Why spin it out further? Emilia Lanier took me to her bed and fucked me just as frankly as I’d imagined it on that first plague-struck afternoon: the tongue down the tonsils and right up the tail, the mouth round the prick, the prick in the anus, up to the hilts, the lips of her will parted over my face, the beast with two backs inverted, on its side, upside down, inside out, its legs in the air everywhere at once. Emilia Lanier fucked me with the monthly blood in her, braving the smallpox and monstrous births. She sucked me dry and swallowed my sperm and I licked her wet and drank up her juice. Simultaneous. I came in her face and saw her lashes flecked with foam. I rammed my cock into every orifice, filling nostrils and navel and ear with hot spouting milk.
Offended, Francis? You stopped eating your pie!
‘There’s no offence, Will.’
Oh, but there was, Francis, and much offence too. Would you prefer a fig-leaf to fact? There’s no dressing it up. We did everything a man and woman could possibly do together. And as I buggered her she screamed for me to fuck the harder and stay inside till I’d hardened up enough to give it her again.
‘I can picture the scene.’
Acted out almost without dialogue, the soundless swinging of breasts and balls, the grunts and sighs, the mad moans, the brief muttered directions from one player to the other as the beastly drama unfolded. Words were not necessary. We had nothing to say to one another. She had an itch and I was mad to scratch it. No beast on earth went to it with a more riotous appetite. It was a shameful business, unembellished by any tender touch. No drop of decency was spilt, no milk of human kindness. Triste post coitum was the prevailing wind, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And I lived for months around that waist, well in the middle of her favours. Not that I was the only one of her privates, nor the sole lord of her secret parts. She was a strumpet and she shortened the lives of all who came to spend their manly marrow in her arms, and afterwards go mad. As mad as they had been both in pursuit and in possession of this fatal whore.
None madder than myself. No sooner had than hated. Had, having, and in quest to have – I was like a dog after a bitch, a mad dog, a cruel bitch. It was the season. It was always the season with her. Fuck was her word and the gutter was her cunt.
‘All this the world well knows; yet none knows well – to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.’
Well chosen, Francis. Now close the book. It’s an attack on myself, not on her. No-one knew the way to hell better than I – or less about how to avoid it. Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction. The primrose path. That was her, all right – but without the primroses. She stank of sin.
43
‘And so you broke away from her?’
Let’s say I was broken from her – or just broken. The plague had kept the theatres shut most of the winter but we opened up again in April. Then in the summer of ’94, when the heat brought back the plague, we were shut down again.
I remember that day, the day they came and closed us. I left the Theatre and wandered back to St Helen’s. I’d moved from Shoreditch to Bishopsgate by that time. But I didn’t go home. Instead I carried on walking down Bishopsgate Street, dropping in at the usual inns and ordinaries, the Dolphin, the Vine, the White Horse, the Saracen’s Head, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon, the Angel, soaking it up at every one and throwing every one of London’s weird beers down my throat – angels’ food at the Angel, dragon’s milk at the Dragon, mad dog and left leg and huffecap where I could get them. By the time I came to the Cross Keys my eyes were crossed.
‘Unlike you, Will, to be cross-eyed.’
Unlike me, to be wandering at random on hopeless feet along Cheapside, by St Paul’s, through Ludgate, all the way down Fleet Street and the Strand, past Charing Cross, and south again, till I came to Longditch, Westminster, almost to Whitehall. No, my feet weren’t aimless. Who was I trying to deceive? And as I stared at my filthy shoes I heard again that voice from scripture. Her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell. The thing of darkness lived in Longditch and already I was entering the house I’d been drawn to a hundred times and more. I was climbing the stairs to the room where William Lanier had been cuckolded in every hour of the clock and under every star of the sky, and as I approached the room where I too had made one in that multiple cuckolding, I heard again the cries it made, the beast with two backs, at it, yet again, yes, why should I have been in the least surprised that she was even now about it, the deed of darkness, the age-old trade in which she was the witch, the queen of cunts, and ice-cold breaker of hearts? This was what she was for. This was what she did.
If only I’d turned round and gone away. But how we torture ourselves. I couldn’t stop myself, inching up to the chamber door and easing it open just a crack, to feed my foul thoughts and fuel my jealousy the more. Just a touch more, then, they were so busy at it they wouldn’t be aware of me, oh aye, just as I thought, she was flat on top, with her back to me and only the blind eye of hell staring at me as she thrust and thrust, but a different pair of hands were on her now, delicate and ringed and white, the fingers of a noble, what else, and strange how the aristocratic erection on which she fucked herself so fast and hard looked just the same as any other man’s, player’s, peasant’s, even my own humble will, and it wasn’t until the man cried out in his sudden ecstasy and I recognised that piping, scarcely broken voice, that I understood in the despair and fury of my very depths that this was not just any aristocrat, oh, no!
O, Jesus! Can it be so?
‘Spare me the full details, Will.’
No scene with her in it was ever actually pretty but this one even less so. You can picture how it went – the uncontrolled sobbing I heard coming from somebody till I realised it was coming from myself, the startled servant girl running in, and me hurling a handful of silver at her for the keeper of a bawdy house, the flung coins clattering and rolling round the floor –You, you, yes you! There’s money for your pains, they’ve done their course, I pray you, turn the key and keep their counsel! – the two of them disconnecting then and the awful indignity of it, indeed the pity of it, his prick unsheathed and on show, his seeds spilling from her, the look of black anger on her face, the shame and pain on his – he wasn’t much more than a boy, for God’s sake; and the start of the excuses, ah yes, the excuses, the serpent tempted me and I did eat, that filthy worm! But I’ll not go on, I said I’d spare you. Let’s draw the curtain.
‘Please.’
But the play goes on behind it, all the time, in the mind, and behind the shut curtains of sleep.
‘Was he just another fuck to her?’
Every man was another fuck to her, except this particular man.
He was young, a virgin (take my word for it), he was handsome, he was rich, he was well connected, a peer of the realm – and he was unattached. How could she resist – she of all women? And how could a common player compete? He for his part told me tearfully much later that he was led to her precisely because she was my mistress. And, do you know, I believed him and still do. The feeling rang true. The boy was jealous, he was trying to get closer to me, his friend – in his own fashion he was being even more faithful to me than before. He was fucking me.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief… Thou dost love her because thou know’st I love her… Then, if for my love thou my love receivest, I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest.
But that came later, that time of understanding and forgiveness – no more be grieved at that which thou hast done. He too found himself unable at first to struggle free, the fly to the web, the moth to the flame, such was her fatal allure – O! from what power hast thou this powerful might! And how could I grudge him the petty wrongs that liberty commits? A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities. He himself was a walking temptation to any woman, and when a woman woos, what woman’s son will sourly leave her till she have prevailed? Not my Harry. So I argued it out in my racked heart. She had corrupted his innocence and poisoned
all three of us. The well had been defiled.
But it was the thought of losing him, not her, that was the real terror. And I made this known to him in the sonnets that poured out of me then.
That thou hast her it is not all my grief… that she hath thee is of my wailing chief.
I was writing stark naked as never before. And I veered wildly between humiliation –
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all.
And hatred –
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Until the storm subsided and I said, I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.
But what do you think, Francis? Life goes on. It had been going on for months, so it came out, and it went on for months to come, in spite of the pledges. There were secret meetings, discoveries, quarrels, rumours, reconciliations, promises, broken promises, the whole catastrophe. What was I complaining about, she once asked me? I was breaking my own marriage-vows, after all. ‘A long way from Stratford, you’ve come a long way from home, and you’re just like all the others, so don’t be so desperate, Will, don’t be so dire.’ Then she’d lift her dress and place my hand between her legs and say, ‘Come on, old man, I’ll fuck you out of kindness, for old time’s sake’ – looking with pretty ruth upon my pain. With those eyes of hers, those black and loving mourners. And I’d give in – what else? – and go to bed with her, whipping it up again, the ugly circle of lust, disgust, and jealousy – to follow still the changes of the moon with fresh suspicions, to tell them over on the rack, to long for sweet oblivion of their stolen hours of lust, as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, as salt as wolves in pride, to find not Harry’s kisses on her lips, grossly gape on, behold her topped, and my relief must be to loathe her, like summer flies that quicken in the shambles even with blowing…
And once – once only, as she lay asleep, after the inexorable deed and I looked at her white throat in the candlelight, the black mole moving almost imperceptibly with her quiet breathing afterwards… I thought of it, thought of murder. Put out the light. Strangle her in her bed. Even the bed she hath contaminated. But once put out thy light, I know not where is that Promethean heat that can thy light relume.
And I trembling, fled the scene.
Eventually, inevitably, she gave us both the clap, and so, sick in spirit and flesh, I went to Bath and took the remedy. And a sad distempered guest I was. Past cure I was, now reason was past care, and frantic mad with ever more unrest. Only by writing about it could I cauterise the wound, fight pain with pain. Weary with toil – I haste me to my bed. And so back I came to Harry, the wound in the heart not healed, but hidden.
How like a winter hath my absence been from thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And he welcomed me with remorse. And with more than remorse, with money. A lot of money. He emptied his purse, it was his way of saying sorry. That was when I bought myself a share in the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men, just as the plague finally decided that London had had its share of misery and the theatres re-opened again. It was time to put the other plague behind me, and my two loves of comfort and despair. Two hopeless loves. I loved a man I couldn’t have and I lusted for a woman I couldn’t respect. As for my wife, abandoned and betrayed, the sonnets rubbed her out of my heart, banished her from my life. And yet she was better than the woman who betrayed me. She was false as water.
And Harry? In October ’94 he came of age and had to pay piper Burghley for his breach of promise to marry grand-daughter. The fine was five thousand pounds, which crippled him. But his hour did come. He sailed off with his hero Essex in a company that included, ironically, William Lanier, and also the young Jack Donne. It was an anti-Spanish expedition to the Azores and he captained a ship. He took such a long farewell of his new love, Elizabeth Vernon, that he made her pregnant. Essex came home in disgrace, having let the Spanish fleet slip off without a fight, but Harry sank a man-o’-war and was the darling of the navy, and of his new wife.
He became a family man, grew a reluctant beard, and lost his looks.
He also lost something of his soul. He became a politician and a Privy Councillor, one of the cold controlling kind that eventually inherit the earth – without a hint of meekness. We drifted apart. It’s the saddest thing in the world, is love gone – love gone, and in its place that sort of bare nodding acquaintance that is so painful because it reminds you of what you once had, what you once knew, what you once were, to one another.
I ask you again, Francis. All that love – where does it go to? All that beauty and passion? And when love begins to sicken and decay it uses an enforced ceremony. Better to have nothing at all than to be left with that bare politeness, the stiff and awkward recognition that saddens and embarrasses, don’t you think? You meet in the street, you murmur something, nothing, you look at one another as if over an immense distance. There’s nothing left, nothing there. This is what life does to us. This is what it did to me. And to the third Earl of Southampton, once my all-in-all, once my Harry.
So much for the lovely boy.
44
‘Well, you didn’t lack matter, Will.’
How do you mean?
‘For your sonnets – quite a story.’
It’s the oldest story in the world, the tale of three, the eternal triangle. And it went well beyond the sonnets. Where do you think Leontes came from? And Othello?
‘That was later, wasn’t it?’
You store things up. Sometimes they fester and break out.
Right now I was flexing my dramatic muscles. I threw in my lot with the Chamberlain’s Men, with young Burbage, now the player king, and Kempe the clown. And in that wet but plague-free summer of’94 the Admiral’s Men settled in at the Rose while we took up residence at the Theatre. From my new quarters in St Helen’s, less than a quarter of a mile away, outside the wall, I could hear the screams of the Bedlamites, inviting all-comers to the theatre of madness. Mostly they went unregarded. Who cares about the barking of mad dogs? But madness in great ones – must not unwatched go. And there was much madness to come.
So what do you think – by the rivers of Bishopsgate I sat down and wept? Wept when I remembered Harry? No, I sat down and set the scene. In fair Verona, in money-mad Venice, in easy golden Belmont, it didn’t matter where. London was the real scene and the action was already in my head, past but present, waiting to leap into life, into the future, the play within the skull, the spectacle of a heart ripped out, a soul ground down in the mills of hell, but a mind ready to deal with all of that. The Chamberlain’s Men were the stars of a bright new London, purged of pestilence and ready for taking. For the next twenty years business and busyness were the twin pillars of the new life. They propped me up. I stood between the pillars and like Samson I felt the power flow through. It was like being touched by God. I was inspired.
‘Is that how inspiration comes – from God? Is that how it works?’
Lepers are touched by God. Or so they may like to believe. Remember Lazarus? When you’re a leper you’re in a special relation to God. You’ve been chosen. I was a leper, Francis, be in no doubt of that. And when you’re leprous you either carry your cross or pull out the nails, one by one. Every play you write is a nail withdrawn. No nail, no play.
‘Are you saying that the secret of inspiration is suffering?’
Writing is a form of illness. Happy men don’t write plays. Happy men play bowls.
‘So your Midsummer Night’s Dream is the work of an unhappy man? Come off it, Will!’
Ah now, Francis, that’s why you’re a lawyer, not an actor. Burbage knew all about life’s dream, about the comic surface and the tragic core, how quick bright things come to confusion, when the jaws of darkness devour them up. He could dig deep, deeper than Kempe, and he could make Bottom sound like Hamlet in a world where carpenters talked like gods. You see, Francis, to realise the bottomless reach
of Bottom’s dream is to be wise. Burbage had that wisdom in his bones. He understood that a play with fairies and labourers in it only pretends to be a comedy. He understood that if there were a sympathy in choice, war, death or sickness did lay siege to it, making it momentary as a sound, swift as a shadow, short as any dream –
‘Brief as the lightning in the collied night.’
Well completed, Francis, and apt to the purpose. Such is life, such is love, and such is the illusion of choice. Like the plague, you never know who, where, or when love will strike, but you know it will be devastating and you know you’ve no choice in the matter. Maybe the moon chooses, with its bow bent in heaven. Or the stars strike us with their spears. Whatever the answer, whatever the reason, one thing is certain – human confusion. So Pyramus dies in error and so does Romeo, Thisbe and Juliet too, while sterile queens like Rosaline die unmated, unfulfilled and chaste, free from the chaos, chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon. Celibacy is rape. Better to die by Cupid’s arrow. And a young girl’s flower is purpled with love’s wound. O, happy dagger, this is thy sheath – let it rest there. And so the Dream runs into Romeo, my first work for the Chamberlain’s.
‘Romeo. Now that’s tragic.’
But life goes on, Francis, I told you. Old men babble about their age and ailments, servants squabble, families feud, and a long-tongued nurse wants her thirteen-year-old charge to have sex. That’s not tragedy, that’s life. In spite of tragedy the food has still to be put on the table and the family must dine. You above all appreciate that, Francis, don’t you? As surely as you appreciate the mundane days of the week that keep love in perspective. You can’t imagine Cordelia dying on a Thursday, for example – but Juliet does. Or Duncan being stabbed on a Wednesday – the murder is in Macbeth’s mind and that’s where he bleeds to death. But Mercutio dies on a Monday. Is that trite, Francis? Yes, it is, it’s trite when a man can die on any day of the week, when life has become cheap and chancy – like that chilling thrust of Tybalt’s under Romeo’s arm, that gives the play its real-life twist.
Will Page 36
