The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (29 page)

His mother, he thought, would approve her: her trimness, her straight gaze, the neat needlework of her own that she wore at her high, ripe but modest breast. As for his stepfather, Ben didn’t much care. Of course, if he were to marry before twenty-four, it would break his apprenticeship. He looked into himself for a while, wondering if this was a motive, but not for long. Self-examination, he thought, was futile. He knew himself anyway.

There was the question – once he had settled on marrying her, and Ben’s decisions were as prompt and reliable as his digestion – of what they would live on. Well, if nothing else he could work at bricklaying as a day-man. If his stepfather wouldn’t give him work, he knew one of his associates who would – he regularly winked at using unlicensed labour, and the touch of rebellion in it appealed. And Agnes had a little money.

‘Some people have supposed me an heiress, and I’m not,’ she said, in her cool, downright way. ‘You’re not one of those, I hope.’

‘You have my leave to run me through with a sword, if I am.’

‘A sword? Lord above, where would I get one of those?’

‘You are ever practical.’ He laughed.

‘No: I know you’re not of that sort. And you’re hardly in a position to hunt fortunes neither. Oh, I don’t mean anything by it. I like you very well, though a plain man. I think I shall like none better.’

Practical, yes, and nothing of the light-of-love about her. They walked together in St Paul’s: her little arched feet nosed in and out of view; he allowed his mind to climb pleasantly upward from them. She was proud of her spruce, berry-eyed self, and harvested the glances of admiration, speculation, but he didn’t mind that. It seemed right that a pretty woman should enjoy the consciousness of what she was. Different for men, of course. He was happy with the difference.

Her parents were dead, and she lived with an uncle as guardian and the old deaf woman who had been her nurse in St Magnus hard by London Bridge. The uncle had been a tanner and had, reputedly, made a heap of money. So it seemed from the look of the house, when Ben at last made his formal call: bars and shutters everywhere proclaimed the miser’s hoard. Within, he passed through so many locked doors, and little passages and vestibules – like infant rooms imprisoned and stunted – that he thought he might come out at the back door, never having been properly inside the house at all. He was brought into the uncle’s presence at last, in what he thought was a lumber room. A bundle of old clothes moved, and that was him.

The old man approved Ben. ‘I can tell a good deal about a man by shaking his hand,’ he quavered, forgetting to do so. Agnes yawned and tapped her distracting foot while her uncle showed Ben, with much whispery ceremony, his treasured collection. ‘Such a collection, sir, is not to be found outside the royal palaces.’ Nor in them, Ben hoped, for Her Majesty’s sake: he had never seen such miserable trumpery. The old man fondled a moth-eaten tapestry that might have been made by a set of blind, palsied nuns. The Venetian glasses, thick and misshapen, had never been near Venice. But the old man mumbled and caressed. Put it about that you were mighty strong, and people marvelled to see you lift a middling load. They believed in a cobwebbed fortune behind these doors. They would do anything for belief, the poxed whore, but not for knowledge, the virtuous beauty. It was strange. The old man kissed him and promised to do well by him. Once they were alone Ben wiped his mouth and shared his first proper or improper kiss with his affianced Agnes.

For the first time, also, he saw a little fear on her face. ‘Wilt be a good husband?’ she asked him.

He thought of his dead father, of his stepfather, who spoke softly only to his dog. ‘Only try me,’ he said.

*   *   *

London swallows Will up again. He goes gladly into its maw and ripe capacious guts. Here he can’t think, which is to say he can replace thoughts with a thousand others if need be. He goes to Blackfriars to forage among the galley-proofs, and to pass on news from home to Richard. Not good: old Master Field is failing. Wanders in his wits, and in church has been known to start undressing, as if he thinks himself going to bed.

‘Oh, God.’ Richard speaks more in weariness than alarm. Upstairs his baby heir is squalling. Richard has crossed that line: the new generation is the locus of anxiety. ‘Well, I can’t go back, certainly not this quarter. Unless I want to throw the whole business in the dust.’ He has this continual apprehension of catastrophe too. If prices stay as they are, he may as well set light to the place, and so on. Meanwhile he looks quite comfortable. ‘Jacqueline’s been on a diet of vinegar since the baby. Trying to get her figure back. If you ask me, the vinegar’s affected her temper beside.’ He keeps his voice down for that. ‘Seen the new Ariosto printing?’

‘No, can I borrow?’

‘If you don’t mark it. Lord, what news. I dare say Mother can manage him, though, hey?’

It is not, of course, a question he wants an answer to.

On his way out Will passes Jacqueline talking with a French neighbour: the two women stand close, solicitous, lightly holding hands. Their voices sound like hautboy and flute twining together. The exoticism of it thrills and pains Will: he wants to linger, as the tongue lingers over the cut in the lip, poking and hurting.

Shoreditch hums with the news of a killing fight in the street: drawn swords, screamed oaths, blood spattering the causeway. Nothing so very out of the ordinary in that district – until he hears the name Marlowe.

‘What? Nothing’s happened to him,’ says Nashe. Will finally finds him at the Mermaid, almost walled in with books and papers, and lingering out a tankard of small beer. ‘Well, apart from committal to Newgate. But it’s a formality, he’ll get bail. He was quite an innocent party. Well, as near as friend Kit can
be
to an innocent party. Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you the tale. To be sure I’ll tell you without the drink, but it will be a mean, spiritless species of narration…’

So, there were three men in it. One was named Bradley, and the son of an innkeeper. Bradley accosted Marlowe in the street – in Hog Lane, no less – over a debt. Swords out: general agreement that Bradley drew first. (But Marlowe wouldn’t be slow to respond, Will thinks.) While they were hacking at each other, along came Thomas Watson, good friend of Marlowe’s, fellow poet. Watson protested or intervened or drew his own sword – accounts apparently differ – and the next thing wild Master Bradley was attacking him in turn. Watson defended himself, so well that his sword went six inches into Bradley’s breast and killed him. So, committal for the two of them.

‘Kit, as I say, will get his bail, and almost certainly be cleared, for he landed no killing blow. Watson did, but it was plain self-defence, and he’ll surely be extended a pardon if he can live past the gaol-fever.’

‘And all over a debt?’ Will says. ‘It’s prettily paid now. I suppose there is no enforcing laws about the wearing of sharp swords.’ He calls for, needs, a drink.

‘Nor on men’s tempers.’ Nashe tickles his own chin with his pen, regarding Will brightly, subtly. ‘And you wonder with me, perhaps, what
is
Kit Marlowe fighting when he does this? Himself? God? He believes ardently in one – and hardly at all, you may have divined, inappropriate word, in the other. For my part I would have people keep mum perpetual about their bed-tastes alike with their religion, but it’s as if Kit wants to throw them in the world’s face.’ Nashe shakes his head. ‘Brawling and stabbing, blood and death in the middle of hoggish Hog Lane: what a picture it makes!’

Yes: Will sees it, crude and bold in afternoon sun. If he puts himself in it, it is in the shadowed sides. Moving along the margins of life, where you can’t be pinned down. But come, out into the open with this, Will: the leap and lurch of your heart when you first heard the bare mention of killing alongside the name of Kit Marlowe. Stratford and London, his two impossible, irreconcilable poles, meet at least in this. In both he knows what it is like to wish a man dead.

But he is like neither of them. No grand doer of deeds. No strong swordsman of life. Instead he has this, and to win he must take it up, light, with a sharp, sure tip to balance the world on: his pen.

9

The Chances (1592)

‘With the hunchback, do you suppose him weak in the legs likewise?’ Burbage says. ‘How if I limp – or will that make him too pitiable?’

‘Go by me again,’ Will says, watching. ‘No, I think no limp. I fancy he would move fast. Strength in his motion, like a blind man’s voice. Mind, we don’t want him pitiable at all.’

‘No? Not even in the scene of the ghosts? “I shall despair. There is no creature loves me.”’

‘Good, good, give it so. You’ve learned so far?’

‘I’ve learned the entire thing, much as you’ve tried me.’ Burbage goes to the keg and taps it. They need many pints of small beer to see them through these rehearsals, starting at cockcrow so as to utilise the light. The yawning prompter holds out a mug. ‘I never conned such an infernal long part. But I warrant you, it’s easier to get by heart than a Marlowe character. Your Crookback is more – well, he is himself, and not just so many lengths of verse. By the by, you know your accent’s not regular there.’

‘And elsewhere. So I want it. In Marlowe there is too much—’ He stops. Burbage, stocky, sandy, round doughy face, gives him a wry, surprised look. ‘I don’t want regularity. Not like a clock ticking. Bend it, as you did then. There’s an extra beat at the end, on “me”. The voice drops at it. In that is Richard’s sad recognition. “Me” is almost naught.’

‘Yet no pity? For this is what pricked me, Will, to take him: that he’s not a mere Tamburlaine vaunter atop the heap o’ corpses. Everything he does is villainous, yet he’s not all villain.’

Will remembers long ago sitting by his mother’s side protesting,
We are what we do, surely.
‘I think we may feel with him and for him, but not with that pity which places us above him. Not looking down. More – looking in the glass.’

Burbage wipes his beard. ‘Hm. Heaven knows I have my faults, but…’

Will laughs. ‘Look you, if we were to be villains, what manner of villains would we better prefer to be? Weak vacillant ones, or tremendous ones, tip-full and exuberating? And have we not all overreached at some time in our own lives, even if not to murder and kingly thrones?’ He half fills a mug: his mood plunges. ‘And haven’t I done so, with this? Overreached?’

‘Dost think so? I don’t,’ Burbage says. ‘I’d not throw my reputation in after it, if I thought it would sink. What you put together with
Harry Six
was very well, but that crowded historical pageanting goes only so far. And rot me if I could remember which duke was which for half of it. No, this is what I look for. Someone to write me a man, who thinks and lies and bleeds, and you remember him when you lay the book down or leave the theatre, recall and judge and think around him like a man you’ve known long to drink with.’

‘We should feel more for him the worse he gets,’ Will says tentatively. ‘Will it answer?’

‘Aye, if we keep our eye fixed on him. Less of the pageanting.’

‘I’ve tried to keep it down. In fact, I fear the historical facts have gone under the straw and out of the window—’

‘Where they belong.’

Will grins. He is addicted to hunting through the chronicles and compendia he has accumulated from Field’s shop and elsewhere, and sometimes vividly dreams of reading pages full of rich matter and could almost weep when waking scatters them; yet once he begins to write he wants to shrug them off, like whining, insistent beggars. He has to be left alone in that place.

Burbage adjusts the stuffing of his hump. ‘This thing keeps slipping. Come costuming, it had best be sewn in. So, entrance, does he soliloquise on the winter of discontent, or is he confiding?’

‘Confide, bring us in, we are all human alike. Prowl and invite us to your secrets, so. The measure is irregular again, I know, purposed so. Just follow it: the accent hands you the meaning. Falls heavy on the first stroke of
glorious,
for he’s mouthing it with mockery. Now skip light along
by this
and land plump on
sun
– aye, makes you smile, like a wedge of hard cheese.’

‘I have you. A slippery pulse. Think you Alleyn could speak this?’

‘Never.’ Alleyn is Burbage’s great acting rival, stately, magnificent legs. But for Will, Burbage has twice the gift because of his presence – or, rather, the absence of his presence. When Burbage steps on to the stage he gives up on his self, leaves it like a snake’s shed skin. Not dissimilar to how Will has begun, at last, to write properly and alone for the stage. He finds he does best if he takes himself almost by surprise in writing: sidle to the desk and begin jotting while standing, not sit down solemn to the great task of composition. Irritably leave it, walk away, pounce back on it half hearkening to an argument downstairs or a broken song in the street. Become a part of that argument, a note of that song, thread yourself into its progress and no matter where it takes you, as long as it’s away from yourself.

This is the great, matchless discovery: a place he can enter and not be.

No set times, for that, too, would inhibit (here I sit down to compose), but he works long and hard, is never far from his writing-sheets. His barber notices them.

‘A pretty comedy, that’s what you should give them. Not these tragical kings. Lift chin. Mind, he was a rare villain, your Richard, wasn’t he? Or so they say. More of a mixture, like any of us, perhaps, if truth be told.’

‘Ah, but which truth?’

‘Strange, some men lose from the brow, some from the crown. Yours is thick as thacking at the back, look. Truth, well, that’s a thing as lies fair or foul depending how you comb it. Will it please you perfume the beard? Heyo, you know best. Grey hair, now, when that comes you can cry welcome, for it don’t shed.’

‘Is there no happy way, then?’ Will says. ‘To keep the hair and the colour?’

‘If there is it’s not this side of the grave. The Queen, now, she’s been bald as an egg for years. A crown won’t save your crown, as you might say. But would I change places? In a trice I would.’