All that, Francis, and the fact that you never really know who your family are, who your friends are, or who you are yourself, until it’s too late. By the time tragedy has released the real people, the hidden identities, out of their own surprised skins, the stage is suddenly littered with corpses, like the stage of this wide world, and we’re left asking, how did all that happen? And once more the fatal truth hits us. Free will is an illusion. At least it looked that way for two young star-crossed lovers, once upon a time in Verona.
45
‘I don’t know how you found the time, Will.’
Time for what, Francis?
‘Time for all that subtlety – I mean, to put all that thought into your plays.’
Thought, Francis? No, there’s no thought in them, not a scrap of rumination. Think for a solitary second and the thing goes dead. They were scripts, not plays, written by the hour and for the hour, they were lines on paper, that’s all. No, if I’d stopped to think, I’d never have written a single script. They’re plays now all right, but only because of what you or I can see in them, or choose to see in them. At the time I didn’t do any choosing, there was never any question of choice, I was simply driven – driven mad, if you like, mad, possessed, fired and surprised. Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with thought. It was entirely instinctive – irrational, and even insane.
‘Not stark raving Bedlamite insane, though, surely.’
No, that’s the destructive and self-destructive end of insanity. Mine was the creative end of it, but it’s the same stick, and it easily gets turned around. Things go wrong as you write – and for the better. If you’d thought about it you’d have put it right, and the play would have suffered. Take the Merchant, for example. Should have been a straight uncomplicated romance, complete with wicked Jew. But then look what happened – Shylock ran away with the play.
‘You allowed him to.’
I couldn’t control him. Maybe it was my own humanity I couldn’t control, and it got the better of the playwright. Maybe it was because of what they’d done to Lopez.
‘The queen’s doctor? The one who tried to poison her?’
No he didn’t, it was Essex poisoned her mind. But yes, Lopez, and those fine Christian Jew-haters of old England. Maybe it was because my own father was a money-lender and a butcher, good with both blades, cutting his pound of flesh from beasts and people, in order to survive. Maybe it was because there was some sort of fellow-feeling between me and Shylock. What’s the difference after all between a dirty Jew and a filthy outcast actor? Whatever it was, he grew under my pen, demanding to be heard. Yes, he’s avarice, he’s anger, he’s the devil from the old dramas, he’s the killer of Christ and the tyrannical father too, but he’s also got eyes, hands, organs, senses, affections, passions, and they’re all abused. Ghettoed, garrotted, beaten, burned alive, murdered in mass, he’s the voice of subjugated peoples all over the world and all through history. He compelled me to listen to him. Even the groundlings did. They left the theatre applauding but rubbing their eyes, a little dazed by what they’d just heard. They remembered Shylock long after they’d forgotten the moonlight.
I had Burbage to thank for that. Take another bow, Richard. He never came on like Barabas. It was a cut above Marlowe and he knew it. He could do you the cut-throat dog, the black demon whirling a cloak of flames, all that stuff. But he made you see and hear the fellow creature underneath the greasy gabardine, tortured, baleful, intense. He made you feel for him. And he went out with a howl and a whimper, like the dying Lear, like the dying bear, dragged from the pit, after the show for the Christians is over. They laid him on the rack and the gentle Portia turned the screws.
‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’
The irony of it! Nobody marks that. Punish a man not by hanging, beheading or jail, but by making him change his religion. Now there’s the ultimate twist of the knife, far surpassing anything Topcliffe could have invented.
‘Yes, but that awful pound of flesh –’
Is emblematic, not essential. Flesh is living but weak, gold is dead but powerful, capable of corrupting the flesh, but incorruptible in itself. It can be weighed to the exact ounce and it doesn’t bleed. Flesh does – and so does the heart, never more so than when betrayed, when love fails and its lily festers.
‘They did show mercy of a sort.’
Not at Tyburn. No Portia in disguise arrived to save the day for Lopez, and nobody knew how many drops of blood were shed when the disembowelling was done and the quartering was over, or how much his innards weighed. Nobody was counting. Except Essex perhaps, who’d hounded him to his death like Gratiano, while the Christians cheered. ‘Don’t give his prick to the dogs – it’s circumcised! They’re good Christian hounds!’ So: bloodshed, ballads, jests, a carcass torn for hounds, and a Jew died in agony – all in all a good day out. Nobody wanted to miss out on any of it, least of all the dramatist. Every man wants his pound of flesh. Especially the dramatist.
Yes, I hated the laughter, the mockery, the way Lopez was jeered all the way to his disembowelling. I hated the bloody, cynical Marlowe and his Jew of Malta play, hated all that. But I cashed in on it all the same, milking the myth for all it was worth. The Jews caught little Christian children and used their blood for bread. They poisoned wells and spread plague. Jewish women produced sperm. Jewish men menstruated.
‘I saw the play once, Will – but I never saw it that way.’
Blood and betrayal, that’s what I fed on. I’d tried all the other roads and failed, got lost. Failed as a husband, failed as a father, failed as a tradesman and as a scholar too, though that was hardly my fault. Failed as a martyr, you could say, not one of God’s soldiers. And when a lovely boy and a dark woman have let you down, when pure friendship and pure lust have also failed – then what’s left, I ask you, Francis, what’s left to save and satisfy?
‘You tell me.’
The stage. The stage was what saved me and kept me sane. It was banishment from respectability, exiled and reviled at first, just like Shylock. But I found great fellowship with the actors. We were a tight-knit family, bound by our common trade, illusion. And by our suffering, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
And now I was in full flow – not in full control, thank God, for a writer in full control is a corpse, without the Promethean heat – I was inspired, if that’s the word, by that very suffering, and my willingness to let it work, to get myself out of the way and give the crowds what they wanted. There seemed nothing now to cross me from the golden time I looked for.
Little did I know. There was more pain to come. A personal pain that divorced me from my time and made me madder still. Harry came back from Cadiz like conquering Caesar, the queen reached sixty-three – a portentous nine times seven – and didn’t die, confounding her astrologers and drying Jeremiah’s tears. The mortal moon had endured her eclipse and peace proclaimed olives of endless age. But the drops of this most balmy time, precious as they were, couldn’t heal the hurt I was now about to endure.
46
I was sitting in St Helen’s shortly before sunrise. It was the tenth of August, ’96, the Company was on tour in Kent but I’d stayed behind and was struggling to bring King John to life, when the knock came to the door. I clattered downstairs, cursing, anxious to see off whoever it was and get back to the early thirteenth century. Perhaps I’d find a princely heart in the foxy monarch, as Holinshed had suggested, though it wasn’t looking likely. When I opened the door and saw the horseman framed in the blue oblong of early Bishopsgate light I knew at once that King John’s would be a heart that would never find a beat. My own skipped more than one.
Why do horsemen always call at dawn? He bowed slightly from the saddle but didn’t dismount as he held out the letter at arm’s length, as if rejecting all responsibility for it. I took it from between two gloved fingers. Then he wrenched fiercely, suddenly at the horse’s reins and galloped away up Gracious Street, his crimson cloak fluttering like the
streamers of the dawn. The cobbles rang to the hooves. He’d made no other noise, hadn’t spoken a solitary word.
He didn’t have to. It was Anne’s hand all right. Almost illiterate when I’d married her, and still unable or unwilling to read, she’d made heroic efforts to scratch out this one and she was numerate enough to count the cost of a courier. The heart started its thudding as I broke open the red seal. It looked like a bloody splodge of sun, matching the Bishopsgate one that was catching the spire of St Helen’s and turning its windows to fire. I was still standing in the open doorway.
Seconds later I was lying in the street, my legs buckled under me, my head swimming, in all that incredible blue emptiness, reaching unseen into ever more emptiness. By the time I’d risen stiffly and dizzily and found my way back upstairs like an old tired man, I was able to look at the letter again. I could see only the one tear-blotched line. Our son, your Hamnet, sick unto death. For Jesus’ sake come quickly!
Every scrape of the pen had been a torment to her, physically and emotionally. There were no details. Was it a wasting? Was it a fever? An accident? Either way I knew what to expect. I sat down quietly at the table and looked at the seventh scene of the last Act, where I’d left off. God help me, I couldn’t help myself. I picked up the still-glistening quill and I carried on with the dying King’s last lines.
There is so hot a summer in my bosom
That all my bowels crumble up to dust:
I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment, and against this fire
Do I shrink up.
It was the first time I’d slipped into the skin of the unfortunate king. He’d been poisoned. What had happened to my son? How sweet it was for a moment to retreat into the unreal world of the play and shut out the terrible questions I knew must come. Not for long, though. Forty minutes later King John was dead, the drama was over, and I was on my way back to Stratford.
All the mind-filled length of the journey home I tortured myself with guilt. Was Hamnet’s death a punishment for my desertion that day on Clopton Bridge?
I remembered the agony of poor Browne in the Boar’s Head, that day he learned that he’d lost his family in the plague and wished he’d been there in London to die with them. ‘And I must be from thence,’ he kept saying, ‘and I must be from thence,’ before he crumpled up into that tight little knot of pain and was struck dumb with grief. ‘Give sorrow words,’ we kept saying to him. I remembered that advice bitterly now as I rode along in silence. Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break. But there was no-one to speak to.
On the Chilterns I caught up with the horseman who had brought me the letter. We glanced at one another as I passed him in a dust-cloud on the blinding white road – staring into the eyes for a few strict seconds in the silence and the heat. I wondered for a moment if he rode a pale horse, but it was a bay. Neither of us spoke a word or twitched a muscle. Having delivered doom to my doorstep he was taking it easy on the return. I dug the spurs in deeper and hurried on northward with my heartful of horror and dread.
The rooks were cawing from the elms as I rode in and I knew they were singing his requiem. I didn’t need the family huddle of five white faces out in the street to tell me that much. The shutters of the upstairs room were closed. Ten arms went round me from all sides, gripping me tightly. I took Judith and Susanna in an arm each and hugged them hard but the other arms continued to enfold me tightly, blindly. I thought of Laocoon and his two offspring, crushed by the monstrous sea-snakes that the gods had seen fit to send to suffocate them into silence. Nothing was being said here, just throat noises and tears. Then that old wordless air started up again in Henley Street, the one that only mothers sing, the one I’d heard Mary Arden singing for her dead daughter Anne, the one she’d sung before I was born, for Joan and Margaret. The one Anne Hathaway was singing now for our son.
‘Let me see him now.’
I left them and took my grief upstairs. All grief is private. Jack Donne used to say that no man is an island. But every man is, especially when death comes. I opened the door quietly as I used to do, in case I waked him. Maybe he was only sleeping. That’s what Jesus said, didn’t he, about Jairus’s daughter? The maid is not dead, but sleepeth; therefore weep not.
My son was dead, though. There was a terrible stillness about that little form beneath the blankets, a stillness that was not of sleep. Now I could re-speak sonnets in chilling whispers. Even so my sun one early morn did shine…but out! alack! he was but one hour mine. The region cloud had masked him from me now. Now I was Capulet. Alas, he’s cold. His blood is settled and his joints are stiff. Life and these lips have long been separated. Death lies on him like an untimely frost. Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.
Juliet and Jairus’s daughter got up again and breathed. They stretched and yawned. Where have I been? But here would be no miracle, no friar’s balm for Hamnet, culled from the cunning fields, to make him wake as from a pleasant sleep. And, in spite of Christ’s injunction, someone was weeping. I could see the scalding teardrops splashing the white sheets above the whiter face, and I could hear the strangled sobs coming from someone far away but painfully close – sounds harsher than the requiem of the rooks.
Stand with me a moment longer, Francis, while summer lasts and I commit that little body to the wet green earth of the riverbank. Stand with me still, while I sweeten his sad grave with thought.
It was the eleventh day of the month and I’d buried my only son, aged eleven. Through the slanting tombstones I could see the baby swans following in their parents’ wake along the serene silvery Avon, and I could hear the silvery shouts of the schoolboys running home from school to play in the streams. Hamnet should have been among them, the son that had caught a raging fever that nothing would quench, and none could bid the winter come to thrust his icy fingers in his throat, nor let the kingdom’s rivers take their course through his burned bosom, nor entreat the north to make his bleak winds kiss these parched lips and comfort him with cold. As I’d sat in St Helen’s scribbling away through these long hot summer days and our blistering ships had cut their way into Cadiz, my cygnet had burned up and died. Now I was the helpless child, following the dead form of my son as he sped like quicksilver into eternity.
And still am, Francis. I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan who chants a doleful hymn to his own death and from the organ-pipe of frailty sings.
Where was my old Catholic God now? And all those sonnets to Harry about fatherhood and begetting a son – how ironic now they sounded in my mind. I was thirty-two and Anne Hathaway had forty winters on her brow and looked it. There had been a winter in her womb for the past ten years. The tree of descent had all so suddenly been lopped. Fleance had not escaped the stroke of fate. And my brothers – Gilbert at thirty, Richard at twenty-two, and Edmund at sixteen – standing round the graveside with me, they’d all be in their own graves before me, the whole line facing extinction. As we stood and looked into Hamnet’s grave we were looking at the end of the line.
There was another irony, a bitter one. The Garter King of Arms was about to grant at last the family arms my father had been denied and had wanted so badly for nearly thirty years. And now no grandson to inherit the empty fame. The grant came not three months later – Non Sans Droict – the consolation prize for dead Hamnet’s grand-father. Astonishingly, the honour made him happy. As for me, I’d have exchanged a thousand family arms for that one lost son, whose going left such an emptiness in heart and home. I knew there would be no more creations from my body. All future children would be the offspring of my imagination, conceived where fancy’s bred, while the one child I’d cherished and deserted lay dead and cold in his little kingdom of Stratford clay.
Eventually you have to walk away. No matter how fond the farewell, how lingering the clasp, you have to walk away. I turned my back on my son’s grave, came to Henley Street, and went back up to his room. I sat d
own by the empty bed on which his clothes were folded. The room filled up with shadows, then darkness. Still I sat on, unable to retire, unable to bring myself away from that bed. There was nowhere I wanted to go.
47
When I finally came back to my lodgings in St Helen’s, I clumped heavily upstairs to find the script of King John scattered on the table just as I’d left it. I leafed through the pages till I came to Act Three Scene Four, where Constance, bereft of her boy, takes comfort from the Cardinal that we shall see and know our friends in heaven. ‘If that be true,’ she says, ‘then I shall see my boy again.’
The ink in the pot had dried up in the sweltering August heat. The room smelt foul and was like an oven. I opened the shutters to let London in again, re-filled the inkpot, and with three strokes of the pen scored out the scene. Then I sat down and re-wrote it on the spot. This time the distraught mother found no comfort in the golden words of the church. As I wrote, I recalled those four empty walls in Henley Street that used to echo with his laughter and prattle.
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
Stuffs out his garments. I was remembering that little pile of clothes. And how I’d sat for hours in Stratford, turning them over and over, holding them up, crushing them to my lips. My own garments were stuffed out now with a stranger. I caught a sudden sight of myself in the glass. A ghost had come back to Bishopsgate to carry on the life of work and worry. There was nothing left for him to do. I knew he would throw himself into it, reap the rewards, bask in the glory, the honour, the fame. All of which he did. But he carried a long sorrow for his son and these were not the last lines he wrote for him. He spoke to him in his verses many a time to come. That’s what the death of your nearest and dearest does to you, Francis – estranges you from yourself, from life. After the funeral you look at the world like the moon, with that vacant stare, and no one sees or knows what’s on the other side.
Will Page 37
