Mistress Shakespeare (36 page)

Suffice it to say that it seemed to me that Will was living and visiting and even writing all over London, driven, I’d say, by some demon I could not name. Ambition, perhaps. Guilt. God-given talent, for certain. His temper was often short. It was almost as if he sensed his days were numbered. The passion in his loving had even become fierce, almost desperate, as if he tried to lose himself in me but could not.

Finally, at least in my chambers, we had shared a real bed, one he had shipped at some expense in a dray from Stratford. It was his favorite bed, he said, one he’d used for years when he went home, for Anne had slept in their second-best bed for years.

Although we might have had young, busy Edmund fooled, the Burbage family knew of Will’s and my
affaire de coeur
now—though not that we considered ourselves wed—and accepted it. Richard had told me he understood because he’d met Anne Hathaway on one of their country tours and “her daughters had to beg her to let them attend the play, while Anne refused to come as if we were presenting heresy or promoting treason. Hell’s gates, I’ve never seen a woman bite the hand that feeds her the way she does, then flaunt far and wide that she is the wife of London writer William Shakespeare.”

“I said, Southampton’s not rabble,” Will had repeated, when I did not rise to the bait of his innuendo and argument. From my woolgathering, I came back to the present with a start.

“But some of his hangers-on are,” I said, “and they’re not to be trusted. If a riot of apprentices can start in a theatre, so can a riot of crazed conspirators against the queen.”

He muttered something I could not hear, but I knew he was disparaging Her Majesty.

“Will,” I went on, hands on my hips as he stalked around his big writing table like a caged bear, “I know your privy feelings, but you risk everything by defying the queen and Robert Cecil. I regret that Southampton and his dear friend Essex do so, but that is their unfortunate choice. With all the scribblings on walls and wild broad-sheets circulating, all we need is for someone to quote something from one of your plays to get you in trouble. It’s bad enough that someone put a line about a hunchback on Cecil’s door, so—”

“I am not Kit Marlowe!” he shouted, flinging gestures as if he were onstage. “I have a circumspect reputation, and the queen and court love my plays.”

“They loved Kit’s, for heaven’s sake, and where did that get him? God save us, you cannot stand up to Cecil and those who have her ear!”

“Kit was their spy and he tried to defy them. I’ll not be false to my conscience!”

“Oh, I’ve seen your playwright’s version of that. Clever, last-minute changes of dialogue to challenge Her Majesty even at court and at Christmas. Have you done something to this play now, other than agree to its performance? Have you made the plot worse than it already is with a lawful monarch being deposed, just what Essex and Southampton are probably hoping for?”

“Leave off, Anne! ’S bones, you sound like a wife indeed with your shrewish carping!”

He surprised me by throwing both his inkpot and sanding dish into a corner where they made a black, gritty splash upon the wall and floor. Furious at his tantrum and his heedless behavior, I stood my ground. Of course, I knew he’d also been deeply affected by his father’s current illness and wished he could be back in Stratford with him. The worry over possibly losing his sire had plunged him back into despair over his son’s death, and he’d begun to write dark tragedies in place of the lighter works. Indeed, he was a man of wildly swinging humors lately.

I thought that his dangerous disposition perfectly suited his latest malcontent, brooding hero. I’d even wondered if he’d chosen the title of the tragedy to honor his dead son, though the plot was borrowed from an earlier play with a hero named Hamlet, not Hamnet. It was a work with the ghost of a dead father haunting a son, a play of revenge with a murdered monarch—and a play where a distraught young woman drowned herself in a brook over her lost love. That latter scene had stunned me when I’d first read it, but Will seemed to regard it only analytically as good theatre.

“I cannot help but speak my head and heart,” I told him now as we stared—or glared—each other down. “Your reckless words and this play that ends with a dead monarch in these tense times could spell catastrophe for all that you—both of us—have worked for. They say Essex is demented in his fury, and you know Southampton will do anything that demon says.”

“I’m not sure who is a demon,” he muttered, seizing his cloak from the back of his chair and swirling it dramatically around his hips as if to imitate a woman. “Sometimes, royal or not, damn it, they wear skirts.”

Before I could reply, he was out the door, dragging the cloak and stalking head down toward the Globe. In despair, I watched as he went in the back tiring room door and slammed it hard. We hadn’t spoken since.

But now, two days later, though I had a good nerve to refuse, I did as Richard asked and went behind the stage with him to review what I must know. I’d seen Ned Kinnon, the Globe’s book holder, at work many times, but I listened closely as Richard walked me through the play, act by act.

I would stand behind the curtains of the inner stage or one of the stage doors to whisper cues and commands. Should someone miss or drop a line, I would prompt them. Since this play had not been performed since it was written four years ago, that could well happen. After all, I tried to buck myself up, this was but a play, not reality. So what if, years ago, the usurper Henry Bolingbroke, beloved of the masses, forced King Richard II to give up his crown and kingdom? Surely, Essex and Southampton would not really risk rebellion against their queen, however popular they were with the London crowds.

Yet everyone knew both men were increasingly desperate as they fell further out of royal favor for their rash actions. Essex was the stepson of the queen’s beloved Robert Dudley, Lord Leicester, and she’d favored him greatly, though he’d abused her love. Once, ’twas said, in a Privy Council meeting, Essex had shouted at the queen and started to draw his sword, a capital offense in her presence, though she’d forgiven him. From that time on, her chief advisor, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, homely and misshapen though he was, had been her fierce and dogged champion.

Both Essex and Southampton had also fallen from the queen’s good graces for getting two of her maids of honor pregnant and wedding without royal permission. Southampton had married Essex’s first cousin, Elizabeth Vernon, so that had bonded them even closer as kinsmen.

Charged with gross mismanagement of the Irish War, Essex had been under house arrest last year. I prayed that had settled him down. He’d been ill too, and that oft made a man consider his mortality. Yet the handsome, once-coddled earls, victors and heroes in the Battle of Cádiz, were still wildly popular with the masses and, I fear, that went to their heads too.

But worse, I wagered, than their public affronts to the queen, Essex had stormed unannounced into her bedchamber at Nonsuch Palace before she had donned gown and wig or had her elaborate cosmetics applied. When she’d laid down some conditions for his return to court, he’d declared in a letter later made public that, “her conditions are as cankered and as crooked as her carcass!” I’d seen enough of the prideful woman in the aging queen to know such personal slurs would never be forgiven even if some public ones were.

Conspiracy and paranoia were all the rage and, it was whispered, the plotters met, supposedly in secret, both at Essex House in the Strand or in Southampton’s in the suburbs. It had turned into a battle of wills and words between Cecil and Essex, with all London taking sides. Will’s and my disagreement over it all had tainted our trust and rent our mutual respect asunder.

“Anne, are you listening?” Richard said and touched my arm.

“Oh, yes. But what are those two padded chairs doing there?” I asked as one of the backstage men placed them on the very edge of the stage. “You don’t intend to have the king hand over his crown from a throne?”

“You know Southampton favors sitting on the stage to see and be seen,” he muttered with a frown, not looking me in the eyes. “Well, Essex plans to do the same.”

I should have walked off then, but I stayed. On that day I held more than the playbook through the entire performance—I held my breath.

 

 

 

The Tragedy of King Richard II
was one of the first plays Will had written that used history as personal conflict between two individuals: “Character is fate,” as he put it once. Now, as I watched the nervous, pompous Essex react to the drama—and Southampton seemingly in thrall to him, even mimicking his motions—my stomach clenched with foreboding.

Throughout the drama, Essex nodded at certain lines and gestured grandly to his several hundred guests in the audience—some well-attired and well-kempt, some ragged and rugged. At the description of the deposed ruler as “plume-plucked,” Essex jumped from his seat and danced about, mimicking a chicken with its head cut off—a dreadful image when one recalled that the queen’s mother and Mary Queen of Scots had been beheaded.

Essex looked so demented and dangerous that I almost missed my next cue to get all of the Duke of York’s attenders onstage. And I nearly fell to my knees when I thought I might have glimpsed Mr. Mercer, Walsingham’s old informant, amidst the groundlings. Everyone had heard that Robert Cecil had inherited Wally’s network of spies, so I’m certain Mercer was part of that package.

“Will, this cannot go on,” I whispered as he made an exit. Even he looked worried now that he’d seen Essex close up after his long imprisonment and—some said—debilitating illness.

“It’s just a play,” he said, but his voice shook.

I feared for him. And for our new Globe, so beautiful with some of its silver-grained oak painted to look like Italian marble. Even now, a mournful melody floated down from the ornate musicians’ gallery. The winter day was bright and crisp, but I could not stop perspiring. I almost wished I could sink through one of the traps in the stage floor and hide in what the company called “hell,” the place from which ghosts and sometimes special effects like fog arose.

As drums rolled to accompany the exit of actors from the stage, I began to shake as if I had the ague while Will, playing the minor part of the Abbot of Westminster, spoke the final lines of the fourth act:

 

As if that indeed referred to his plot, Essex leaped to his feet and swept a bow to his audience, who cheered and threw their caps into the air with loud huzzahs. Expecting all of us to be surrounded and arrested at any moment, I clasped the playbook to my breasts and leaned against the stage exit. As Will came off, I saw him wipe his brow. I believe that by the time I cued the coffin bearers onstage at the end of the play—they supposedly carried the dead monarch’s body—he realized he might have gone too far.

 

 

 

When three days had passed
with no rebellion and no reprisals, I—foolishly—felt very relieved. Evidently, I thought, the stalemate between the old queen and her young favorite would go on. I had just received a note from Richard Field telling me that I could pick up the copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
for Will at his print shop near St. Paul’s. Will had ordered it, for he had lost his beloved, dog-eared copy, but I’d never said I’d pick it up.

Did everyone residing in Blackfriars think I was Will’s servant? I fumed. The Burbages now thought I was his mistress. I’d be willing to be his helpmeet, but I was becoming fed up with running errands for a man who was sulky and still upon occasion suspicious of me with other men and who threw temper tantrums and expensive ink with equal abandon. Indeed, I just might abandon him after all these years of hanging on, I thought, as I crumpled the note and tossed it against the headboard of our bed he’d had installed in my chambers.

In that very bed we’d recently had an argument about love.

“I analyze that particular emotion as being just a prettier way of saying people’s needs,” he’d told me. “You know, something missing in one’s life, which he or she finds in another person.”

“That sounds rather cold and cynical,” I said, pulling away from his embrace and sitting up beside him. I punched my bolster to make it fit my form and leaned back against the big headboard with its beautifully carved scene of the Garden of Eden—before the fall from God’s grace, I’d figured. I folded my arms across my bare breasts, then pulled up the coverlet to hide my nakedness. “It makes love sound rather like going to market to barter,” I protested. “I’ll trade you this for that.”

“Tit for tat?” he teased and reached to squeeze my breast.

I hit his hand away. “Whatever happened to those heartfelt sonnets you used to pen for me—and spring on me whenever I was angry?”

He suddenly looked quite smug. “Are you angry now, Lady Tongue?”

“Will you call me your shrew again and try to tame me? Perhaps if you call me Lady Disdain, I will say you are right.”

I scrambled from his reach, pulled on a robe and strode to the table where he’d been writing. Gripping the back of the chair he’d abandoned when we’d tumbled into bed, I happened to glance down and caught these words, labeled under the heading of Sonnet 130:

 

“Damn you, Will Shakespeare!” I cried, pointing at the poem but not touching it, as if it were poison. “This sonnet is about me, isn’t it? Where’s the rest of it?”