The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (31 page)

This is how it begins: the great houses of the nobles with the gated gardens down to the river shut up, the deer lifting their heads in St James’s Park unmolested. Doctors stalk about in long gowns and conical masks filled with rue and bergamot, looking like great spectral birds: not many, though. They prescribe the treacle medicine made of viper’s flesh, vinegar, wormwood, but people keep dying; small wonder if they turn instead to drinking their own urine, to prayer. Or to blaming the foreigners. Yes: that will begin soon.

Will prepares to go home too. He has money, and so a breathing space. Because his clutch of plays have worked. Emulation, imitation, exultation. Knowing what he was doing and not knowing what he was doing. Why not? A player not a sniffing scholar. He stopped worrying about sounding like others when he realised there is no such thing as originality, except the originality that comes from synthesis. It all went in.

But he is more troubled by the interruption than he gives away to Burbage or Nashe, because he has just found himself and found a way, and now the gates are closing, for how long…? And he’s afraid he can’t go back to the person he was before his work became acceptable: the sheets pawed over, the nod, yes, it will serve, the heavy pouch in his hand, and then it was
your
words cutting and floating on the cool afternoon air before the ringing rockery of faces.

He hates it, hearing his words. He wants to run away and scream and hide. His fluency in writing is deceptive. Really he is running over the lines like a man running over a pit of coals. Only swiftness prevents the torture. Yet in words he is home and self and free as nowhere else, and sometimes getting up from the desk he cannot for a moment adjust to the world being physical and not made by him, and he wobbles, as if his legs are turning to phrases and his feet to metaphors. But hate or not he is caught. Essentially he would give plays under the sea or on the moon if there were a way, rather than not do this, be this Will any more. He is all made of steel about it. Yet loving too. Hot and fierce-handed for what he does, in London.

Home, then. He is accustomed to travel now – the long hours in the saddle, the impossibility of impatience on muddy or dusty roads, the fellow journeyers falling in with you, and how you spotted the ones who would be tolerable or a menace. At some point on the way he leaves behind the Will who exists in London, becomes the one who belongs to Stratford. Fancy a post by the road, a stone, this marks the spot. He shouldn’t think this way. It suggests splitting, damage, and he won’t believe that. Useful lesson in humility in it anyhow. Along this road he is just another mark for innkeepers, possibly highway robbers, especially now his clothes sing out a little his growing wealth. Where he comes from – meaning London – he is turning into a name: a public figure, in a small way. A person attracting dislike, envy, even hate.

How he recoiled from that. I shall never, he thought, get used to it. On first hearing the attack on him from a fellow poet, he felt himself inside leap back high in the air like a cat touched by surprise, fizzing, arched.

‘Oh, it’s not just you,’ said Nashe, who told him. ‘He has pitched into Marlowe too. And eke your humble servant who has ever accounted himself Robert Greene’s friend, since we were at Cambridge. But, there, what would you have? We go before the public, my friend, you upon the stage, I in print.’ (Nashe is fecund now in pamphlets and satires; anything odd, sharp-edged, provocative is likely his.) ‘We all stand up to be hit.’

‘I’m not happy about those either but, yes, I’m a son of Adam, my saltest tears are for my own woes, and it’s what he says about me that I resent. Have I met him, that he can traduce me as if he knows me? I’ve read some of his love-tales, but I don’t recall the man.’

‘We may have been in company together. You’d remember the look of him. Pointed red beard and most curious pointed red hair, you might fix his head up either way. But you’re not likely to have been in his company of late. Oh, Greene made a show of it at first, you know, like Marlowe multiplied – gambling, wenching, drinking. He found them a flavourful curiosity, these whores and rogues, and then at last it was as if they had fixed his taste, like a man dining every day on hot mustard and radish. And he has been writing every moment since university, in every mode and manner – writing for his bread. So he seldom speaks – shall I say? –
measured.
’

Players are a low, impudent set, was what he heard Robert Greene was giving out, and it was a shame when a gentleman had to lower himself to write for their capabilities, but at least it was done gentlemanly. Now you have a beggarly player like this Shakespeare taking the play-making out of their hands, copying their style, imitating their methods, garnering the applause for his second-hand glories. It was reported to Will thus from several sides. Bad things said about you never fall into abeyance: they are dropped letters that people are eager to pick up and pass on to the right place.

It stung; it stings him still in memory as he rides the Oxford road with half an ear for the garrulous old man at his side anecdotally reliving his youth, the scampish affair that old men’s youth always is.

In essence, Greene has said: You shouldn’t be here, doing this. Thou art a wrong thing in a wrong place, doing wrong. It beat at his temples, thinking of it: drummed like a confirmation of something.

Nashe excused and temporised. Marlowe, if he knew of it, would surely either laugh or reach for his sword. As for Will, he went to see Robert Greene.

Why? His scalp prickles with shame or embarrassment to think of it, but he was sure he walked down that Dowgate alley, in wharf-side stink, telling himself: I will make him like me, love me. The greatest of all defeat.

He kept thinking of Jacqueline Vautrollier – as she was then – issuing her simple invitation, among the innocent flowering plants. Temptation: surely it didn’t have to lead to this, to peeling, fish-head squalor. Greene had left his wife after he’d spent all her money, Nashe said, and set up with a mistress, Em Ball, sister of the notorious thief ‘Cutting’ Ball – rumoured to act as Greene’s bodyguard against the fellow writers he offended. There is a son of the liaison, a little boy called Fortunatus – call him Unfortunatus, Nashe said. Nashe loves words more than anything.

It was all so unreal. Cutting Ball. The bleak chamber above a shoemaker’s, where Greene received him reeking of wine and rotten guts, dressed in the remnants of a good set of clothes – except hose, showing, uncaring, bare, fleshless legs between breeches and shoes. And that wild red peak of hair and beard. Grief does not sit well on the redhead, or privation. Greene’s pale eyes looked as if flesh had been rubbed away to reveal the holes in him, his life, soul. There was nothing in the room but a couple of stools, a bottle, and paper. He was writing, writing crosswise on the back of bills and inventories. He did not appear surprised to see Will.

‘I can’t offer you anything. Nor would I, naturally.’ A glance at Will’s clothes. ‘My need is greater, a grating need indeed.’ Will flinched from his breath. ‘My apologies for the noxious mephitis: dying, thou know’st.’

Will glanced around helplessly.

‘Starving, no. I do eat. My landlady has a tenderness for me and brings soups and stews. But nothing stays in, and no flesh accumulates, hence my fair conviction that belling death is on my traces. But don’t let that stop you, lay on, you’re Shakespeare, after all, and have a good proper grudge. I’ve seen you play. We met once at Henslowe’s, but you didn’t take any notice of me, you were busy being flattered by someone. Sweet Master Shakespeare. You see, I’m piling it up so you can strike at me and get it over, for I’ve a lot of work to do. A play, ’midst other things, aye, I’m trying ’em too, though with what chance against you I misdoubt. Sir Crowd-pleaser. It can’t be right, you come along, supply yourself with some plain roast and boiled blank verse, a dash of Marlowe spice, and serve it up—’ Suddenly Greene was on his knees, retching into the fireplace. The stuff coming up was an unthinkable colour. ‘Your pardon. My bile punished with bile.’

‘I didn’t come here to strike.’

Greene wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘Why, then? To crow?’

‘For God’s sake, it’s not a contest. To ask you why you defame me. When I haven’t injured you. When I haven’t—’

‘Oh, it is a contest, as you well know.’ Greene chuckled, phlegm-cackling, struggling to his feet. ‘Why? Does it matter? I fucking envy you. Look at me, look at you. I’ve been writing for ten years, yards and yards of print, most indifferent, some indifferent good. I grind it out from the millstones of my brain for the printer, quick sale and forgot and then another. I’ve tried for the high style and the hand of a noble patron to lift me, one step, two, where it’s not so easy to fall back into the mire, everything I’ve done to be heard. We want to be heard, yes? And you – you are heard. And it hasn’t
cost
you anything. Sweet Master Shakespeare, he goes home to his loving family come Lent or summer in the sweet-smelling country where the sweet showers fall.’ Greene laughed. ‘Now that’s enough to make me sick again.’

‘You had a wife, they say. You were well married.’

‘Aye, and deserted her, sent her into Lincolnshire while I whored. What then?’

Will shrugged. ‘So does that make a man a poet? Throw everything in the dust to hold tight to one dark thing? One self? Is that how you see it?’

‘Me, Shakespeare, I’m going to die,’ Greene said, with sudden quiet weariness. ‘I just wonder – when are you going to live?’

(But the youth of today, the old man riding at his side complains, are a standing shame, nothing but fighting and getting wenches with child and wronging the ancientry.)

‘Soft.’ Greene came after Will on his way to the door. ‘Your hand, there. Would you believe, Shakespeare, I wish you well? For I do.’ His drained eyes searched Will. ‘But just this. Hark. Luck is a debt. Luck has to be paid for.’

When Will left, the alley was bright with sunlight, and bright horror, he knows, is quite the worst, like the dead cat he saw in the gutter, with another cat, very alive, contentedly eating its insides. Superb sunlit sheen on everything: sleek fur, pearly intestines.

Drag hence her husband to some secret hole, And make his dead trunk pillow to our lust.
His mind was all large white space as he wrote it, and as he wrote one-handed Titus cutting the brothers’ throats, with tongueless, handless Lavinia holding a basin between her stumps to catch the blood: kind light bathed the page and somewhere in the next house a man and a woman were singing to the lute, so sweetly.

When you make a play strong, you make the world a little less so. Terrible suspicion, that power is the best thing there is.

He is crossing Clopton Bridge, leading the drooping horse; he is almost home. Next he will see Edmund, for wherever he is, his young brother is always the first to greet Will, seeming to possess the ears of a hound. Here he comes, running full pelt from the other end of Henley Street. Twelve now, and more well grown than any of them at that age, broad across the shoulders, boy’s fairness darkening.

‘Brother, my sweet brother Will, thank the kind heaven that has sent thee,’ he says.

‘Your best yet,’ Will says, and they laugh. Every time, Edmund greets him with a poetical absurdity: their little joke ritual. As he goes on to gabble out a hundred things he has been doing, Will hears a reed in Edmund’s voice as if it is close to breaking: very early. Some boy-actors keep their unbroken voice until eighteen, thankfully. They play women better older, even if the stubble has to be masked … Very much a boy, though, the way he skips sideways beside Will. All this vitality. As if his parents had handed some final energy to this their last offspring. Father especially: the same fine looks, strong bones. Unfortunate that everything in Edmund’s personality seems to grate on his father. Unfortunatus. Too much of Will in him, perhaps. Loves a tale or a verse, and hangs on his every word about the theatre. Though Will tries not to talk about it too much, here, on the other side of the border.

‘Anne.’

She screws up her eyes as he steps, reminding himself to duck, from the dazzled street to woody indoors. They embrace, for a goodish time. This is always in a way the easy part. Missing each other, reaffirming love: an imperative as if they have just survived an accident, darted – as Will did once in London – from the sudden fall of a chimney. Later it may be difficult, the complex simple business of being husband and wife, but not now. Now there are the children. They come running. It occurs to him that they would do this for a favourite uncle. Quickly he presses the presents on them, trying again not to be surprised at their growth, their rampant life without him.

He is easiest with the girls. Susannah is getting on for ten with all her mother’s fresh rare field-flower beauty lying ready for her. She is a lady and thinks her father, like most men, an agreeable blunderer. Of the seven-year-old twins Judith seems, as it were, the least twin-like – greedy, careless, taking for granted the indulgence of the littlest. But Hamnet: his great blue eyes seem to see so much, they seem even to ache as if they let too much light in. And Hamnet is not happy with dashed explanations, the things said to a child as you might grab an apple from the store and thrust it into their hand, here. But where is the Quineys’ pig? Dead. How dead? They killed it. How killed it? But the details he wants disgust him. And last year there was the awful moment when he came in to find Will new arrived, still cloaked and grimed, beard untrimmed, hugging the others and then turning to open his arms, and Hamnet burst into tears, ran away, crying, ‘Who’s that man, I don’t know that man…’

Suspicion – terrible, about your own child! – that Hamnet was feigning it a little, for effect, for – what? Well, it was his grandfather he ran to, his favourite. He was like him in his desire for certainties. Truth. What is duller than certainty, thinks Will, what dead thing is deader than truth? Will tries to overcome that look in Hamnet’s eyes with a bigger present, with gentle listening attention. But probably just being here more would do it. Ah, yes, that. The question that jogged here all the way with him. How long would the plague last, how long would the theatres stay closed, what would he do if it went on? Who was he, as Hamnet said, shrinking into John Shakespeare’s belly. Decide.