Or putting them on the stage – in such a way that questions of innocence and guilt were swallowed up in the spectacle of sheer human suffering.
Nowhere more so than in the plays that had poured from my hectic pen for those past ten years.
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The plague, the Powder Plot, the great eclipse, murder and mayhem calculated on a cosmic scale, the sheer diabolical ruthlessness, wickedness and immorality, of people prepared to blow up their fellow human beings in London for a religious cause. To maim, mutilate and murder in the name of God. Jesus Christ, Francis!
‘I know. You wrote King Lear.’
Among others.
‘Well I may be a humble lawyer and you are the English Ovid, but there I take issue with you, if I may.’
You may, Francis, but on what account?
‘On Cordelia’s account. You killed her, Will. You didn’t have to. You hanged Lear’s only remaining daughter – and you made him see it. The only good thing he had left, the only one in the world he had ever really loved. And you crushed them up together.’
I did.
‘But why? I mean, surely, it wasn’t necessary!’
Francis?
‘You changed the plot. I’ve heard it said. You altered the facts of the story. It didn’t have to be that way. What on earth was the point, I ask you?’
What’s the point of anything, Francis? It was putting on the agony, putting on the style – the tragic style. But it wasn’t only the characters I tortured. I wanted the spectator to suffer too. The cruelty is calculated, you can hear it, Francis, in the actual writing, a ferocity that kept me sane – just.
‘Well, that’s a riddle!’
I’d reached the stage where the play was the rack and the playgoer my victim and I was ready to play my terrible game with him. Even when the play was over the pain wouldn’t go away. He’d never be the same man again. Even you, Francis. It’s under your skin. The old Leir has a happy ending like the Book of Job – but my heath wasn’t the forest of Arden any more, and was far from Arcadia. In Lear the plot is there for the pain, nothing more, just the absolute agony of living.
And so I piled on the agony, added to it by draining the play of domesticity – in spite of the flax and the whites of eggs, in spite of home’s dull cruelties and slimy smallness, there’s no background of real living here, no familiar quotidian routines, no comforting ordinariness. You can imagine Lady Macbeth dressing for dinner, or Desdemona hurrying back from the privy to hear the rest of Othello’s travels. In Lear life is lived out in a bear-pit of a world, loud with howls, a world away from the little loyalties of Stratford, the tough kindnesses of Snitterfield, the Christian values, the pastoral ethics, the human knots that bind. Lear’s men and women are merely players, strutting symbols on a propless stage. Their words reverberate in the encompassing emptiness, their actions have no continuance in time.
‘All right, all right, you had your reasons, obviously.’
As for the Green Room at the Globe on a Lear day, you can well imagine it.
‘Man, you’re ill!’
‘Is it the pox or what?’
‘Tell him to take a holiday, go abroad. Haply the sea and countries different with variable objects shall expel this something-settled matter in his heart.’
‘Were you sick, Will?’
In body and in mind, Francis. And it came out in the play. Was it a tale told by an idiot? an absurdity? Was Cordelia’s hanging after the death of her enemies, in the midst of friends, the last hideous joke of destiny? And Lear’s last words as he sees her lips move, a last trick of the tortured brain? Does he die from a broken heart or a surge of joy? Or was it about the corruption of the court and the aristocracy under threat? Or a great cry of outrage against all forms of injustice, ingratitude, ignorance and suffering and violence and cruelty and pain? Especially the pain of the martyrs that makes you want to speak what you feel, not what you ought to say? Was it an image of doomsday? a parable of pride, power, blindness and sight, madness and sanity, the forces of darkness, the need for self-knowledge? Or the need to be human in a state of nature where the human condition is a condition of war, everyone against everyone, and life a bearpit?
Not quite. Yes, Cordelia was pure love and there she lies, dead on stage, and will not come again. Never. The cold core of the play’s statement. And yet, in spite of all the evil – the ingratitude, the greed, the lust, the ambition, the treachery and cruelty and the rest – in spite of suffering and injustice and death and extinction, she has been, she has existed, and her love got through to her father in the end, at no point more movingly and unbearably than when he sees her dead, imagines her alive, and dies himself. I could have denied the audience that last wild flicker of hope before the end. And then it would have been a ticket to hell. But instead I gave them that flicker of a candle in the dark.
‘Is that it, then?’
That’s it, Francis.
‘Must there no more be said?’
No more. Not publicly, anyway. But I’ll tell you in confidence. It’s a play about fathers and children. The Fool is the son Lear never had, the son he only pays attention to when it’s too late. Cordelia and the Fool were doubled by the same actor. And my poor fool is hanged. Yes, that’s Cordelia. But the trick of language and the fact of doubling has you looking down at a dead boy – and there’s a chilling affection in the tone. You recall the king’s other Fool at that point, the boy who went to bed at noon and never got up again, vanished from the action – just like Hamnet.
‘You suffered, old man.’
As time went by the dead son died over and over. After Lear’s bitter boy, young Macduff, Marcius, Mamillius. And all the lost daughters were reclaimed: Cordelia, Perdita, Marina, Imogen, Miranda.
Meanwhile Susanna and Judith were twenty-two and twenty and the best catches in Stratford. Their father could have retired at forty and re-joined them in Stratford. But right now he had more on his mind. And in his sick carcass and ailing soul.
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The fires of Venus had been lit – in my genitals and all other lubricated places, the eyes, the mouth, the nostrils. Most of all the mind, heating it up with horrified contemplation of the body’s rotting. I knew very well what could lie ahead for me; baldness, blindness, lameness, madness – the multiple wages of sin in many a brothel and the hell of many a dark-skinned whore. This was the stake I’d sharpened, and chained myself to stand there. I cannot fly, I said, but bear-like I must fight the course.
And what was I, for God’s sake? Early forties, that’s all. Sounds young, a man in his prime. But not in London. There I was five years past the average for a city drabber, and deep in its hell. Nashe penned a piece he called Christs Tears Over Jerusalem, but it was Nashe’s over London, a lament for its vices. He called it the seeded garden of sin, the polluted sea that sucks in all the scummy channels of the realm. What are thy suburbs but licensed stews? Whores were syphilitic at fifteen, lethal at twenty, skeletal at twenty-five, and dead at thirty – often sooner.
‘A real Jeremiah.’
He did not exaggerate. Three-quarters of the sodden stream of humanity that sludged into St Bartholomew’s were venerally diseased, the result of sex for sixpence – and cheaper with the pox on offer – among a population that had quickly spilled out from the country and fetched up trapped in the capital.
‘You being one.’
Who was I? Where was I headed? Son gone, father gone, the age gone, a strange new epoch in progress, the inner life dead. Only plays left to live for.
And driven, Francis, driven. Burning out my brain in building all those other worlds. Where does it come from, the energy? Where does it reside? Deep in the nerves, I suppose, and somewhere in the sick soul. I told you, inspiration is illness, that’s all I know. I don’t know where it comes from. I know where it went to, though – into those other worlds. And I know what it left behind. A man who’d lost the taste for living. A man stuck in lodgings for half his life, no longer needing to mak
e money but who just couldn’t stop writing, not yet. Because work was all there was. It was what was left. You know how it happens, Francis, one day you’re taking a piss with a group of younger bloods and you’re suddenly horrified by the gush they’re producing, the strong steaming waterspouts, in contrast to your sickly trickle. Gloom descends.
‘Oh come on, Will! Put off by a piss! You’re not serious.’
And yet more work becomes the substitute – for the healthy life. It keeps you going, day after day, in the fly-infested, plague-prone, stinking city which has claimed you for her own. She gives you all she’s got and you’re utterly dependent on her, she’s your infected mistress, you’re her hag-ridden man-whore, and you sing to her in the sickness of your soul. I loathed London. She made and unmade me. She was the real Dark Lady. She was a Muse – of hellfire.
I’d reached the age too where loan oft loses both itself and friend. The knock on the door, the urgent letter – I’d come to dread them. Always amounting to the same thing. Will you lend us thus much moneys? Now that you’re successful, friend, and free from care.
Free from care. Did they think Lear was written one carefree afternoon? Did they think adultery lay simply in the script, and the stench of cunt only in the ink? Burning and consumption a figment of the mind? And an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to ease my imagination? Sweeten it away? Begone, bloodsuckers! There’s money for thee! Now go – and get me surgeons.
Add to that the pox and there’s your Timon, Francis. I had him on my mind with Lear. Once you’re infected you want companionship in misery, you want the effects of it to multiply and so contaminate the stinking city from wall to wall, strike the whole world. You write hymns to syphilis, to blast the ingrates out of being. No, Lear was too kind. Call down on them instead all the horrors of the dreaded disease, hail down on all men, consumptions sow in hollow bones, crack the voice, hoar the flamen that scolds against the quality of flesh, down with the nose, down with it flat, take the bridge quite away, shrivel the privates, turn piss to fire and breath to agony, make bald the pate and let the unscarred braggarts of the war derive some pain from you! Plague all, that your activity may defeat and quell the source of all erection! There it is again, erection, erection, that furtive fucking, fully clothed, a short and secret act, and a mere spilling of animal spirits and filthy stinking fluid. Love is the door that opens on disease…
So Timon turned his back on Athens, as I’d turned mine on London. Already I was going home. In my mind’s eye. A breath of country air was all I wanted now, the soothing balm of Stratford. But I could never go home like this, laden with London’s lethal gifts, a surfeit of deadly sin that had damned both body and soul. I didn’t even finish with Timon, I banished him instead to his everlasting mansion upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood, where once a day with his embossed froth the turbulent surge shall cover – lines already tangy with the fresh and eager air of the last plays – and there I left him. And my ruined self – the two of us unable any longer to stand the pain of being.
And went not to Stratford but to the consulting rooms of Dr Simon Forman, the last resort of diseased bodies and ignoble minds, out beyond Cripplegate.
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It was the plague that made Forman. Somehow he cured himself – and others – so successfully that he was prosecuted by the Royal College of Physicians, who couldn’t tolerate any form of medical success in a case where the doctor in question didn’t even have a degree to his name. There was no lack of quacks, imposters and charlatans who set themselves up as physicians and astrologers, raked up dunghills for dirty boxes and plasters, and out of some toasted cheese and candle-ends tempered up a few ointments and syrups with which they sped into the country and gulled the rustics. Forman came to the capital, and very soon there wasn’t anyone who hadn’t heard of Simon Forman. By the time royal Jamie came more than half of London’s paying population had been to him. That’ll give you some idea of his love life, because most of those who came to him were women and by all accounts including his own, he seems to have fucked them all. Only the chosen few left him unadulterated, or virgo intacto. Ben had a list pinned up in the Mermaid, which he added to week by month, and the roll-call of seductions unfurled with astonishing speed and to seemingly infinite length.
‘I don’t believe it.’
Carved in my memory. You want names? Sarah Archdell, Appelina Fairfax, Anne Waller of Ashby, the widow Boothby in St Lawrence Lane, the widow Calverley at Holborn, Mrs Withypoll’s daughter at Stourbridge Fair, Katherine Gittens, Anne Eglesfield, Mistress Lee, Captain Monson’s sister.
‘Stop, stop!’
Anne Nurse, Judith Ankers, Joan West, Elizabeth Hipwell, Mrs Anne Condwell, Frances Hill (his own maidservant), Bess Parker, Actaeon Dove, Aquila Gould, Temperance Slaughter, Cognata Stocker, Cassandra Potter – to name but a few. Ben said he liked men too, though he was as old-fashioned as Old Street in my opinion. And this was quite apart from the various loves of his life, Anne Young and Avis Allen and Jane Baker. And so they came. And came. Emilia Bassano’s name was not on the list but that meant nothing.
‘But what did they come for?’
What does any woman come for? Pregnancies, false pregnancies, deliveries, stoppages, averted miscarriages, arranged miscarriages, in the course of which he wandered deep into necromancy and infamy and horoscopes and forbidden realms. He was London’s very own Faustus. They said he knew something about everything under and including the sun, and that what he didn’t know he was ready to guess. Sometimes his guesses were inspired. As for me, I reckoned that a man who’d danced with the Black Death and lain with a third of London must have had the pox at one time or another and was surely worth a visit. There he was, living prosperously and healthily just upstream from me in Lambeth. What could I lose?
‘Reputation, Will?’
Well, I knew he kept case-books – and held more intelligence in his pen than the recording angel. But I went loaded with gold and told him I was ready to pay not just for cure but for anonymity even in his deepest files. Quill shall not whisper to paper, etcetera. He said he admired my plays, had been to hear some of them, and would show me the respect one seeker after truth accorded to another. There was something I rather liked about the red-haired little runt with the frizzy beard and freckled face who looked directly at me across piles of textbooks and case-notes and in between leaning towers of pill boxes and dangling animals, long dead, but bright-eyed and knowing in their stuffed secrecy. Something rather reassuring, really. It wasn’t the trappings, the planetary charts on the walls, the unicorn’s horn, the relaxing fragrance of remedy, the comforting authorities bound and stacked on the shelves – Hippocrates and Galen and all the medical giants – it was something about the man himself. Maybe it was because he’d started off talking about my plays. He had a good bedside manner for sure, and before I knew what was happening I felt so much at ease I was exchanging small talk with him about our respective trades and enjoying the stream of cases he referred to without dropping the name of a single patient or client.
Her menstrual blood is running to her head, she has a wolf at the breast, he’s afflicted by melancholy and wind. And the endless questions they brought to his door: what about her husband who sailed to Russia in the White Lion? what does a dream of swans signify? is she pregnant? has he been poisoned? will the ship or the child miscarry? is it a changeling? is she star-crossed, planet-struck? should we sell up? stay in London? go to the country? can you deal with a suicide sprite? – it’s offering knife, rope and water – can you find buried treasure? discover a lost dog, a little bitch with six silver beads about her neck and a greenish and blueish velvet collar? And so the curious callers came to this curious little man, who saw, found, predicted, diagnosed, and sometimes cured. Richard Field went to him as I recall, when he swallowed a Portuguese coin, though he could have saved the coin he paid Forman and simply let nature take its course. Mountjoy consulted him to find out if his wife was lying with other men – and Form
an didn’t require specialist knowledge for the answer to that one. I still kept wondering if he’d had Emilia. Not that I cared nowadays, though it seemed a likely scenario, given the natures of both doctor and client.
‘But mostly,’ he was saying, ‘it’s the usual stuff, you know, the humdrum of a doctor’s days. Can’t sleep, can’t stop sleeping, can’t eat, can’t stop eating, can’t shit, can’t stop shitting, can’t shag –’
‘Can’t stop shagging?’
‘Well, yes – and no. Not many men find that condition a cause for complaint. But their wives do, naturally.’
I smiled slightly, suddenly anxious to get on. Which he sensed.
‘And now Master Shakespeare, let’s do something about this pox of yours.’
I hadn’t given him the least indication but wasn’t in the least surprised that he knew.
The interrogation began. How many whores? How many times? How long ago? Their complexions, please, their years, the addresses of the stews. Had I tried hard pissing at any of these? (The best brothels, Francis, kept two chamber-pots beneath each bed for pissing into fiercely by the client, to piss out the poison, immediately after sex and while his prick still retained some erectitude.) Did I still get erections, by the way? Apart from morning erections, that is – how was my old Adam, in other words, and were stiff ones painful? Was pissing laborious, difficult, sore? Did I feel as if I were pissing blades of Spain?
What I did feel was as if I were a gigantic prick, nothing more, burned up with sin and syphilis from hilts to slit, and all the other parts of me – arms and hands and legs and head – just didn’t exist. You know the feeling, Francis?
‘I most certainly do not.’
Your entire body and being have become reduced to that one distempered part of your anatomy and you are now an object of curiously unhorrified analysis by one who has seen it all.
‘I can introduce a thin lead pipe into your penis, Master Shakespeare.’
Will Page 44
