The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (40 page)

All Gilbert’s talk was of the city. At the Fields’, Richard went out of his way to talk to Anne of Stratford, which she supposed was kind of him. (Though did it show so much that she was gasping and flexing on the bank?) Mistress Field she could not take to. Though it was interesting to meet a Frenchwoman, no doubt. Yet Anne wished she could just have these interesting experiences over, like the diseases of childhood. And Mistress Field had too good a figure for a woman who had borne children, and you could tell she thought so. And too many wise words about teething and the care of linen, as she smoothed her enviable flat belly. I never get along with the wise, Anne thought. A pity her husband was plainly frightened of her. No one could say that of Will. But perhaps she should be exercising a little fear over him. Be a little of the termagant wife. Was that what others did? She never used to care what others did, disdained it, even: felt that behind their closed door she and Will lived by their own rule.

She wondered a lot of things, and they jangled in her head so much that sometimes she followed Joan’s prescription. Before coming to the Fields’ she had had the maid bring her up a cup of wine, and now as Mistress Field offered her almond-milk or sack, she had no difficulty in choosing. It helped a little: the mind found one thing to fret about instead of several.

One thing it dismissed. As they rose to leave the Fields’, another woman came in, a dark, frowning, half-pretty woman who looked, as so many did here, as if she ate and slept badly. ‘Isabelle, my dear,’ Mistress Field said.

And the woman looked up at Will and said: ‘Master Shakespeare.’ But gave his name a peculiar pronunciation, which made Anne conclude she was French likewise.

‘Madame Berger, your servant,’ Will said.

The Frenchwoman took no notice of Anne at all. ‘You must come and see me again,’ she said. And Will bowed, not looking much enthused. And Anne thought: Well, my God, if there were anything, it wouldn’t be as fearfully obvious as that.

Still, she said as they walked home: ‘Who’s she?’

‘A Frenchwoman. A silk-weaver’s widow. I helped her once, when there were disturbances against the foreigners.’ He added: ‘She’s mad,’ as easily as one might say, she lives up the hill. Nothing there, she thought: surely.

Naturally his work took him away. Away from the house – or just away. Once he said, ‘I must go,’ and soon afterwards she found him upstairs, writing. And his look seemed to say: Well, it’s as I said.

She watched him with the theatre people, heard dimly their talk. Box-takings up. This latest broadsheet from the Puritans attacking the theatre, poorly writ but, Lord, what a siege-train of citations from the Bible. Trouble ahead from the lease of the land the Theatre was built on: well, we must shift somehow. Clowns improvising, man, that belongs with slashed doublets and rhymes, we want none of it, the words as writ on the page or else. Two lionskins and a bearskin and a tree of golden apples, all lost: well, someone’s stealing properties, that’s all there is to it … He was so much a part of them: but did any of them know him? she wondered.

This man, perhaps, more than any other: Ben Jonson. At first she was relieved when he came to Bishopsgate, square and stocky and shovelling up food and drink with his big work-cracked hands, and taking very little notice of her as he talked to Will: for a space she almost felt she was with Hamnet Sadler, moored in a quiet Stratford afternoon where nothing was expected of her. And she was glad – though she would not have said so, just then, under torture – that he was apparently nothing to do with the theatre. She heard him talk of his day’s labour, of his wife’s coming confinement, and thought: Finally, something that hasn’t been crowded out by the theatre, the grand brute that pushes life with its elbows to the unregarded edges.

But soon Jonson’s talk climbed winding into the high and learned, where she could not follow, and where even Will sometimes seemed hardly bothered to pursue him. And then Jonson offered to hear Hamnet’s lesson.

‘Who is this governor you’ve appointed to the whelp?’ Jonson boomed. ‘I’ve never heard his name.’

‘Tutor only, not governor,’ Will said, smiling, ‘and allow me respectfully to suggest, Ben, that you haven’t heard of everyone.’

‘Everyone worth knowing. Well, come hither, boy, I shan’t bite thee, saving thy Latin is villainous, and then I can’t answer for myself.’

That was when Anne began to be in two minds about him. Plenty of people used ‘thee’ for children they didn’t know, but she had never liked it. Nor did she entirely like the way he loudly challenged Will on things to do with learning, arts, poetry. Perhaps she didn’t wholly understand: she could see it was a sort of fencing, and that Will seemed to enjoy the exercise, and he never ended up banging the table as Jonson did. Still, she felt curiously oppressed when Ben Jonson called, as if the room were suddenly overheated.

But that might have been something else at work. A sort of transferred fear. Because from what she could gather, Jonson was in the process of leaving real life and entering the theatre. And Will was – what? Helping, responsible, involved? (To blame?)

Another friend of Will’s – a long, lank, inwardly smiling man named Tom Nashe, whom she did not like at all – was there when they talked of it. Will, it seemed, had directed Jonson to Master Henslowe: and she had picked up the word about him: beside Burbage he was the other power in the London theatre. A little like the two big farmers about Shottery, always looking to buy up a morsel of land, and win out.

‘And so you are employed, fruitfully, dutifully employed, by Henslowe?’ Nashe said. ‘And pray tell which of your bollocks did you have to hand over to his keeping to seal the contract?’

‘Pah, the man’s gentle as a sheep with me,’ Jonson said, big bristled chin jutting. Anne sat by, knitting hose for the twins, though Will urged her simply to buy these things in London.

‘It’s journeyman work,’ Will said. ‘Henslowe has need, as we all do, of plays, and if not a whole play then a play-plot to be worked up, or an old play warmed over. With a little, I say only a little, recommendation from me, Ben is doing these things for Henslowe, here and there.’

‘A little, a very little effort from me, you know – a mere thumb-nibbling insult compared to what I
could
do – and, lo, the piece is transformed, and I think Master Henslowe will soon be loving me above every other,’ Jonson said.

‘Here’s Ben going through the manuscript,’ Will said, putting on the barrel chest, the chin. ‘“This too long. This to be moved to the end, ’twill balance better. Add six lines heroic measure to bring out the rival, he’s too faint. Tut, a laughable figure, out with it. Tut, polish, polish…”’

‘Aye, a fair representation,’ Jonson said, smiling and red, ‘and in truth the piece was worse than that. It was so artless and sprawling I thought
you
must have had a hand in it.’

And Will laughed – which she could not understand. ‘So, if they’ll have you, will you go?’

‘Why should they not have me?’

‘Well, I heard what Pembroke’s Men thought of your acting, so—’

‘Oh, I haven’t,’ Nashe cried. ‘Pray tell.’

‘They made me try out a most lamentable poor part. There was naught to be done with it,’ Jonson scoffed.

‘They said blustering is not acting,’ said Will, temperately.

‘This company is of a different mettle entirely,’ Jonson said, ‘and better able to appreciate a man’s new-minted but solid ringing worth. And when they set out in June, they say, I may thoroughly count upon a place, all being well.’

‘A travelling company is a very fair fit place to begin,’ Will said, ‘as I well know. But it does mean beginning, Ben: choosing that life, and everything that goes with it, and not turning back. It must be all or nothing.’

‘Oh, I know that. She knows that. I’m ready.’

He never referred to his wife by name, Anne thought; and bit through the wool with her teeth.

*   *   *

At the top of the house there was a garret where the maid did the laundry, hanging it to dry on a pulleyed string across the street. Very London, Anne thought: you put out your shifts and drawers for all to see, yet of course no one looked up to see them, because that would be countrified. Would they look up if someone were hanging there? Another of her wonderings. She wished she could stop them. This, she thought, when she went up to the garret, is my head. Full of flapping shapes and light, and the heat rising.

*   *   *

‘Dance with me?’ Edmund said. He had found her alone, and without her face ready: her London face, plucky and responsive.

‘We haven’t done that for a long time,’ she said: meaning no.

‘Too long.’ He had hold of her hand. He hated seeing her unhappy – Edmund hated seeing anyone unhappy, indeed – but she knew that he particularly wanted her to stop being unhappy now, here, because he was so very happy. And her being unhappy probably spoiled, a little, his happiness. So he wanted her to dance him into reassurance.

She did it. Well, it was not much to do; and it was part of the old Stratford life, besides. Ah, and there you heard a chime of revelation. That Stratford life was what you wanted. With Will, without Will? Dance, hear the mind-music, don’t hear the question.

*   *   *

‘Edmund wants to do what you do,’ she told Will. He was undressing for bed, hardly able to stand for weariness; she had been lying sleepless behind the curtains for hours. Different clocks. Different skies.

‘I know. He’s said so – or tried not to say so. I wish he could.’

‘Do you? Why?’

She sensed him, in the half-dark, jerking back from the shin-barking directness of that question.

‘I mean,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the bed – the very edge, ‘I wish it were more probable, since it’s what he wants. But I doubt whether he has it. The ability to be a player. Well, call it something else, for it’s a species of inability, in truth. Edmund’s too much himself. If he were to try acting, I’m afraid he would always be Edmund.’ A pause, in which something in Anne, a prentice yelling revolt in the street, cries out:
Good for him, so he should be.
‘You can see the difference in Matthew.’

Oh, yes. Him.

*   *   *

Richard Burbage brought him, though obviously Will had agreed to the fact of him earlier. She watched them from a first-floor window, standing in attitudes before the street-door: Burbage with his hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder, Will with arms folded, the two grown heads in discussion – and the boy between, a blob of fairness atop slenderness, a dandelion-boy. He was looking at a waiting laden donkey as if he could look at that sight for a long time, hands folded before him: as if he could find plenty there to occupy him, for now.

If not for him … How wicked of her. She should have felt motherly, no doubt. But surely there was meant to be a limit to that, and that was why they had come here, to narrow family down, not spread it out.

Naturally, it was Will’s work. Matthew Hollingbery was a boy-actor, to be trained up by a seasoned actor. It was not a formal apprenticeship, but it was very like it. Will was master and tutor. Also landlord and, perhaps, a kind of father.

‘It’s how it works in the theatre,’ Edmund said to her. Increasingly he made these explanations, or excuses: his brother’s advocate. ‘It’s a professional matter.’

But Edmund believed what he wanted to believe, which gave, she thought cruelly, a slightly strained look to his muscular eagerness, like a man at the fair bending iron. Of course it couldn’t be just professional, unless you were inhuman, which Will wasn’t. There must be some warmth involved, some connection. All the more, in fact, as Matthew belonged to Will’s work – for that was where she suspected Will’s heart, elusive bird, settled most.

And impossible not to have the suspicion, when in the evening Will and Matthew withdrew to the garret for an hour to go over lines, try out voice and gesture, that he relished this. Even when she heard a nagging or weary edge to his voice – ‘Come, pat on your cue, Matt, hearken else all’s lost, for God’s sake—’ Anne suspected he was enjoying himself more than with his own children, who were so very much themselves.

She hated herself all the more because Matthew was so unassuming. A schoolmaster’s son, she learned, orphaned, then placed with a relative who had been vicious. A refined manner, but without affectation. He would sit in the window-seat and read, or gaze out. Blue eyes. An odd-looking peachy complexion – odd-looking to her, a mother, who saw all children as not quite coming up to hers in looks, and their hair strangely cut. His gaze at her was humble yet not submissive. If anyone, he put her in mind of Will when she first knew him: when he could blanch his identity from the room, turn into a sun-drop, a breeze-touched cobweb.

Hamnet was eleven. Matthew was thirteen. They had nothing to say to each other. Hamnet watched his father. Came out with it.

‘What you said about boys going into a nobleman’s household … If I did that, what would you think, Father? Would you think more of me?’

Will gave a start. ‘Great God, how could I think better of you than I do?’ he said. He hugged his son.

Anne, divided, could have told him Hamnet didn’t much like embraces now, even from her. Blacker thought: London has certainly done this, it has shown that we really don’t mix well as a family, and it was silly and countrified to think we could. And perhaps none did: thinking of her father, her beautiful past, she realised she was a sport, a white blackbird. The common way was thus: father governed all, mother governed children; father and mother conducted themselves towards one another with proper esteem and respect. Love was there; but you all took your places at its table in due order.

And as for the sacred domestic hearth, here in London, here in the domain of the theatre…? Well, perhaps again she was being unrealistic. Some players were married, certainly. Still, they were more with each other than with their wives. Sometimes, instead of an inn, the Chamberlain’s Men adjourned to this house after rehearsals, occasionally performances. They made a great noise, drank and ate hugely. Sometimes she heard them harsh in hilarity. Bawdy talk too. Will tried to restrain it. Still she could not help wondering how much he joined in when she was not by. A cup of perry nerved her to ask him.