that coming home is part of his working life. Like rehearsing. (Like the writing he does when he is here, the making of plays, this new refinement of his career that baffles her more than anything in its silence, its remoteness from her, for he won’t talk of it except to say, ‘Yes, I turn my hand to it.’ And yet, good God, how it is filling the money-box.) It’s knowing that he’s home early this time because there’s plague in London; theatres closed because of it, and no tour ready yet. Not here because he just wanted to come home. Anne smiles; but behind it a feeling like a hailstorm, so hard grainy pelting it could brain you. Luckily hail never lasts above a minute or two, and melts as if it has never been.

*   *   *

It begins with plague; which begins with headache and chills and fever and, oh, God, the light, take that light away. Before the swellings in the armpits and groin, the suppuration, the bleeding from within. It begins with warning red crosses on house doors, the carrying of red wands in the streets: to say, it’s here. Perhaps it will falter and sputter, kill half a parish-worth, fizzle out. But no. This is a strong, lusty outbreak, a charioted Tamburlaine of sickness. By June the playhouses are ordered to close, because they spread infection, though the city fathers would love to see them like this permanently.

Choices for the players and the theatre people, some more stark than others. ‘They’ll keep them shut till Michaelmas,’ Richard Burbage says to Will. They are spending the afternoon at a bowling-green in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Probably these places will be closed too, soon. ‘Early to mount a tour, and then we must hope the country won’t turn sick of acting companies, as we’re all like to be out there.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Bugger. That’s a villainous shot, look at that rub. Oh, I’ll see what Father says. We’ll find something to do – the Theatre needs repairing and cleaning. What about you? Well, you’ve your family in the country, I know. Look you, I shan’t mind if you tour with Alleyn. If you can stand being on stage with the great bag o’ wind then luck be with you, man, that’s all.’

‘Home it will be. I’m never quite easy with either Henslowe or his crown prince, and besides…’ Will lets the thought go with the bowl, trundling away, to end where it will. ‘You know, there’s room in the theatres for you and Alleyn.’

‘I prefer to think not. A little competition, a little whiff of the adversarial, makes a man a better actor. Come, what’s amiss? Art afraid they’ll forget thee?’ Burbage claps his shoulder, making Will stagger. ‘Love thee no more?’

‘Who?’

‘Why, the public, who else? It’s poor luck to be sure, a closure just when your name on the bills is tickling the audiences. But the other poets will be silent perforce too, hirelings and grandees alike. The crowd will come back for you when the flag goes up again.’

‘Oh, the public.’ Will smiles, or feels his lips doing it. ‘I don’t fear them. They don’t know me.’

‘Write me another Richard,’ Burbage says, with sudden urgency, squeezing Will’s arm. ‘Christ, man, what we made of your Crookback was something worth. Bating flattery, Will, there’s your golden vein, you please all about, the men and the women and the high and the mere. No more of your
Titus,
please you – not that it won’t go: it’s the prettiest piece of bloody Seneca that was ever carved reeking off the joint, but I only get to speechify.’

‘Another Richard? We’ve brought the Roses down to the Tudors.’

‘Nay, leave off the history now, if you will. Tap your vein of beauty. Tender and true, to make ’em weep. But it must be an actor’s piece and a crowd piece likewise, look you. Have an eye to what Marlowe’s about. Still waxing heroical? He turned his last piece after your example, I swear.’

‘Now you do flatter,’ says Will, grimly.

Where is Marlowe? Tom Nashe isn’t sure. Earlier this year he was abroad. Flanders, they say: arrested and sent back, they say – or is that what they want you to think? Certainly he has been in London lately, because he was bound over by Shoreditch constables to keep the peace. As ever Will wants to gobble up news of Marlowe and to spit it out. When Nashe said Marlowe came to hear
Richard III,
Will refused to believe him. ‘You are too sweet and gentle, William, or perhaps too happily secure in your triumph, to remark you proved me wrong.’ For he and Nashe worked together on a first draft of
Henry VI,
but Nashe extricated himself after one act. He couldn’t flourish, he said, shut in this historical paddock. It’s a space, Will said: that was all he wanted. As for Marlowe now, he may have gone out to the country as so many are doing, because of the plague.