Will

by Christopher Rush

  Ben Jonson’s son died too, of the plague, seven years later (the child was seven at the time). I poured drink into Ben that night.

  ‘His life may have been cut short, Ben – but in short measure life may perfect be.’

  He looked at me with red eyes. And later stole the line when he lost a daughter too and penned her an elegy. Never missed a trick, old Ben. But for his son he wrote a touching little lament of his own: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy – my sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

  My own sin had been the opposite. I hadn’t thought of him enough. Not after that day I’d left him on Clopton Bridge. At least Ben Jonson didn’t have that guilt to live with. But I buried my guilt between many lines. Ben’s grieving love deserves to stand out clear.

  Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie

  Ben Jonson his best piece of poetrie,

  For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

  As what he loves may never like too much.

  It was nicely turned, don’t you think, that verse of Ben’s? But I don’t believe Ben turned back to it after that. He moved on. Maybe I moved on too, or seemed to. But it didn’t stop me, couldn’t stop me turning back. Grief in its fullness doesn’t always erupt at the time of death. It may take years to blossom, to burst into those blackest blooms of the heart. The black bile was always threatening me anyway, but Hamnet always kept it at bay, even when I only thought of him. And when I saw him, all too seldom, he cured in me thoughts that would thick my blood, with his child’s matter made a summer’s day short as a winter solstice. After he died came bleak December everywhere, every day; and every day after that, somewhere in every single day that followed, I felt the chill of that one awful day that would never go away. Every chill was that same chill, every day was that same day, the day we buried him.

  What ceremony else? That’s what I really wanted to shout at them that day, remembering my sister all over again, and those maimed rites. What ceremony else? The old rites were gone that could have comforted. We therefore commit his body to the ground. Therefore. It follows. Because we can no longer sing him to the saints with sage requiem and ministers of grace. Because we have taken away your old rituals, and therefore something of your beliefs too – for even beliefs are made of words.

  Which leaves you with what? With a private knot of pain. Goodnight, sweet prince, I wanted to whisper – and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. But no more of that, if you please. Forasmuch as it hath pleased almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Sure and certain? Nothing was sure and certain any more. They didn’t even call him by his name, didn’t even use a personal pronoun. Not a ‘thou’ was spoken. Dear brother? What brother? What impersonal being was that? Dear God, he was my son, my only son. They were throwing on the earth, closing up the grave, shutting off communion, sundering me from my dead child with their Puritan words, hammered like cold nails into his coffin. Must there no more be done? Can’t we help them on, our lost lovely dead? Can’t they be allowed to call out to us, to help us too, the ones that mourn? Can’t we communicate? Must the bond be broken so entirely by death, and the starkness of that cold ground, those inflexible words? No, the dead boy is not in heaven, he is in the earth, he’s dead, dead and rotten.

  That’s what you’re left with on that terrible day, worse than the wrath of God. Dies irae? God’s anger would be acceptable, divine ire heaped on your head, better than that emptiness, that coldness in the soul, and that rebellious anguish that makes you cry out in the bitterness of your heart. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more. That’s the closest words can come to expressing the pain of child loss. And ten years later, in Lear, the pain was still going on.

  It went on in play after play. Sebastian was plucked from the waves and restored to his twin sister, Viola, the sea of troubles turning to salt waves fresh in love, in my troubled mind. And Leontes sees the dead brought back to life, a miracle before his eyes, and all pain subdued. But not the son, not Mamillius. The son never comes home again. Good night, sweet prince. It’s the father’s fault, always the father’s fault. John Shakespeare’s time was unjointed and I’d to set it right, an absent father, and I must be from thence, and Hamnet’s life the price, aye, Will, lay thee down and roar.

  So he died over and over as I lived on and wrote on and on, died in every play that filled up the space he’d left. He couldn’t stop dying, even in the days of my best success. He had to keep on dying because I had to keep on burying him, laying him to rest – not in shattered Catholic rites but in the only rituals left to me, the theatre, the ones that plays provided. They could never take that away from me. What ceremony else? The play, of course, the play’s the thing, once more, over and over again. It was a public burial, never ending, pulling in mourners from the globe, from the ends of the earth, but it was also deeply private too, it was that paradox of the self that only the player knows.

  Hamnet’s passing wasn’t the end of it either. Death had us on his list, it seemed. Just after Christmas old Henry died in Snitterfield – the toughest tree falls in the end – Aunt Margaret just two months later, and that was the end of another era. Old Hunsdon had gone and while Lord Cobham briefly took over the Lord Chamberlain’s office (but not his players) we were known as Lord Hunsdon’s Men after our new patron, young Hunsdon. But within a year he’d succeeded to his father’s office, and so when the queen appointed him as the next Lord Chamberlain after Cobham’s brief slot, we were once again the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

  ‘Don’t confuse me, Will.’

  Confuse? It was a fixed point in a wild and whirling world, and a brain gone blank and blue as that empty sky. This house – this was another fixed point, a piece of solid ground under slipping feet. Why do you think I bought it, New Place?

  ‘You tell me, Will.’

  I was trying to bury my grief by buying the finest house in Stratford, Clopton’s old house. Sixty pounds for a sixty-foot frontage, thirty feet high, seventy feet deep along the lane, brick-nogged and lead-paned, three storeys, five gables, ten rooms, two gardens, two orchards, two barns, three-quarters of an acre – an easy bargain, you would think, Francis, you being a lawyer, except that the legal figure of sixty was to keep the Crown’s fingers from dipping too deeply into my coffers.

  ‘I didn’t hear that.’

  The real price of twice that sum was between myself and William Underhill, whose father had bought it from another William, name of Bott, when I was three.

  ‘I didn’t hear that either.’

  Did you hear that Bott poisoned his own daughter?

  ‘Jesus, why?’

  He’d married her off to a young idiot called Harper, under an arrangement that Harper’s lands would pass to Bott should the daughter die childless. She did – Bott saw to that by poisoning her, thirty-four years to the day before I bought the house, and he used the law to keep his neck out of the noose.

  Two months after I’d bought it, Underhill himself suddenly died – murdered by his own son, Fulke, another bad lot, the motive the same – inheritance of lands.

  ‘And the method used?’

  Poison again. Fulke went to the gallows but legally my right to this house wasn’t finally secured until murdered Underhill’s second son, Hercules, came of age three years later and secured the sale of it to me, confirming that the purchase had been properly made from the victim and not arranged with the murderer.

  So along with the house I purchased a couple of murders, if you like – a daughter’s by her father and a father’s by his son, two dire crimes a generation apart, darkening the atmosphere if you cared to sense it, and linking it to poison, poison in the family. And it was poison poured into the ear of a playwright who’d lost a
Hamnet and was seeking another. Across the road the chapel priests chanted prayers once for the repose of old Clopton’s soul. But Chapel Lane out there, that’s another irony – they sometimes call it Dead Lane. It was a dead man who bought it, and the purchase was a hollow victory. Death had triumphed instead. As always.

  But I installed the family and took stock. I was thirty-three, the perfect age of man, a gentleman in fact, with a mansion, a coat of arms, my name starting to appear on the title-pages of the quartos, and men of taste and discernment about to elevate me to stand with Ovid. All that and my son lying dead by the river. The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away – without asking me which I’d have preferred. But as for John Shakespeare, he was happy as a cow in clover. He and my mother did their best to bring me out of the dumps, chiding me for my veiled lids, my nighted colour.

  Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.

  Aye, madam, it is common. But I have that within which passeth show, these but the trappings and the suits of woe.

  I left them in their brighter garb, to their arms and airs, and went back to London.

  48

  ‘You went back to King John.’

  I went back to history. I told sad stories of the death of kings. Ben Jonson chastised me for this, naturally.

  ‘Wasting your time with the dead.’

  Maybe he was right. Maybe it was to elude the sad ghost of the fresh dead Hamnet that I buried myself so sweetly among the safely, famously dead, those on whom the worm had long ceased to feed. There’s a massive certainty and calm about the past, a freedom about its finality. It’s over. It was with a huge feeling of relief that I opened the book of history, from Richard of Bordeaux to Henry Five.

  Henry Four was like Oedipus – he’d afflicted his people through a primal sin, in his case the killing of a rightful king. Henry was a better ruler than Richard but there was blood on his hands and it couldn’t be washed away. He remained what he was: a vice of kings, a cutpurse of the empire. A king of shreds and patches. A common thief.

  The cutpurse and the king. Bolingbroke with the measured talk and Richard, for whom life and language are intuitive matters. But the Richards of this world are the puppets of history. They come to pieces because in spite of their play-acting, they have no identity outside their public roles, no hard private core, no real selves. They are paper men, green reeds of weakness and sensitivity. Only in defeat and death can they find some sort of tough contentment, acknowledging that one last truth – that they are losers, shadow kings, meditating on the shadows that went before them.

  ‘On worms and epitaphs.’

  Not good listening for the ageing queen, who had just a few years left to live – and looked it. The end of century melancholy, the end of life gloom had already settled on her.

  ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’

  Especially if it’s a usurped crown. Elizabeth’s was rightful and she shone under it. Bolingbroke never dazzled like his ancestors and his offspring. His reign was sad and he himself pathetic. As the main character he’d have been a bore – two such plays a double bore. I needed something to bring them alive.

  ‘And that’s how Falstaff was born?’

  A liar, a cheat, a braggart, a fat drunken whoring coward – why did I love him so much? Because he isn’t the Puritan who pisses in the ale, isn’t the patriot who gets you dead for your country, isn’t the soulless pious controller who wants to make you part of the state furniture. He’s old Adam gone to podge, fallen humanity, Satan with a sense of humour. He’s Tarleton, he’s Yorick, he’s the moral rebel and social renegade – and he’s betrayed by his friend. Somebody has lent him a thousand pounds. It’s spent and he can never pay it back.

  Serve him right? Yes, the scrounging, thieving, work-shy ruffian. Why should we work and fight to keep the likes of him? A fat fraud without a conscience who digs you in the ribs at the tavern, and sweet talks you out of the price of the next drink. A filthy old bum and a corrupter of youth.

  And yet. If you hate war, detest bullshit and Puritans and politicians, Falstaff is your man. He shows you that big bellies and nimble wits are not incompatible. He has the joy of life in him. He was born in the same sea as Venus, carries the tide of poetry in his head, keeps your feet on the ground and makes you feel the thrust of good old mother earth. And the various kings spin round him like remote and unreal moons. Without him the state goes back to being what it always has been – boring. Of course Henry Five has to reject him because the new king has now become public property. He has killed off his youth. And that killing is also the killing of poetry.

  ‘But he sticks in the heart like a piece of old England.’

  And that’s because, Francis, the real hero of these plays is neither God nor King but England itself, and not the England of the great ones or even the England of John of Gaunt, it’s the England of Shallow and Silence, the pathos of old men remembering their youth. It’s Falstaff thinking of the fate of his three hundred conscripts after Shrewsbury, fit only for the town’s end, to beg during life – the well-peppered poor sods that gave the Cripplegate its name. It’s the image of somebody swearing on a parcel-gilt goblet sitting in the Dolphin chamber at the round table by a sea-coal fire upon a Wednesday in Wheeson week. It’s soldiers shaking hands knowing they’ll never all meet again, not like this. That was my England, Francis. It had nothing to do with St George or St Crispin or any Henry. That was for queen and country and Privy Council. It was for the Master of the Revels and the listening censors. It was for the dukes and generals and for the groundlings in their mindless patriotic passion. When all’s said and done it was for the box. Maybe it was even for the drama. All I know is that nobody took down the names of the humble dead at Shrewsbury or Agincourt, only the names of the great ones. But it was the unnumbered ones, the nameless ones, that made up my England. Heaven rest them now.

  49

  ‘Heaven rest us, Will. It’s growing late and I want a signature from you today, not tomorrow.’

  You have till midnight, then.

  ‘Jesus. I came here for your will, not your life.’

  A man’s will is his life, Francis. I’d best conclude the business.

  ‘You mean the will?’

  I mean the whole thing.

  ‘In which case I’d best finish this last bottle of sack. A nightcap and a cat-nap much needed now, old man. Ten minutes, then back to work, how does that sound?’

  Make it half an hour. I need to think.

  And before the glassful had reached his belly he was flat out and snoring again.

  How I envy him his fat contentment and easy oblivion. I never had that ability, never found the way to Lethe. There were always dreams. Even after a tiring journey I’d throw myself down to sleep, only to find another journey starting up in my head, to work the mind and keep the eyelids open, staring into the darkness, seeing but blind.

  That’s why you sympathized with Bolingbroke, Will, isn’t it, old lad? You allowed him his moment – the ailing king who couldn’t sleep even when he’d put aside that polished perturbation and golden care that kept the ports of slumber open wide to many a watchful night and many an English king. Envy Francis? The dying king envied those lucky thousands of his poorest subjects who at that very hour were fast asleep even in the hardest of states – in loathsome beds and smoky cribs, upon uneasy pallets stretching, and hushed with buzzing night-flies to their slumber – while here it was being denied to him, the highest in the land, even here in the perfumed chambers of the great, under the canopies of costly state and lulled with sound of sweetest melody.

  Ah, Will, Will, how you long for it too, don’t you, that oblivion, the common nightly balm of sleep, and your mind goes now to the wet sea-boy on watch on the high and giddy mast, in the middle of the storm. Deafened by waves and cuffed by winds, still he can close his eyes and be rocked in the cradle of the sea, while here in the calmest, stillest night, with all applianc
es and means to hand, the sleep the ship-boy finds so sweet and easy is denied you, as it was kept from the most care-ridden of kings.

  Henry Bolingbroke couldn’t sleep. Maybe that’s why he fathered so many children – though perhaps the real credit should go to his first wife, Mary de Bohun, married at the age of ten, mother of Harry the Fifth at seventeen, bearer of six children and dead in childbirth at the age of twenty-four, a martyr to the principles of dynasticism.

  Nineteen years after her death Harry became King of England, and also winner of one of the most famous fights in history. Absurdly outnumbered, the entire enterprise irresponsible and illegal, his assertion to France unfounded in fact, still he led his small force of Englishmen to a famous victory on the field of Agincourt. The lightfoot lad of the Eastcheap pubs, Hal, the bosom pal of drunken bums and servicer of whores, had in truth seen action aged twelve – only Othello had beaten him, by five years – and he did well at Shrewsbury. Not that he really killed Hotspur there, but it made good theatre.

  To temper these manly spirits he threw off his old unruly self and became the skeleton at the feast, even at his own coronation, where he frowned and ate like a mouse, while a terrible blizzard raged outside, warning of war and an implacable purity to come. The moody young king was making a public statement. He was a new man for a new play. About a famous battle and a band of brothers.

  So he took five thousand killing machines to France. Five thousand six-foot lengths of yew and elm and ash – with a minimum draw weight of eighty pounds, many over a hundred and some above a hundred and fifty, and with a range of four hundred yards at maximum elevation, effective at two hundred, lethal at eighty – loosed their arrows in the same single second at the king’s command. Three seconds later they shot again – and yet again in another three seconds, while the first volley was still in the air. Fifteen thousand thirty-inch lengths of poplar and ash, fletched with the finest feathers, had been launched into the air at frightening speed. The geese of England were flying again – but now they were making a blood-curdling song. It was not the song of the quill. The sky darkened under the storm-cloud, and from that storm-cloud there fell on France a terrible rain. The swallow-tailed arrowheads were made to inflict the most fearsome wounds, and the needle-pointed bodkin heads were unstoppable. They could bring down horses, pierce armour, penetrate helmets, vizors, dig deep into hearts, skulls, brains. So much for the little Englander with his little crooked stick.