When the plot was discovered and the villains tried, tortured and executed, unfortunately, Robert Cecil ordered new legislation against all Catholic recusants, especially around Stratford. Susannah and Will’s brother Richard ended up in their hometown courts with hefty fines for refusing to take Protestant communion. Will stomped about a great deal when we heard and more than once muttered a line he’d written in protest, “Every subject’s duty is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.”
I heard from my maid Sally’s gossip that Stratford folk were pleased to see the upstart Shakespeares put in their place. When Will heard the word
upstart
, it distressed him even more for two reasons. First, that Anne was ruining the family’s reputation in the land that had bred him and where he was working hard to become a leading landowner and citizen, for he blamed himself as absent head of the household. And second, because he too had been branded an upstart by his detractors years ago and had worked so hard to get past that slur. All this worried him, but the religious persecution at home riled him even more.
“I’ve learned a lesson from all of this,” he told me as the two of us sat over a late supper in my rooms at Blackfriars. “‘The fool doth think that he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,’” he quoted from
As You Like It.
“In short, times change, the country’s ruler has changed, but unfair persecution goes on. Your queen was perhaps not so very different from my king after all. So I’m going to write King Jamie a play to set his teeth on edge.”
“Will, not again! If
I’ve
learned a lesson from all this, it is do not bite the hand that feeds you!”
He laughed and reached across the small, cluttered table to still my hand furiously forking him out more venison. “Just listen. I’m going to write him a Scottish play, so he’ll let all else in it pass, born-and-bred Scot that he is. Imagine, a Christian king, planning to sponsor a huge Bible translation, and he’s afraid of witches. Yes, I’m going to write our Jamie a play that starts out with three witches and a curse . . . and plotting for the throne and murder and . . .”
And so it went, with new characters and plots and scenes—and dangers—swirling around us as he created play after play, each one with darker visions, but ones I understood:
Julius Caesar; Othello
, his study in jealousy run rampant;
Macbeth
and
King Lear
.
Family events came fast and furious too. Jennet and John gave my godchild Kate a total of six siblings. Perhaps their healthy family was the result of Oxford’s small-town air, or perhaps it was that Jennet had finally given up a bottle of fine wine each day.
Susannah wed John Hall, partly because I’d put it in Will’s head that the next time he went home, he should see to it. John told Susannah he wanted to invite me to their wedding—I visited Temple Grafton off and on, just as Will did to tend his growing Stratford properties—but poor John was shocked to be told why I would not be asked. Yet he and Will formed a fine, mutual friendship, and Will said John always asked how I was getting on. More than once, the good doctor stopped by my front gate to inquire about my health when he rode between Stratford and Temple Grafton, so I reckoned he must take his wife’s and mother-in-law’s opinion of me with a grain of salt.
Will’s mother died the year after the wedding, but worse was our loss of dear Edmund at age twenty-seven from a swift onset of the bloody flux. As if he’d lost his Hamnet all over again, at first, Will was inconsolable.
“I loved him too, you know,” I told him as the two of us walked away from St. Saviour’s Church on the south bank of the frozen Thames, where Will had paid to have him laid to rest and for the tolling of the passing bell.
Edmund’s landlords, the Mountjoys, with the grieving Frances held between them, had just departed under a stone gray sky spitting snow. The bitter wind cut like a knife, but we hardly noticed. Edmund’s loss had happened so fast, and now Will had to send the sad news home.
“I know you loved him,” Will told me. “He and Frances loved you too.” We held tightly to each other in the buffeting wind. No boats were on the frozen river, and we did not want to walk its width, so we started home across the bridge. “And it was so good of you to ask Frances to stay with you, but it’s best she be near her work—bury herself in it, rather. I’ve paid the Mountjoys for Edmund’s room for the next year, so she can live there.”
Halfway across the bridge, looking between the buildings, we stared at Londoners cavorting on the Thames, slipping and sliding on the ice amidst screams of joy. Seldom were the winters cold enough for the great river to ice over, but this one had been bitter and brutal.
We did not speak of the fact that Edmund and Frances had had a child together, a son, who did not live long, and who was buried next to him. They had not married in a church but had handfasted, or so Edmund claimed. In a strange way, I felt in burying him we had buried what Will and I might have been and might have had: a life in London as man and wife with a child or two while Will made his way on the stage.
“With all that’s happened, I didn’t realize it’s the last day of the year,” I said. My words came out muffled because my lips were so cold.
“And good riddance to the old year. That is, but for our marriage of true minds and hearts getting stronger each day. ‘And ruined love, when it is built anew, / Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.’”
“I favor that sonnet over a few others I’ve seen. But Will, not only Frances will bury herself in her work over Edmund’s loss, but you will too.”
“I will bury myself in my work, and also in you, my love, and I shall use that as a
double entendre
in some bawdy clown scene sometime.”
“Or in a battle royal of courtship between some full-of-himself man and some shrewish, smart-mouthed vixen.”
“One with hair black as wires.”
“And the man will want to tame her but will find that he cannot.”
“Anne, my beloved Anne, let’s hie ourselves back to Blackfriars where it’s warm and bright, however dark and cold the night.”
And so we did.
“The Lord giveth
and the Lord taketh away”
—
my da used to say that. And so it was.
Richard Burbage finally got the Blackfriars Theatre back from the boy players of the Chapel Royal, and Will and I took a one-seventh share in it. The intimacy of the place brought benefits but challenges too. Will wrote for it with a will, if I may pun upon that. But in that happy time, the Prince of Wales died and Will’s brother Gilbert too, the latter at age forty-five, so all of us became public and private mourners again.
Still the king and queen decided to go on with the wedding of their daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, to Frederick of Hapsburg, and the King’s Men put on fifteen plays for the celebrations of that royal event. The plays included
Cardenio
, based on a translation of Cervantes’
Don Quixote,
a collaboration Will wrote with his protégé John Fletcher. Will was also bringing along Francis Beaumont, training both men to be the King’s Men’s principal writers for the future. The demands on the company and Will’s stamina had made him decide it was time to pass that torch.
“The subject for
Cardenio
just shows how things have changed in our lifetime,” Will told me. We would both turn fifty next year, and he’d taken to philosophizing. Since he’d lost the spring in his step, he’d also quit acting, but for a few small parts.
“True,” I agreed. More than ever these days, I knew what he would say before he spoke. “It would have been the kiss of death to write a play based on a Spanish story back in the days we were all terrified of the Armada.”
He seemed to have come to terms with his once fierce feelings toward the former queen: with a bit of help from Fletcher, he wrote a history play called
All Is True
about the early reign of King Henry VIII, which ended with the baby Elizabeth’s baptism and fine accolades for her glorious future.
I liked the play immensely but for one thing. In the character of Cardinal Wolsey, whose power declines in the play, I feared Will saw himself. Lines like “Farewell! A long farewell, to all my greatness!” and “I have touched the highest point of all my greatness, / And from that full meridian of my glory / I haste now to my setting” greatly worried me.
“I believe,” I told him the day the play was first performed at the Globe, “
All Is True
will be my favorite of your history plays. But everyone’s just calling it
King Henry VIII
, you know.”
He heaved a sigh. Though it was his practice to be backstage during premier performances, this had already been played at Blackfriars, so we were sitting in the lowest of the three Globe galleries, dead center in the front row. “They may call it what they will,” he said, “but I want to make the point that what has happened already will, in one way or the other, happen again in the history of mankind. The past is prologue. All is true.”
“Like King Solomon’s ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’”
“Exactly.” He squeezed my knee, as we watched the theatre continue to fill.
It was a lovely late June day in 1613, a bit windy with sea air off the Thames and gulls wheeling overhead. I was not nervous to sit with him in public, something we hardly worried about anymore. More than once some stranger had called me Mistress Shakespeare, and indeed, I had always believed I was.
I did not know this play as well as his earlier ones, for Will often had John Fletcher take his dictation now. I missed being an integral part of his initial creation, but we were as close as we had ever been.
The scenes of Act II rolled by, and, like the penny knaves on the ground and their betters around us, I was snared by the speeches, the wonderful words, words, words. Henry VIII’s first wife, Queen Catherine, “like a jewel hung twenty years about his neck,” was about to be replaced by his second wife, the enticing Anne Boleyn.
At the thought of two wives, I shifted slightly in my seat. No wonder Will’s daughter Susannah hated me, for she believed her mother to be Will’s first and only wife. My last time home, I’d crossed Susannah’s path, this time as she shopped in the marketplace with her mother, and I’d been badly burned for coming to her aid.
“Hey now,” the red-haired, handsome Rafe Smith had cried, coming out from behind his cheese stall, “if it’s not their majesties, the Shakespeare high-and-mighties, come down to throw us poor dolts a few bones or a few coins.” I stood at the next stall, owned by John Lane; like everyone else in the area, I turned and stared as Smith stripped off his jerkin and threw it mockingly at Susannah’s feet. “I’d take off more’n that for you,” he told the blushing girl, “aye, lay myself down for you and with you again and again.”
“Susannah, do not even address the likes of that lout!” Anne Hathaway ordered her daughter and turned away, whether from Rafe Smith or from me, I was not sure.
“She’s addressed me afore, hain’t you, Mistress Hall?” Smith goaded Susannah. “Paid for my very best goods off and on for years, husband or not—”
The crowd was growing. Susannah was pippin-red and stammering in embarrassment and anger. Thinking her daughter was behind her, Anne had flounced away. This entire sordid scene seemed as if it led from the first act I’d seen here nearly ten years before, so what indeed had been going on? Will had not come back to Stratford this time, but best he get here soon and sort this out instead of just tending to his business affairs. Surely, Susannah, wed to the upstanding Dr. Hall, had not had an affair with this ill-bred man.
Before I could rein in my Italian choler, I strode between Susannah and the man. “I shall summon the constable if you do not leave off your insults and slurs, Master Smith.”
He hooted a laugh, but worse, Susannah hissed from behind me, “Cease! I don’t want the constable, Anne Whateley, and I don’t want you to stand up for me or even near me!”
Susannah’s mother, dragging her servants, was back; they formed a fence about the younger woman and moved her away from Smith and me. I faced him alone but with half the Stratford market watching.
“See?” he goaded with a rude laugh. “They think their chamber pots don’t smell, that they can just dump a man like me in the sewer with the night refuse. But they’ll see—they’ll see.”
“They and the rest of the town will see that buying cheese from your stall is a danger to one’s taste in more ways than one, that’s sure,” I’d said and, head high, walked from the place and the staring people.
I’d told Will about it when I’d come back to London. He’d said that if Susannah’s husband had not done so already, he’d settle the man once and for all when he went back next time.
Frowning at the memory, I jumped so hard at the blast of trumpets and the roll of drums from the musicians’ gallery above that Will laughed. Small cannons popped near the roof to signal a noble troop of strangers arriving at Cardinal Wolsey’s banquet. It was a play with fine sound effects and endless pomp. The musicians wailed away on their hautboys as Richard Burbage as the king danced with Anne Boleyn. Smoke from the cannons drifted down to the stage as if steam came out Henry’s ears when he beheld the beauteous Boleyn.
“Those cannons make a stench,” I whispered to Will.
He squinted up at the roof. “Still smoking.”
We were well into the next scene when someone in the musicians’ gallery cried, “Fire! Fii-re! Fiiiii-re!”
People around us vaulted to their feet. Some screamed and, trying to get out, bumped into each other as if in a comic scene. Will and I looked around, behind, below, then up. I could see flames not only licking at the roof thatch, but the entire ring of sky looked smoky.
Panic swelled as the hundreds of patrons in the two galleries above us clattered down the stairs, only to find them blocked by those on our level. The groundlings fled; actors shouted to one another. Will and I knew what we must do. Even if the building was consumed, the expensive costumes and precious playbooks must be saved or, royal patronage or not, the future of the King’s Men was doomed.