The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (48 page)

‘How do you say it?’ Heminges asks, on their first read-through. ‘Ar-nus, or Ay-nus?’

‘Tempt me not,’ Burbage says, with an ashy grin.

But they go ahead. Burbage gets the vast static speeches into his capacious head. Tries, really tries, to make a living character out of – Will admits it to himself – a set of marble attitudes. (Ben last night, as they quarrelled over it:
I tell you, it will outlast marble, it will last a thousand years.
Will:
No, it only seems like that when you hear it.
) Perhaps he should have said something, something clinching. Burbage wants cuts from the beginning, but Jonson refuses adamantly. As it is, or not at all. He means it too. Time, declares Jonson, for the stage to bear a correctly made tragedy, fashioned after classical models, and inculcating virtue. No shrieking ghosts or bloody swordfights. Time for people to be serious, and learn.

And what the Roman people did to Sejanus the man, the Globe audience do to Jonson’s play. Luckily a play can’t bleed when torn limb from limb.

Jonson is the first to acknowledge the failure. He watches from the gallery with Sir Robert Townsend, his new patron. Yes, he accepts it; though, as he remarks, the Roman people were on the whole worthy of a great nation’s name, whereas the English theatre mob are the dullest paddockful of braying asses that ever turned up their snouts at fine-chopped sweet hay to provender on pissed-on thistles.

What is Will to say? It was too cold, it was too stiff, it didn’t move in any sense … Whatever he says will ally him with the idiot multitude who clap their paws for his Shylock, his Falstaff, his somehow-living impurities. How do I make them live? I give them life. And they give me a life in return.

When they all repair after the play to the Mermaid, Will hopes to avoid saying anything. Perhaps they can just be convivial, leave the subject untouched in the middle. But conviviality won’t come. The wearying speeches, the goose-hissing of the crowd, lie heavily over everyone. ‘Well,’ says Burbage, half giving a toast, ‘we gave it everything, friends; and everything we received in return, as due reward…’ The speech falls apart. People find excuses to go home early. Will and Jonson, and a few others, stay on drinking. Unwise, after the event. But they are not drunk – or at least, neither of them loses coherence in liquor. Somehow the bare thoughts slip out. Somehow, instead of the usual fencing, there is the clash of verbal steel.

‘But you can’t lecture an audience into loving you.’

‘There – love – you betray yourself. I don’t want to be loved when I create, man, I want to inspire thought, reflection, moral improvement.’

‘A great pill to swallow ungilded.’

‘Let them choke on it, then.’

‘You see, Ben, they can tell that that’s what you think of them.’

‘Aye, and why not? What is the mass of humanity but a parade of voice, vanity and folly?’

‘Everything, and everything besides. Look in that mark left by the tapster’s finger there, and you fall into an infinity of worlds.’

‘It’s a fingermark like any other, and he’s a tapster like any other.’

‘Nothing is like anything else.’

‘Wrong. One fool is like another, one thief is like another, and if we do not march them in file in our mind, then chaos is come again. Aye, your words, Will. Your words spin a wondrous penumbra over the mind, in which it cosily blinks and can hardly see a good strong shape.’

‘And they beguile the fools and thieves, no doubt.’

‘Men of sense, too. I don’t deny that. But it’s the cheers and plaudits that lead you, is it not so, Will Shakespeare? You follow where Goodman Plain wants you to go, laughing comedy or shrieking revenge, and even when you touch brilliance you have a care for him, never take him out of his depth but keep his great flat feet ever on the ground. And you make him feel that he’s a fine fellow, even as you grub up his money.’ (Careful, thinks Will, with alarm, as Jonson says this, shaking: this is how disappointed and jealous Jonson is, beside himself, beyond himself.) ‘In that, you are very like the best class of whore.’

Careful. ‘You would know more about those than I.’ Too late.

‘Oh, I make no denial, I am no domestic mouse, and I suspect have a by-blow coming in a little yard off Hog’s Lane, what then? I am no hypocrite.’ Crimson now. ‘Contrast sweet Master Shakespeare, modest darling of the stage whom everyone loves, dutifully sending home his loot to furnish his honest burgher’s mansion and ray his country wife in silks, and all the time keeping his dirty little mistress in town.’

Heads are turning. Jonson looks a little frightened at himself: Will is half on his feet. And yet for the moment he is taken merely by sheer astonishment. Not that Jonson knows something – rumour would trickle out eventually – but at the way he says it.

Keeping a mistress. Is that – great God – is that how they call it?

*   *   *

Ironies: he first moved to the Cripplegate district because Jonson spoke of settling his family there. Also, it seemed a sensible shift for a man of his age and wealth, away from the theatre environs of Southwark and Shoreditch, rackety, quick-knifed. Instead the northern edge of the city, with the country heights visible from his upper window. A better air, as he wrote to Anne, not supposing she would much care. Also it was closer to Matthew’s lodging, so he could keep an eye on him. (A fatherly eye? Well, why not, when the lad had no father?)

A better place, a new place, away from temptation. And it was Jacqueline Field who recommended the house in quiet Silver Street. It was kept by a respectable French Protestant family of her acquaintance, the Mountjoys. Tire-makers in a thriving line: head-dresses for noble ladies, even royalty, it was murmured. Sober, industrious people, a well-kept house, and there he had two good chambers, meals if he wanted them.

And Mistress Mountjoy, it turned out, knew Isabelle Berger.

That might not have meant anything. So, she was back in London: so, if she saw him no doubt it would be like at the Fields’, wanting to draw some response from him that he didn’t understand and didn’t care to. Strange, capricious, sallow woman he knew once. A little hole in the road, a stumble, and on.

Except … something about the time. The years, dark years without form, without doors in or out, where he walked alone. Anne lay on the other side of the turning world – where he had placed her, or where she had placed herself, or where the great division had left them.

And on the page and in the theatre he was always occupied with character and exploring what made a person, where the self ended and began. And in Isabelle he discovered a self that he could not read or write. Once it was begun, he could not stop. Because of the mystery.

Will stares at the black and white squares and thinks: How explain that to Jonson? Would he sneer, say he knows exactly what sort of mystery that is? Will moves his queen’s rook. His queen is peculiarly powerless in this game.

*   *   *

‘Ah! I was just saying to Mistress Mountjoy,’ Isabelle said, the first time he came downstairs to see her there, warming herself at the fire, ‘how quiet her lodger is. I said, “What can he be doing up there all alone?” But now I see it’s you. And now I know. Master Shakespeare, our most excellent play-maker. What are you working on now?’

‘A play of a man who kills a woman for love of her.’

‘Oh.’ She yawned. ‘Another stale old tale.’

Pretty, birdlike Mistress Mountjoy looked a little shocked: she esteemed Will highly.

‘Oh, never mind me, my dear,’ Isabelle said, pressing her hand. ‘I may say what I like to Master Shakespeare: he knows my true feeling for him.’

And then, a look in her eyes: a snap, a lick, God only knew, everything in a look, as he had never quite believed possible. He had tried to avoid the poet’s convention of seeing stars and wonders in a pair of eyes. Eyes could only contain so much, he had thought: until then.

He blundered back upstairs, trembling as if he had stolen something, and it was under his shirt, precious and spiked.

*   *   *

So, he stood once more at the stair-turning with the warped window looking out on the leads, and the pastille-scent creeping up to him. And he thought: You knew, didn’t you? You knew you would be here again.

‘Let us talk,’ she said. She led him into her overheated rooms by the hand. He stayed for three hours, and her hand was all he was permitted, or ordered, to touch. Near the end she put the tip of his forefinger in her mouth, before sending him away with a look of mild contempt.

He would not go again. In his bedchamber at Silver Street he lay face down, as he had not done since he was a whipped boy, as if exhausted or flattened, blinking, and heart-raging.

*   *   *

‘How did you know,’ she asked him, licking wine from her hand, ‘about Ophelia?’

As always, when called on to discuss his work, he felt a shield lift.

‘The madness,’ she went on. ‘How did you know that’s how madness is?’

‘Not mad. Distracted.’

‘The difference?’

‘It’s the end of a path. Our path, not a different path. We all fall short of madness, while we have luck, but it’s just over there. How did you know? Or what did you recognise?’

Isabelle laughed. ‘Great God in heaven, you won’t catch me like that.’

‘What?’ Her laughter could sometimes hurt him like a punch in the chest.

‘By asking. Because you cannot even conceive, believe me, the right question. How is your boy-girl?’

‘Matthew. His name is Matthew.’ He had told her all about his apprentice. Had told her, probably, everything: he couldn’t be sure – strange memory lapses afflicted him after being with her, as in drunkenness. She drew it out of him, like the conjuror he saw at Bartholomew Fair, pulling the coin from his ear with a smiling wince. That was Will, telling his life in the dark, scented, too-warm room: sitting at a distance, if she is in banishing mood. Or sometimes seated next her on the settle, and Isabelle throwing her leg over his, negligent, boyish, as he and Richard Field used to. The cock-stand was like a long bright headache that did not fade. She knew, saw, was scornfully amused.

‘Do you lie with whores?’

‘No.’

‘You should. It’s not fair on your wife to be your whore, not after childbearing.’

‘Don’t speak of my wife.’

‘Oh, is that today’s game, you pretend yours is the control? Diverting. Why, Monsieur Berger used whores all the time, and I was glad of it. I used to smell them on him and think, Ah, now he is full of guilt, so he will be kind.’

‘Was he often not kind?’

‘He used to beat me. And worse things – slow, clever, cruel things.’ She turned her head away and wept. Or did she only seem to? He didn’t know what to do. The floor seemed to ripple beneath him. Suddenly she was looking at him and laughing. ‘There. Good, wasn’t it? Really, we should allow women on the stage, should we not?’

Savagely he jerked back. ‘Do you think I would laugh at that?’

‘No. I don’t want you to laugh with me, ever. When we laugh we go away to a distance and look on and I don’t want you up there.’ Her voice was rushed and harsh, a wind of October with leaves and spiders in it. ‘I want you down here with me in the hell dark, sweet.’ She leaned in and bit his lower lip gently. That would be today’s.

*   *   *

Black, and white.

‘Your move,’ Jonson says. He makes it sound a dreadful prospect.

*   *   *

‘Will you hear me read my part? Truly?’ Matthew said. ‘It will be dull work, for it’s the dullest part ever writ.’

‘It won’t be dull,’ Will said. And it was not, though the writing was so execrable. Just to sit here, in the tavern garden, and be near Matthew’s cheer and lightness and sometime silliness. And when one of his friends turned up and they fell to drinking, boasting, mock-boxing, silliness indeed, still then Will was happy to sit by, and let a little of it lie across him, like the edge of a bright bar of sunlight.

*   *   *

‘You are quite a stranger to me,’ the Earl of Southampton said. ‘In all ways.’

‘Not in all ways, I hope.’

‘I’ve seen your Dane every time. He transports me. They say I spend too much time at the theatres.’ He sighed, a rich, careless sigh. ‘You’re better where you are, my friend, where you may walk unseen in the shade. So how do you call these sonnets?’

‘Sonnets, my lord. Every poet has a tilt at this target. They make a shapely vessel to pour one’s small beer in.’

Southampton looked at him critically. Matthew did that sometimes, when he was talking wisdom: as if he could see someone behind him, prompting his lies. ‘Not these. I see something of me, is that so? Marry and beget. Did my mother urge that on you?’

‘Something of you?’ Will said. ‘Something of everything I have ever seen, done, also, and of everyone else. We breathe the air that Caesar expelled from his lungs.’

‘Hiding again, Master Shakespeare.’ The earl tosses down the manuscript and motions Will to follow him. The echo of their footsteps welcomes them like gentle applause to the long gallery. ‘I think it is, in essence, a sort of drama or play. Everything turns into a play in your hands, does it not?’

Will made an equivocal motion with his head. ‘They may be that. Or – you might, my lord, call them touch-pieces.’

The earl seemed dissatisfied, today, with being unable to pin Will down, where once he had been intrigued. ‘What next for the stage, then? That’s where we would have you. No doubt you may write as you will now, and name your price.’

‘Not so, alas. One piece that does not please, and you are cast down with the general.’

The earl pursed his lips, as if Will were pleading poverty. Something you accepted as you grew older: some friendships decayed, liking spread thin, and there was no help for it. You tried to accept it, at any rate.

‘Meaning you still need patrons?’

‘No, in truth. But I still know how to value those who have extended the hand to me.’

‘I served your purpose, in fact.’

‘If I must answer that, my lord, I would ask, did I serve yours?’

The earl stopped and glared at him, a professional kind of glare. Then it thawed. ‘Forgive me. That’s life at Court: makes a man see nothing but double-dealing and interest.’