The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (16 page)

‘Well, there are worse things,’ said the young man named Will. ‘At least you’d be comfortably asleep when it happened.’ He spoke with a certain hesitating thoughtfulness, as if scrutinising the joke on its way out, wondering if it were serious after all. His eyes met Ben’s for a moment, with a peculiar awkward intimacy, as when feet accidentally touch under the table. They seemed to read reason in one another, before the page of recognition was whisked over, Fire-face furiously banging his beer-mug down.

‘And where do you stand, Will? Since you scoff at our peril, I would know just where you stand.’ Ready to fight over the disposition of a hair – Ben recognised it from his stepfather.

‘I stand nowhere,’ the young man said. ‘I hate the Spanish. I hope they burn and plunge to Hell and that our Englishmen consign them there. And I stand nowhere.’ He kept still, his face angular in repose, but his fingers turned the spill faster. ‘Once you stand anywhere, you turn to stone.’

‘The Admiral’s Men,’ Nicol persisted, conning faces, ‘they had
Tamburlaine
for themselves – pray you, are any of you with them, know them? They must have first refusal of Master Marlowe’s next work, surely…’

Nicol’s hearing, as he admitted to Ben a while after, was growing worse. Hence his anxiety to hear
Tamburlaine
again, or anything of spell-binder Marlowe’s, because soon he would be stone deaf. When that came, he said thoughtfully, he might kill himself, like his father, and make a proper job of it.

But the players in the Shoreditch tavern could not enlighten him; and when Ben and Nicol left, Fire-face and Pale-face were furiously quarrelling over the bill. The young player called Will watched them with a peculiar intensity: like a fair-juggler, Ben thought, watching his sticks turning in the air.

*   *   *

Follow the dark young player called Will when he leaves the Shoreditch tavern a little later.

Follow his rapid progress through the baffling noonday London streets, where breath is always on your face and human life is collision. Follow him precisely – the trail of his body-shape through the crowds – and you find that you touch no one; that somehow, without slackening pace, he ripples and sidles and at every moment presents a slender fencer’s breathed-in profile and reaches his destination as free of contact as if he had walked there across a gleaned field.

Off Cheapside he slips into an eating-house where even the front door seems like a back door. Across the way great timbered frontages, inns of note and renown, hold out their heavy signs like back-braced heralds. There is a Star: there are Three Cups; and on a corner plot there is a Mermaid, slowly grinding her wriggly painted half-self against the wind. But this most ordinary of ordinaries suits him well: the food is cheap and filling, and you can call for writing materials and find the ink usable, where in many inns it comes clogged or overwatered.

Ink and quill, and an order for a roasted fowl. He has brought his own paper – a string-bound manuscript written in various hands, some neatly marching, others staggering across the downhill page. He uses the blank versos to write on, in fidgety bursts. In between he gazes towards the great hearth where his meal is cooking and sometimes his left hand moves oddly on the tabletop, like a dancing caterpillar. The verse, the pulse, you must make sure it counts.

What he is doing: patching and cobbling a thing already patched and cobbled, a play written in collaboration by three men and altered by three others before he got to it. Make the thing work. Not greatly different from other men of business you can see repairing to city tables, bum-shifting round the steaming joint, consulting their tablets. A worldly task.

Except that through the cracks of his busy fierce dissatisfaction shines something else: something that belongs to another life, another world, distant and present as the workings of gods.

This Will: and Will the glover’s son who walked up the Stratford street to the Swan to pass the time of day with the travelling players.

How could one become the other?

*   *   *

‘Dear God.’

‘Aye, Will, so you keep saying. What, are you training to be a priest?’ Jack Towne drew a scarlet jerkin from his pack and irritably shook it out. ‘Look at that! Crushed to buggery and I laid it up so fair … Look, it was self-defence, the coroner saw that from the first. Ask Tarlton, ask Wilson—’

‘No, no, I don’t doubt you. I only wonder at – at what a man can do. When life suddenly takes such a turn.’

‘Suddenly is the word.’ Towne looked icy and pared: as if he expected every surface and shadow to draw a sword on him. ‘He would have killed me, you know. I was looking at my own death – there, just there.’

‘Dear God. How did it feel?’ Will asked, with passionate interest.

‘Which? That, or killing a man?’ Towne dragged out a pair of round hose. ‘Torn, look. Disgrace. A Queen’s Man tricked out in shreds and patches.’

‘Show.’ Will reached out. ‘Only the seam. I could mend that for you, neat, not a stitch to be seen. Both, both, I mean: mortality.’ He glanced up. ‘Naturally you’re sick of talking of it.’

‘Could you mend?’ yawned Towne. ‘How so? Art seamstress?’

‘No, hand-craftsman, as thou know’st.’ Will tossed the garment back, cold now. He had a suspicion of how cold he could be: the vast potential of it. ‘And if I pry or offend, just say it.’

‘Oh…’ Something seemed to shiver through Towne, sorrowful. ‘I’m not sick of talking of it, Will, because I don’t. We don’t. It’s there always. But we’ve had to go on. You must go on, you see? Even after…’ Momentarily Towne was imploring; and he looked at his own beautiful hands as if contemplating a deformity. ‘I’m not safe yet, man. Yes, the coroner found for me, but I’m on, whatsname, recognisances, awaiting Her Majesty’s word. I would have given everything I have for this – this thing not to have happened. But he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop, Will.’

Will touched Towne’s shoulder. Towne looked at him with complete, stranded surprise, as if he had just woken up. ‘Let me stitch up your clothes, I can’t stitch up your mind.’

‘I don’t know. If anyone could … You’re a strange one, Will. Here you are, an old wedded man with six children—’

‘Three, for pity’s sake.’

‘Three may as well be six. Here you are, and you seem no different from the youth who used to come dog-foot after the cart as soon as we crossed the bridge. Still no flesh on you. Don’t good townsmen start to plump the moment they turn twenty-one?’

‘You suppose me a good townsman?’

‘Oh, surely. You do have this odd look, mind: a sort of guilty look, which I can’t account for. How do you transgress hereabouts? Poach a deer?’

Will laughed. ‘Why would I want to do that? No, I’m something far worse than your common thief and despoiler.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll leave you to guess. So who takes Knell’s parts? How do you go on?’

‘We go on as we go on,’ Towne groaned, ‘which is to say, like a three-wheeled wagon. Knell’s parts we divide, and we contrive. But with everyone moving up a step, so to speak, there’s a hole left at bottom. Consider.
True Tragedy of Richard III
has sixty-eight speaking parts. Even at full strength four of us have to take seven parts each, and then we have to doff costumes like lightning. Take one man away, and you can picture: there’s only so much doubling you can do. Makes a poor spectacle for the Queen’s Men. We have a name for laying on the grand shows, look you, where the whole history goes in majestical procession before their eyes. And then I swear we shall all be jaded to a shadow before we— What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why look so, then? As if you’d reprove me. Yes it’s my doing, but not my choosing.’

‘I don’t reprove you.’

‘Are you ill? Hold off if you are, we want no sickness fewing us further. Is there any ale in this house?’

‘I’m not ill. Did you say
fewing
?’

‘Did I? Yes. Fewing, making few, it sounds right. Damn words, man, they’re ours to do with as we will. If not ale, cider. I’ll not touch wine any more. No, it’s all a wry pickle: at the least we want a hired-man from London to make up the company, but how to send for one suitable? One of us would have to go, which would only compound the problem. But we surely can’t give over the tour.’ Towne looked Will up and down. ‘What
is
the matter? Are you drunk? If so, at least let me catch up.’

‘Nothing. No, I—’ The cloak he was inspecting slid from Will’s fingers. The room listed and swung like a pieman’s tray. He put out a foot to steady himself and heard his voice say from somewhere: ‘I can’t stay, nor – nor anything. Good luck to you.’

He got out to the yard without falling. There was a horse-trough, so he dunked his head in it to rid himself of strange raptures and rash possibilities. And when they would not go he stayed thus, upside down and breath-stopped in floating hair: thinking, There is always this instead, always.

*   *   *

As the twins burst in John Shakespeare was working leather on a staple, arm muscles corded, shadowed face grim.

Anne hurried after them. ‘I’m sorry. But they won’t think of bed without Grandfather…’

Instant transformation: she had known it would come, but still she relished it. He dropped his work, flung out his arms, and tossed them up laughing and biting.

‘And I can’t think of bed without my tasty supper, and here it is. Which first? Mm, thou art both sweet. Peace, peace, wilt wet your clouts a-laughing. Now where’s thy father?’

He raised his tousled head from their squealing, the question alighting on Anne.

‘Home soon,’ she said.

*   *   *

He came up with the biggest breath he had ever drawn, and he was still snarling air into his lungs and shaking gouts of water from his hair as he pounded back into the inn and slammed the door open, and Jack Towne, jumping, said, ‘My God, what? Are you mad, what?’ and Will, dripping, heaving, glaring, said: ‘Take
me.
Try me. Try me, take me.’

‘“The richest ransom that the kingdom yields

Shall be thy portion; and if my jesting cousin

Sets his cruel wits to darker mischief—”’

‘Not the text,’ John Dutton put in. ‘
Wicked
wits,
further
mischief. I thought you said you knew this piece by heart. You’d better have the playbook.’

‘I do know it,’ Will said. ‘But my text is better.’ They were in the Swan tap-room, with the benches pushed back. His audience, six Queen’s Men, stood or squatted, chewed lip, plucked beard. Unimpressed, or unimpressible. This country hind? Jack Towne had persuaded them to give him a hearing. Will fixed his eyes on Towne’s, moving downstage. Trying to be easy and graceful and not hobbled by a dozen years’ longing.

‘“His proper toils I shall upon him turn.

For though the snake its venom tastes unharmed,

’Tis otherwise with e’en the supplest villain

Kindred to the serpent kind.”’

‘Why do you say your alteration is better?’ Robert Wilson, the quietest.

Will knew about quiet ones. ‘
Wicked wits
trips too merrily. We don’t feel it.
Cruel
catches like thorn or nettle.’

Wilson inclined his head. ‘And
further
?’

Will shrugged: he wanted to be performing. ‘Oh,
further
says only one thing.
Darker
says several things at once.’

‘Which
can
lead to confusion.’ Wilson smiled.

‘Have a care, my friend,’ Tarlton said, uncorking a cider-jug. ‘Master Wilson had a hand in the composition of this, did you not?’

‘It’s your work?’ Will swallowed. ‘I’m sorry – sorry a thousand times.’

‘I had a hand in it, as Tarlton says, along with half a dozen others,’ Wilson says gently, ‘and we all wrought as best we could. The thousand apologies are rather too many.’

‘Oh, but still, I wouldn’t have spoken. Anyone who writes – who makes these things—’

‘Can we get on?’ John Dutton said, shuffling through the playbooks. ‘That wasn’t perhaps a good choice. Peristratus is a chief part, after all. And if we
were
to think of taking on a hired-man outside London – which I for one am far from sure about – then you must understand what would be required of you.’

‘Mere drudging factotum,’ Tarlton said, beaming at Will and drinking to him, ‘with your choicest part the Second Squire, who says, “Yes my lord”, twice.’

‘Care of the wardrobe besides,’ said John Singer. ‘Scribe the parts, and shoe the horses if put to it.’

‘This isn’t scaring me,’ Will said.

‘Try
King Leir.
It’s new, you won’t know this.’ Dutton passed him a playbook: manuscript, and the hand not at all clear. ‘Proud old dolt of a king divides his kingdom between his daughters. Two of them are bitches. This is one, Gonorill. You’re Skalliger, her toad-eater. Oh, damn it, we need Cooke for her. Where is he?’

‘Gone to stool again,’ Towne said. ‘He will eat of the green fruit. Here, I’ll take the part, I can still outwoman the best of ’em.’ Will saw an eye roll, a cheek distend at that. ‘Come, Will, we must look over the same book. Where, now … “I prithee, Skalliger, tell me, if thou know, By any means to rid me of this woe.”’

Towne did not so much raise the pitch of his voice as lower it, finding helpless softness deep down. His hand rested lightly on Will’s arm: inviting, urging.

‘“Your many favours still bestowed on me, Bind me in duty to advise Your Grace…”’ Throw the voice forward without shouting: how was it done? These last few years he had recited only in a whisper, alone in dead of night or on the open road, like his father pattering prayers. ‘“The large allowance which he hath from you, Is that which makes him so forget himself…”’ Resurrect the Will who used to declaim to the fields, putting all his love into it. Towne’s eyes searched his, challenging. You have to put all your love into it. None left over. This, this, I want this. The crabbed script wavered before his eyes; he blinked sweat.

‘“For why, abundance maketh us forget

That ever frugal pinch and dearth existed.”’

‘That’s not the line,’ John Dutton grumbled. ‘It’s
The fountains
—’