The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (45 page)

‘Do you ever have trouble remembering the real you?’

‘Remember? There’s no past in it. I am whoever I am at that moment,’ Matthew says. ‘You must know that.’

‘Must I?’ Watching Matthew sit bonelessly, painlessly, on the boards, Will feels as old as the rocks.

‘Yes. You taught me it.’

Sometimes there seems to Will something almost cruel about Matthew’s luminous gentleness, like the sure-handed care of a good butcher. Sometimes he imagines Matthew has a twin, who is unteachable and awkward and dark.

‘“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”’ Again that shining, cheerful simplicity, as if life is indeed a garden, with nothing at its edges but ivied kindly walls.

Will writes home, enquiring about wool prices.

*   *   *

New Place.

This is the house in Stratford that Will buys for his family to live in. The house that says to the town, Look at what Will Shakespeare’s strange scheme has wrought; and says to his father, simply, Look: we are restored.

It is the second biggest house in the town, built by the eminent Stratfordian Hugh Clopton who also took the south road to make his fortune in London, and ended up Lord Mayor. It stands on the corner of Chapel Street, three sides around a courtyard: as big, Anne thinks, as many a whole street in London. Needing a great deal of work when Will makes the purchase – but the work can be done, there is money for that too.

‘Ten fireplaces,’ murmurs Judith Sadler, when she and her husband make their first tour of it, when the builders are still hammering and sawing. ‘Count them. Ten fireplaces, husband.’

‘Aye, heart. So you can warm your backside wherever you find yourself,’ says Hamnet Sadler, with his little apologetic, unhappy laugh.

New Place, being made new for Anne, for Susannah and Judith and, of course, for Will whenever he is home. Which will surely be, in time, more and more, else why fix himself in Stratford so grandly? And perhaps something else is embodied in these stripped panels, clear-glazed windows, barn and stable and buttery: something like a new start. New Place, and this new place they have come to in their marriage, their lives.

A place of ultimate division.

The absence of Hamnet is the absence between them, of understanding, of warmth. She cannot forgive Will for Hamnet’s death. Cannot forgive him for living on, acting, making plays, making money, instead of being swallowed up by that death as she is. And she cannot forgive herself – for these things, and for looking at her husband, when he’s home, and thinking:Why can’t I have my son instead of you, when you’re no good to me, and we can’t love each other worth a farthing, love each other in a way that changes things? Surely the only true love: spell-love. And if you had said to her, ‘You want something from Will that will bring Hamnet back, or make up for his death, and that’s impossible,’ she would have said, ‘Yes, that’s what I want, exactly.’

The years, for Anne: she is not like Will, she has never moved neatly through them. She has always drunk time and dipped in and out of it, flowing, and sometimes she couldn’t breathe for it, sometimes it exhausted her, but always she has been of its element. Now it pushes her, the years, the days, like a constant head wind. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear herself talking and walking backwards. Often, quite coolly, she supposes she will go mad.

Once she approached the ultimate madness. She woke from a dream of Hamnet so real that it was unbearable, simply, to return to the life where he was not. It was before the move to New Place. She woke and went into Susannah and Judith’s bedchamber. Sleeping, they were so beautiful, characterful, perfect. And yet. And yet it wasn’t enough. So she realised a terrible thing: that there was a limit to happiness, but no limit to suffering. So she went downstairs. The household was asleep, though it was at least two hours before midnight she reckoned: early to bed in John Shakespeare’s house. Quietly she unbarred the door and went out.

It was summer, you see. He died in the summer, among the heat and the green. And here was summer breathing its choicest. Brought up on a farm, Anne lived in as close relation to the sun as pears on a wall. Familiar, that sensation of lengthening days, the light of evening persisting so long and light of morning appearing so early they left only a sliver of night between them. Going out of Stratford she found the world brimming with light. Always before, summer had had the feeling of life announcing something. Now it was mute. Oh, she had never known till now what silence was; how silence, through the long waning of the afternoon, could seem in its accumulated weight and profundity to be on the verge of an utterance. The living summer was dead. The sky was still lit, there was a running sparkle on the river, trees washed their reflections. Movement in the branches, some spirit abroad, perhaps.
Give me that boy and I will go with thee … Not for thy fairy kingdom.
Anne stood on the bridge looking around, looking down. Beauty. She looked at it like a patient parent with a child’s drawing. A long dry moan came from her. She already knew she would not climb up and leap. She was too afraid – afraid perhaps that what lay at the bottom of the river might be the same intolerable dream. No choice but to be.

So she returned, through a landscape still at eleven o’clock seething with rose-stained shadows; and for the first time she realised that today was the longest day of the year.

New places. After Hamnet’s death, Will gave up the big London house, and took modest lodgings near the theatres. Unspoken, that there would be no more London household. Instead, this, with its ten fireplaces.

‘The handsomest property in the town,’ John Shakespeare said. ‘He has done well, daughter. We— Certainly he has done well.’

He gives you this, Anne thinks, the first time she walks around her new home-to-be, in return for what he takes away.

‘You expect too much of marriage,’ Judith Sadler told her. She seemed to grow more snappily scornful of Hamnet as he grew gentler, more thoughtful, even handsomer with age. ‘It’s a matter of shaking down with the fellow, and then be sure of your family well placed, and all the rest is flummery.’

You didn’t have to tell Anne that, though: she knew it perfectly, intimately, as you know your supreme folly.

‘You’ll not be minded to move in until the work’s finished, I think,’ Will said, as they stood in the courtyard, surrounded by New Place, and their usual dead, tingling air.

‘Well. We could. It’s habitable. The children want to move in now.’

‘Hm. Children always think they know what they want.’

‘And then they grow up, and cease knowing.’

Soon, she thought, we won’t say
the children.
Instead we’ll say
the girls.
And that will be Hamnet dead once more. Discovery: you never stop losing a child. Not worth trying to say, though, across this crippled air.

So she and the children, the girls, moved in while the house was still half repaired, and Will went back to London, leaving her in charge. Bartholomew expected her to be helplessly at the mercy of builders and tradesmen. ‘I won’t be imposed on,’ she told him, noticing the broken veins on his nose. ‘Once, I might have been.’ But unhappiness of this kind, it seemed, was a great simplifier. Large areas of life now had no power against her. Anne directed the renovations, reckoned up day-wages and costs, and even tore up floorboards herself when it was going too slowly for her.

A new place, living apart for the first time – so it seems – from John Shakespeare. So, freedom, in all its complexity. No longer the ally at her side, fighting her cause. And yet that Father John, her champion against the giant trampling dreams of Will, is fading, almost gone. See him instead walking about New Place, measuring its capacious rooms with a bright, wondering eye: and then see him walk on down the street, slow and steady in the sunshine, lifting a hand in sober greeting here and there. Master Shakespeare. Good sir, your servant. On his way to the council chamber, where he has resumed his place, his so rightful place. New place: where he is not just John Shakespeare, alderman, but John Shakespeare, gentleman.

She can’t begrudge him the happiness he carries so reverently. Especially when it’s Will who has given it to him. Will has won his father’s heart. She only glimpses how much that means to Will, though a glimpse can be revealing.

Did I ever have him? She does wonder. When he is so many-sided: when he can be the man who made that beauty, more tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear, when wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear; and at the same time the man who bought New Place, at a good shrewd price, talks of malt and wool with his father. Suspicion that she had only one of his sides, as lover, wife, and it happened to be turned to her for an unusual length of time; and now, the infinite diamond of him has turned again.

Meanwhile, as it were incidentally, she is becoming the most significant woman in Stratford. Though when Joan tells her so, she shouts with laughter.

‘Well, mirth apart, Mistress Quiney speaks of you with envy dripping from her chops. All the town ladies do, and I know ’em, trust me, for they forget to pretend before me.’

Joan is preparing to marry. At last, as the god-sibs doubtless say. William Hart is a hatter, plump, agreeable, eyebrows perpetually raised in admiration of everything Joan does and says. Flattering, Anne suggests.

‘Oh, I dare say. Yes, he’ll do very well. We laugh. We do laugh, which is a blessing. But, Lord, I don’t want to put my whole life in his hands. And the bed matter, that’s as rank and tedious as it sounds, is it?’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Anne says: matron, still thinking like a maiden.

‘I hope it doesn’t take you away from yourself. I said to my lord there –’ a jerk of the thumb, as if Hart is always present ‘– I told him we must have two sides of the hearth. Me here, you there.’

‘A relief,’ Bartholomew says, ‘for Master Shakespeare to get her off his hands at last.’

‘Yes. And she didn’t get with child first, unlike me.’

‘Did you?’ He looks blank for a moment. ‘To be sure. Somehow I’d forgot that.’

Oh, dry, crackling woman. I shall cultivate this part of myself, perhaps: the sharp tongue, tart as capers. It gives a woman an occupation. Though in truth she has plenty to do. Reluctantly she accepts that Joan is right about her significance, as she settles into New Place, becomes its chatelaine. Many things to take charge of, and Will entrusts them all to her. Money apportioned, difficult letters construed: the rest I leave to you, heart. Perfect trust there, at any rate. She is good. Sets the new outhouses working, brings in willing young girls, so there are butter and eggs and yarn for the market. People are beginning to think of her as a solution: when a beggar comes into the parish with a doubtful pass, when a maid claims a pregnancy, they say, ‘Let’s send to Mistress Shakespeare, see what she thinks.’

So, a good thing, this New Place. And consider, after all the money and time he has put into it, surely New Place says, ‘This is my place, our place, here I root myself. Here is my heart.’

Except, no. When his bones are too old to mount a stage, perhaps, his fingers too weak to hold a pen. In the meantime, it is a huge golden apology, a magnificent regret of stone.

He is home for Joan’s marriage. He makes handsome bride-gifts, and seems preoccupied. Anne still understands him. It’s Susannah, who is of marriageable age. The years. Susannah sees it, too, in his watchful, wistful look. ‘Now, Father, be of good cheer, you’ll not need to make me a dowry just yet.’ He smiles as she cuffs him. This easy mocking affection, exclusive to them. Judith, since Hamnet’s death, has been both quieter and more noisy. She seems to be trying to find a personality that fits her. Sometimes in the night she comes wet-faced and curls up in bed beside Anne.

‘Our daughter is almost a woman,’ Will says, as they make their way to the church.

Anne looks at Susannah, wand-like, serene: and Judith, her hair for once coiffed and presentable, trying to copy her walk. ‘And our other daughter is almost a girl.’

They laugh, a little. Fond parental jesting can only go so far; and then it comes to the brink, the chasm of Hamnet.

‘How does Matthew? A quick learner still?’

‘He’s gone beyond me, now. I learn from him.’

She is close enough still to feel a little irritated by this.

‘The Chamberlain’s Men will do well if they can keep him. We need our permanent theatre. Our Globe. That’s how the Burbages think to call our new place, when it’s finished.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, it has a fine grand sound. And then, besides, all the world will be there.’

‘For you, it will,’ she says, deadening. Lack of love is a miraculous marvel: a loaf that never runs out.

Very well, she thinks, when he goes back to London, this is my new place: here I have been set loose to graze, and so I will. Peacefully, I hope. Not like a beast everyone thought tame, suddenly maddened by hornets, trampling and wild.

*   *   *

Ben: for him, the years were a steady progress towards his aim. Or perhaps a voyage to a new land reliably reported, with charts missing just a few details: sometimes a wrong course, sometimes a storm.

There was marriage, which, leaving aside the splendour of his son and the lesser but still notable splendour of a daughter squalling at the breast, was a dull business taken all in all. Agnes kept a good house on unreliable funds and always looked handsome, but she was shrewish and tongue-clacking, or perhaps all wives were. He was not much interested in the question, and spent as much time out as possible. Sometimes she wept and bewailed her lot; but other times she had her female neighbours in and, he guessed, dissected him over the griddle-cakes and cock-ale, and that made her feel better.

And then there was the playhouse-public: capricious and unreasonable as any woman born, as easy to please with the right chosen word, as implacably sullen once they had taken against you. Still he worked away: aiming for that shore of lasting fame, scholarly renown, the true reward of learning and art applied to the errant muddled stage. He was too clever, too truthful to appeal consistently to the mob – as his friend Shakespeare did, with his tender enchantments, rhapsodising lovers, kings winning battles across six feet of battlefield, and lopsided pillow-stuffed entertainments. So he had perforce to sell his talents at a cheap rate, providing plots and extra scenes for a purse from Henslowe, collaborating with the opportunistic journeyman likes of Tom Dekker. Hateful, necessary compromise.