The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (11 page)

‘So I should hope. She is fair and gracious. If you were not to do right by such a woman, I should think you deserved whipping for it … Ah, now you’ve spoiled the fire with poking.’ For a moment Will thinks this is some bawdy proverb – but that has never been John Shakespeare’s way. He goes frowning over to the hearth, rubbing his hands. ‘Look. Let the ash lie atop. No, Will, if you had not forced the matter, I would still have thought well of Mistress Hathaway, trust me. But it’s not a matter of her years. It’s yours.’

‘Men have married at eighteen before.’

His father gives the slightest of shrugs. ‘To be sure. Often when folly has pushed them to it and they have no choice.’

‘Often, yes, which means not always, not in every case, and now what else would you have of me, Father? Am I to have your permission or not? After all, if you stand against it, I’m not the one who will suffer.’

‘How you fire up.’ His father smiles aridly. ‘You love the maid and wish to wed her. Who doubts you, Will? Who?’

Will sits down heavily. He meets his father’s look. Knowing that someone sees the worst of you gives a kind of ease. Yes, somehow his father has glimpsed them – those bat-flutterings in the dusk of his thoughts. The idea that he has not designed his future, as a pair of gloves is designed from hide to finish, but has put it ramshackle together from odds and ends.

One day, Will swears inwardly, he will see the best of me; and wonder.

‘Naturally you must marry,’ his father says. ‘But that’s only the beginning. Does she know what to expect, your condition, estate?’

‘I have created no illusions about myself, Father. That would never do, in this house.’

‘Must you put such hate into it? Perhaps you must…’ Like clandestine love, the enmity issues urgent and passionate while it can. Quite still, gaze level, they pant like wrestlers. ‘Once married, besides, you can never be my apprentice. You’ll have thought of that.’

‘Oh, faith, that was my chief reason for falling in love, what else?’

‘Still you must settle, Will, settle. Hast thought on it? For I won’t say yea if I suspicion you are not in earnest, and will want to skip away once the wedding-clothes are old. Settle and be a husband and father, work hard, plan for the morrow,
know
the morrow, its very shape and colour. And if you find you don’t care for it, who shall you blame?’ He does not smile, but parts of a smile appear on his face. ‘Not me, not this time, my boy. That’s a luxury you must forswear.’

Will says: ‘I intend that there will be no regrets on either side, Father. Above all, that my wife will never blush for her choice.’ The slightest emphasis on that
my.
He knows how to distribute the stresses, to produce the most telling effect. The parts of his father’s smile disintegrate.

A brutal bout – but still only a Brummagem dog-fight, the beasts hauled back at last on their chains to have their wounds dressed; not the baited badger Will saw last month, his black and white turned spiky red, undefeated, yet clubbed to death at the dull end.

And while the shape of a new generation is hacked out in Henley Street, in the church the congregation cough and shuffle and submit themselves to the sermon. The question of sin is posed in the vicar’s odd, high, niggling voice; to some there it sounds like a wife or a master complaining from the kitchen, urging that something drearily necessary must be done. Others, perhaps, hear it hardly at all, are busy missing the wall-paintings, the crucifix where the royal coat of arms hangs, wishing the jawing priest could float above them in a swirl of vestments. Perhaps: a lot of faith is habit, and even the deepest thoughts are easily scattered, by a twinge of sciatica, by the cry of a crow from the churchyard, incredibly loud, full of sulphur.

‘You’ll want to marry before she starts to show. We’d best apply for a bond,’ Will’s father says. ‘Hm, a poor turn-out it will be. Your mother went to the altar slender as her bride-lace.’

Will has a vision of Anne’s naked whiteness blazing against the dark bed; and likening that moment and this, it seems to him that there is no principle of connection in life at all, only jolts, blind alleys, severance.

‘A great belly, a hurry, and no prenticeship, aye, very well,’ says Will, ‘but are we not allowed to rejoice a little, somewhere along the way? This is love, not death.’

‘Did I not say I wish you happy? I do, for both your sakes. I wish you happier than I fear is likely, Will. You are not a villain or a wastrel, no, but you excel at small disappointments.’

*   *   *

This could have been worse, Anne thinks, as she serves the spiced ale to Master Shakespeare. And it is he who makes it so surprisingly tolerable – her future father-in-law, who has most unusually stirred from Henley Street and ridden out to Hewlands Farm for this, the meeting.

‘Thank you, my dear.’ His eyes meet hers, smiling a little, above the nutmeg steam. Yes, the business is solemn, and trouble and shame are in it, but when he looks at her she has the feeling of an exception being made: like a blanket being gently tugged over you as you fall asleep. ‘Aye, sir,’ he goes on, ‘I recall in your father’s time that was never accounted good barley land. Too strong…’ There is this refusal also to be hurried to the subject: first we prepare the ground, we converse. Bartholomew’s foot taps and fidgets at it; nevertheless he has put on clean bands, he has put forth the solid, sober, goodman side of him. Lately he has been informing himself of the Shakespeare fortunes, the losses and court summonses, the property remaining. It is all out in the light of day now – of market-day – this love that belonged to green dusks roofed over with birdsong. But Master Shakespeare’s gravity makes the occasion bearable.

And Will, of course – though there is something skewed now about their time together, which is neither snatched nor granted. Papers lie on the table, ready to be attended to when Master Shakespeare has concluded his civilities: when the talk must turn to dowry and jointure and bond. Though her father once began teaching her to read with Bartholomew’s hornbook, she never got much further than the criss-cross row, and she cannot think her presence will be of much use when they fall to conning those inky thorns and loops. Will that be a fit time to say, ‘Come, Will, let us walk a little in the herb garden’? Is it seemly – or where if anywhere does seemly lie, when she is pregnant and their families are arranging their marriage in haste?

In the end it is the men (as she thinks of Will’s father and her brother) who leave them alone for a space, Master Shakespeare wanting to look over the farm, which he has not seen since old Master Hathaway’s time. She hopes he will not harp on that string too much, knowing Bartholomew’s intolerance of the past – but, still, they tramp off pretty cordially together. Cordiality, indeed, is the note of the whole business so far; and if you take out the sickness and tender breasts and the fact, soon to be loud and undeniable, that she is no maid and a baggage without a shred of regard for her family’s name, it might almost be a normal marriage that is being arranged.

She wants to say something of this to Will, to make him smile; above all to break the tightness that his father’s presence seems to set on his brow. Instead they find themselves sitting together on the settle by the fire, holding hands. Courtship backwards, she thinks but does not say. Somewhere a voice both familiar and strange nags,
Hot love soon cools.

‘Well,’ Will says, ‘at least they trust us not to get up to anything we shouldn’t.’

Though his tone falls so desperately wide of the mark, they laugh together: the laugh a kind of promise, or – in the spirit, perhaps, of those papers on the table – a down-payment. There will be more laughter to come, in their life to come: surely.

*   *   *

At a wedding, a gift of gloves is sometimes made to the guests. Not this one.

For the marriage that John Shakespeare would in due time have hoped to solemnise between his heir – once out of his apprenticeship – and the daughter of, say, a fellow alderman with a tidy property, there would have been a gift of gloves for every guest; there would have been everything befitting. But that is the life that did not happen.

See in a wood or on a heath how a path forms. When does it begin? Someone habitually walks that way, perhaps, and then another, and another; and then someone walks that way simply because it’s a little flattened, a little easier. Eventually the path becomes broad, smooth and permanent: like a thing that has always been there. But look carefully among the trees or the gorse, and you may faintly see the lost beginnings of other paths, paths that through an accumulation of little chances and choices were never made.

So with the life that did not happen for John Shakespeare. And, perhaps, his son.

No time, besides, for the gift of gloves, with a wedding by licence: skip the banns, hurry it through. Two friends of Bartholomew’s put up money as a surety – meaning, if the groom isn’t serious, he’ll be held to account for it, oh, yes. Stratford is, intermittently, diverted by it all. No end to Master Shakespeare’s troubles, they say. Some moralise, or in other words gloat – remembering his remarkable marriage to an Arden, his dizzy rise, and then the wool-dealing and rumours and murkiness and fall: so, here’s the Shakespeare name stumbling a little more, probably to fall at last from the ranks of the foremost, from the possibility of a coat of arms, of a Sir somewhere along the next generation or two. It has happened before. Across Warwickshire men hack at ditches on land their great-grandfather might have owned. Altogether, it is not a great matter for anyone who talks about it, set against this quarter’s rent that must be paid, the little sickly son whose vast eyes say he won’t live, the chimney-fire that has disrupted the workshop.

Master Field stops Will in the street the day before the wedding, shakes his hand. ‘Marriage,’ he pronounces, somewhere between congratulation and condolence, ‘is a blessed and solemn state for the Christian man and woman.’ Rumour murmurs that lately the respectable house in Middle Row resounds with nocturnal fighting, and that once Mistress Field locked him out of doors. Will thinks of Richard in London: pictures him setting up type in a dark print-shop ringed by roof upon roof. Setting up, character by careful character, the text of his future. But love, surely, can be an opportunity too.

We must be everything to one another. We will be. We must be. We must be, and we will. So it goes in his mind, until it’s like the game of hands he played as a child with Joan, one hand atop hers then hers atop his and faster and faster until you could hardly tell which was which. And now his hand covers Anne’s, as they stand together in the church at Temple Grafton to which no procession of musicians has accompanied them. Anne wears her hair loose for the last time, before marriage binds and conceals, and it seems to Will that he has never truly seen its magnificence before, its beautiful unlikelihood. Each tress round her face has a precise hang and spring, like peel descending from an apple. They stand in the sight of God and a dozen mortals, breathing cold, damp November in their responses. A single shaft of light falls slantwise from the narrow window, looking both solid and temporary, like something propped there for now, soon to be taken away, sawn up. And between two calls of a crow from the churchyard, they are made man and wife.

Now the path through the wood takes shape. Anne will return with Will to live as his wife beneath his father’s roof, and there the child will be born and the new generation raised among the leather and the account-rolls, and that path takes such a definite direction and the ground is so clear it’s difficult to see how any other way could ever be taken. There would have to be, surely, hacking and burning.

And Anne: she experiences a happiness that is at once startling, pure and complex, as if an icicle should form into a love-knot.
Forsaking all other keep thee only unto her.
That is what Will is going to do – she believes and trusts it, which is the exactness of her love – and it is so wonderfully definitive that the unsatisfactory falls away, the haste and the bond, the roundness of her belly and the emptiness of the church.

This spirit even seems to infect Bartholomew, who has been dour and hunched all day, swinging the purse containing her dowry like a weapon, frowning at the wedding-ring, which he considers a popish trinket. Service over, wine uncorked and handed round the church, he brightens and broadens, shaking hands and slapping shoulders. And so perhaps when it happens he doesn’t mean it, and it is just ill luck the way it comes out.

‘Well, Anne,’ he says, embracing her, ‘you caught him in time.’ And says it just as Will turns, and hears.

4

Love’s Metamorphosis (1587)

Entering his fourteenth year, Ben grabbed the strap from his stepfather’s hand one humid midsummer eve and did as he had long ago promised.

Ben hit him informatively, as it were, rather than vengefully – just clearing things up; and the man took it pretty well. He even invited Ben to the alehouse with him the next evening. ‘Now we are men together,’ he said. Ben went, just the once. It was interesting to see the fuss the man liked to make around himself, with his own fireside chair and polished tankard, and everyone treating him as an oracle. He confided to Ben, after the fourth pot, that he aimed to be nothing less than Master of the Worshipful Company of Tilers and Bricklayers.

Ben nodded thoughtfully: not so much at that, for he found his stepfather’s bristling stupidity no more attractive with its soft belly turned up, as at the experience of drinking. He greatly liked what the ale did to him, and wondered if he might come to like it too much. But he still rose at five the next morning, doused his head under the street pump, and read Horace as he walked to school, feeling none the worse. He suspected that drink might indeed be an ally and resource against what he could see was coming to him.

‘If there were any other way,’ his mother said. She had turned notably bony now, brisk, to the point: always like someone measuring out emotional rations. ‘But there isn’t enough money for the university. So, you must have a trade. And it makes no sense paying a prentice premium to another master, when you can stay at home and learn a trade for nothing.’