Yet they needed one another. It was their desperate glee, their melancholy need that made these hangers-on hang out as one, threw them together with the even sadder Feste and the unholy Maria, the mistress with the streak of cruelty, whose relationship with Toby hardly goes deep. They’re failures in fight, failures in drink, in love, in life, in everything. They have no work to go to, no worldly hopes. They live in, but they are outsiders.
The extreme outsider is Feste, put out of doors like poor Tom, back to his almshouse by the church if he’s lucky, or in harder times abroad to beg his bacon, to face the hag and hungry goblin, nothing but his songs to clothe him in his nakedness from the spirits that stand in the book of moons. And only the flaming drake and the nightcrow make music to his sorrow. These are his new companions as he barks against the dogstar and crows away the morning, the moon his constant mistress, the lonely owl his marrow. Sweet mistress his exists only in his songs. And though he’s not disfigured by Malvolio’s self-love or by Jacques’ aloofness, still he stays unloved and lonely, a sad figure with his wistful songs that sound as if they belong in a play – which of course they do! A player then, an entertainer – removed from the married estate back in Stratford, if you like, and lying down alone under a roof that is not his own.
Yes, yes, easy enough to feel with him. I always said I’d hate to end up like Feste, and all my life I strove to build my scripts against the spectre of a jester’s ruins. And succeeded beyond the dreams of all security. All the same it’s Feste I stand with in the end: the Fool who stands outside love, stands in the wind and the rain and sings of all three sadly. Love is like the sea, endless in capacity but it’s water through the fingers in the end – it’s the wind and rain that are the true elements, those counsellors that cannot disappoint, whether you’re king or clown.
I remember the early days, when I believed in the illusion, that I could come in from the wind and the rain and join the cakes-and-alers in the castle. Now, years later, as I come to die, I know the truth of it. Sobriety bores, but revelry is a belch in the face, ripe with pickled herrings and the plague. Olivia’s beauty is truly blent and won’t outlast wind and weather. Youth’s a stuff will not endure. So beauty fades, the cakes go mouldy, the ale turns sour. Nothing is certain except death. Shallow and the Psalmist have their say. Even the opposites, Viola and Olivia, are almost anagrams of one another. Work it out.
‘And love?’
Well now, Francis, a good fuck is still better than a good belch but even there desire outlives performance. And it is performance. All is performance, especially love: foreplay, development, complete with climax and untying of the knot and plenty of cunt and thrust – and love itself the romantic spectacle, the grand and noble lie. For what is love? ’Tis not hereafter. Present mirth hath present laughter. And women are as roses, remember?
‘As you said. Whose flower, being once displayed – ’
Doth fall that very hour. They die even when they to perfection grow. The spinners and the knitters in the sun, and the free maids that weave their thread with bones, they chant a song that dallies with the innocence of love and promises old age and death.
So come away, come away, death. Feste says it all, with his two songs of love and dissolution, comedy and tragedy, the one commending Venus, sex, and laughter, the other draped in crêpe. Feste is inconsolable. His sadness is the artist’s, who knows that by singing a song for sixpence he’s merely helping you pass the time before you die, in a world that began a long time ago and has not got much better with age or practice. Still the swaggering and the knavery abroad, cutpurses and punks and the roaring boys’ bravado. Still the disillusion of love and the black coffin coming after the cakes and ale.
And always the fucking rain.
No, I was in no mood for clowning, or for any of those comforting fairy tales by which human beings try to run their lives. I come no more to make you laugh. Things now that bear a weighty and a serious brow I do present. Twelfth Night was my farewell to comedy. The death of Essex had put an end to all that.
54
‘More sad stories, Will?’
Of the death of princes.
‘And enter Hamlet?’
Essex’s was the most famous death of 1601.
‘But your father’s now, was one of the more obscure, in spite of that coat of arms.’
The king my father. Having achieved his dream, he began to dwindle, subtly, and by slow stages. It was as if there was nothing left that he really wanted. Maybe he was more affected by his grandson’s going than I gave him credit for. People grieve differently – some store it away, some start to die themselves. Even before Essex embarked on his last venture, John Shakespeare’s death ran up like a flag in his face and it was against the fading light of these two stars, one the brightest luminary, the other a dim glimmer, that I began to write Hamlet.
Sons and fathers. I had lost one and could see the other receding from me – ineffectual, mysterious, and pale. Where do you stand exactly when the pillars topple, when your past and future fall away from you on either side? It’s hard to stand upright on the empty heath, when you’re a man in limbo, when you’re a ghost. And what better part to play in your next drama than the ghost of a father? The husk of a king, and the eggshell of John Shakespeare, who could kill an animal with an impatient shrug and leave you with an image of a life lived without the shadow of a doubt. So frowned he once when in an angry parle he smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.’ Tis strange.
Strange indeed. When someone dies whom you’ve dearly loved, you understand as never before that your own being was rooted in that relationship, partly, largely, it depends on the person, and now that he or she has gone, something of you has gone too, along with the dead one. You don’t know who you are. Identity? It’s amputated. That part of it will never grow again. It needs must wither. You have to find a crutch – and hobble on, to silence or survival. Some never make it, do they?
‘And you, Will, did you make it?’
A piece of him, perhaps.
‘Who are you, old man?’
I’m nobody, I told you. A ghost, no more. I’m the man who wrote Hamlet, that’s all, an actor, a player playing a ghost, twice unreal. I don’t exist. Where is that Stratford lad, my lost son, the grandson of the father who was himself now disappearing like the ghost into the dews of dawn, through the eaves of Henley Street, where his Testament lay lodged, hidden, but not forgotten. The glow-worm shows the matin to be near and ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire. Adieu. Remember me. Say masses for my soul, pray for me in purgatory. Yes, father. And O, my son, my son, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe – yes, by heaven. The voice of a dead father, the voice of a dead son, my own echoing voice, crying Hamlet, Hamlet! Every time I wrote that name it was a stab in the heart from my own quill, the life of the quill that had taken the life of the son, the absent father, and my own father still crying out for reparation. I was father and son and my struggling self, caught between them, three generations fused in a single play, Hamlet, Hamlet, remember.
Remember? How could I ever forget that awful duty he’d laid on me by his own failure: to win back from life what he had lost. And to fulfil it I’d had to leave them, all my pretty chickens. This was my task and its completion was a coat-of-arms and a play – the deepest statement of my entire being, and a bloody revenge, bloodier even than a father’s that cost a son’s life.
Revenge was in the air. Dead Kyd was enjoying a resurrection with his Spanish Tragedy. His own old play of Hamlet had been around a dozen years or more and had been done to death at Newington Butts. But Marston was the man of the moment with Antonio’s Revenge, Tourneur and Webster were on the way with tragedies of white devils and duchesses and atheists and other revengers. And there were shoals of small fry around, swimming in and out of skulls. It was time to show them the way a revenge play could go – a direction never dreamed of, not even by Seneca’s ghost. Now my Hamlet stepped out onto the stage with a problem that the s
tage had never known before, a set of crippling anxieties, hesitations and doubts, displacing the revenger and putting a thinker centre stage. Now the interest lay not in putting another person to death but in the very nature of death itself, and in the nature of that soul-sickness that makes you long for death when your dearest loved one dies and you suffer the worst of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, the worst one of all, a father grieving for a son, and watching a father die.
The time was anything but out of joint. We knew we’d have a Danish queen in London when the Scot succeeded to the throne. And something was rotten in the state of Denmark, traduced and taxed of other nations. A Scottish play might yet be needed, but for now the Dane was the man, his story reaching down to the roots of history and human life, the darkest tangles of the jungle, the first corpse, the curse of Cain, and of Oedipus, incest, adultery, suicide, revenge.
Stage versions were dire. Glaring at the groundlings, a filthy whining ghost lapped in some foul sheet or leather pilch comes in screaming like a pig half stuck and crying Vindicta! Or, in Kyd’s old case, Hamlet, Revenge! Vengeance is not yours, he says to God, it belongs to the hero, who will kill the killer, and the filthy ghost will turn up like a groundling to the moment of reckoning and will enjoy every second of it, gloating over his murderer’s final demise. The revenger is unlikely to survive and his corpse is added to the shambles that litters the stage. Pig’s blood has been bought in by the bucketload and adds to the general smell of mortality and crime.
That was the formula faced.
The abominable Bacon once said that if you begin with certainties you will end in doubt, but that if you will be content to begin in doubt you will end in certainty. And as a law of life that rings rather true. But not for Hamlet – who begins in uncertainty and ends in even greater doubt. The play’s the thing. But the play is unreal. Fill it with questions, Will, questions that question the action and the actors, questions that obliterate in their range and depth the one absurdly elementary objective, to kill the killer. Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge. There’s some greater task afoot, something bigger than revenge, something to stop the action and give us pause. What is it?
It has something to do with death.
Death is certain, did I hear myself say? Some time ago, but yes, nothing else is fixed, not even birth, for you may be born dead, die in the womb, never be born at all, joining the billions of spilt seeds that went among the wastes of time. To be or not to be? That was the question, and not to be – the likelier of the two, the surer fate, not to have been in the first place, never to have been at all. But once born you will surely die, and though all your life you will shun this certainty, you draw towards it day by day, faster and faster as you age. Work, play, politics, love and money, music, friendship, wine – you will find a thousand corridors to avoid the one that leads to that dark door, and you will never be happy because you can never forget it quite. It will always be there, that door, opening on that one question: what is it that waits for you at the end of the last corridor? An end of flesh, yes, and rotting in the earth, but after that, what? Translation, torment, extinction, oblivion? A next world? And if so, Catholic or Protestant? Hell or heaven? Or Greek shades. A dreamless sleep perhaps, and an end to heartache. Or an endless troubled night, with the days’ affairs running riot in your head, a lifetime regretted and a restless eternity all around you like the sea.
No, Will, no. Other than death there is only one certainty: that action is futile, momentary and absurd, that suffering is long, infinite and obscure. You know this for a truth but you know also that nothing can alter it, and so you work on, killing yourself, shortening the process, the madness, striving to forget – and lose the name of action, but unable to escape the treadmill of existence and the thousand grains that issue out of dust, afraid to take the forbidden route to resolution, the bare bodkin, the watery plunge. You know only that truth arrests all enterprise, that understanding kills action, that in order to act you need the veil of illusion. You know that Hamlet was the only one to face it, flat on, to see it squarely, to get it right, irrevocably and whole. You know that his call to self-slaughter was the right one for his philosophy, but that you will never take up arms against that sea of troubles. And so you will carry on courting illusion after illusion.
And for you the best illusions are the purchase of properties and the penning of plays.
‘It seems you never knew what else to do.’
I couldn’t find the other way, Francis. Native – and to the manner born, as somebody once said. I did what I could, what I had to. And life passed – and here we are.
55
‘If you’ll forgive me saying so, Will, for someone who was only apparently filling in time, you filled it in rather well. How many plays did you pen altogether?’
Heaven knows, there were so many hands in the kitchen at one time. About forty, I suppose.
‘Well, don’t you want to let me have a note of them, some sort of list? They’re your works, after all. They should form part of your estate.’
Trash, Francis. Who’d want them? They’re afternoon entertainment. And their day is past, I fear. Anyway half of them aren’t even in print. They don’t exist – as good as not. They’re the footnotes of history. Concentrate on my properties.
‘Yes, you’ve given me careful notes about all these. Henley Street passed to you when your father died?’
Death always enriches somebody or something, even if it’s just the earth.
‘And half of it’s let to sister Joan.’
The other half I let out.
‘Yes, and 107 acres of arable land in Old Stratford to the same man, Lewis Hickocks.’
Along with John Hickocks. That was the following year, 1602. And I bought twenty acres of private pasture.
‘The Chapel Lane cottage you purchased in the same year. Why did you buy it?’
I needed a gardener and he needed a house, simple.
‘And the rents came rolling in, I see.’
The ledgers grew thick with figures, like the plum trees in my orchard.
‘Then you bought a half interest in the lease of tithes of corn, grain, blade and hay.’
From old Stratford again.
‘And from Bishopton and Welcombe. You kept your eyes open.’
Slight risk. It was £440 down and an annual rent of £22, but the guaranteed return was sixty pounds a year. On top of which, the purchase of these old religious tithes made me technically a lay rector, with the right to be buried within the rails of the Holy Trinity chancel, where I already had a pew, not outside in the anonymous earth, like Yorick, along with my father and my sisters and my poor lost son.
It would have mattered to my father though, and with him in mind I looked on the prospect of a very respectable death, if not a glorious one.
Glory? What am I talking about? Even Gloriana died like any other ill old woman – by stopping breathing and entering the rest of silence. Nobody followed her into that silence – except a few hack writers, among whom I did not number myself, I have to say. By then she was past her time. She was in her seventieth year. Three thousand gowns gathered dust in her wardrobes. Always stingy with the state but ready to spend on herself, she grew tired at last of display. Vanity palled, melancholy fell, appetite went. She was dying. She’d gone lightly dressed through a bitter winter, eating little and wandering a little while her courtiers huddled in furs and hugged the fires, shivering and swigging back mulled wine. It was as if she was summoning the king of terrors to come to court and face her rages.
He came first for her old friend and cousin, the Countess of Nottingham. And when one of her own ladies of the Privy Chamber, Katherine Carey, lay on her deathbed, she whispered a terrible confession. It was she who’d been given the ring to pass to the queen, which she had deliberately withheld. That was the one sent by Essex the night before his execution, and it was the ring the queen had once given him as a token of her protection. Essex’s last plea f
or his life had gone unheard.
‘May God forgive you,’ said the queen, ‘because I never can.’
This plunged her into the melancholic fit out of which she never came. She didn’t want to – she had finished with life and started to die, refusing all physic or entertainment. You know, Francis, there comes a time when an organism is like an age – it dies because it wants to die. It’s had enough.
We performed before her for what turned out to be the last time on Candlemas Day. We might as well have played for a corpse. Nothing registered in those black eyes, sunk deep into the shrunken white face. And the black teeth stayed hidden, though Armin jested and even Cecil cackled to encourage her. Nothing. Not one crease added to that hideously wrinkled mask. When I saw her like that, I knew only death would make her grin again. And maybe she was the best critic, in her coldness, of that particular play we gave her. Maybe she sensed the irony of the title. All’s Well That Ends Well, a cold story of rings and wrongs and a lame attempt to sweeten the bitter past. And when the play is done and the costumes taken off, what is a king but a beggar? That’s the epilogue to even the greatest life. When her godson Harington tried reading her some of his witty verses she told him stonily, ‘When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate, such fooleries will please thee less. I am past relish for these matters.’
The year moved gloomily into March, her last month.
She still wore a small ring that Essex had once given her but the coronation ring, embedded in her flesh and impossible to twist from the finger, was filed off. It had been there for forty-four years and five months. She’d always said she wouldn’t wish to outlive her usefulness to her subjects or her country and now she was acknowledging that the bright day was done and that she was for the dark. Her life’s long task was over. She fell into her final illness.
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