The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (33 page)

They are alone in the library, or as alone as it is possible to be with a young aristocrat like this: over by the fire sits an old tutor or governor in nodding watchfulness, a liveried manservant holds the door, and occasionally another peeps in with a figure seeking audience, to be nay-said or encouraged to wait with a shake or nod of the earl’s head. Will has been there. Even the ante-rooms to the earl’s presence are an education: he heard several new lute songs, had a first-hand account of a shipboard storm off the Azores complete with rescue by Moorish prisoner, and learned to pun in Italian.

‘You know why I had so great a desire for this?’ the earl goes on, butting his hound’s questing nose away. ‘Because of its incompleteness. These doubtful areas where our mapmaker has resorted to curlicued monsters. I would love to make these places surer, con the world aright. See, discover. Oh, I’ve been over to France.’ Dismissively, as you might say Westminster. He sets the globe spinning. ‘Places
sans
names, look you, are your only destination. Ye gods, how tiny we must be on this earth. Like the spoor of flies or fleas, or smaller, would you say, on this scale?’

‘Smaller, smaller. Imagine the smallest thing you can, then cut it in half. Then cut that in half, and on and on.’

‘And,
ergo,
you never come to nothingness, how terrifying!’ But nothing terrifies this young man, Will sees.

Like bees about a blossom, Nashe said of the young Earl of Southampton, the scribblers and the thinkers and the singers flock to him, or shall I rather say like flies to their proper attraction? Nashe has hopes of patronage from Southampton too. The young sprig is not just rich and powerful but educated, cultured, as devoted to his library as his stable. A beneficent sun around which men of the arts may dispose themselves like stars, reflecting a little of the greater effulgence … It helped, Will found, to accustom yourself to the language of the thing: patronage. Also, this is something new to him, beyond the directness of play-maker and crowd. At its crudest, if they don’t like what you offer they throw it back at you, slap, like spoiled meat in the tavern-keeper’s face. But to lay your writing before a patron, an aristocrat, is to speak in another voice, to appeal to a wider and narrower world. Writing his poem, preparing his dedication, he has mingled the lofty sex of Venus and Adonis with images of hopeless subservience, booming doors slamming in his face while mute stewards hurried by him with rent-rolls, even, in whiter mood, princely munificence: I am well pleased, bury him in gold. Conjured them all as he inscribed the dedication, sought out which of his houses the young earl was staying in.

Close to London, it turned out, in spite of the plague that lurked through the winter. And then the approach, writing turned ritual. Look favourably on my poor wit and dry fancy. All mighty strange. It didn’t alter, though, the central feeling, the feeling of creation. Is this the best of me? he asked himself. Plays are made in the air, in the space between the actors and spectators, like a storm between fanning breeze and hot still air. You wouldn’t inscribe a storm. But this,
Venus and Adonis,
was him set out on a page, the craft and learning, and the thing he rode when imagination hit and words passed through him.

‘You are a good sailor, my lord?’

‘Oh, sick as a cat from the first spread o’ sail, but what man would stick at that before the Americas and El Dorado? And then the anthropophagi in Africa, men with heads beneath their shoulders – though assuredly I’ve seen
those
at court.’ He does an imitation, with the geniality of a man who will never know mockery. ‘I know, I shouldn’t. But, really, the flattery they bestow on the Queen is enough to turn a man’s stomach. Well, my globe was a pretty purchase, no?’

Will allows a smile inside, for Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, is as greedy for flattery as any ageing monarch shunning the mirror’s shrewd eye.

He is certainly a young man of unusual beauty, beauty a little ambiguous, as all male beauty must be: only the plain can be themselves. He is gorgeously dressed, as befits a young noble with the world before him, but there you can see simply the eagerness of tailors and jewellers, making him in their profitable image. The hair is different: a rare true auburn, longer than most women’s, tied and looped over his shoulder. Few men could carry that off: you need that hawklike delicate mixture of feature. The beauty is effortless now, but in time it will need cosseting to be maintained. Will thinks of Jack Towne: he last saw him in an indifferent production, looking both grim and flabby. Something like regret touched him.

‘A beautiful sight,’ Will says, of the globe. ‘An image of all that could be yours. Not like Tamburlaine, subduing. Possessing in the mind.’

‘Alexander weeping for worlds to conquer. Oft mistranslated from Plutarch. An imaging of the futility of desire.’ Just when he seemed most a boy, preening, he came out with these things: fruits of university, of this library he says Will must treat as his own. ‘Naturally, I want to do everything. Italy, now – Master Florio says I should have been an Italian, and when I sing in a madrigal I think – but then I yearn to be a poet. Do something like yours.’

There is the manuscript, on a stool near the globe: is this the moment for abasement? Last time Will just read him a little, and had permission to leave it. Instead Will says, serious: ‘Truly? Because I doubt it.’

‘You shouldn’t. You will reach a multitude when you print, and not just because it is so warm and amorous. Because it finds room to be comical too. At least’ – he smiles – ‘I hope that was your intention, else I have just dashed you.’

‘That’s what I sought, yes. Lust is ridiculous because we fear it. That’s why we laugh. The deepest most helpless laughter I ever saw was at a burying.’

‘You fear the act of flesh?’ For the first time the earl looks lofty, perhaps because unsure.

‘Well, everything else we know whence it comes, where it goes – hunger, ambition, love of our family, our dreams, our God. Nothing of this is comprehensible. In nothing else do we look back on ourselves and behold such a fearful stranger.’

‘They want me to marry,’ the earl says flatly, signalling for wine. ‘My family. My lord Burghley has particular notions … I suppose everyone marries in the end. A matter of what’s suitable. Do you have a wife?’

Will bows yes.

‘It’s different for me, you see. When I marry, they’ll have to get the maps out. The lawyers will measure out the bride-ale. Can it be like this? “Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace; Incorporate then they seem; face grows to face.”’ The young man blushes a little as he summons the quotation.

Now Will does make sure to bow. ‘You do me too much honour. My poor words…’ In fact, though, he is quite pleased with those lines. ‘It is a picture of the ideal. Still – there’s no reason why love and policy may not live together.’

‘You don’t sound very convincing. Excitement and steadiness together. A great deal to ask of life. Oh, I mean to ask it. Likewise my intention of doing everything, or being everything.’

‘A man would have to be nothing, for that,’ Will says, and thinks: It sounds extremely desirable.

The earl pours wine and hands him a cup. Great significance in these things when a noble does them: the old winking tutor stirs, noting the favour. ‘Come down to my place at Titchfield. Aye, too grand of me, I know, disposing of your time. Forgive it, say yes. I’ve got to go, estate matters, and I want more of your company.’

After a moment’s space, Will goes back into character. ‘I’m yours to command, my lord.’

Drinking, the earl is seized with one of his sudden thoughts. ‘Mind, if that were really so, a man could be invincible.’ He gestures at the globe. ‘But we live in the gap between the show and the truth.’ He laughs. ‘They say I’m over-susceptible, Master Shakespeare. We shall start a great tale.’

Ah, will they? Will travels down to Titchfield Abbey with the household servants, which is perhaps revealing. There is a cook among them, fussing over a new-bought
batterie de cuisine,
looking down on Will with his drab books and papers. On the way he thinks: New year, surely the playhouses open again, I can be myself at last. But isn’t this? Well, part of him. Alarming to discover how many parts there are; and the challenge, keeping them separate. No, he doesn’t think this is the wrong course: turning himself into the poet of formal modes, writing for the refined tastes of Southamptons. (What Greene wanted, really. Greene now dead and pauper-buried.) Like the theatre, a matter of uncertainty, favour, suspense. Actually he loves it, but wonders if he loves it more because his father hated it and wanted to tear him from its embrace.

But if Anne should say no to it? Call him back from these wanderings in search of a role to say, ‘You have one here,’ the lines learned by heart long ago, by heart …

The life of a country estate is new to him. Tenants and stewards, orchards. A loyal welcoming dance of maids and children. The long gallery, so admirably designed for those in-between times of the day, like walking the deck of a ship, he imagines. He is not untouched by it all, its rite and fittingness. The mother arriving with the state of a prince, outriders, dogs and horns, the wallowing coach, the little figure large with clothes gliding into the hall where Will waits with the musicians and the man whose exact place he does not understand, who knows the earl and cries from time to time, ‘A boon, my lord, a boon,’ and always it is ‘Presently, presently.’

He expects to be forgot likewise, especially with the mother’s coming, the colloquies of family state. Will roams the grounds and, very soon, the library. In one hand Italian, in the other Spenser, morbidly beautiful (and touched by his hands: great Spenser he has been here). Oh, you could do this for ever, and consent to be forgot – or, perhaps, await the greater elevation that may come, especially when the earl reaches his majority. A secretaryship, perhaps, trusted servant in charge of his papers, correspondence, library, acquisitions, with time to write also, each new production inscribed with greater affection. Tempting indeed, and what Kyd is after surely when he haunts Marlowe with his monotone my-lord this and my-lord that. And Will? Fitting in has never been his difficulty. And yet still he can’t see it. If this is his way and road, then he feels he has made the wrong beginning, in the shout of the theatre. Of course that may be so. All his beginnings are askew, after all.

The earl sends for him one morning early, before hunting. Will finds him half or a quarter dressed, the rich hair down ungathered. White breast, long rider’s thighs. ‘Will, hold this looking-glass, will you? Hold it just so, I want to see myself in true perspective…’ This is where you know he is a great noble and you are a scribbling player. Do it, though; because they are friends also, as far as they can be. Tilt and upward flash of the heavy mirror in his hands. ‘No,’ sighs the earl, after a long look. ‘The trouble with me is, my feet are a little too big.’

A merry, dark, challenging look thrown at Will in the mirror, where they live together, as they cannot in the world outside it. No, my lord, not me, thinks Will, lowering his eyes. I have a strange relation to the attainable.

*   *   *

‘You know what you should be doing, don’t you?’ Bartholomew said, swiping sweat from his forehead; the drops spangled in the sun.

‘No, but you’re going to tell me,’ Anne said.

They were walking the field path to Shottery. Whenever Bartholomew was in Stratford, which was more often lately, he came to Henley Street. Dealings with Father John, she suspected. Whom her brother still thought a papist – but such things never stood in the way of money. The children were walking with them, or at least Susannah was. Hamnet was racing Judith, cheeks bursting, as if it were the aim of his life to beat her to the riven oak.

‘You should bring them over to the farm more often. It sets them up. Poor air in the town.’

‘Very well. Is that the thing I should be doing?’

Bartholomew shook his head at her, his old habitual look: Oh, Anne. ‘So, he’s being entertained, or he’s serving perhaps, at a noble estate. How long?’

‘I don’t know. He’s a guest – but there are many of those, he says in his letter. It’s a great household.’

‘Think you he’ll get a position from it? Money? Plainly he’s expecting some advantage.’

‘Something of that, yes. While the theatres are closed, he must turn his pen to other things.’ So much she had gleaned from his letter. Not revealing, Will’s letters, even now that she was beginning to read them without help. The effort of being himself seemed to overcome him.

‘So is that the purposed design? He’ll go back to the theatres when they reopen? Or what – be a poet outside the stage, print and sell?’

‘I don’t know.’ Whatever it be, she thought, it will be beyond me.

‘What you need,’ Bartholomew said, ‘is a house of your own.’

Loyalty flared. ‘And so Will is working and saving for it.’

‘Sooner rather than later. I’m almost tempted to say anything will serve. Great God, Anne, look at what he’s doing to you. Yon father-in-law.’

‘I thought you and he got along.’

‘We do, on the right ground, but I couldn’t live with him above a sennight. And that’s saying a good deal, when I lived with you for so long.’

She’s happy with him like this, or at least she knows where she stands: the brutal frank brother. ‘Father John – Master Shakespeare has done nothing but make me feel welcome, considered, cherished, since we married.’

‘And that seems to you right and fit? Come, the man’s an eternal politician.’ As usual when drunk, Bartholomew was more perceptive. ‘Doesn’t attend the council any more, but he plays with power at home, with those he loves, wherever he can. I don’t know what long grey war has gone on betwixt him and Will, but assuredly you are his best weapon.’

She knew that. There was a peculiar horror in Bartholomew knowing it.

‘And those children too. Look at what he’s doing to them.’

She turned on him. ‘Don’t dare. My children suffer nothing. I am—’

‘You are a loving, kind mother and a very lioness to them, I know. But mark, you said, “my children”. Look, they see more of their grandfather than their father, and grandfather thinks they’re angels descended, which no children are, nor no children should think they are. You stop seeing it, perhaps, because it’s before your eyes every day. But you have my meaning, don’t you?’