The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (23 page)

Jack Towne, whom he runs into in a Bishopsgate tavern, shakes his head knowingly. ‘Your acting don’t suit a piece like that,’ he says. As for Towne, he is still with the Queen’s Men, but they are not the force they were: the word is that they are falling apart without Tarlton, and will turn into a tumblers’ troupe. Towne has a young doxy with him and is making much of her. He laughs too much. His fairness seems faded to a sparrow brown. He doesn’t notice Will go.

Forsake thy king, and do but join with me,

And we will triumph over all the world:

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,

And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about.

He beats the lines out with his mind and with his striding legs as he makes his way to Tarlton’s house. But the shutters are up, and evergreens wreathe the door. So, Tarlton was right.

Will goes to see his burial. Even actors must have their obsequies, and St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, marks their mortality among the pullulating alehouses and brothels and skittle-alleys. Will Sommers, King Henry VIII’s fool, is buried here too, Will notes; and thinks of Tarlton’s story of the Shropshire bone-heap. Perhaps in time the jester skulls will grin at each other. But, then, all skulls grin. A bad thought to take home with you to an empty lodging. You wake alone, Jacqueline Vautrollier (Field now) told him. A driven pig squeals across his path, bloodied from the boy’s lashing stick. The boy grins. Will fills his mind with Marlowe again.

And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere

Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Draw forth thy sword, thou mighty man-at-arms,

Intending but to raze my charmed skin,

And Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven

To ward the blow, and shield me safe from harm.

The brazen words blaze, though still he doubts he could say them well, or say them as if he meant them.

Pregnant, luminous, Jacqueline Field welcomes him to the Blackfriars house in her usual way. ‘Here’s Will: here you are.’ Having revealed herself that day in the courtyard, she might justly have hated him for ever more, with the special hate reserved for those who have seen us weak. Instead, this: nothing more than a mild, benign surprise at his continued existence. Here’s Will, yes: but he loses himself gratefully in the shop. Daily now he enters the field of shelves and stacks, where print springs up and showers him from the pages like a volley of sweet-thinking arrows. And like Blackfriars itself, like Southwark and Smithfield, the shop is a babble of tongues. The shipborne Spaniards may sink to hell, but here we are in a world where English twines with other languages, like tails of snakes in illuminated letters: where the curlicued French of Mistress Field meets the plain bold type of broad-faced Dutchmen in street-market and church: where the chequered splendours of Italian, of tender myth and triumphing murder, are set out in dictionaries and primers and stories: such stories.

Will is not alone. They stare at each other, in Field’s shop and elsewhere, above the turning page. They jog bony elbows around the bookstalls of St Paul’s Churchyard. Young men on the rise, walled with suspicion, wanting to break it down.

‘Put your hand on your heart. Now feel it, pa-pum, pa-pum—’

‘I can’t. I can’t feel my own,’ says Will.

‘I know, nor mine, what the devil is that about? You might work it up, you know, into a reflection on how we mortal men can’t apprehend our own selves, the glass of the bosom ever murky, very profound, that. Now, feel and hark, pa-pum, pa-pum, see? It’s where your heroic verse measure comes from.’

‘“Forsake thy king and do but join with me—”’

‘You see? Though in this case a little too – if I dare say it of Kit, my fine and puissant friend – too regular, too pa-pum.’

‘God, yes, how can you? Marlowe’s verse – it’s magnificent and perfect and fine.’

‘It can’t be
all
of those.’ Tom Nashe sighs at his own pedantry, like someone with an habitually embarrassing companion. Younger than Will, not long come down from Cambridge to throw his siege-ladder of learning and wit against the ramparts of London. They strike up a friendship among the books. Nashe writes; Will, shame-faced, confesses he writes too, and is cheered and braced when Nashe quizzes him about it.

‘Oh, I’m unsure of what I do, because I lack learning.’

‘Because you haven’t been to university? But not all learning is there – though assuredly there are those who come from those penned precincts scribillarious, and
think
they know all, and know all too little.’

‘Scribillarious…’

‘Do you like? The root is in a good soil,
scribillare,
Latin if not Cicero’s.’

‘From
scribere,
and better.’

‘There, you see, you have Latin, yes?’

‘Small Latin,’ Will says, ‘and less Greek.’

‘A pretty phrase, you should remember it. And then, look here, has learning a beginning and end? Hunt among those groves of books, William, and there the quest is ever. And, besides, here’s another university lying all about.’

They are passing through St Paul’s, along the great aisle, along the great stinking trading-crowded roofed-over first-place of the kingdom, where nobody properly should be except in worship, and where the noise and thunder of voices and walking feet expresses a hundred markets and guildhalls. God and his angels are up there somewhere, above the scriveners with bundled scrolls under their arms, bare-breasted whores, gallants and tailors and quacks.

‘There’s Goodman Applecheek from the country, chasing a lawsuit, and, oh, handsome Deborah, her father is a cit and a very mint of a man and seeks to husband her well. Will it please him look over here?’ Tom Nashe is not so much tall as long: a loose, lean, asymmetrical fellow with a half-handsome, drowsing spoon-face and a slow, burred voice. ‘And is she really innocent? I would like to set it to the proof or demonstration…’ A sort of fanciful, mildly romantic lechery characterises Nashe, who is always talking of the ladies, disguised as Clorindas and Chloës, who have wounded his heart. Some of them seem to belong to the highest circles, which makes Will wonder a bit; Nashe’s father is a Norfolk minister, and there is no fortune, unless he earns it by his pen. Which means winning himself a powerful patron.

‘Unless you write for the stage,’ Will says. ‘There’s money there.’

They are drinking in a Cheapside tavern called the Mermaid, a proper prodigious inn straddling two streets and shelving up three storeys: rather expensive, but getting up a reputation for choice witty company.

‘Ah, the stage now, William, this mighty fat infant theatre we’re raising. I’m in two minds about it. Oh, in the seclusion of my closet I have turned my own pen to it, a speech here and there, you know – only I wish it had all begun in a different way. Wasn’t it good Master Burbage who put up the first theatre, and decided in his carpenter’s wisdom to let the lowest sort in for a penny?’

‘So it was, and every player thanks him for it, trust me. That’s how the box fills, that’s how we thrive.’

‘Ah, but thrive in the right way? As an art? Are you serving delicate sweetmeats to the dainty palate, or ladling out hog-broth for blind, greedy appetites? Tell me, William, when you act on the stage, they are mighty close, aren’t they, the crowd?’

‘Oh, you can feel their breath. And when they laugh, the great wind of it smacks your chops.’

Nashe pales. ‘I admire – and shudder.’

‘Come, sweetmeats and broth together, is that not palpable? And what of your friend Marlowe?’ A little giddy dip of jealousy as he says this, as if the world has gone over a pothole. For Nashe knows Marlowe well: he moves in that little gilded circle linked by Oxford and Cambridge, who touch the theatre at pen’s length only. Wits they are accounted; shits they are sometimes called, in the world of the working player. ‘He pleases, he sets those crowds gasping, what would he say?’

Nashe laughs. ‘He would beat me like the blind bear for asking, and then dizen my wits with a subtle answer. Where did you get your earring put in?’

‘Jeweller in Wood Street. You like?’

‘It’s a curious fashion, but I’ve heard sweet Lucilla say it beguiles her, to see it on a man … Does it hurt, the piercing?’

‘A mere tickling. With the ale you’ve drunk, you wouldn’t even know when it was done.’

So they go forthwith; and Nashe howls and blubbers.

‘You said it wouldn’t hurt. You swore by the Holy Name it would not hurt, that it would be soft and sweet as a buttercup under the chin.’

‘I swore no such oath. Lord, I’d never have urged it if I’d known you were such a craven.’

‘Ah, there’s the crux of it. You don’t know me well enough yet, William, else you’d know that my essence is pure poltroon.’ Nashe comforts himself with more drink, handkerchief clapped to his ear. ‘Do you know I fear thunder too? Poor thunder that never harmed a finical, filamentary hair of the most luckless man’s head. Ow, it hurts like buggery. I use the phrase only as a rhetorical figure, I should add, not from experience.’

Will has heard the name of Marlowe in that connection too, but he keeps quiet.

‘What do you fear, William? Come, tell, tell. The drink isn’t working, man, medicine me with speech, narrate me a narcotic. What?’

‘Oh, nothing. Or only the afternoon. A dull grey afternoon in tardy spring, perhaps, or mild autumn, and no matter where, country or city street, it’s the same. Feeling of leaning numb shoulder against the dead wall of life. But never mind because evening’s going to come, night’s going to come, with lights leaping in windows, brilliance, a new crisp air. Now, what if evening never comes? Afternoon is eternal and perpetual and the thing you await never is, was, nor will be.’ He blinks at what he has made. ‘That’s my fear.’

*   *   *

What he wants: he wants to write a play.

A natural progression, in one sense, as he has always loved them. And from the Queen’s Men on, he has improvised speeches, patched and polished the individual parts. He is acknowledged to have a talent for this, and for players every extra talent is useful – a good singing voice, an ability to fence, a well-shaped leg.

But he wants to write a whole play of his own – or, if need be, write in collaboration. The wanting is a gathering of many things. Understanding, first. As an actor he knows what works. He knows what makes the audience gasp or freeze, chuckle or fidget. He knows what speeches exhaust the player’s lungs, when a quick change of role in the tiring-house is too quick for adjustment, how an exit-speech must be timed so there’s no standing and staring while you get yourself off the stage.

And he knows plays. A good dozen he has entirely by heart, several dozen more he can fill in the speeches from cues. Any day, as a player, you may be presented with a new one. Plays are everyday things, baked like pies, sewn like gloves. The companies buy them as the miller buys flour or the tailor cloth: necessary stock. Usually the leading players will assess a play in tavern conclave, candles and beef-juice and beer spotting the pages as they leaf through the manuscript, sounding out a phrase here and there, questioning the writer, is it grand, merry, how many boys needed? (Lately with Pembroke’s Men, though he is still only a hired-man and not a sharer in the company, he has been called in to a couple of these conferences because of his reputation as verse-cobbler.)

Sometimes, if the writer is proven and trusted, the money will be handed across the table on the strength of a jotted outline. Rare, but it does happen. And how the writer tries not to snatch at the purse of coins. Its pouchy weight: he remembers Tarlton making great obscene play of the suggestiveness of that, dangling it on his palm – oh, ladies, is there aught belonging to a man that feels better in the hand?

Then the play belongs to them. If it works, they’ll place it in their repertoire: a really popular piece, a
Spanish Tragedy
or
Tamburlaine,
will come round half a dozen times a month. Don’t overdo it, though. Nothing pleases like a new play. New plays are wanted, and he wants to write one.

And he knows plays, their sorts and styles. Comedies boiled up from the dry bones of the old Latin comedies he recited at grammar-school: high, stiff-necked tragedies of emperors and blood: rumbling pageants of kings of England interspersed with hinds and horseplay. He knows the language they’re couched in, from the donkey-jog verse and sedative rhymes of the older plays to the new surge and splendour of Marlowe. And what those words must do: from the moment the play begins, they must make everything; they create the earth and sky and the people who move there. A soldier’s breastplate, a painted throne – these tawdry bits and pieces are the only aid the words can call on. First, words. First and last, words.

He wants to make, with words. He wants to try it. He doesn’t think it’s his destiny – it’s necessary to be clear about that. But still, there is a gathering: droplets must gather to make a storm.

Drunk with Nashe another night, he speaks of it: the wanting.

‘Make something bigger than ourselves, you see,’ he says, ‘but make it from ourselves.’

‘Excellent, more.’

‘Make my father proud of me.’ Will is very drunk.

‘With words?’

‘With what words will make. Make my wife forgive me.’

‘For what, things done?’ Gulp and grin. ‘Tell.’

‘For what I might yet do.’

Very drunk. A warning. Will shivers at his own exposure. Careful of the drink now. Remember to make the most of your assets. There are some players (better actors than him) who drink themselves out of work: they can’t memorise their parts, or they spoil their voices, or they’re sleeping in gaol when they should be trying-out. With care I can beat them.

For this is part of the gathering too – wanting to be a success. Selfishly. Not to flounder here, and be fished back, half drowned and pitiable, to Stratford. Prove himself. Push his way up alongside the wits and the shits. Emulation is there, too – or call it by its proper name, envy. Will envies Marlowe so much he could be sick.