The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (44 page)

In this world, I mean. As for the next, is that not your province? Repentance, aye, I understand there must be repentance. But tell me, where is the line drawn betwixt regretting your sins, and wishing you had never committed them?

Spencer had no wife or child, or none that I know of. But nothing could have made a difference. Nothing, after what he said.

Kneel?

Well. If you think it will help.

*   *   *

If anything saved him, he knew it would be learning. When the day of the gaol-delivery came, and he was marched across the incongruously pretty garden to the courtroom in Old Bailey, he knew he was going among enemies. The judge on high with the bunch of sweet herbs before his tender nose, the citizen jurymen blowing and staring: in the purest sense they did not care about him, and would willingly send him to be hanged, if nothing cried out against it. He was not Ben Jonson the most learned man in England here, but Benjamin Jonson the prisoner. The prisoner was taken up with the weapon still at his side. The prisoner stands accused … the prisoner admits … He wanted to cry out,
There is more to me than this.
But here, of course, there was not. And there was nothing he could say or do that would change their minds. The guard behind him yawned and shifted the weight of his halberd. Dust-motes rotated in a thin shaft of window-light. Ben tried to see God in it. Only learning could help.

‘The aforesaid Benjamin Jonson feloniously and wilfully slew and killed the aforesaid Gabriel Spencer at Shoreditch.’ The judge repeated it, though the juryman had a good strong voice, suitable for a theatre. ‘Prisoner, how do you plead?’

‘I plead benefit of clergy.’ Now there was a voice for you. Fill your chest, expand your lungs. If the judge did not allow it – if books were consulted, precedents reviewed, heads shaken, then – then it would be very much like the dreams that had exhausted him the last few nights in his cell, dreams so brilliant and dramatic he had begun to mistrust the power of his own imagination. And so to Tyburn tree to dangle. They would need a strong rope. I am not afraid. But how did I get here? Sure never was so long a chain of mad mistakes …

The bishop’s chaplain walked up to the dock. Ben took the psalter. It felt greasy in his hands, as if it had propped someone’s dinner. It was salvation. Earthly, perhaps heavenly, but just now he had his mind only on the one.

‘Choose your verse, prisoner.’

Verse? Let me give you the whole thing, first in Latin, then in Greek … He chose, and read with eloquent expression, fixing the chief juryman’s eye. On impulse he kissed the book when he had finished.

‘
Legit ut clericus?
’ intoned the judge.

‘
Legit.
’ Read like a clerk. And so his plea was accepted. He tried to picture Agnes’s face, or his little son’s curly head, but all he could think of was great tall windows opening out. And the subtle smile of the old priest in his cell. Well, he thought: a bargain. The tears in his eyes surprised him intensely.

But then they did duty for what happened next, which was the branding. He had a little dealing with the hangman after all. And an ungentle brute he was, though Ben supposed that was part of the profession. Marched up to the brazier, which gave off a kindly Christmas sort of heat, he clenched his tongue between his teeth and resolved not to cry out. To his embarrassment, he did groan a little when the brand went sizzling into the base of his left thumb. Not just the pain but the nakedness of that letter T, marking him as a felon, marking him for Tyburn tree if he offended again. No benefit of clergy twice. He belonged to death, if he were not virtuous, and he hated belonging to anyone.

But he had survived. Marched back to the gaol, Ben wondered if there was anything he could not survive. That was the sin of pride, perhaps: he would have to find out from a priest of his new faith. Or perhaps consult his own understanding. The True Church had undoubtedly been waiting for him, but he intended being his own pope.

*   *   *

Ben held his son high, up to the rafters of their poky parlour: the lad crowed, he loved it, the higher the better. ‘Oh, my chick, I love thee,’ he said. He looked at Agnes, who had finished her relieved crying, and was sitting at the table, head in hands. ‘And thee, sweetling.’ The cloth was gone, he noted, and a few pieces of plate – pawned, doubtless, for the gaoler’s fees had been heavy and they were short of money. He put little Ben down. Best get to work.

‘Never,’ his wife said, raising her stormy face, ‘never put me through such a thing again.’

She actually looked fiercely accusing. He shrugged. Anyone would suppose, he thought, as he began looking for paper, that she was the one who had been in prison.

*   *   *

‘The whole thing,’ Will says, ‘has seemed to me a terrible marvel. One moment I’m acting in your play; the next I hear you are marked for the gallows.’

‘Why are we mortals so surprised when life takes a turn for the unexpected, when we cannot even tell what tomorrow’s weather will be?’

‘It will be cold, because it’s January.’

Jonson laughs. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to kill a man.’

‘Oh, faith, that goes without saying.’ They are coming out of the turreted lodge of the Marshalsea prison, where Jonson was thrown for a debt to another actor. Will has paid it off. Jonson looks pale but hearty. ‘Will you promise me now to keep your head out of gaol for at least half a year?’

‘Hm, that would be making an impious declaration against the will of God, which may be that I should suffer the martyrdom of the cell again. But no. For the love I bear thee, Will, I make thee a promise. Besides, there will be nothing worth presented on the stages so long as I’m out of commission.’

Freezing new year 1599. Harsh winters following lean harvests: full boneyards. But Will Shakespeare is still prosperous, if at something of a stand in his career just now. The Chamberlain’s Men are without their usual home, the Theatre, the lease having run out on the land. In fact, the Burbages do have the substance of the Theatre, because they took down every timber and strut and tile of it in the winter dark and are ready to put it up again when they can find a site. In Southwark probably, where Will is living now, modestly. Giving up the large house in Bishopsgate has been a saving. (And, of course, it was imperative. He won’t even walk that way now.) Southwark, place of stews and actors, bear-gardens and prisons. A terrible marvel, Will called what happened to Ben Jonson, or rather what Ben Jonson inflicted: and he has hardly conveyed to his friend just how terrible he found it. It was Henslowe who first told him of it. ‘Yon bricklayer has killed one of my best players,’ he grumbled; and no one suitable to poach from the Chamberlain’s.

At first Will suspected a theatrical exaggeration: not actual killing. When he heard about the brute scene in Hogsden Fields he had no trouble in imagining it – old imperishable memories of Knell and Towne rushed in there – but could not explain it. The waste, the waste: and Jonson just on the verge of great things with his play. There was a madness in men, one always knew that; but the madness of self-destruction was the most baffling.

And then, when Jonson was delivered from peril of his life by the fortunate accident of the neck-verse, he announced to his friends on his release that he had become a Catholic. Nashe was quietly scornful. ‘Pray don’t pay him too much attention on account of it,’ he said, with vinegar smile, ‘for that’s all the reason of his conversion.’ Will thought there was more to it. There must be, for a man to lay himself open to charges of recusancy, to lay up trouble for himself as a potential enemy of the state; and all for what? But he could hardly take up that question without exposing himself to Jonson’s eager cross-questioning; and in himself he had dusky vacancies and gaps on which he wanted no searching light to fall.

When, three months after his escape from the gallows, Jonson was taken up for debt, it seemed to Will almost a comforting piece of normality. And now he is free, and no doubt will want to rejoin his family in Westminster.

‘Time enough for that. I worked on a new plot for Henslowe whiles I was detained, a neat piece of Terence brought up to date, and you might like to hear it through over a glass. Oh, Henslowe will forgive, man, because Henslowe, like most mortals, is made of self-interest, and I am useful to him.’

So, the Mermaid instead. Boat across the river, Jonson leaping the wharf-stairs three at a time. Such energy and appetite. Thrusting into the city streets, Jonson begins telling him at length of his plans for a sequel to
Every Man In His Humour,
in which he will set out his theories of the drama in a prologue or preface.

‘And after the prologue or preface, will you have a trumpet-blast to let the audience know it’s time to wake up?’

‘A low hit. Unworthy,’ Jonson says, seating himself at ease. The Mermaid features broad settles and stools, apt for his behind, which, unthinned by prison, is like a bag of laundry. ‘You must buy me a drink to atone.’

They are joined by Thomas Dekker. Three parts ink and one part wine, a Londoner born and bred, with a sharp, dark, winking face and shoulders up to his ears, Dekker has lately begun pulling at the galley-oar of play-writing: a scene here, a rewriting there, wherever I am wanted. It is his boast that he was once woken by Henslowe at three in the morning with a mere play-plot, and he had the first two acts ready before noon. Will likes him, for his modesty and the earthy liveliness he brings to his writing; Jonson condescends to him. They make a sort of triangle.

Dekker shudders at the mention of the Marshalsea. ‘Don’t, I pray you. I’ve been in the rough belly of the debtors’ prison. I don’t care to be swallowed again.’

‘Why, talking of it won’t make it happen,’ Jonson says.

‘Won’t it? As to that, I don’t know. Observe how you come across a new word for the first time. Ten to one you will hear that word again within a few days.’

‘What’s your meaning? That mere superstition should govern our lives?’

‘I’m content for anything to govern our lives, as long as it be kind,’ Dekker says, with a placating shrug.

‘Why, man, who would ever feel alive without adversity? Who feels the merry fire who’s never starved in the cold?’

‘Is this your priest’s chop-logic?’ says Will.

‘You pale puerile Puritan. You have not opened yourself to the mystery of the faith.’

‘A mystery that will land you with a fine,’ says Dekker, ‘or worse.’

‘If you keep quiet about it you may still do pretty well,’ Will says. ‘The Queen said she wanted no windows into men’s souls.’

‘Quiet?’ Jonson booms. ‘Why should I be quiet?’

‘Or how, indeed? It seems scarce a possibility,’ Will says.

Dekker shakes his head. ‘I don’t understand a man’s laying up trouble for himself.’

‘Oh, you follow this fellow’s lead, hey?’ Jonson says, slapping Will’s shoulder. ‘Anything to be liked.’

‘Yes, I want to be liked,’ Dekker says. ‘For myself not so much, for my work certainly, I want to be popular. Who wouldn’t?’

‘But at what price, man?’ Jonson says impatiently. ‘If you write for apes you must write like an ape.’

‘But bating all flattery, Will doesn’t write like an ape, and he is popular,’ Dekker says, with a look both innocent and shrewd. ‘So how do you account for it, grave Master Jonson?’

Jonson twitches his shoulders in irritation. ‘I need more drink if I’m to bear this nonsense. Besides, you’re thinking of retiring from it, aren’t you? The house in the country. Setting up a future, clovered, away from all this, isn’t that in your mind?’

‘No. I’ve never thought of that,’ says Will, hastily: too hastily. ‘The house is for my family. The money invested for their future. But I’m devoted whole-heart to the Chamberlain’s Men. When they raise the new theatre I shall be with them. If the pale puerile Puritans allow.’

‘Though at least they’re zealous in what they believe,’ Jonson says, eyeing him.

Will signals for more ale. ‘Now why would Ben Jonson, a man of reason, a man who never prated of religion before, join the papists? Could it be he must have a stick to beat the world with, even when it is not at odds with him?’

Jonson does not answer until the jug is refilled, and then he speaks, quite temperately for him. ‘You may be in the right of it, my friend. But it would be good to see you take up any sort of stick, for once.’ And from the grave Will hears Robert Greene enquiring, just as temperately, just as sharply:
When are you going to live?

*   *   *

The years: when you were young, they were like great rooms. You entered each one with attentive solemnity, you looked all round it, accustomed yourself to its dimensions, its furnishings, the feeling in its air. You were going to spend some time here.

That was how it used to be, for Will. Now time has changed its manner of living: turned nomad. Now he’s out in the open, and there are no thresholds, and he moves on without quite knowing how far he has gone. The years are invisible. Except when you look in the mirror and think, I’ve slept and woken and missed something; or find an old grief or joy, thin and reproachful, like a tethered beast you forgot to feed.

It is Matthew who reminds Will most forcefully of his ageing. A magical being, with his shooting growth, his transformations. Will watches in troubled admiration and tenderness, trying to locate his feeling. Fatherly? Ah, but that shouldn’t be. Not after Hamnet. When he revisits that place in the heart, there is so much grey ash, he can hardly move, staggering and choked. Better to put yourself in this, this living world, this professional world where he works on bringing out Matthew’s gift. The youth has all and more of the ability he once had to lose his self in playing. Even, above all, his sex.

‘“Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent.” So?’

‘Excellent,’ Will says. ‘All simplicity. As simple as a woman disguised as a man pretending to be a woman can be.’

Matthew laughs and rubs at his corn-fair hair. ‘Thank God for the disguise part. I swear the Rosalind wig is lousy.’