Will

by Christopher Rush

  These two set up bachelor lodgings on the Bankside and shared everything: one house, one cloak, and one wench – whom they did so admire as they lay together! But Beaumont married in 1613 and died this very March. They used to drink in the Mermaid with Ben and Donne, and Ben said Beaumont had died of marriage, for not only had they shared everything but they were so wonderfully attuned. And the knave was only thirty-two. So much for them. They’d waltzed their way to stardom and had drifted apart on a floor of glass. Fletcher carried on, collaborating with me on Henry VIII and on Cardenio after I’d retired, and later I lent a tired hand to The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was mainly Fletcher’s. His hand crops up in many a play and still he writes his own. But the partnership with Beaumont was the great thing.

  Partnerships often are. While Beaumont and Fletcher were deep in their dramatic union and in their one wench, my daughter Susanna was busily accepting the attentions of the doctor who came to call and stayed to court.

  Dr John Hall – a marvel of a man, if a little unorthodox.

  ‘But well qualified, Will?’

  He took his B. A. and his M. A. at Queen’s, Cambridge but didn’t graduate as a doctor. He trained in Switzerland, according to the school of his ultimate authority Paracelsus, who’d written about syphilis. Not a bad man to have in the family, then. He was also impeccably Protestant, if inclined to Puritanism. It hardly mattered. Or the fact that he was only eleven years younger than me. For that matter he was only eight years older than my daughter, the same age-gap as I’d known with Anne. I gave my blessing and Susanna has never looked back. They have a good house nearby and he owns land at Evesham where he grows his plants. He cures with many concoctions of these and they’re a far cry from the backstreet bullshit of barmy old Simon Forman and his ilk.

  Bullshit is almost literal, Francis. A hot cow-turd clapped on for a bad knee. A lye of ashes burned from dog’s dung for baldness, or the ashes of little green frogs instead. And to cure the toothache, application to the tooth of several of these many-legged lice that you find beneath old stones and rotting wood, each insect to be pierced with a bodkin before putting on.

  ‘You just love it, don’t you? – ailments and antidotes, the diseased human flesh, all that medical chatter.’

  Talking to John, though, that was like getting back into the innocence of Warwickshire, and a long way from London. I loved his talk when I first heard it – it was full of healing. Conserve of red roses, syrup of violets, raisins of the sun stoned, sugar candy, fumes of frankincense, juniper, storax, distillation of coltsfoot, ground-ivy, speedwell, knapswood, scabious, hyssop, herb trinity, great figwort, maidenhair, roots of orris, angelica, soapwort, water-betony. For greensick girls round here he makes elixir of rosemary, borage, fumitory, and winter savoury, simmered in white wine, boiled and strained, then mixed with cloves, powdered cinnamon, nutmegs, raisins, figs, saffron, and white sugar, all reheated, stirred and thickened – a pleasant and expensive remedy that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. If they can’t afford it he gives it to them anyway. A feverish young lady in Bridge Street was coughing herself to death. He gave her back her strength with chicken and veal, lettuce, frogs, snails and river-crabs mixed with women’s milk. Susanna surrendered some of her breast milk for the purpose after Elizabeth was weaned. He lengthened out the young lady’s life by a year. A doctor is not a god, and a year is a long time in an uncertain world.

  Certain young men of Stratford come to him for impotence of their members.

  ‘How come young men can’t get it up these days?’ I asked him.

  He frowned at my language, unseemly in an invalid like me, old before my time, and ill again with you know what. Getting it up was never my problem. I asked him again and his frown darkened. A bit on the prim side is our family doctor. But he told me his remedy. Civet, potato roots, and sea-holly from Colchester, its long pokery phallic roots boiled, cut up, and candied. I’m still curious about life, as you see, though my own is ebbing away from me. Faster every day. This is one thing the good doctor can’t cure, though he’s tackled everything from measles to melancholy hereabouts, the whole range of medical miseries: colic, cancer, black stools, pleurisy, pneumonia, the French pox. He treated and cured a chambermaid of ours when her arse-gut fell out. He cures young folk prone to pissing the bed. He fights scurvy with his scorbutick beer – watercress, brooklime, scurvy grass and a concoction of herbs and roots all boiled in beer with sugar, cinnamon, and juniper berries. When Susanna had the colic and was in agony he fixed her up with a pint of hot sack pumped up the arse, which he said produced a massive blast of wind but immediate relief from the pain.

  ‘Did you ever hear your wife fart before that?’ I asked him.

  The frown, the pursed lips, the shaking of the head.

  ‘Health comes from God, Will. If a fart is necessary it is a blast from heaven, not hell.’

  ‘I never thought of it in that way.’

  Nor me, Francis. But John’s one of those zealous church-goers who scolds latecomers or those who nod off or keep their hats on, and let their hands wander into ladies’ plackets. Religion hasn’t disfigured him, though. He still ministers to lords and their servants alike, to poor folk, barbers, children, Catholics, Protestants, even animals. He’ll ride forty miles a day to see a patient, and he’s already declined the offer of being elected a burgess because of the needs of his practice. A son-in-law to be proud of and to be grateful to. And for.

  ‘And yet his God has not blessed this upright man with a son. Or his father-in-law with a grandson. What does that tell you?’

  It tells me many things, Francis. But you’ll find them written already – in my plays.

  66

  I’d few left to write. And little more that I really wanted to say. John’s concoctions included coral and pearl. Isn’t that surprising? Ariel remembered that and put it in a song. And I slipped a Paracelsian doctor into Pericles. But if a new type of play was needed to suit this last mood of mine, a new theatre was required in which to stage it. And that’s exactly what the Blackfriars provided when we recovered the lease.

  We got it for twenty-one years, longer than I knew I’d need. Apart from our summer quarters on the Bankside, we now had our winter theatre – the Blackfriars was enclosed. It had a roof, darkness if you wanted it, candlelight, magic tricks, and an altogether smaller arena for the chosen few, seven hundred spectators to savour the strange new flavour of these last plays. The days of huge heroes and actions bloody were over. So were the days of vulgar laughs and a penny a seat. The Blackfriars prices ensured a higher class of spectator. Entry to a gallery, sixpence; a bench in the pit, one shilling and sixpence; a box, half a crown; a bench on stage, two shillings. And as many as ten tobacco-puffing peacocks could parade themselves on stage under their plumes of smoke and huge feathered hats.

  We celebrated our success at the Mermaid, toasted ourselves deep in wine, don’t ask me why – we were toasting the demise of my kind of drama, the plays that had shot us all to fame. Marston and Middleton and Massinger were now the masters, Jonson the master of the masque and the uncrowned king of the court. The discerning sort now approved of him more than of me. I was beginning to feel I’d outlived myself, but not yet ready to give up. We were a private company taking over a private theatre and in the process we were moulding ourselves to the changing tastes of the new audiences, exclusive and expensive, expecting to see plays that were more exotic, less representative of the great sweep of life that had brushed the boards of the Globe with such gusto. Our new theatre was eminently suited to old romance. And these were the last offerings from my suddenly antique pen. To the last, and as far as I was able, I went with the flow: Pericles in 1608, the year we got back the lease; Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale in 1610, and The Tempest in 1611. Nothing in 1609 – the theatres were shut for more than a year. The plague, the story of our lives, had not done with us yet.

  And so to the few final feathers from my plume.

  ‘A last stateme
nt, Will? What were they saying?’

  For me, they say something about an author on the retreat from time. The ancient enemy is breathing down his neck and the fleeing dramatist is feeling the gulf, now yawning hard. The old family is being folded up one by one and put away from him. Friends have gone into the dark. Your author is not old but he’s increasingly isol-ated. At the same time he clutches at the hope offered by youth and regeneration. He’s returning to the themes of the sonnets – love and begetting – but this time round it’s not an exercise, it’s personal. His grand-daughter Elizabeth has been born in Stratford and the old home he wanted to be away from begins to call him back again. Old longings and memories are always quickened by new births. The heroines that will grace the last plays like beautiful flowers stem not just from the newborn child but from the dead one. They have their roots in a poor dead son, deep in his fathom of earth, deeper than did ever plummet sound. And a youngest brother is almost like a son. The girl-heroines are re-inventions of Hamnet, of Edmund. Over and over your author is asking a dead boy to forgive him for letting him die, for not being there for him, for not being there at all. The pain never goes away.

  The last plays are an antidote to pain, to tragedy personal and theatrical. Improbable plots, unlikely characters, exotic settings, shipwrecks, storms, separations, reunions, revelations, reconciliations – all brought about by the unlikely interplay of chance, nature, the gods, and the overpowering drive of human love, leading to ultimate hope and harmony. Faults are forgiven, discords dissolved, lost love restored, lost children found, parents re-united, the hearth become the new kingdom of the heart.

  ‘But what are they all about?’

  About a state of mind. And a need. Job recovered his peace of mind not by listening to philosophers but by contemplating the beauty of the world – the glory of the stars, the wonder of a snowflake, the grand simplicities of nature. I think I understood something about this at last. I’d been ill. And to tell you the truth, Francis, not, I fear, in my perfect mind. I needed surgeons. And I looked back to Stratford as the medicine requisite to sweet sleep.

  But not quite yet. There was still one last thing I wanted to say.

  Not so much with Pericles – not all mine in any case. An obscure hack started it and I finished it off – a step back twenty years into the past. It was a long time since I’d tried my hand at somebody else’s play, a sure sign that the blaze of energy was dying down.

  And yet I liked Pericles and still do. Maybe because the story goes back to old John Gower. I was always fond of him. St Mary Overy wasn’t far from the Globe. Many’s the time I used to stop off there and stand by Gower’s tomb and effigy, in a silence not so much reverential as affectionate. I liked the monument too – the old poet with his head resting on a pile of his own books, Vox Clamantis, Speculum Meditantis among others – and Confessio Amantis from which some of the story of the play is taken. Not a bad way to be remembered, I often thought. I even played the part of Gower myself and enjoyed the easy beat of the tetrameters in the Prologue, with its talk of ember-eves and holy-ales that evoked for me again old Warwickshire and an older England, changing fast.

  To sing a song that old was sung

  From ashes ancient Gower is come.

  Yes, it was a great moment, to stand there before an audience of the elect and break the candlelit silence of the Blackfriars with a song of the sea – to fill the theatre with it, the surges which wash both heaven and hell, the brine and cloudy billow that kiss the moon, the belching whale and humming water, and how that same ocean makes raging battery on shores of flint forever. To give sea-room to a tiny stage was the task in hand, to make every line wet with surge, and I knew I’d made it work. As old man Gower has risen from his grave to tell the tale, you can expect it to be a tall one, and I can get away with the unlikeliest episodes that evoke and fulfil the playgoer’s sense of the miraculous, his longing for the wonder of life. It’s not primarily his, of course, it’s the author’s – an author now turned from tragedy and history and comedy, and looking increasingly to magic, as all old men do, even Homer. Your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions.

  The vision I’d had as a young man entering London twenty years ago had passed. And in a sense had been fulfilled. Not quite as I’d expected, perhaps, because we constantly expect happiness, knowing it to be an illusion of the tomorrow that never comes. I had achieved only two things of which I was absolutely certain: premature old age and absolute exhaustion. My next play, Cymbeline, another collaboration, was a tired man’s play, the tinkerings and fidgetings of a man suffering from nervous fatigue. It’s not the imbecilic plot that matters, its thrills and spills taken from all over the place and ending up all over the place. Not guilty, Francis, I assure you – it wasn’t mine in the first place, this stagy trash, and I wouldn’t have taken it on if I hadn’t been so spent. But now I see a writer tying himself in knots. He’s lost his power of expression. He’s written too much and in too short a time. He’s still trying to say something but the utterance is nervous. He can either have his breakdown or go back to Stratford for a rest.

  I went back to Stratford – where rest indeed awaited me.

  But so did the ghost of dead Hamnet, still haunting my plays from his still empty room.

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

  A dirge for a dead boy had been playing in my head for nearly fifteen years. He should have been twenty-five. Instead he was tetrameters, he was imagery, he was rhyme. He was Fidele.

  And he died again as Mamillius, a boy who fell ill and died because of the absence of a beloved parent – his mother, as it happened. But it was the father’s fault. Of course. And I punished him in the play.

  ‘You were punishing yourself?’

  Who else?

  Mamillius says before he dies that a sad tale’s best for winter. And there’s nothing sadder than the death of a child. Nothing more useless either than our vain attempts to resurrect that child in the person of a sibling, though the boy-actor playing Mamillius appeared later in the play as his long lost sister, Perdita. I had a Perdita of my own, Judith, living among the sheep and flowers of Warwickshire, unmarried, lost to me, an absentee father – London, Bohemia, what did it matter? – and the twin of lost Hamnet, so always associated with lostness, with the missing one. It’s the penalty a twin always has to pay, and sad and loving and vulnerable creatures they all are. So I have observed.

  So Hamnet lies in his grave, Susanna is married with an infant daughter –

  ‘And Judith?’

  Ah, Judith’s a story that can’t keep much longer. Let’s say for now that Dr John Hall may now be the only suitable begetter of Hamnet’s substitute, a male heir to gladden my age and fulfil the golden promise of my own destroyed loins and the eternity outlined in those sugared sonnets.

  What fools we mortals be. They may be old romances, these last plays, but they come close to home. A dead wife quickens, a lost daughter comes back across the trackless seas, a mad husband is restored to sanity. It was he and not his wife who was the unfaithful one, unfaithful even in his thoughts. Now he is himself again. And everyone comes home.

  ‘But there is that penalty – the dead son.’

  I would most gladly have forgot it – O! it comes o’er my memory as doth the raven o’er the infected house, boding to all. The dead son. This is the punishment visited on a shaky father, an unbalanced, overwrought, sinful character, always asking himself the question: was Hamnet’s death the retribution for my crimes? Hermione’s infidelities were unreal, imaginary, all in the sick mind of her insanely jealous husband. Mine were real. Is this how the gods punish us, then? Or God? A son dies. The faithless father is smitten with disease. Job again. Your son is dead – and
Satan strikes you with those hideous whips, those scorpions that bite into the bone and turn you all to ugliness. And pain.

  Pain, self-torture, delusion – it’s all in the play. But it’s only an old tale, after all, nothing more. A stage play, taken from Greene’s Pandosto: the Triumph of Time. And my own triumph over the man who had poured so much ridicule over my arrival on stage twenty years ago. I suppose I was allowing myself a sort of revenge over Greene, long dead and defenceless, augmenting the sound of the verbal echoes, the borrowings. Thefts, Greene would have called them, and I’d have reminded him that poets are magpies. I enjoyed beautifying his dull feathers and turning his old argument against him, turning his mediocrities into a marvel. He wasn’t entirely devoid of talent, he just didn’t have a lot of it, that’s all, reading matter for a chambermaid and nothing more. Pandosto re-appeared in 1607 but I used my original 1588 edition, one of the first books I bought when I came to London, and took from it what I wanted, settling an old score. Eat your heart out, Roberto, and may your ghost revolve in its grave.

  Such was The Winter’s Tale, my last look at the life of Warwickshire and the England I’d known: the songs, the shepherds swooning for Sylvia, the lover and his lass, kisses sweet and twenty, all the flowers and gardens of Stratford, flowers that nodded to me as retirement beckoned. And the wind and the rain, not forgetting them. Or the thieves and wanderers that walk in them. Or those that milk their ewes and weep. The drama has its dark side; there’s no denying the cruelties of nature, no escaping my own inadequacies as husband and father. It was time to make up for all that – time to return to flowers and roots and family and friends, yes, friends.

  But I’d still one more play to write. My swansong to the theatre and my return to Stratford and the swans of the Avon.

  67

  It was an exotic enough source that took me home. A sea story, like Pericles, beginning in 1609 when an expedition set sail to succour the Jamestown colony. Half the Virginians were dying each winter. So a little fleet of ships set sail from Plymouth on 2nd June and they all reached Jamestown – except for their flagship, the Sea Adventure. The fleet had been scattered by a storm and the flagship disappeared – into the white throat of the sea, so it was assumed, the vessel and all her hands.