The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (19 page)

‘I tend to think the same, drunk or sober.’

The captain motioned to the company clerk. ‘You’ll have time to say your goodbyes, naturally.’

So, his greatest leap of decision: the cold water so far below he could hardly see its glitter. Behind him, on the cliff edge, figures: his mother; Master Camden; Nicol; no one, really. What was it the young player, Will, had said?
Once you stand anywhere, you turn to stone.
It occurred to him that joining the army he might get killed; or, worse, slowly die, like gallant Sir Philip Sidney, gnawed away by a month’s gangrene. But, then, there was more than one way of slowly dying. He looked at his rough hands, as Master Camden had. I want to be the most learned man in the kingdom. Tamburlaine leaped up on his chariot. I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove. Ben became strangely aware of his own blood in his veins, as if the fluid were transformed along with his future, liquid fire, seed and ink and tears, who knew? Come on, then. The company clerk’s hand was vile: Ben brushed him aside, took up pen and inscribed his own name on the roll. He loved to write his name: if only he could write it across the world. Come. Leap.

6

When You See Me, You Know Me (1588–9)

Will’s leap. First: it was a horror.

He missed Anne. Everything, everything about her, from the clean curve of her calf, to her soft fluty
by Christ,
to her indecisiveness, which was really a refusal to rule anything out of life. He ached for his children’s arms round his neck. He had never been further than ten miles from Stratford, and now he was confronted with difference upon difference, air and landscape and building and faces and dialect, and sometimes he felt he might have been in Muscovy or Virginia – that far, that lost.

And he was ever in the company of a small group of men, all of whom knew each other much better than they knew him, who were an over-sensitive quarrelsome set generally, and who were even more on edge because one of their number had died on the sword of another, and several of whom didn’t approve of him. And instead of dreaming plays and whittling lines for pastime in his head he was having to learn parts overnight, small parts but multiple, and make the voice carry (Jack Towne’s hand pressing on his upper belly, there, and fill your lungs as if to yawn) and learn how to walk the boards and express with gesture (too little, too much) and do a hundred other menial jobs besides – sewing costumes, sorting dog-eared play-parts, baiting the horses.

And they might be the Queen’s Men, but that did not alter the tramping along dusty or boggy roads in every weather, the comfortless halts between towns with hose dripping from tree-branches and a pan of grey pottage belching over a sulky fire, the indifferent lodgings with flea-ridden mattresses and stinking privies and swindling landlords. Or sometimes the hostility, the bullfrog stare of nay-saying aldermen – even the refusal to give them a roof.

‘God damn you, we’re the Queen’s Men!’ John Singer yelled, one rainy evening at the barred door of a second-rate inn on the Chester road. ‘Never heard of the Queen? Never heard the name of Walsingham, hey? You’ll recall it quick enough when you’re stretched on the rack! Thieving Welsh bastards!’

‘We’re not in Wales.’ John Dutton sighed, tugging him away.

They put up at last in a barn. The farmer charged them outrageously and took his lantern away. Will knelt in something rank, fumbling with the tinderbox. All around him was vivid, fierce and heartfelt swearing.

‘A rat,’ Singer wailed, dancing, ‘a rat just ran over my foot! Shit, shit…’

At last Will managed to make a light.

Singer glared at him in it. ‘What the devil are you smiling about?’

‘Pardon,’ Will said, busying himself. ‘I didn’t know I was.’

And it was true. Because the horrible loneliness and homesickness and discomfort and doubt were all so very real, and yet they took up such a little room inside him. And all the rest, amazingly, was boundless hunger and joy. He had great Americas within.

Later, wrapped in blankets and cloaks, drunk, most slept. Will lay blinking, thinking of a little heap of stones. Close by he saw Jack Towne sit up, shivering, rubbing his hands across his face. In the bleary moonlight Towne’s fair hair was the colour of ashes.

‘Can’t sleep?’ Will said softly. ‘Or don’t want to?’

Towne showed his teeth. ‘A little of both.’ He threw off his blanket and hitched himself closer to Will. ‘Sometimes the night’s like a blindfold and a gag. Smothering. And then the dreams…’

‘Do you go through it again? Or is it different?’

‘Oh, every time it’s different.’ Towne laughed, a sound like the fluttering of wings. ‘He gets up and laughs – or he gets up and kills
me
– or the swords turn to butter and everything, everything is well … Sometimes she’s there too. The little miss he married. I feel for her, though I know she won’t weep long, and naturally he should never have married her at all.’

‘Naturally?’

‘Players and the domestic hearth don’t go together. Is there any more drink there? Never mind. What about you? Can’t sleep for wondering how you ended up in this shitten pot?’

‘If I felt that, I would be on my way home.’

‘Would you? Because, after all, there’s pride, you know. You might not want to admit you’ve made a mistake.’

Will felt as if he had swallowed ice. ‘Is that what they’re saying? Am I not good enough? Tell me—’

‘Peace, peace.’ Towne’s hand searched his shoulder. ‘Aye, they doubted, some of ’em. Not that you had a gift for it – but you’ve been bred up so different, you see. You were so much the honest burgher.’

Now it was Will’s turn to laugh, in the same feathery way. (Often this happened, he took on the tone of whoever he was with, had even offended a stutterer once by seeming to mimic, but no help for it.) ‘I see.’

‘So they wondered, some of ’em, how you’d take to it. Not me, though. This is what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? To be sure, you’ve much to learn. Instance, it’s no good looking fear with your eyes, for that don’t reach across the inn-yard – let alone when you get to London and stand on the stage of a proper theatre. You must throw it into your posture.’

‘What – gibber at the mouth, and saw the air?’

‘No, coxcomb, imp.’ Towne grinned, gripping Will’s neck. ‘Look, wouldst learn from me or no?’ Suddenly his other hand was in Will’s shirt, lightly caressing his chest from nipples to breastbone; his voice sank low: ‘Naught amiss with this, heart, if thou hast a mind. Sometimes a man wants comfort, not conquest, hey?’

Will laid his hand on Towne’s wrist. How prominent the bones and veins, yet not without softness. He was stirred, partly through memory of first thinking on these hands and their touch, a long-buried fancy of youth. But also, yes, he was stirred.

‘I offend,’ Towne said, in a small, squeezed voice, as Will pushed him gently away.

‘Dost not, Jack. Thee, never. It’s only—’

‘Because I killed?’

He had thought of that, as the hands touched him: of what they had done. But that, shockingly perhaps, made no difference. He shook his head. ‘It’s only the time.’

Towne sat back. His eyes were smudges of light. ‘Late, you mean.’

‘Too late.’

The eye-shines dwelled on him for some moments, and Will had a strange sensation of small unworthiness: as if he had told a needy friend he had no money while his purse chinked.

‘Alone, then, Will, eh?’ Towne said at last, lying down and wrapping himself in his blanket. ‘That’s how you think to do it? Well, we’ll see.’

Alone, then. Will lay on his back on the cold barn floor, miserably tingling, and remembered – how long ago? Lying on his back either in cot or first truckle-bed: very young indeed, and with a definite sense in him of being new in the world. Bed-time. The rays of the setting sun through the half-shuttered window were sharp. They clustered at you like a handful of dry straws. You could grasp them if you weren’t so tired. His mother bade him good-night. He heard her skirts swish away. And then it was just him, and the rays. At last they softened and spun before his closing eyes – and there would be morning again, his mother returning to him, and restoration; but still, when it came to it, you went alone into the darkness.

By the time of the first few yellow leaves, the Queen’s Men were within a day’s trudge of London, and Will was different. Not one of them, not quite, but he was a player now, an actor, instead of the faintly embarrassing but useful country tyro who had got them out of a difficulty. He had taken a few larger roles when John Dutton went down with an ague in the poisonous Cambridge fens; and he had learned to fetch his voice from somewhere below the base of his spine, to move and speak as a giant must in a world of giants; to see a woman in front of him and not a youth wigged and painted; to be ready with invention for lapses and forgetful fish-mouths and leaps ahead of ten lines; to not mind it that Robert Wilson, the quiet, scholarly one, did not like him and tried to undo him; to spot when a child was trying to climb on stage, to hurry the piece when the light was fading, to respond, always respond, to what went on beyond the little circle of the play.

‘You’ll be a goodish actor,’ Richard Tarlton had said to him, the day before London, ‘but bear in mind that you’ve been rather protected from competition, touring with us, and now you are a little fish in a teeming pond and the crumbs are few. Luckily you’re adaptable. Some men, as soon as they walk on, you think: kingly. Knell was like that. I put my ugly snout round the curtain, and people laugh. You – you don’t suggest anything. A valuable quality. Yes, young Will, I’ve been watching you,’ he said, at Will’s surprised look, ‘and thinking how you’ll get on. I came from the country too. Lord, I was green when I began. Knew naught.’ He patted Will’s arm. ‘Have a care in London, sweet, and don’t drink and whore too much. Come see me if you
entirely
starve, though I shall expect to see ribs before I’ll open my purse.’

Now, as the road broadened and flattened and the rumbling cart became one of many and a great city began to occupy the horizon, like troops moving into position, Will struggled for a response. He had seen so many places, grovelling hamlets and fine towns, he had seen high peaks and glittering seas: now London demanded something of him, and he almost felt he did not have enough left to give. Especially as he felt, obscurely, that this place would not be satisfied with a little. As if he had made it some deep blood-promise, long ago.

Jack Towne slapped his shoulder. It hurt a little. After the barn he had been distant, then at last friendly again, especially since a messenger had ridden out to them in Essex to report that the Queen had graciously granted a full pardon to her loyal servant John Towne for his part in the affray at Thame. Now he was all Towne, all high flamboyance, becoming more himself as London walls took shape in the smoky dusk, and becoming, somehow, a man Will would know less and less.

‘There she lies, Will, the great strumpet of the kingdom. And, by God, I love her still, and will catch my dose of her any day o’ the week. What dost think, hey? Want to turn tail and run home to Stratford?’

‘You were the first person who told me of London,’ Will said. ‘You said it was the worst place to starve in.’

‘Did I? When?’ Towne shook his head, quickening his pace. ‘God’s blood, Will, that memory of yours.’ Ahead the world was swathed in a great dark shawl embroidered with lights. The Queen’s Men broke out chattering and shouting, transformed. Will was quiet. ‘Ah, Shoreditch,’ he heard, as scrubby streets closed in, ‘grimy as ever, aye, but our place, by the mass.’ There were still fields, cows being led, but the very air was different: hundreds, thousands of voices swarmed in it. Towne hung back to nudge him and point. The Theatre. And, look you, the Curtain. They were smaller than Will had imagined, yet still he marvelled at the way the playhouses rose up among the sober proper dwellings, so impudent, so defiantly unlike other buildings: were they allowed – were they really allowed?

A wall, a gate. The city admitted them indifferently. Bishopsgate. Now it felt to Will as if they were driven along the packed street like sheep in a pen. Houses rose five, six storeys – palaces, he would have said once, but worldliness was coming on apace, and he saw them for the rich merchants’ houses they were. But what merchants, he thought, and his father passed sadly before his mind’s eye, worn with the effort of pride. He saw a water-carrier bearing on his back an iron-bound jug as big as himself. He saw a dancing-bear led through the crowd, like a helpless waddling man. He tried to analyse the stink of this place. Just an ordinary town stink, he thought at first, but it was more than that: nurtured here in such concentration, it had become strange, like the fantastically shaped fungus luxuriating under a fallen tree.

Keep faith, he told himself, keep faith. Blood and stones: he pictured them. For this was Will’s bargain and how he proposed to distribute himself. Everything I want of living may be here – but everything I want of love is back there. So let it be, or the curse, yes, the merited curse. Was that a sensation of tearing he felt? But so many sensations, excitement, sickness, exhaustion, and the hard tugging of a beggar at his sleeve, a beggar who seemed to have no nose or mouth, only the imploring eyes.

‘Drive him off,’ Robert Wilson said at his side, cuffing, ‘else you’ll have them all round you. Well! Yonder’s the Bull. Journey’s end. I’m not sorry.’ He yawned. ‘You’ll be wanting a lodging, Will.’ It was not an offer of help, or even a statement. It was a notification that Will was, yes, alone.

*   *   *

‘Sing another song, Mamma,’ said Hamnet. At his side Judith was asleep, but his giant, tireless eyes seemed scarcely to blink. He resented sleep, like a dose or a smacking.

‘That’s all there is,’ Anne said, coming back to herself. ‘I don’t know many songs.’

Somehow she must have sounded pathetic about it, for Susannah, who had her head in Anne’s lap, looked up indignantly. ‘But the ones you know are beautiful,’ she said. ‘That’s what matters.’

‘Is it?’ Anne hadn’t meant to say it. She stroked Susannah’s hair. Hamnet reached out for her, wanting caresses too. They all wanted so much of her, but she didn’t mind that at all: there was more than enough of her to go round. In the window-seat Edmund settled himself more comfortably, looking out at the dusk. She could have told him there was no use looking out. She bade herself be content, and began to sing again: an old song.