A quiet life? James wasn’t the only famous visitor to London that year. Our old friend the plague returned, and after almost a decade away he’d gathered strength. There were over a thousand deaths a week that first summer, rising to three thousand by September, with thirty-five thousand dead in the first year of the new reign, a sixth of all souls. In the Cripplegate where I’d been staying, it was a lot worse, nearly five-sixths, if you fancy it in fractions. Put it another way. Out of three thousand folk there were barely six hundred left alive. I was one of them, but I wasn’t there in Silver Street to be counted among those still standing. We were much in demand outside the plague-ridden city.
After it passed we never really stopped playing for the king – who paid well. I’d ample reason to be grateful to him. His predecessor never rated a play much higher than a cock-fight or a jig. Hers was a prose mentality, clever but dull, devoid of fancy. Now it was farewell, sour annoy! For here I hope begins our lasting joy!
Lasting joy. Was that what I really felt in 1603 and after? Joy had fallen from the air during the queen’s last days, along with the brightness. Gloriana had got tighter, coarser, colder, more of a close-fisted old shrew. I felt a surge of hope now that she was gone. And yet and yet – in Jamie’s time the gloom somehow deepened, the sourness thickened, plots and plays curdled. Something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark’s partner. The golden time I’d looked for – and got – had somehow gone, trickled like water in the desert, right through my fingers.
And so. You strive all your life against your lot, against fate and circumstance, against your own faults and follies and those of the times; you win through to security, stability, recognition – and yes, Francis, yet more money in the purse. And then? Suddenly you start to age, to sicken and slide into doubt, along with the times. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with kings or queens, who’s in who’s out, it’s just you and history going grey together, not even gold with grief, just drab with disenchantment. The days of drums and defiance are over. Men are no longer heroes – the toads are croaking thick on the ground. The soldier’s pole is fallen, and withered is the garland of the war. And there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. Even sex no longer attracts. Something has gone out of that too – the thrill, the passion, the fun and folly. Even the guilt. And all that’s left is a sudden coupling. Underneath a brothel roof. And a cynical uncoupling. An uncoupling too of morality and manners from life. Tragedy is no longer grand, history no longer healthy, comedy no longer corrective or even funny. Nothing works any more. Self-doubt takes tighter hold, closes round your soul. And if you happen to be a playwright, you may lose the plot. Or you may go to plots and places you never dreamt of. And you write Measure for Measure.
57
It was the first play I gave the king and in so doing I was giving him a glass in which he would almost see himself. Playing does not exactly hold the mirror up to nature, as Hamlet said. It holds up a distorting mirror instead. Plays are not copies but illusions of reality. And Jamie always saw what he wanted to see. He was an easy target for a new and subtler kind of writing, one that reflected the spirit of the new age without fear of being seen as critical.
Look at the way he played cat and mouse with conspirators. In Elizabeth’s time they’d have been tried and gutted and that would have been that. But he enjoyed the torture of the mind, granting brief reprieves, two-hour stays of execution, sudden pardons, keeping his guessing subjects on their toes and playing God. An excellent candidate, you could say, for a duke in disguise.
A story with a beard. The disguised king goes among his people, righting wrongs. But there was also the story, not inappropriate, of the corrupt leader who abuses his power to slake his sexual lust. Bring in the other bearded legend of the wronged wife who uses the bed-trick to regain her husband – and you have a triple plot under way.
Jamie was free to see the Duke as a flattering image of himself: benevolent authority, caring king, kindly father, the master of munificence, life’s scripter, destiny’s dramatist, actor in and director of his own creation, a healer of his sick and seedy city. Not too hard in fact for James to glance into the glass of art and see himself as something even greater than an earthly king – God himself, divine mercy, heavenly grace, Christ the cauterising sword and forgiving redeemer – with Angelo the Old Testament letter of the law, Isabella chastity and righteousness, Lucio the Devil, and Claudio unregenerate man. It was the kind of scheme designed to appeal to a king who really believed he had private audiences with God. He’d even written a book about it, confirming his authority as God’s deputy.
What he chose not to see was the other side of the Duke: a man remote from his people, a people he doesn’t love, in spite of what he says, but sees as his concern and source of his power. A king without subjects to control is a king of shadows living in a paper palace. The Duke has neglected his kingdom and allowed moral chaos to reign, so draconian measures are required. But if you don’t want to be the unpopular reformer – if you want to continue to be flattered and admired, make somebody else stir the moral midden. Angelo’s the man, the assistant doctor to lance the sore – while the Duke questions the distempered part in secret, revelling in the play, plotting real people on his stage, extracting actions, dialogue, giving them set speeches, but giving little away. A controller who hated to get too close to the crowds he controlled.
I love the people, but do not like to stage me to their eyes, I do not relish well their loud applause and aves vehement. Nor do I think the man of safe discretion that does affect it.
In the end he’s a stage duke, a theatre puppet himself, created to put a play before a king, that’s all, and yet this thin but intricate figure gets the girl in the end, in spite of his insistence that he was proof against the dribbling dart of love. Yes, that’s how he described it: the dribbling dart of love. A reductive image of the prick, you’d say; and people like that who pontificate, tuck back their balls and deride the penis are usually the first to end up with an erection. By the time I’d finished with him he was hot for Isabella – she turns on the men of power – and she goes off-stage to get what nature intended for her, a better image of the dribbling dart.
Picture, if you will, dear Francis, the Green Room at the Globe, and poor Sam Gilbourne, who had to play her, smashing his head against the stage and asking me the way. How to play her, this novice nun who makes the snow-broth blood of Angelo boil over?
Poor Sam. Whatever you do, I said, with tongue in cheek, don’t make her likeable. She’s a damaged Diana howling for sex, the very words she chooses exuding a longing for rough stuff and penetration – the keen whips she’d wear like rubies – and strip myself to death as to a bed that long I have been sick for. Oh yes, she’s hot for it, Sam. Let Angelo get an erection in her presence and make our Jamie roar. The wanton stings and motions of the sense have come to plague him.
‘A little harsh?’
Served him right, Francis. Angelo the fallen angel, the counterfeit coin, a nasty piece of work, a Puritan. And an indication of how things would have run had they got into power – decent people punished, adulterers even to the death, while the pimps would be untouched because they went with the unregenerate and were therefore acceptable, like imps on lettuce leaves and turds in privies – part of our fallen nature and part of God’s plan. But Puritan Angelo is punished where he most deserves it. Malvolio I punished merely in the mind. This kill-joy gets it in the balls, and the critic of lust now burns with it himself and is exposed for the hypocrite he is.
But what does it mean, Will? – more anguished back-stage squawks. Actors always want to know what they’re doing. So you hand them the script and say, don’t ask me, I only wrote the thing. Words, words, words. They come from deep within – or far without. Either way you can’t reach the source – what they actually meant as they came to you. And that too is inspiration.
‘What did it mean, Will? Did it mean anything?’
It seems to be a comedy – muc
h disguise, much confusion and confrontation – but there’s no friendly wildwood here in which it all gets disentangled, no leaves and lyrics. Something less healthy than nature sorts it out – sorts it out in the corner, muffled and shuffled and feeling dirty. Dilemmas, disturbances, dubious ideals, a loss of bearings. And a feeling that people are not so nice any more – the absentee ruler, the hypocrite judge, the chilly sister, the lax brother, the whores and pimps and bawds and murderous convicts, the state itself that sentences a man to death for sleeping with his girl. Life has lost its lustre but death still horrifies and the prospect of any redemption is remote and unreal. Sex is a mire and marriage a punishment – the wedding bells jar at the end, jangled and harsh yet again. Angelo’s nuptials are an alternative to execution, Isabella is stamped as the Duke’s marriage property, and Lucio is made to marry his whore.
A play for an anxious era and for melancholy middle age. A thing of darkness, twisted and wrung into a suspect structure, of uncertain essence. It leaves you disturbed and divided, less certain of your ideals, a little cynical perhaps, even a little disgusted with life, a little weary. Meanwhile the plague sweats on and on, death’s messenger, wedded to sex, and the king pulls down the brothels. And maybe you can’t come closer than that, to any sort of belief. And yet once more – it’s something to do with sex. And yet once more it’s something to do with death. It’s what it always comes back to in the end. Death is the end of every story.
58
‘The best antidote to death is birth.’
Still with me, Francis? Well, I remember one of my Silver Street neighbours, William Taylor, asked me to be godfather to his baby girl at that time. She was christened Cordelia.
‘Ah.’
Ah, what?
‘Nothing got lost on you, did it? Nothing ever went to waste.’
You weave into the tapestry everything you can find. Some of it’s from books but much of it just straws in the wind, thistle-seeds, the gossamer of gossip. A dropped feather turns into a quill.
‘You’ve got to start somewhere.’
There were other beginnings just then. I was in Silver Street, in the Cripplegate, cornered with Muggle Street, in the north-west of the city, almost at the wall, where from my upper room I could look out over a sea of rooftops to St Paul’s, and with St Olave’s a spit of the mouth away. Not that I was a church-going man in London, though I showed face at funerals and baptisms.
I was lodging with the Mountjoys. I’d met Monsieur Mountjoy’s wife, Mary, through Jacklin Vautrollier – Wood Street being just around the corner, running down to Cheapside. Do you want me to spell it out for you, Francis?
‘Not another dark lady!’
I was up to my ears in them.
‘Not the anatomical image I’d have chosen.’
True, Francis. But Mary Mountjoy – you’ll recognize the name from Henry Five, and it does have a certain vulgar aptness, you’ll admit – also fucked elsewhere. In particular she’d been joyfully mounted, hoping to make me jealous, by one Henry Wood, mercer and cloth-trader in Swan Alley, and she thought she’d joined the pudding club, so she went scuttling off to see Simon Forman, as they all did. It turned out she was no more pregnant than I was. Or than Henry Wood was, for that matter.
But old Christopher Mountjoy suspected she was having it away with somebody and ironically poured out his woes to Will – whose will had been most active in his good lady. So I gave him the Iago stuff. I’d watch out for Wood, if I were you. Note if la belle femme strain his entertainment with any strong or vehement importunity. Much will be seen in that. In the meantime, hold her free, I do beseech you. I then warned Madame to stay well away from Swan Alley and make sure to give Mountjoy the time of his life for the next few nights. She was so grateful she fucked me too for old time’s sake and present thanks – I’d given up brothel-creeping by that time. Doubtless Forman fucked her too. He fucked most of his clients.
‘You make Cripplegate sound like a fleshmarket.’
There were almshouses and autopsies within fifty paces, and poor old buggers living on seven pence a week, five sacks of charcoal, and a quarter of faggots a year. The Barber Surgeons opened up the corpses of criminals four times a year and let you see what bred about their hearts if you cared to sit through the lectures. After I’d seen that I needed a drink in the Dolphin in Milk Street where for tuppence you could browse and sluice in your private snug and if you wanted to write, the candles were free.
‘They made wigs there, didn’t they?’
And tires. That was Mountjoy’s trade. Old Ben once said of the queen that her teeth were made in Blackfriars, each eyebrow in the Strand, and her hair in Silver Street. Mountjoy’s shop was one of several and he devoted his days to beautifying the heads of ladies. It wasn’t far off being a fleshmonger’s, though, as you will hear, Francis.
‘All ears and no choice.’
Mountjoy had a daughter called Mary, after her mother, and she – young Mary, not the mother – was being fucked by one of the apprentices, Steven Belott, unknown to the parents. I knew about it, though. The shop was on the ground floor and everybody slept upstairs. Her room was next to mine and if the walls didn’t have ears, I did. French women come like it’s the end of the world – trumpets and tambourines and the crack of doom, that sort of thing.
Belott, like Richard Field, was a young bugger on the make. He had business plans and wanted a bigger dowry than old man Mountjoy was prepared to offer. They dragged me into their wrangling, and for the sake of peace in mine inn and paying my sexual debt to Madame Mountjoy, I became a judge, settling on an arrangement to everybody’s apparent satisfaction. Sixty pounds down as soon as the knot was tied and a further two hundred jinglers as soon as Monsieur Mountjoy had said bonsoir to this world. The unwritten assumption was that the apprentice would also inherit the family business, especially as young Mary was the sole child and daughter and thus his heir. Belott was onto a good billet. All he had to do was wait. They were married in St Olave’s and I looked forward to the sounds of legal shagging shaking my chamber wall. And as legitimate sex invariably settles down to being a lot less vigorous and a lot less frequent than the illicit variety, I also looked forward to a lot more sleep.
Things took an altogether different turn – though I did get the wished-for sleep. To my surprise the shagging ceased altogether and the sounds of stifled sobs came faintly through instead. I could live with that. And sleep with it too. If young Belott was not seeing to his husbandly duties and young Mary was being denied her conjugal bliss, it was none of my affair – though if I’d been his age and betwixt the sheets I’d have done his office gladly. Mary minor was a pretty thing, dumpy and plump and with a dusky little rump which I’d glimpsed in action one summer’s midnight when her door was ajar and she on top, thrusting merrily. But now it seemed that Belott was coming out in his true colours. Not willing to wait for the death of his employer, now his bonpère, Belott haled Mary from Silver Street without so much as an ave or adieu, to set up a rival business of his own, expecting to use the promised sixty pounds to the purpose.
It didn’t work out. Mountjoy went wild and gave them only ten pounds, palming them off with some old rags and sticks of furniture thrown in. ‘Voila! Set up your ’ouse and shop wis zat, if you can!’After all, if Belott could renege on the deal, so could he. But then what happened? Madame Mountjoy suddenly died (of one of Forman’s concoctions no doubt) and the prodigal couple came back to the sad fold to look after father and to become his partners.
Not for long. The old squabbling started up again and the couple stormed off, leaving the ageing wigmaker to turn to Bacchus. Belott heard on the breezes that his father-in-law had every intention of putting away down his neck as much of the inheritance as he possibly could before cutting off son-in-law without a penny piece. ‘He won’t even have a nail left to claw his English arse with by the time I’m done!’
The saga ran for years. By the time it came to court I was retired and had to leave S
tratford and go up to London to summon up remembrance of things past. There I was obliged to inform the Court of Requests that I found myself unable to remember all the details of the case. Yes, I did recall Stephen Belott, who had struck me as a good enough worker, and yes, I recalled that a sum of money had been agreed on. It might have been about fifty pounds. (It was sixty if it was a penny but it wouldn’t have done to remember too precisely.) And I recalled nothing of the two hundred pounds. Two hundred is a lot of money. But Belott had been a good worker, was that the phrase? Well, yes, good enough, and valued by Monsieur Mountjoy for his services as an humble apprentice, but at the same time I hadn’t heard Monsieur say that he’d made any real profit out of him. And coming back to the crucial matter of the money, the actual sum promised? Ah! Now there I simply couldn’t swear to an exact figure. Couldn’t swear that there ever was such a thing as an exact figure – more of an honourable agreement, perhaps, if even that. There my memory simply failed me.
‘You old fox.’
I’d had enough of the Mountjoys and the Belotts and I wanted no more. I wasn’t going to come down neatly on either side for the benefit of one of the parties. Life’s not so simple, is it? And discretion is the better part of witnessing. I left it to other parties to sort out. It turned out to be the elders of the French church, when the case was turned over to them. They found for Belott and ordered Mountjoy to pay him twenty nobles – which as far as I know he never did. They also added that both father and son-in-law were a couple of drunks – something they didn’t get from my studied ramblings on the stand, though I could have given them chapter and verse on that old score. I could have given them the whole volume if I’d wanted. But the older I got the more I valued silence, suspension, keeping my thoughts to myself.
Will Page 43
