The bland voice, announcing torture, hardly seemed real. The whole thing was a dream, for sure.
‘Since the Armada year some of my colleagues in the field have been using a slender stalk of parsley or mallow instead, but there have been cases where these have snapped, leaving the patient in considerable trouble. Personally I prefer the lead. Excruciating, of course, but no worse than syphilitic constriction during involuntary erection or necessary urination. And of course stricture of the member can eventually kill.’
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.
‘I think I’d better examine you now.’
Sweet Mr Shakespeare, the English Ovid, honey-tongued Melicert, star of the stage and genius of the Globe, removes his breeches and lies on the table. Dr Simon Forman, physician extraordinaire, bends down and peers at poor Percy, pursing his lips and reaching for his notebook, which Will waves away.
‘Ah, no notes, of course, I had forgotten, very well. It’s no matter, this is far from fatal, I can assure you. I think you’re oversensitive, my friend. All the same I’m going to suggest the lead pipe and also as a precaution the mercury fumigation.’
And so to the powdering-tub of infamy in which I’d placed Doll Tearsheet, dying of syphilis in Henry Five. She was exposed to the fumes of cinnabar heated to smoking on a hot plate and the remaining powder used to dust the suffering body. This is the treatment she underwent at the hospital of St Mary in Spitalfield, once used by lepers. Now it was the turn of her creator, lying in Lambeth with the smell of the sea from the Thames killed by the combined stenches of mercuric sulphide, vermilion, and mercury ore. That was the start of it for me and it went on from there in the usual way, first the ointment applied, and then I was wound up in sheets with winter warmers, hot bricks and heated stones, for hours a day over many days, to sweat out the disease, fighting fire with fire. Some died in the sheer hell of the cure. Others simply succumbed to the slow rotting that was taking them apart.
I dreamed for years afterwards of those benchfuls of men, their legs swathed in spotted bandages, their flesh pitted with sores. And still I dream of them, and instead of waking up in Stratford I’m in the terrible stews again, being helped out of my clothes, sleepwalking my way to the smoking rooms and the tubs and the rows of corpses. The temperature soars, visibility plunges. Silent forms glide past, half hidden in skeins of steam, applying the poisonous concoctions, filling up the wounds on backs and bellies and privities, gilding the skin with the silvery-coloured cure that floods into the system and causes more pain and poison than the disease itself, fighting hell with hell, just as Hippocrates advised, little to distinguish between the fires of Venus and the fires of the physician. The blisters spread, the gums begin to bleed, the body bakes and suppurates, consciousness collapses, and in your struggle for sanity you try to remember a doctor of Verona who wrote a poem before you were born: a poem in which Syphilus – the name sounds innocent and idyllic – insulted the god Apollo and was punished by a pestilence that could be cured only with quicksilver – the quicksilver that was killing you quicker than the pox and dividing the spoils between them, body and bones and brain, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans nose, sans everything, except the peace of death. But it could be many years before the man finally died. A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury – so the saying went.
Somehow I came through, the survivor of just one of the cures for those that breathed the air of infection, made love to a killer, and lived on the slicing edge of death.
As did we all.
‘But some of us don’t help ourselves,’ tut-tutted Dr Forman, ‘by our general way of living, Master Shakespeare. Nothing to do with sex – you have assured me that’s all in the past. You clearly don’t look after yourself properly.’
And that was true enough, too. Meat over-salted, over-spiced, red-hot bowels in winter (whip me, ye devils!), an angry liver, an itchy skin, and carious teeth. Generally I ate with one hand and wrote with the other, ate on my feet, pacing up and down between speeches, speaking the lines trippingly over mouthfuls of pippins and cheese. That and the brief sleeps and buzzing slumbers, waking early and unwashed in dirty dawns to escape the scorpions of the mind, and moving at once to the work that crushes even as it relieves. Work was what it was all about. Work was what London was for. Was it why I had come here, then? Not exactly. Work isn’t what Adam dreams about, it’s what he’s been assigned to. No, it was something other than the notion of work that had sucked me up into the city all those years ago, but whatever it was, it had been largely forgotten. As it always is. All I wished for now was a little rest in Stratford, rounded off with a good long sleep. Followed by a never-ending one. The consummation devoutly to be wished? Years away. I still had plays to write. And money to make. And health to ruin, in spite of Dr Forman’s advice.
‘Go home,’ he’d told me, ‘go home and get some sleep.’
62
But in the year 1606 Macbeth put an end to sleep.
He did as the Powder Plotters did, the year before, when sleep stole from my pillows, and I began to fear the knock at the door at four in the morning.
The true begetter of the Catholic plot may well have been none other than Robert Cecil, but as far as the world was given to know, it was another Robert – Catesby, an old friend of my father’s, and not only a friend but a deep religious one to boot. My father was safely in his grave – nothing could touch him further. But his son wasn’t. And the conspirators were on the run. They tracked them through the November glooms, the rain-drenched lanes of Warwickshire, where Catesby died with harness on his back. But others were taken for the torture – under which anything could be said, true or not, it didn’t matter. The rack spoke with a tongue that always told on somebody. And sleep was the first casualty. The old Warwickshire ghost was back again, putting paid to that.
Night after night the restless ecstasy. Morpheus slipped out of Silver Street and never really returned. Names were being cut out of the conspirators, literally, before their very eyes, and before their slow deaths. Names were being roasted, wrung, squeezed, twisted, teased, and torn out long before the ripping of the actual heart or the prolonged burning. Names that come out during torture don’t have to mean anything, don’t even have to exist, except on the tip of the terrified and half-torn tongue. But once uttered – oh, then they will become confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ. And will be found to fix on someone, like the slime that sticks on filthy deeds. Yes, I often heard it, in the dark, that terrible knocking, and lived out the following scene in sleepless fear and memories of Hartley. Bind fast his corky arms. Out, vile jelly! See shalt thou never. You don’t know anything? Of course you don’t. You’re dead. The dead know not anything. Don’t you read the Bible?
It was a fearful time.
And the next play was drenched not only in blood, but strung with that terrible sleeplessness, and haunted by witches, witches that perplex and prey upon the brain, releasing your deepest darkest fears. Is your manhood certain? Are your friends true? Is your future secure? Are you sure of your wife? Can you trust your dreams? the double-talk of destiny? the meanings of words?
‘A play to please a king?’
Please him, yes, butter him up, work by witchcraft – his favourite study – revive the old terrors, Satan stronger than gunpowder, the evils he adored, tickle his childhood fears, flatter his ancestry, derive him from Banquo, not father Darnley but the dauntless valour of the incorruptible – hedge him with divinity too, and he’ll lap it up.
And he did. Macbeth killed Duncan not on the field but in his bed, while acting as his host shattering the sacred duty of the host. His reign was brief and brutal, not the stately seventeen-year affair it really was. But I wasn’t writing history now, I was putting a king-killer on show – and showing what happened to king-killers.
‘Which is?’
Brooding discontent, murderous ambition, your secretest thoughts spoken aloud, suddenly, on a blasted heath, not by yourself, but by three weird women, who
disappear like the words themselves, breath into the wind. You’re ready to renounce the life to come, but even as you spur your horse to jump your conscience, you start to hear the voices in the night, to see the pictures in the dark – a sleeping king, his innocence pleading with you, trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking off, the world spread out at angels’ feet, heaven’s cherubim horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air, the naked babe, sweet Jesus, striding the blast, tears on the wind, terrors in the sky. Et sepultus est in inferno. And now you falter. But not your wife – bring forth men children only, you gasp, as she takes out her breast and bares her nipple in your face, saying the unsayable. Appalled by her undaunted mettle, you drown the voices, tear the pictures, suppress your conscience, sell your soul. Now you’re Faustus. Worse, you’re Judas. That thou doest see thou doest quickly. And all goes down before you – your best friend, your king, your marriage, golden opinions, eating and sleeping, the wine of life, self-respect, peace of mind, old age, honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, all for your few years of power, your circle of care, your paltry pieces of silver. And you’re left with what you have accepted instead – the curses, not loud but deep, the mouth-honour, the scorpions of the soul, the mind diseased, the written troubles of the brain, the stuffed bosom, the perilous charge which weighs upon the heart.
And it’s only the beginning. Add to that nightmares, demonic possession, strange intelligences, air-drawn daggers, deceptions, delusions, broken promises, mysterious messages, mocking echoes, gouts of blood, rooted sorrows, uprooted branches, moving woods, dead men dining, ghastly concoctions, poisoned chalices, drugged possets, vaporous drops, stolen garments, insane roots that take the reason prisoner, Satan himself – Seyton, I say! Seyton! – and the gashed king’s skin, all silver, laced with that golden blood.
What else? No end? No end of it, never an end, the apparitions, glimmering killers, spies, night-borne beetles, gory locks, strewn brains, strange screams of death, accents terrible, someone weeping in the dark, that nipple plucked from boneless gums, a woman wringing her hands, a knocking at the south entry, always the south entry, the rack, the rooky wood, the torture of the mind, the walking shadow, the bloody child, the great bond of destiny, all of nature’s fluids foaming like the sea, blood and milk and tears and wine, and all great Neptune’s ocean turning red, the multitudinous seas incarnadined, everything laid on, courtesy of the instruments of darkness, a feast of horror for a soul in torment, a heightened state of feeling that I never touched again in any play. I wouldn’t have wanted to. You don’t write plays like that and know a good night’s sleep.
Othello never charmed the king quite as well – no ghosts or witches here, no consequences hanging in the stars, no metaphysics, cosmic meditations, voices from the grave, from worlds beyond, all that predestination. The wickedness is exclusively human. Unbelievably human. And a private agony made public is what makes the play unbearable. In torturing Othello I was remembering the rack and how I lay on it in the Bassano years. Desdemona now, was she so innocent after all? She betrayed her father, dallied with Cassio. She sang of loose loves and eyed up the handsome Lodovico. One thing she was not. She was not Ophelia. Or any of the string of innocents to come: Imogen, Perdita, Marina, Miranda.
And she was not my Susanna – though how did I know exactly how it was with my daughters down in Stratford, while I’d lived the guilty life in the capital? An absent father. One who’d whored his way to forty and whose next stop was fifty.
The fires of Venus were dying down. And no more storms on the heath. You can see the difference, Francis. Cleopatra was calmer, Coriolanus colder.
‘You were mellowing.’
A nice euphemism, Francis, for decline, the slow ripening of the plum that goes before the drop. Perhaps Cleopatra was how I’d have liked Emilia to be – everything there except the infidelity.
‘You were no Antony, though.’
A soldier in decline, an ageing lecher who just wouldn’t, couldn’t give up, infatuated to the last gasp by his swarthy goddess, and he himself a onetime god, now become a pair of bellows and a fan to cool a gypsy’s lust. These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, or lose myself in dotage. Easy to say, Francis, but time passes, the hair grows greyer, thinner, the beard more grizzled, the sap not so rich and thick as it was wont to be in your salad days when you were a cannon on the loose and firing fourteen-pounders. And for Antony there’s the knowledge that this could be his final fling. She is it.
And what a woman! Death for her isn’t the end of a tale told by an idiot, isn’t a descent into dreams or sleep, a slipping into silence or rottenness – it’s an orgasmic adventure. Husband I come! As she must have said often on the Nile, and to the sound of music, moody food of us that trade in love. And they’ll be going hand in hand where souls do couch on flowers and with their sprightly sport make the ghosts gaze. She’s echoing Antony’s own erotic farewell to life. I will be a bridegroom in my death and run into it as to a lover’s bed. The bright day is done and they are for the dark. But darkness is the door to love as well as death.
Even the dreaded end is eclipsed by love, as Charmian says. Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies a lass unparallelled. Downy windows, close, and golden Phoebus never be beheld of eyes again so royal.
My own mother was dying at the time. It was 1608. I wrote Coriolanus here when she was ill, and you can find Stratford in it, if you care to look: the shepherd’s pipe, the hunted hare, the burning stubble, dogs chasing sheep, the boys pursuing summer butterflies, the butchers killing flies, the graves wounding the churchyard grasses – my mother’s soon to be one of them.
Stratford. I’m growing tired, yes, and some memories of first love even crept in, and marriage to my Anne, when our nuptial day was done and the tapers burned to bedward. No more o’ that, Francis. No more. Coriolanus was the closing of a door.
And the death of tragedy.
63
‘How many did you write?’
Tragedies? Some dozen.
‘Didn’t it depress you?’
Not professionally. I got better at it – brought it on a bit. I inherited the groundling’s version, the medieval model, the turn of the wheel stuff, inhuman, mechanical and immoral. Any saint or sinner can go down, though by definition they must be high up on the wheel in the first place. And the downturn is tragic. On this model failures and vagabonds can’t have tragedies – they’re already in the privy. And when you’re in the privy what can you expect? That’s reality, not tragedy. But to see a great man go down – it satisfies the envious streak in all of us, and our need for spectacle, to colour our colourless lives. Even the recording angel feels a glow of pleasure as he scribes. And heaven stops the nose at it.
‘So how did you improve on this?
By making the wheel turn not by chance but by the influence of some prodding finger on an evil hand – a wicked woman, a witch, an ungrateful daughter, a hard ambitious bastard, a psychopath. And by allowing another invisible hand to add its weight to the wheel – the hand of circumstance, accident, ill-luck, call it what you will, call it destiny, fate, the stars – or lack of stars, if night’s candles are all out – darkness, the fly-killing gods. In this scheme trifling incidents may turn the scale, as happens in life – tittle-tattle, a letter delivered or undelivered or intercepted, a chance meeting, a handkerchief spotted with strawberries. Or simply being thirty seconds too late to prevent a hanging. As terrible and trivial as that.
‘I prefer to keep the trivial trivial.’
One thing you know from the start – your hero is doomed. There is no cheap suspense deriving from any vulgar possibility of rescue or escape. None of us escapes death in the end. And so there is a greater tension in tragedy – the tension caused by your certain knowledge of the hero’s approaching death and your fascinated glimpses of the inevitable stages by which it is arrived at, as the cat comes closer to the mouse, or the mouse to the cat. The wheel slips through Fortune’s fingers and
fate’s grip is inflexible.
Still too simplistic? I see the look on your face, Francis. But supposing I were to make the hero lose his own balance on the wheel, thereby adding to its downward motion and lending an unfortunate hand to the forces already militating against him? And this is precisely what happens. Some vicious mole of nature, the stamp of one defect, being nature’s livery or fortune’s star, some error of life, some habit, if you like, the o’ergrowth of some complexion, some flaw in his character, his imagination, his arrogance, his greed, his ambition, vanity, credulity, jealousy, blindness, lust, even his idealism and intellect, an honest carelessness and freedom from suspicion – the very things we value and respect, in other words – may contrive against him in the peculiar circumstances in which he finds himself; wrong place, wrong time, irony of fate. And all the other virtues, be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo, shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault.
And so what happens? All these forces, external and internal, combine to produce a catastrophe in which not only the hero but his friends and loved ones as well as his enemies perish. Even innocent bystanders get sucked in – or relatively innocent. I wanted to leave the audience with the feeling that everyone is guilty. You can’t wholly blame the hero. You can’t fully sympathise with him either. After all he was free to choose. Or not to choose. And even not to choose is a kind of choice. He’s got it coming to him. You feel sorry for him but you grant the rightness of what’s happening even though it feels wrong. You’ve been caught up in the rich complexity of life itself – which somehow you feel you understand better now, though that’s an illusion. You have been reconciled – not to a single point of view but to an admission that one truth does not exclude its opposite, and that today’s answers may not be tomorrow’s.
That doesn’t mean it’s not hard to bear. A son suspects his mother of adultery with his uncle and then finds out it’s worse than that, it’s murder. He’s betrayed by the girl he loves, by his friends. He loses his taste for living. An older man is torn apart when he thinks his wife is sleeping with his friend. Another woman walks alone in the night, wringing her hands for a killing she thought her conscience would let her get away with. Her marriage has floundered and her husband has given his soul, his eternal jewel, to the common enemy of man. Just like that older man – who strangles his innocent wife only to realise that like the base Judean, he has thrown a pearl away richer than all his tribe. O, insupportable! O heavy hour! And a father finds that children can turn into monsters. Monster ingratitude! When all that happens, there should be huge eclipses of the sun and moon and the affrighted globe should yawn at alteration. But there aren’t. And it doesn’t. Instead it’s human goodness that for a time appears to be eclipsed.
Will Page 45
