The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (46 page)

Tribulations on his journey, but the end never lost sight of; and he was printing, he saw his work presented in all its irreproachable correctness on the page, and his lines were plucked and gathered in selections from the choice authors of the day. And men of taste and wit, men of good estate, had tendered him their compliments.

All the more galling that there had to be this war.

There had to be: that was a given. Left alone, Ben knew he was the most peaceable and retiring of men: his ideal was Cincinnatus, called from the virtuous plough only when duty would not be denied. But, like Cincinnatus, he was a doughty warrior at need. Once insulted, he must be avenged.

‘You don’t understand,’ he told Agnes, while young Ben, arm-girdled, practised his ABC in the margins of his script. The lad’s hair smelt like spring. ‘They have aimed another hit at me, on the public stage, and if I don’t strike back—’

‘Aye, what then? It will be forgot. Sooth, if I go to the play I want to be taken away with a story, not hark to a set of playhouse cats spitting at each other about who has first piss on the chimney-top.’

‘And thus,’ said Ben, thickly, ‘you like to see your husband’s reputation traduced.’

Agnes grimaced as she unwrapped little Mary’s soiled clout. ‘Does Will Shakespeare join in this fool contention? I thought not.’

Will Shakespeare join in? Of course not. It might make him an enemy. It might interrupt the devoted wooing of his fat, smirking mistress, the public. So Ben might have said, if he had been of a jealous disposition – which, thank heaven, he was full armoured against by reason.

Besides, Will was a romancer, his pieces played out in imaginary dukedoms and forests and never – as the true poet should in all conscience – holding up a mirror to the real world. That was his strength and his weakness. And that was the risk Ben took in his own work, where he stood up tall and addressed the matters of the age in his own ringing voice: the risk that the shabby and petty would seek to bring him down with cheap gibes and calumny.

They did it, naturally, when he tried to rise. He was looking for a better place to display his talents. The Chamberlain’s Men made a great deal of their new theatre, the Globe, but still it was the same cacophonous arena where the most delicate flights of a man’s wit were thrown in the dust with the nutshells. Ben’s publisher stood near the Inns of Court, and there he had cultivated improving friendships with learned students who understood what he was trying to do. A restrained and chaste theatre, they told him, was what he needed: he would be heard where he could be heard. And then came the boys’ theatre at Blackfriars, looking for plays. The child actors made it decorous, and the fact that it was indoors made it select.

The new freedom made him, perhaps, indulge a little; direct a few well-chosen blows at the more arrant pretenders of the theatre. And if they recognised themselves there, then that was revealing in itself, and one would have supposed they would take the lesson to heart. Instead they were foolish enough to turn on him.

Dekker was one. Poor patched, zany, sottish Dekker, the mere broom-seller and cress-crier of the stage: he could hardly have risen to such impudence, Ben thought, without being pricked to it by a craftier spirit – and there he was, John Marston, John Mar-all, Ben would call him, a slovenly half-clever, half-Italian smiler, who wrote by the yard for whoever paid him. Oh, how neatly he slapped them down when he presented them in his
Poetaster,
in all their pretentious folly, with the wise figure of the true poet Horace purging them at last … But then they were donkey-headed enough to reply, instead of taking their medicine, and the thing became mere coarse insult. The piece in which they gulled him – he would not dignify it with the name of play – was put on by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe.

Yes, Will acted in it. To do him justice, he played no great part, and plainly could not give himself to such a gimcrack gallimaufry. Still, it was low for the Chamberlain’s Men to stoop. Ben saw it: he was not so thin-skinned as to stay away. But it was poorly done, he thought. They had put his character of Horace on the stage and tricked him out with – well, mere tricks to hit out at Ben. Horace had been a bricklayer, he had fought a duel, his skin was marked with the pox, and what-naught. And this they called satire! As for the vices they attributed to this poor puppet – the vanity and conceit, the way he puffed up his own compositions, the way he stored up his fawning letters to great men – well, they were so crude he could scarcely credit even the Globe audience with genuine laughter. They must have been soused to a man.

But it was no use trying to convince his wife. She lived for small things, it seemed, and could not appreciate the great, which was the besetting sin of most humankind. Unluckily, just as he was dipping his pen in its most brilliant scourging gall, ready to put his buzzing foes to flight for ever, it was snatched from him.

Authority poked its nose into the playhouse again, and did not like what it saw. Ben, in the fertility of his invention, had jousted at a few other targets in his
Poetaster,
including some that sat high; and there was to be no more of it. Ben felt the itching brand on his thumb, and acquiesced. One of his friends from the Inns of Court put in a word for him. He was free to write, but no more barbs.

Very well, he would write, and he would write in such a vein as no one had suspected in him before. Dignified, aloof, he would retreat to contemplate it. Never mind if it appeared that his adversaries had won. The philosophic mind rose above such things.

‘You vermin, you roguy, beggarly pimp, the day was cursed when you were gotten on a poxed whore by the wambling village fool atop a dung-cart.’ So he greeted Dekker when he came across him supping with Will at the Mermaid.

‘Well,’ Dekker said, with a sheepish smile, and a glance down at Ben’s fist gripping his bands, ‘I’m glad you’ve taken none of it to heart.’

‘Peace, for God’s sake, no more of it,’ said Will, pulling Ben down into a seat. Ben thought for a moment about being offended by this, accepted the offer of a drink, then returned to the attack. ‘Your pardon, Will, for the intemperate language; and as for your own small part in these outrages, as a member of the Chamberlain’s Men, I forgive it. But I must know, before I consent to drink with you, whose part you take. You sit in amity with this hedge-bird, and so I must assume it is his.’

Will stared at him. Drink, curiously, made Will pale rather than flushed. He was very pale. His eyes were the colour of the pewter mug by his hand: a full mug. ‘Part, I take no part. Are we to draw daggers over a play that will be forgot in a year?’

‘You mean mine, or his?’

‘All. Drink about.’

‘You take a poor view of posterity. And I would still know, my friend, to which side you incline. To take a side, after all, is to take responsibility. And we cannot decline that. An artist has a first duty, and that is to the truth.’

‘Artist?’ Dekker said, with his most infuriating blinking innocence. ‘But we only make plays.’

‘We? You can scarcely include yourself in the honourable company, man. You’re a wandering tinker hammering bits of trash together—’

‘You’ve given us epithets enough,’ Will cried, rubbing his right temple. ‘Soft, for pity’s sake, and an end to contention.’

‘Well, do you believe the artist, let’s say the poet, has a first duty to truth, yes or no? What of you, Will Shakespeare, why do you do it?’ He had almost said,
How do you do it?
which was an absurdity.

‘To create is the greatest thing in the world,’ Will said, after a moment, frowning: the mug at his hand was still brimming. His eyes roamed past Dekker, past Ben, but did not seem to find anything. ‘And also it means nothing, absolutely nothing, and we can speak of monuments reared up in the ruins of time, as we surely do, and precious words outlasting perished silver and gold, and it means nothing, it means absolutely nothing: my art, his, yours, it’s the shine on the gatepost where the cattle rub by.’ He pushed his mug blindly towards Dekker. ‘Now peace, it’s a battle over the disposition of a straw.’

Well: Ben surmised, from these sad wild words, that something must have been amiss, because no man with Will’s genius, for all its flaws, could think thus. And he was, as usual, right. To do Will honour, he shook Dekker’s paw, and once the fellow had drunk his head away and staggered home to sleep, Ben fixed Will’s eye with his own. They were always better like this.

‘You sit long in the tavern tonight, my friend, yet you hardly drink. Do you have news?’ As Will did not answer he went on hurriedly: ‘Thy children, Will, they thrive, tell me, for Jesu’s sake.’

‘Yes, nothing of that.’ Will seemed to assess him for a moment. Gentle and sober and unremarkable as his face was, still to have Will do that to you was not, Ben found, wholly comfortable. ‘My father’s dying.’

‘Jesus. A luxury I never knew. A father, I mean. I talk about myself all the time, my friend, I’m sorry. It’s to stop something else, but I don’t know what.’

‘But you always know everything,’ Will said, grasping the proffered hand. ‘Oh, God. They brought me the news late this afternoon. Greenaway the Stratford carrier brought it, to my brother Gilbert first, and he brought it me. Failing, they say. Not in great pain or distraction, but failing, and so … I must go. Gilbert has business – he can’t get free till the day after tomorrow. I must go. So I sit here, when I might have made a start this evening, hm? What does that say?’

‘A night ride? You’d be mad.’

‘He made me, you see. Even in my turning against him, and in my heart I turned more than he ever knew, or did he? Still, he was all. Now I have to face the end of that.’

‘Drink. Drink, by Our Lady, or I’ll pour it down your throat. I knew a lad at Westminster, raised by his uncle. The uncle beat him all the time. The lad had a permanent stoop from ducking blows. When the uncle died the lad wept and wept, and tried to jump into the grave. Something like?’

‘Translate it to the mind, the thoughts, the feelings.’

‘Ah, those. You go tomorrow?’

‘First light. Well, hence these tedious low spirits, forgive ’em. Likewise the self-talk, which is something musty.’

‘Do you want a companion? I’m the world’s worst rider, mind. My body was made for a tavern-chair, not a horse. It was divinely appointed so, and I am not one to quarrel with my maker.’

Will shook his head. ‘I’ll go alone,’ he said. ‘I always go alone.’

‘Everywhere?’ Ben would get nothing more, he knew from Will’s expression – an expression like a pack being fastened, lights snuffed – but he pushed a little, in any case. ‘Why apologise for talking of yourself? Most men do it at some time, even if they are not passionate self-admirers like me. What do you fear?’

‘You can’t talk of what isn’t there,’ Will said, with a faint smile: last candle being put out.

Or what can’t be measured, thought Ben. And then: Is that how he does it? The thought made his mind reel a little, and he sat on long after Will had shaken his hand and gone, drinking, until he had dragooned his thoughts into place again, and denied chaos.

*   *   *

Going to your father’s dying: what speed, Will thought, should you make? Your heart and limbs are laggard, for you don’t want to see it, no man does. Yet you fear to be too late, to find the shutters up, the dead face already bound, soul in flight.
Festina lente,
then, hurry slowly, hurry as in the stickiness of a dream, ever renewing itself in unlikely shifts and turns. At Oxford he stops at the Crown, eats an excellent mutton pie, so excellent he calls for another, feels he could go on luxuriously eating for ever. And the bed, always good at the Crown, clean linen and no fleas, but exceptional sweet and soft this time. You could live at a good inn, he thinks, with money enough: just stay there for ever, eating and drinking well, retiring to your soft bed, and never going home: never requiring home, or required by it. Perhaps that is how some people manage in the world. He has no dreams in the sweet bed. When he wakes he feels no urgency. It’s almost as if they are staging a play with a good fortnight’s rehearsals: every minute accounted for.

A better harvest, he notes, on the last long stage of the ride to Stratford. The gleaners in the fields don’t have that hard, frightened look. They don’t know him. He wonders if it’s time to buy land. The Globe is doing well, though he is careful to avoid complacency: you have to be aware of shifting tastes, sense where the audience is turning. He is working on a tragedy of revenge, which seems to be coming into fashion again, and using as a model an old piece of Kyd’s. Poor Tom Kyd, who died penniless a year or so after they racked him; who never had a good word for Will. Death is the only thing they will have in common. He goes straight to Henley Street, not New Place. As he dismounts he has a dizzying, unbearable sense of a threshold. He feels like a hinge about to break. A figure moves at one of the windows and something about it makes him think: That’s Father, he must be better. But it’s Richard, grown thickset, who comes to the door and says: ‘Will.’ And, ‘He’s going.’

And in the dim bedchamber Will howls, and then howls again to hear himself. Because he didn’t expect this. His father, and dying, yes, and the two together. But not this perfect picture of death coming. Not this spareness, bone, stare, flat hands made of veins. Not this happening to John Shakespeare, as if the universe has singled him out, closed quarters, and kicked him into a corner. Not those eyes.

As he weeps, he is aware somewhere of Anne: of her understanding, and its helplessness.

*   *   *

His father murmurs a good many prayers, while his strength lasts. He calls down blessings on Mary Shakespeare, the best wife in creation, soon to be widow: everything for thee, my dear. He is more than seventy years old by his own reckoning. He has made his will. He does not have a hard dying, as the phrase goes. He is himself to the quiet last.

But there is this. Those eyes, which you can almost hear grinding and turning in his shrunken face like pestle in mortar, wander over Will’s face, in the grey light of the final morning. The tight skin puckers.