The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (47 page)

He says: ‘I don’t know you.’

‘Why, John, it’s Will,’ croons his mother, hand at his brow. ‘It’s Will come home from London.’

The eyes harden a little: with recognition?

Will bends closer. ‘Father.’

‘I don’t know you.’ Very softly: ‘Why don’t you let people know you? Why?’

His breath smells of the tomb.

‘Father. I love thee.’

Very slowly his father shakes his head. ‘No. Never, quite. I knew it. Bless thee, mind, a father’s blessing.’ He puts him far off with the faintest twitch of his fingers. ‘But never, quite. I knew.’

*   *   *

John Shakespeare is buried in Stratford church, on a day of long September light, reaching its gold out as if to point to something both delicate and important. Enough colours in the sky to suffice for ever. On such a day the earth could hardly be more beautiful if it had been designed so. A good death and a good funeral, solemnised by aldermen, reverend grey and bald pates. Stratford receiving its own into its earth, full of years and honour. John Shakespeare, gentleman.

Anne observes Will’s look as the coffin dips out of sight in a haze of dust. The look of a man on a deserted strand, watching his ship go away. You’ve left me: you truly have done it.

His look doesn’t take her in at all. This is what it’s like to be a ghost – but a ghost unseen, moaning in deaf ears.

*   *   *

‘So, is this your Dane, and is he finished?’ Burbage says, peering over Will’s writing-table. ‘Or, should I say, will he ever be finished?’ His pudgy hands fidget through the manuscript. His lips flicker as he reads. ‘It’s fine, it leaps, it sounds great depths. But it’s too much. We’ll have to cut, sooner rather than later. You understand me, Will? In a perfect world…’

‘Ah, that. We have the words for it, yet no one can imagine it. Cut, certes, cut, it’s a play, we have to make it play.’

‘And pay. You can always print the whole later. Like bully Jonson, correcting his every comma.’ He does a squinting, tongue-poking imitation, then shrugs at the cheapness: everyone can do Jonson.

‘You think it will hold them?’

‘Man, give me your Dane shorn, a good boy, a fair day, and we’ll hold them and carry them further than ever Shylock or Romeo,’ Burbage says, squeezing his shoulders and lifting him an inch off the ground: in him a mild, undemonstrative gesture. ‘You still mean to take the Ghost?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m born to play it.’

*   *   *

‘I still think you might have thought of me for Ophelia,’ Matthew says. Gently reproachful, not sulky: the smooth brow clear. The skin of the young, Will thinks, is miraculous: they hardly seem to have inhabited it at all.

‘You’re too sane for tragedy.’ Matthew has a lodging of his own now, a respectable place with a tinsmith and his motherly wife. But Will can see the bottle thrust behind the bed-curtain: and sniffing detects tobacco. ‘So, when you gather with your friends to read over the latest script, do you find a pipe aids your appreciation?’

Matthew blushes, but at being caught out rather than in shame: he has, thank God, none of that. Like a cat, he sees himself as a handsome and worthwhile part of nature, deserving of a little cream. ‘In truth it does. Have you not tried it? It brings a stimulation to the mental parts, and potently primes the understanding.’

‘And also spoils the voice, which is of most importance to a player.’

With a deep bow, ‘Yes, Father,’ Matthew says grinning; and then: ‘What’s wrong?’

*   *   *

In the tiring-house heat of jabbing elbows and pungent stockings Will works the chalk powder into his cheeks, alone, coolly jostled. His lines ring his mind like a coronet: fixed in place. Memory moves in the midst. Taking his morning draught at Jonson’s house. Jonson is drumming up patrons now, has taken more commodious quarters, though still you feel he views his home merely as a different kind of tavern-room. He was nursing a metheglin headache, in spite of claiming he never drank the stuff. ‘That was last week’s never.’ He has a child’s appetites and easy denials, and gets on famously with the sturdy little boy and infant girl who dangle about him for his bearish hugs. Mistress Jonson looked on, sharp-eyed, affectionate: she could not smile, Will noticed, without a frown grooving her brow. He suspected there were mighty quarrels. Jonson has read the Dane in manuscript.

‘You won’t carry them. Not with this.’

‘Revenge, ghost, blood—’

‘Oh, they may expect a revenge tragedy, but look what you’ve done with it. There is no revenge, for one.’

‘That’s what they’re not to see. One of the many.’ For little Benjamin he did a trick with a coin that Jack Towne taught him years ago. (How many? God. He’d had a dream about Towne the other night, strange, clear, piercing dream. At thirty-seven.) ‘There, Benjamin, didst see where the penny went? Yet you like the trick, hey?’

‘And then in your fourth part you send your prince away to England, for how long? I know, he doesn’t get there, the pirates take him,’ Jonson rolled his eyes in exasperation at that, ‘and why not bring them on the stage while you’re about it, have ’em sing a song? But my point is we must fancy a good deal of time passing while he’s at sea. Months. I know you will never care for the unities, but this – it’s a violation of sense.’

Will did the coin trick again. Benjamin watched with craving eyes.

‘By God, if I had your genius,’ Jonson grumbled, ‘I’d know how to employ it.’

‘Peace, make peace,’ said Mistress Jonson.

‘It’s only nine in the morning,’ Jonson said. ‘Too early for that.’

‘Mark this, young Ben,’ Will said, giving him the coin. ‘It’s never too early for a man to make his peace.’

Jonson looked at him quizzically. ‘With God? With death?’

‘With his birth.’

Will finishes his painting. Chalk doesn’t make his skin flare like blacking. Burbage strides by in giant, genial, anxious mood, booming: ‘Is everybody mad? Good people, is everyone stark
mad?
’ And when they groan
yes:
‘Excellent, it bodes well.’ Kempe, the clown, has left them: usually he would be soothing nerves now. Will, chalked up, meets Heminges’s eye with a wry smile of recognition. Heminges, solid and shrewd, always turns sensationally white before a performance. They all have something of this fear, though what do they fear? They are the Chamberlain’s Men, a bad performance will not ruin them. It’s the fear of the play itself, perhaps. Once you set it going, there is no turning back: it lives of itself. What sound in the world is more awesome, terrible, than the first cry of a new-born child? He sees tiny Hamnet fighting the air on the way to Anne’s breast. The last trumpet sounds. What sort of a crowd? Fair, middling fair. A cold day. Not as cold as the conjured night on the battlements of the mind, as the cold inside, it is a nipping and an eager air. And I am sick at heart. ‘And I am sick,’ Burbage is saying, ‘of having to prompt the pissing prompter.’ They huddle to shake hands and laugh nervously before the beginning. Ophelia is painted but not yet wigged: almond eyes, hedgehog hair. Some last questions of Will – ‘Eyases, how in hell do you say it?’ – but not many: he is the giver of the words and a player among others, no overseer.

And how he feels about it: it’s still alive, or still a thing being born. Yes, if we overrun, cut the business with Osric and the hat. The face Will presents, or self, is smooth and lustred, and you can see yourself in it, but peer further and there is space rather than depths. Like the space between the lines. Burbage, in black, tosses down his apple core.
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother.
The lad with the mirror passes among them, the mirror a great flashing, polished silver plate, for glass always got broken in the hugger-mugger of the tiring-house. He tilts it at Will, at the Ghost. Looking well, sir. Is this how I will look when I’m dead? If only we could know. Do we hover, looking on, hear the hypocrisies of the funeral?

Now to go on, now to be Ghost. It banishes the other ghosts from his side, for a time: being someone else. Leaving the world, he steps on stage. Now, the real turn into ghosts. Like a snail in reverse, he can only live away from the shell of himself.

Faces, faces, so many and expectant. You learn not to see them individually, to let them blot on your vision like dandelion-heads. But no. One face stands out, in the nearest gallery.

There she is, again. Without seeing her, he sees her. Like the future.

13

A Game at Chess (1603)

In the Mermaid Tavern, two men face each other over a chessboard.

Regular customers look askance, wondering if it will end like it did yesterday evening.

Dekker was here: saw it all. Not their usual way, these two. Big fellows in the world, you know, princes out of my star – though to speak truth Jonson and I have writ together since we had our falling-out. He held his nose, you know. Shakespeare I’ve never writ with, he usually works alone. Fact is, he’s too fast for any of us. Oh, it is a quarrelsome trade, anyone will tell you that. You’ll have marked the brand on Jonson’s thumb. In and out of jail and favour. Never Shakespeare, though, which makes it all the more surprising. Always seems to rise above it. Has his Moor on the boards just now, magnificent piece. Oh, and a success, to be sure: he never has anything else. Could it be that was what the quarrel was about? It could be.

*   *   *

Black and white.

Will stares at the black squares. Lately wearing black for the Queen. Great Elizabeth has gone to her rest at last – a heavy, painful clawing down to death, he has heard; and so the Chamberlain’s Men, her favoured troupe, don the inky cloak.

Last time he saw her, at Whitehall in the Great Chamber, he thought her sleeping: a-slumber in the great upright bed of her dress. Then the squirrel eyes would unlock, move in the white face, and fasten on you. She always knew him, remembering his name just when he thought she’d forgot: a good monarch’s touch, of course. Think of all the people one knew by name: in Stratford, fifty perhaps; here perhaps twice as many. People you know, happening to live in the same slice of time as you: spade in earth, worms moving in the wet black wedge.

Dekker approaches their table cautiously. ‘Chess,’ he says, ‘excellent, a much better way to settle your differences. What
was
it all about?’

‘A contention between black and white,’ Jonson says, with a half-smile.

‘Ah, but who is which? And cannot a man be neither?’ Will says.

Jonson gestures at the chessboard. ‘Without black and white, no game to play.’

‘Well, you might have a chessboard on which all the squares are grey. There I could play to my true content.’

Jonson shakes his head. ‘Make your move, man.’

Will stares at the black and white. Black king, white queen.
If virtue no delighted beauty lack, your son-in-law is far more fair than black.
What was it all about? A play, of course – what else is there? And things like truth. And a dark woman.

*   *   *

‘How do you call this piece?’

Firelight streaks her fingers as they delicately stab the keys of the virginal. Always she has a fire burning, like his father. He sits at a distance: a good yard today. Tomorrow it might be two yards; or he might sit beside her, at her feet, study the little blue vein under the ankle. It is up to her decree. The music has no form. It leads you down delicious paths, then leaves you there without bearings.

‘A touch-piece,’ she says. ‘They are my favourite kind. I like nothing finished. That’s why I never say goodbye.’

Her fingers lift, and she closes her eyes, and he realises he is dismissed.

*   *   *

‘She is a curious creature,’ Richard Field says. Isabelle Berger: for a time she continues to haunt the shop when Will is there. ‘My saviour,’ she calls him, but then will not speak to him. ‘I wonder if she drinks.’

‘She has had great griefs, I think,’ Jacqueline says, sounding faintly jealous. How people long for those – though only in the past, not now. Things to build yourself on.

What griefs? No one knows. And then she is not there any more. Jacqueline thinks she has gone to the country for her health, but isn’t sure. No one is very sure about anything when it comes to Isabelle Berger: as if her very existence is conditional. Perhaps that’s it. Will writes, acts, looks for himself in the great polished plate. Looks in vain for a hero or a king.

*   *   *

Jonson puts his fingers to his black king, changes his mind.

‘Not to renew the quarrel,’ he says temperately – though temperate in Jonson is as awkward and forced as a dog standing on its hind legs, ‘but posterity will speak the last word.’

‘We shan’t hear it.’

‘Our descendants will.’ Realisation flashes on Jonson’s face. ‘Oh, damn it, damn it a hundred times,’ he says, furious: his equivalent of sorry, a word he cannot pronounce. ‘Curse me for a proud, stiff-necked, blabbering fool—’

‘I did that yesterday. No more of it.’

Jonson shakes his head, moves his queen’s bishop.

Everyone has quarrelled with Jonson at some time – or, rather, Jonson has quarrelled with everyone. Will is the exception. It is known around the theatres, and their concomitant alehouses and eating-houses, skittle-alleys, stews, fence-houses and knocking-shops, that Will Shakespeare won’t be drawn.

And then comes Jonson’s tragedy,
Sejanus.

‘You mean he’s put this whole bloody lockjawed speech in, just because it’s in his sources?’ Burbage snarls.

‘Tacitus,’ Will says. ‘And it will be his own fair translation, nothing inaccurate.’

‘The public don’t give a fiddler’s fart for Tacitus. And look – everything stirring happens off stage.’ Burbage sighs. ‘Don’t tell me: it’s authentically Senecan.’

‘It has grandeur,’ Will says. ‘It is lofty, stately, chaste…’ He is struggling, and Burbage’s liverish eye says so. Ben Jonson’s reputation in the theatre is growing, and he has announced, with characteristic boldness, that he is turning to tragedy: and there is interest. But Will knows that his was the deciding vote in persuading the Chamberlain’s Men to take on the result,
Sejanus.
He did it for friendship.