The Swan sang itself out, Hope dwindled, and the Rose faded and fell – the Globe was the death of it. Henslowe admitted in the end that the Bankside was ours, and he and Alleyn decamped. They went back across the river, north of the city, and there off Golden Lane, close to the open fields of St Giles without Cripplegate, Finsbury Liberty gave them their site, about half a mile west of the Curtain. On it they built their successor to the Rose, and when they finally ran up the flag in 1610, it was the flag of Dame Fortune.
Now we were the lords of the south bank, and to be close to the Globe I shifted my lodgings again across the river to Southwark, idyllic with wildwoods and flowers, babbling with streams – and imbued with the leakage of cesspools and graveyards that seeped into our houses, breeding fevers in the flesh and agues in the bone.
‘More money in your purse, Will?’
Yes, it was time for serious business, and it was on 21st February 1599 that I entered into an agreement with the Globe syndicate, binding for thirty-one years.
‘What was the agreement?’
You don’t want the details, Francis. They’re boring.
‘I’m a lawyer. I live by details. And by boredom. Tell me.’
There were seven of us including myself, Will Kempe, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Thomas Pope, and the Burbage brothers, Richard and Cuthbert. We split ten shares among us – five to the Burbages and one each to each of the other five. Which meant that as one of the housekeepers to the Chamberlain’s Men I owned ten per cent of the whole. When Kempe left (as he did right soon) my share rose to an eighth, but when Harry Condell and Will Sly came in with us it fell to a twelfth, and later to one fourteenth when William Ostler bought in. But by that time I’d been earning up to seven hundred a year for more than a dozen years in the business. Even in the early days I was taking in a couple of hundred. The Company took half the income from the galleries but the other half went to the housekeepers, plus the takings at the door. I was writing plays, acting in plays, and selling them to my own Company, an actor business-man, helping to run the theatre I played in. As long as the theatre stayed open I couldn’t lose.
‘And you didn’t.’
Gradually the spectre of debt withdrew to the rear, though it never ever left the stage. Not the stage of my mind. The worry was always there – that it could all crumble away, just as it did with my father. I just couldn’t shift it – the uncertainty, the unease. I became what Hamlet doubly despised – a great buyer of land, spacious in the possession of dirt. A strange compulsion – to purchase acres of what you need only six feet of, to amass money for other people to spend.
‘Ah, very well mentioned! You have indeed amassed a tidy amount of money. Now let’s get back to giving it away. Back to the will for a moment, if you please. Mostly it’s covered. We haven’t entirely wasted our day.’
And you’ve fed well on me, Francis. You’ll feed even better when I’m gone.
‘I’ll ignore that quip. Now, these fellow actors of yours, your second family –’
My only family.
‘If you all got on so well then you may wish to leave some small bequests – to a chosen few, that is?’
A very choice few.
‘You mentioned Kempe, for example.’
Left us. And left the world.
‘Phillips?’
Left me a thirty shilling gold piece in his will, he did. But sadly – he too has left the great stage.
‘There was Tom Pope.’
Stone cold.
‘Sly?’
Dead and rotten.
‘Jesus, how many others have gone?’
Ostler, Bryan, Cross, Gilburne, Cook –
‘Enough, no more! What was it about acting?’
On the contrary, most of them did well for themselves. And they had another thing in common. Almost to a man they were married men, and family men, with lots of children. Heminges has fourteen! Condell’s got nine, Dick Burbage can account for seven that I know of – I’m counting down – Cowley’s got four. Phillips had five before he died. They were busy men. And they had property, lots of it, in and out of London, town houses, country houses, estates. They lived in a world of make-believe, rattling through rôles at battle-speed, growing and shedding skins that left ordinary mortals standing gaping, but they were realists to a man, and they had a strong nose for the three facts of life.
‘Which are?’
Land, lucre, and loads of kids. Don’t you be fooled, Francis. Dick Burbage may have been the doomed hero of the stage and died a thousand tragic deaths, but when he makes his last exit he’ll be leaving his wife and children a rich legacy.
‘Talking of legacies –’
Right, let’s do it. Item, I give and bequeath to my fellows John Heminges, Richard Burbage and Henry Condell, thirty – no – twenty six shillings and eight pence apiece to buy them rings.
‘That’s it?’
It’s a token. They’re well-off men, as I said. If you want to know how close we were, you won’t find it in a funeral ring. Look at the names Burbage gave his children. He had a daughter called Juliet – she died young. There was another daughter called Anne. Ring any bells? And he had a son called William. There’s a better token of how close I was to Richard Burbage.
‘What about Cuthbert Burbage?’
Sly left him something, as I remember…but no. He wasn’t an actor, he was a manager, that’s all. Richard had some soul.
‘What about Henslowe?’
What! What about Henslowe?
‘It was a joke.’
A bad one. He died the month before last. Hadn’t you heard?
‘God rest his soul.’
Too late. The devil will have snatched it already. No, Francis, that will do for my fellows in the trade.
‘Very well, Will. Were you really so close to them? All that family stuff?’
Yes and no. Oddly out of step, I suppose, with these fellows – living alone, shifting from lodging to lodging, Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, Southwark, then back across the river to Cripplegate.
‘For I myself am best when least in company, eh?’
You never fail to astonish me, Francis. But yes – that’s when I wrote my plays, after all, in solitude. That’s when I came alive. And that’s how I made my living – bought my own scripts and shared in the profits. A good system if you keep scribbling. Which I could and did. And we were lucky not to be controlled by the likes of Henslowe. He kept his company under his thumb and he treated all writers like hacks. Even good hacks like Dekker had to be rescued from prison within a month of starting to scratch for Henslowe. Thank God I was under no such bad angel. Nor was I under the influence of any aristocrat and his pack of chattels and toads. I was myself alone. And free to write for the company I chose – and as I chose. I should have been a happy man.
52
Happy? Call no man happy until he is dead. Only then is he free. Never really free, was I? Only as free as the Company allowed me to be, fashioning scripts to the available talent, or lack of it. Kempe was so coarse he didn’t even catch on that he was Bottom, a part specially created for him. It was self-parody without self-knowledge – the playing up to the audience, the interfering with the script, the self-importance and wanting to take over every rôle in the play, especially the lead, and steal its thunder. Not to mention the massive hamming and crude antics. Good for Bottom, you would think – and on its own level it was. But when he fell ill, Burbage took over the part for a single performance, investing it with a subtlety and depth undreamed of by everyone, except by me, and turning the ingenuous weaver into a half-tragic character, to the Company’s amazement and Kempe’s disgust. That was the start of the rift that led to his exit.
I was glad to see him go. He danced himself to Norwich – and from thence to death, when he borrowed money from Henslowe. Indebtedness to that implacable creditor was always the kiss of death. They said he faked his own demise so as to escape him, and that he lived on in poverty and secrecy for another fi
ve years. Others said that the queen who’d let old Tarleton die had also seen out his fat successor. Nothing sadder than a spent jester shaken by the pangs of death, infirmity that decays the wise improving his gags by bringing them to an end.
And along came Robert Armin, the genius of the tear behind the smile, the wistful irony beneath the wit, the subtler strain of comedy, written not for a straight clown but for a witty fool, even a bitter fool, Touchstone, Feste, Lear’s loyal boy, he took on the lot. By the time he’d done Thersites and Caliban he’d left comedy far behind. But then so had I. We’d all come a long way from the days of tubby Tarleton. And from a queen who put plays on a level just one up from the torture of bears, as public entertainment. Why do I flatter her? Probably she preferred the bears to the actors. Clever she may have been but she had not an ounce of art, except for politics. She was bloodless, you see. She was a Tudor. The Tudors were the shopkeepers of the realm.
So Essex made his bid to turn a tired old shopkeeper out of her stall. But he understood one thing too late – that Englanders are content with shopkeepers, not with stars. Shopkeepers go to bed – stars fall from the sky.
Impossible to say – but not to speculate – what went through the Earl’s mind that cold Ash Wednesday morning on Tower Green as he mounted the final steps to embrace the block, his last lover. It must have been clear to him at last that the play-acting was over. This was really happening and even his old red flame Bess wasn’t going to step in and save him. She’d never received the ring he’d sent from prison – her own gift to him – and he knew that was his last card. Probably he was just glad he was going to die with his bowels still in, and his privities intact, and that he wouldn’t be jeered from the stage by the mob whose hero he’d once been. He was turning down his red waistcoat as he recited the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer and prayed for the queen to have a long life. She had two years left.
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it. He died like one that had been studied in his death, to throw away the dearest thing he owned, as it were a careless trifle. Rebels and traitors may yet die well and give a good performance. Ralegh apparently wept – and those standing close by saw crocodiles falling to the ground, sweet ones, they said. Even the Ralegh tears were perfumed.
The Earl’s last words were to thank God that he had been thus spewed out of the realm. The axeman didn’t succeed in getting him out of it immediately. It took three attempts and the handsome head parted company from the body only on the third. He was thirty-five years old. Young Burghley was watching, rubbing his rubbery little hands. He might have remembered what his father once said about Essex, prophesying his end: ‘Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days.’
On the eve of the execution the queen passed the time at Whitehall by watching a play. It was a command performance and the players were – yes, the very men, the Lord Chamberlain’s. And not only had she asked for us but she particularly requested the play she wanted staged. It was the contentious Richard the Second, the very play we’d put on to promote Essex’s failed coup. Not only that, but she wanted it complete with deposition scene. And she had one further request, that the part of King Richard himself be taken by none other than Master Shakespeare, that he might know what it was to be a prince and to be deposed. What a hag! And I sweated through that performance – for which I was unfitted anyway – conscious of those cold eyes glittering at me out of what was left of her face.
After the execution she paced up and down in her privy chamber for days on end, stamping her feet, fretting and fuming, and thrusting her rusty old sword into the arras in a fantastic rage, a madness. How now! A rat! dead for a ducat! Dead!
The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interrèd with their bones. But in Essex’s case the people chose to forget the moody cruelty, the procrastination, theatricality and instability, the wild-eyed boy who’d burst into the queen’s bedchamber, mad as the sea and wind. They remembered after all that he was frank and free by nature, cultured, witty, loyal, gracious, kindly to inferiors, generous to a fault, a devoted husband and a brave soldier – but no general and a political dunce. Strange how death alters a man’s character. But nothing much wrong with that in a world of self-seekers and cynical clever climbers up back passages. Better to be a failed idealist and be lamented by the people, a noble mind o’erthrown, the expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observed of all observers, quite, quite down. Better to have a poet write your epitaph – truth and beauty buried be – and to live again in The Phoenix and the Turtle – for these dead birds sigh a prayer – or just to be remembered even by your enemies in a wave of warm nostalgia, as an embodiment of the old classical virtues. This was the noblest Roman of them all…this was a man.
53
‘A melancholy mood, Will. And yet you wrote more comedies.’
They darkened round the edges. And tragedy ran into comedy.
‘But Illyria –’
Not so much a place as a state of mind, a dimension in which you can go disguised until you’ve discovered your true self. A place where you have to fall in love with the wrong person so that you can find the right one. It’s the Forest of Arden, the wood outside Athens, the comic opposite of Lear’s heath on which things are as they are and people are seen for what they are: angels, sharks, dragons, worms. In tragedy people don’t put on physical disguises, they assume inner costumes instead – the wickedness wherein the pregnant enemy does much – to hide their true selves from themselves, and others, and it’s hard to see through the veil. But in comedy you simply remove the doublet and hose and say, ‘Look, I’m a girl!’
Of course the conventions we followed added to the comic situation. Viola is a boy actor playing a girl pretending to be a boy and dressed up as such. Rosalind took it one stage further by asking Orlando to imagine her – or him – as a girl, which she both is and isn’t.
So what’s real and unreal? Sebastian seems to be Viola; Orsino seems to love Olivia, who thinks she is loving a young man, Cesario, and also imagines herself as a grieving sister and perpetual spinster, though that role now seems to have worn thin; Viola and Sebastian think themselves bereaved; Malvolio thinks Olivia is in love with him; he thinks Feste is Sir Topaz; Sir Andrew thinks Cesario a demon with the sword; he thinks he can succeed with Olivia; he thinks Sir Toby is his friend. None of them is actually mad but illusions can come close to madness and Malvolio teeters on the brink.
To arrive at happiness you have to throw off all this illusion and live life genuinely. People like Jacques and Malvolio – cynical, Puritanical, disfigured by misanthropy and sick of self-love – they’re unable to do this because in spite of their lofty opinions of themselves they too are playing parts which they can’t get out of –the part is playing them –and so they prolong their solitary off-beat retreats, ending in sadness and solitude, eating sour grapes or plotting revenge, surrounded by married couples whom they will pity, ignore, sneer at, or be revenged upon. Their high-minded superiority is another envious illusion and they don’t have the prerogative of truth that they think they have. What they do have, however, is a point of view. All the world’s a stage. No more cakes and ale. For life is never simple.
And so my last real comedy was already looking to Hamlet – who may be dressed in black but is brighter than anybody in an Elsinore that would be a poorer place without him, all sex and flattery and alcohol and a plentiful lack of wit. Viola isn’t lacking in wit. Out of the sea of troubles that starts off the action, she comes alive and kicking, interested in rich bachelors, and finds herself in an Illyria that, unlike Elsinore, is dressed in crêpe – a world whose leaders, are busy playing parts, sad ones. It’s a languid society, apart from the hangers-on, a society where Puritans thrive and clowns are low on work. It’s in need of livening up and releasing from its restrictiveness and she’s just the boy for the job. Into this melancholy, half-dead, self-deluded world of mourning, repression and frustrati
on she comes, breasting the surge, with the tang of the sea about her, to regenerate and replenish. Oh yes, I was already looking beyond even Hamlet, to Pericles and Prospero. Tempests, it turns out, are kind, and shipwrecks do save souls. As Prospero’s family and friends find out – and his enemies too.
But not Malvolio. He won’t be pacified by life from the uncivilised sea. The fault is in himself, not in his stars, though there’s cruelty here, and torment, and the shadow of revenge, and he’s notoriously abused. So, like Jacques, Malvolio resists the neat and friendly closure – marriage is denied him. Not that he could ever have had a true marriage. His own mind was impediment enough to that. And yet there’s a dark truth that sticks to him, uncomfortable as it may be for us to admit it. You can play your way through life to find an otherness that can free you from yourself, attach you to another half or integrate you into society – but the self is always incomplete. And uncertain of itself. Viola is still dressed as Cesario, Malvolio has stalked off, and Feste is out in the cold, Belch and Aguecheek deprived of their melancholy minstrel and of each other. Their illusions have been ripped away. An ageing drunk with a broken head has discovered he can no longer fight like he used to. And an antique idiot finally realises he has been strung along. All along.
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