White slack nakedness gathering itself, in shock, together. 'It was, she was, that is to say,' twitched Richard, in his unbuttoned shirt, grinning, ingratiatingly smirking, trying to hide his, though it was fast sinking in its own bestial shame, instrument of. WS stood there, beginning to glow and shiver with the cuckold's unspeakable satisfaction, the satisfaction of confirmation, the great rage which justifies murder and the firing of cities and makes a man rise into his whimpering strong citadel of self-pitying aloneness. He marked the bed, her bed from Shottery, nodding. She wrapped her ageing treacherous bareness, bold as brass, into a night-gown. 'She was sick,' went Richard on, 'and lying thus for the heat and I came in now and----' Suddenly, limping a pace, buttoned soundly, he changed his tune. 'It was she,' he said. 'It was she that made me.' He began to whine. 'I did not want to, but she----' He even pointed a trembling finger at her, standing, arms folded, bold as brass by the second-best bed of New Place.
'Aye, aye,' said WS, almost comfortingly, 'it was the woman.'
IX
IT WAS THE WOMAN, it was the woman, it was the woman. He did not expect it, but he rode back to London in terrible calm. I thank you both for that cornuted manumission, there is naught like cuckoldry for the promotion of a man's health and vigour, it is a kind of gift of money to spend on one's own sins (nota: guilt, gilt, gild, geld, Danegeld). As for the abandon of rage and striking (even with that gentleman's hanger that swung at his side, sheathed), did it not smack too much of the stage? I am paid to act, I act not gratis. That is why I bowed out, my dear wife, I will be back for supper and to have a word with my daughters, if they be mine. For you, my little brother, practice your trade of comforting elderly female flesh elsewhere, nuzzling worm, worming into abandoned holes.
Oh God, God, God.
Despite all, he was numb, only half-there. The business of London autumn impinged only in dream-voices.
ANDREW WISE
Touching the publication of this play,
Richard the Second, I the stationer
Wise, wise in my station, do propose
Prudently the prudent lopping-off
Of that tendentious scene which does present
The king's deposing. There be Privy eyes
Glinting for hinted treason in these times
When e'en the whisper of the word 'succession'
(What is 'succession' but a whispering word?)
Can, in a wink, swell to an autumn gust
To blow down heads like apples----
RICHARD BURBAGE
They have relented: we may play again.
Gain, though -- what gain? Only the Rose hath gained
With three new petals that to us be thorns.
Spencer and Shaa and pestilential Ben
Have navigated the rough Marshal's sea
And are three masts now for the Admiral.
ANDREW WISE
It doth well, marry, aye. In Paul's Churchyard
At the Sign o' th' Angel they with silver clamour
To buy this tragedy of Richard's death
And Bolingbroke's -- but that's a dirty word.
RICHARD BURBAGE
'Tis gone, our Theatre's gone, with lease expired
Vile Giles, the villain Alleyn, has prevailed,
Our art is homeless----
CUTHBERT BURBAGE
Yet there's Curtain Close,
Its eponym the Curtain that our father
Did buy ten years back with that brainless, gross
Grocer John Brayne. Let's welcome winter in,
Like to heap gold, like autumn, in our laps,
For plague's in exile, Parliament is called,
The City will be crammed.
O God, God, God.
RICHARD BURBAGE
Not so, for newly come to Court is one
That says the Spanish fleet is on the sea,
A laggard captive searched, her papers read,
Wherein it doth appear a great Armada
By Falmouth hovers off. For Parliament,
It is adjourned, the City empties fast.
CUTHBERT BURBAGE
Fast is the Don dispersed, the rumour goes,
God striking, as in 'eighty-eight, our foes
With vengeful thunder: fifty ships are gone
Full fifty fathom down, the rest as one
Vile whining ragged pack turn tail for home.
ANDREW WISE
Oh, it sells well, since that my lord of Essex
Is back at Court, brawling his wrongs. See how
So many feign to see his lineaments
In Bolingbroke's.
Oh God, God, God, God, God.
They do not even descry their own folly, not the folly of wrong but of poor art. For adultery, aye incestuous adultery, calls for craft in its enactment; to be caught is poor craft. But we expected not----No, and yet our plays are full of the husband returning unexpected, from Corinth or Syracuse or Stoke Newington, it is the very stuff of comedy. I can hardly forgive the ignorance, the rank folly, the want of craft.
If only I had not known, not seen.
And so, best release, into his own craft and the big buffeting wind of history and public events, wrapping his own wincing and withdrawing soul in a mountain of blubber, a jouncing armour against grief of every kind, save perhaps later for the treachery of a noble defecting patron.
'YOU ARE BECOME altogether too moral,' said Harry, one leg over the arm of the best chair in his friend's chamber. 'First you have Robin as Bolingbroke triumphant, then he must grow old and relent, and then you must have this Hotspur, which is Robin again, and he must die and be picked up by a fat coward and so dishonoured.'
'I had not my lord Essex in mind for either. It was merely that Richard sold well and I thought I would be carried further by that wind. And,' mumbled WS, 'I was asked for humours.'
'They are all saying that it is Robin,' said Harry, pouring some of the Canary he had himself brought. WS would not have any. 'And we all said, when we saw your Richard on the stalls, that we had found a poet for our cause.'
'What cause? What do you mean?'
Harry drank, somewhat gloomily. Then he said: 'This cannot go on. The Queen fleering and jeering of the Lord Admirable, as he thinks himself to be since his new earldom. Robin played the hero at Fayal, and fat thanks he has had for it.'
'I heard that it was Sir Walter that took Fayal.'
'Whose side are you on? Robin has been treated very harshly, and there are some who will soon pay for it.'
'I,' said WS gently, 'am on nobody's side. I mind my own business, a humble and disregarded poet.'
'And no longer my friend?'
'Oh, Harry -- My lord -- I have nothing to say about these big storms, being only in their suburbs, so to speak, and feeling mere little breezes. What have I to gain or to lose by speaking allegiance to this cause of yours, as you call it? And what, for that matter, have any to gain or lose by my speaking?'
'There was a Roman poet,' said Harry, turning his goblet between his fingers and using a rather mincing accent, 'you may have heard of him, his name was Publius Vergilius Maro. He sang the glories of the Emperor Augustus----'
'So my lord Essex is to be the Emperor Augustus, is he?'
'You have no doubt, I see,' grinned Harry, 'that you are a sort of metamorphosis of Vergil.'
'I would rather be Ovid.'
'Aye, exiled among the Goths. Look, I would speak seriously on all this. The Queen grows into her dotage. These mad rages at Robin, the slights, the injustices, even -- the other day -- a blow; did you know that? -- a blow on the face, and all for nothing, all these show her waywardness, the turning of her mind. Abroad we cannot hold what we have: look at the quality of the generals she would send to Ireland. Aught that Robin suggests is flouted. She is past rule.'
'Treason, my lord, my dear dear lord.'
'Treason in a poetling's chamber, aye. And was that of Bolingbroke's treason?'
'Kings and queens are not to be de
posed.'
'Oh, hark to our grave-bearded preacher of divine right. None shall harm the Lord's anointed. So Henry the Fourth was an usurper and it was right that Hotspur should rise -- is that not so?'
'Henry the Fourth was an anointed king.'
'I will anoint that singing beggar out there in the street,' said Harry. 'I will have myself anointed as Harry the Ninth. This must be very precious ointment.'
'Those old days are gone,' said WS. 'I have been reading of them in Holinshed to make plays out of them, the days when right belonged to the grasper. Those days ended on Bosworth Field.'
'Aye, aye, I saw the play----'
'We do not want them to come again, barons growling at each other for a gold hat that will not even keep off the rain.'
'That is so the ointment may be washed away,' said Harry. 'You shudder at usurpers and rebels but your plays make them very eloquent and persuasive.'
'There's a devil in all of us,' said WS. 'We are full of self-contradiction. It is best to purge this devil on the stage.'
'You may purge yourself, forgetting that you inflame others. They are at least logical that say to castigate folly you must first exhibit folly as a castigable thing, and in showing folly you thus cause more folly. Well, you may commit your own share of treason in a play about England's history. As for treason and folly,' said Harry, 'they are but words.'
'You sound like the Duke of Guise himself. That, you will remember, was when we first met, when you were with this Emperor of yours at the Rose. Machiavel,' said WS. 'I doubt it was poor Kit Marlowe or any other of us poor poets corrupted you.'
'I am not corrupt,' said Harry calmly. 'I spy corruption in the State. The State is crumbling and collapsing with corruption. The young men must cleanse it.'
'Harry,' sighed WS, 'I am ten years older than you---- No, I will not say that, I take that back, there is no virtue of itself in age. Let me ask rather if you would live to my age.'
'Life,' said Harry carelessly. 'If there is no virtue in age of itself, then to live to be older is nothing. I would do things. If I die doing them, well then -- I die. I might have died on this Islands voyage.'
'You acquitted yourself well, I know. You were made a knight. Sir WH.'
'Oh, there are a many Essex knighthoods.'
'But death then would have been honourable. Would death be honourable if it were like the death of that poor Jew, a comic death with the crowd roaring, your flesh pulled aside like a curtain to discover guts for the pulling-out? I mean a traitor's death. For, mark my words, I see that for you. Nobody will drag this queen off her throne. She will live out her days, and there cannot be many of them left.'
'She will grow older and older and pull the country into more ruin,' said Harry. 'She mumbles over the farthings in her purse, eating bone-soup three dinners running. And we must lean to her stinking breath, her teeth are all rotted, and prate of her eternal beauty. She cackles, she confounds her French and Italian and Latin, she peers at little stories of love in her bedchamber, drooling and slavering over them.'
'The French Ambassador was full of praise for her wisdom,' said WS uneasily. 'At least, I have heard so.'
'Aye, you have heard this and seen that, but you know nothing. The Queen is a rotting heap of old filth. I know, I am at Court. What we want from you, Ovidian metamorphosis, is something, play or poem, which shall show what is wrong and what is wanted. Something that shall encourage the young and point the way. A play about some old mad champing tyrant that is deposed.'
'When,' said WS slowly, 'I have written poems in the past, I have written them for your pleasure. I ceased writing them when it seemed that you took no more pleasure in poems, even in sonnets. I am not hurt by that -- your time was come for taking your place in the world, with little leisure for poetry----'
'Aye, aye, come to your point.'
'My point is that I will write to give pleasure to you still, if you wish it, but only lawful pleasure----'
'Ah, Jesus, our moralist speaks again.'
'I will not write anything inflammatory. I will not make my pen a servant to treason. Oh, Harry,' he said, pleadingly, 'do not mingle yourself with these madmen at Court.'
'Am I to go on scraping to a madwoman? And I will not have you continually using this word "treason". Who are you, what are you, to be warning me against treason?'
'A friend, a lover. I thought a friend had certain rights----'
'In that you say you are a friend and lover,' said Harry with a kind of prim grimness, 'you may rightly talk of your rights. First, though, you must prove yourself both by showing duty.'
'Duty,' repeated WS with some bitterness. 'Ever since I was a tiny boy I have been told gravely of my duty -- to my family, church, country, wife. I am old enough now to know that the only self-evident duty is to that image of order we all carry in our brains. That the keeping of chaos under with stern occasional kicks or permanent tough floorboards is man's duty, and that all the rest is solemn hypocrite's words to justify self-interest. To emboss a stamp of order on time's flux is an impossibility I must try to make possible through my art, such as it is. For the rest, I fear the waking of dragons.' He saw the slack development of that metaphor ready to form on Harry's lips. 'And,' said WS, 'do not start talking of dragon-slayers, for out of dragon's blood are formed new dragons. Let them sleep, all of them.'
'It is much,' said Harry, 'the view of life of the small greasy citizen. Well, I ought to have expected it from you, old age creaking on. Rheum and plum-tree gum and all the rest. You will lend no words to leadership, for you are afraid. What you will churn out now is what the citizenry wants as its own badge and image. London Bridge built on woolsacks. Where is your furry gown and aldermanic belly and, oh yes, your young wife to be courted slyly by young men with flesh in their codpieces? There you break the pattern, true.'
WS smiled very sourly. 'Oh, if you want your true toothless citizen's picture you may have it. I can outdo all in patriot's fustian and panting over gold-counting and even in cuckoldry. Behold one cuckolded by his own younger brother.'
'Cuckolded----! By----'
'You heard me. I saw it. I saw the nakedness and the leaping out and the shame and the shamelessness. The woman, you know, is never ashamed. That is a sentence to put down in your tablets.'
'Tell me all, I must know all.'
'I went back to Stratford when The Isle of Dogs shut the playhouses for us. Unannounced, unexpected. My brother and wife were busy with sacramental ceremonies, ensuring that New Place be a true house of love.'
'Tell me all, everything, everything that you saw.'
'I have told you enough.' WS saw the seething of his friend's laughter ready to raise the lid. 'Too much.'
'Too much!' Harry's mirth broke hugely. WS had never liked his laugh -- high-pitched and maniacal; he had never liked the way the smooth face collapsed with laughter into an ugliness the more frightening because of the miracle of beauty it displaced: it was as if that beauty was nothing to do with either truth or goodness. 'Ah, no!' screamed Harry. WS saw the decay in a bared dog-tooth; the tongue was caked and yellow. 'Too much, too too too much!' The laughter tumbled out, an icy burn with the sun on it, then met sudden rocks of coughing. The thin body shook and throbbed under its finery. 'Oh, God.' He was weak, he lay back limp. 'As you say.' His arms trembled as he sought wine from the writing-table. 'Much too much.'
'The cuckold is always comic,' said WS, sickened by the transport he had seen, a transport as obscene and shameless as the image that had been its first cause. He remembered Gilbert's words, some odd country sentence twisted and transformed by Gilbert's peculiar genius. 'We know what we are,' he said, 'but know not what we may be.'
'Oh, sweet Jesus, I ache all over.'
'The goat and the giant codpiece,' mused WS. 'That act contains all. But why then cannot the cuckold be tragic?'
Harry choked on a mouthful of wine. Laughter buffeted it out, a bubbling spray. WS felt the wetness prick his face; a splash took the corner of
his mouth and he tasted the sour sweetness like the end of friendship. He took a spotted handkerchief from the table and wiped and wiped and wiped. 'I pray to God that you too will learn,' he said. 'The bitterness of life may make you a man.'
'I have broke a rib.' Harry groaned in the pain of laughter's recovery.
'You will learn about order in time. Marriage is order. One suffers but cannot break it. Learn from that. One suffers that order may be maintained.'
'Well----' Harry rudely grasped his friend's handkerchief from the hand that still wiped; he mopped at his eyes, blinking away water.
'The ambiguousness of tears,' said the ready word-man.
'-- Order or no order, you have made me suffer.' Panting, he felt his sore ribs.
'One thing, then -- you will today ask me for no more poems or plays on this theme of foul tyranny and the duty of usurpation. You will leave here bearing instead the picture of a cuckold.'
'Cuck----' That word was ready to flint fresh laughter. Harry set his lips primly and brushed down the breast of his doublet as though laughter had been a rich pasty shedding crumbs. 'Aye, well, you have diverted me from state matters. It is the brother, I think, that is the cream of it.' Cream. His face moved once more towards disintegrating; he cracked the laughter to quiescence: down, wantons, down.
WS began to see that the final weariness was approaching, soft-footed down a long corridor. This boy, this great lord, had, in boy's or great lord's carelessness, bared a friend's viscera like a hangman: see you, this sonnet here; herein he saith -- Now here was a sweet story for the telling, God knew. It is the brother that is the cream of it. WS said coldly:
'If you want all for your retailing, the brother's name is Richard and he is full ten years my junior.' It would not be carelessness next time, not that innocent manner of carelessness. 'And now, my lord, you may go.'
Harry stared an instant. Then, amused, he said, 'Oh, I may go, may I?'
'It may be that a common player's horns will be too lowly a joke for your great friends at court. It will serve, then, for your tavern acquaintances. Whatever it may be, you are heartily welcome to it. And now leave me.'
Nothing Like the Sun Page 19
