Ten months later, almost to the day, two little ships put in at Jamestown. On board were the full crew of the Sea Adventure, not a single man missing or harmed. It was miraculous. They’d run aground on Bermuda, the Isle of Devils, where they’d expected to be eaten by tribes, or at the very least to encounter horrors as bad as anything experienced by wandering Othello. On the contrary they found the island to be a haven of shelter and natural resources. And they survived for all those months on wild hogs, game and fish, roots and berries. Their only fears were caused by the certainty that the island was haunted, it was so full of noises – spirits and devils for sure – and there on the Bermudas they built the two small craft that took them to Jamestown.
Soon the stories began to circulate like sea-fire in the shrouds, shooting from sail to sail and running along the rigging. And so Ariel was born. I flamed amazement: sometime I’d divide and burn in many places; on the topmast, the yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, then meet and join. They were seeing St Elmo’s fire, that’s all, but a spirit makes for better spectacle, and who’s to say that spirits don’t inhabit nature? The fear of human flesh-eaters gave birth to Caliban – as close to cannibal as a name can get. A pamphlet described the miracle of mariners fallen asleep where they lay at their working positions on the ship, while the storm howled about them, and yet not a man among them come to harm.
And so The Tempest – in which a storm turned out to be less destructive than it seemed to the terrified sailors because it was called up by the art – or science – of the king of a New World island, Duke Prospero who’d already brought the natives under his control and raised his banner. Caliban and Ariel would play elements of that unspoiled world and the play would put the question of whether these were superior to those of the better-taught.
And so it went off again:storms, shipwrecks, abandonment, lost children, dearest believed dead, adults at odds, pure young lovers having their difficulties, deities, songs, the supernatural, split people, split time, all working towards reunion and reconciliation and the fairy-tale ending – in spite of dark continuing undercurrents to give us pause. Sounds like a hotch-potch, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. I’d recovered from the fatigue of Cymbeline and I knew I could end on a strong note and with classical concentration.
Caliban had come a long way from Shylock, and even further from the fairies in the forest. He’d been dispossessed and exploited and there’s a warm-bloodedness about him that could trap you into thinking him innocent, or even noble. But dispossession and exploitation don’t alter the fact of his nature: bestial, primitive, ugly and gross. He’s not your unspoiled innocent who eats berries and likes music. He’s the Wild Man who rapes your daughter. He made little enough of his island before Prospero came, and when the colonists withdraw you don’t have to be a seer to see what’s going to happen when the natives regain control.
Prospero himself was hardly the perfect ruler, either on his island or back in Milan, and you start to warm to him a little only when he takes off his cold robes of office and learns a little humanity, humility, compassion, starts to think about dying – the vision every ruler should start from, the vision I have before me now.
It’s a drama about power, natural and supernatural, temporal and spiritual, power over the self. Prospero has to learn to be a better ruler in all senses. It’s about atonement, regeneration, planes of truth, the need for some kind of belief – but not belief in any form of dogma, rather some kind of natural magic, without which even the comedy of life is no longer tolerable. Call it prayer, if you like, as Prospero did. And my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by prayer. But he didn’t mean an Anglican prayer. That last play shows how little I’d left in me of formal religion – it was fairy-tale stuff and I knew it. We are all islands. And no island is more enchanting than that of the theatre.
Nor more desolate and sad than when the audience has left and the playwright has no more scripts. Then it’s time for him to go back home, renounce the magic that made him the demi-god of the theatre for twenty years and slip back again into the comfortable clothes of ordinariness, his preparation for death. That’s what I ask you finally to confront: the vulnerability, fragility, and impermanence of life. It’s a tough play but it’s about things that are tender and transient and infinitely touching.
And true, Francis. And true.
‘Our revels now are ended.’
These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air: and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Rounded, not ended, if you care to see a circle there. Or you may prefer to see this life as a brief awakening from the oblivion that surrounds us.
‘Well, well, well.’
Forgive me, old friend, this assumption of your indulgence. My story will soon be over. That last speech was the breaking of the staff, the drowning of the book. The magician abjures his astonishing magic, his visionary gift, and goes back home. He who had imagined so much must embrace ordinariness again. But it’s what he started from, and never lost sight of. Now I was an actor without a part – nothing sadder – a magician without a wand. This was my farewell to my art. I bought London property after writing it, but the play was my farewell to poetry, not property. As far as I was concerned at the time, these were the last lines I would ever write, and they came from the heart, as poetry does, not from the arid intellect, which makes a writer scribble on and on in vain as I did for a bit. I was burnt out, Francis, but I’d summoned up a burst of the old magic for that one last performance.
The King saw it in the Banqueting House at Whitehall on All Saints’ Night, when the Revels began in 1611.
‘Ah, I see, of course – the Revels.’
Yes, and I came up from Stratford for the performance, having written the swansong some little time before then. Because by then, I’d retired to the swans of Avon, and here I am – with every third thought my grave, and my long suffering lawyer come from Warwick, to round off my life with a nice tight will – and a good long sleep.
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‘I’m all for a nice tight will – and we could both use a good long sleep. But I’d like to round off with a last bite of something for the road. I fancy a bit of toasted cheese, how about you?’
Not for me. It’ll make you dream, Francis.
‘What dreams may come, I’m ready to face them – on account of the cheese!’
And Francis lumbered off downstairs, gone quieter now, to find little Alison – now rich little Alison.
What dreams may come.
There was a story about an emperor who dreamed he was a butterfly, and when he told it to one of his sages, the wise man asked him, how do you know you’re not a butterfly dreaming you’re an emperor? Good answer, Will. How do you know you’re not a butcher’s boy dreaming you’re a dramatist? Or were a dramatist. It feels like a dream now, though it was only yesterday. But that’s what happens as you approach the end of your time. The life you had drifts past you and away from you as if you were a drowning man. You see it as a sea of troubles, flecked with bright heads lolling slowly in the wishless deep, all those you knew and loved, gone from you now, irretrievably lost. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes…
Eyes. Alison briefly came in with shining eyes – and a platter of cheese.
Nicely toasted for Francis, Alison, to make him dream of fees. Queen Mab will be visiting.
‘What’s that you say, Will? Queen Mab? What are you talking about?’
Oh, nothing. I was dreaming.
‘Still on about your dreams. Have a bite of cheese.’
Thank you, no. You’ll have every mouse in the house here shortly, to share it with you. What an odour!
‘De
licious. Excuse me while I munch and talk. Now then, let’s get this will in the bag.’
In the bag. You know, Francis, I remember packing to leave London. Prospero was my last complete play. New Place awaited me. Like Ariel, I’d flamed amazement and like Ariel I longed to be free – to embrace the elements again. I’d lived light in London, for I didn’t even live in rooms, I lived in plays, and I was taxed at only five pounds. Of course I squirrelled some things away, out of the sight of the assessors, not that it would have made that much difference. So I put all of the London life into a bag – the work of ten minutes for this sudden stranger I’d become to myself, a man with no continuing city. I never had possessions in London. I’d lived out of a bag. And I closed the door behind me with the toe of my boot. The truth was I didn’t dare look back. I might have wept.
Stratford in September. It was 1611 but it could have been 1601. Or 1581. The place looked much the same. And some of the familiar folk had survived into grizzlement and either corpulence or spindliness. Most were dead.
The mad Puritans, were all too alive. They’d banned all dramatic enactments in the parish. Let nothing about your Puritan surprise you, Francis, least of all his fear and hatred of the theatre. Maybe I welcomed the anonymity, the oblivion, the freedom from the dust and heat of the race. The curtains were drawn on all that. It was past, it was over.
‘Or was it?’
Stratford didn’t have the exciting unpredictability of a London that kept a man on his toes when he’d rather have been oftener on his back, or his backside. I’d imagined that the Stratford retreat would at least bring me the remote balm of breathing-space, the opportunity to relax a little and calm myself, far from the clatter and the chatter of the city, its filth and fury, the hectic rounds of writing, rehearsals, meetings, management, and the mad and manic business of making more money. But that was the very trouble. A man becomes addicted to overwork. Without it – such is the mad paradox of this life – he relaxes even less. Inside his own mind, that is, the beating doesn’t cease but grows louder than ever. His fingers twitch – fingers without a pen in them – his eyes dart anxiously in all directions. He catches sight of the haunted stranger in the glass, staring back at him, and asks him the question he was afraid to ask himself. Is this it, then? Is this what it was all for, this half-oblivious existence? Surrounded once again by the infinite pull of skylines, insistent as the tides, as the tugging of the moon, he shuts his eyes on them and tries to pretend they don’t exist, or that he can continue to ignore their beckoning, the long low lure that drew him away a quarter of a century ago.
And so I pulled fruit, fed cattle, wondered what the late sunsets meant, pondered the spaces round the poplar tree. Prospero had come off his island of art and had found that Milan was as irksome and insipid as ever. I was bored. I rose early in the mornings, as was my wont – couldn’t help my nature – and sat in a chair staring into space. What was I supposed to do? Count the plums in my orchard? Yes, said, Anne, that’s exactly what to do, count the plums in your orchard. Do something useful.
Useful? What’s useful? I’d written forty plays and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets and a best-selling poem and other things – but were they useful? Of what use is art? Of what use is anything?
And then there was Anne – sexually extinct at fifty-five, having lived her sexless grass widow’s existence uncomplaining for a quarter of a century. Now she had a husband again, retired at forty-seven, and after all those years of separation having to get re-acquainted with married life. I’d last known it in my early twenties. Can you picture it? Two old outlanders, strangers to one another, climbing into the matrimonial bed and lying side by side in the night, hearing each other’s breathing through the soundless dark and waiting for each slow dawn to leak like a wound. Over wardrobes and walls. We were inches apart in the nordic drift of those sheets but the scale was an inch to infinity and if we rubbed shoulders or touched toes it was the unlikeliest of night-collisions for which apologies were not quite expected but sometimes offered. I wondered if she ever thought back to the eighteen-year-old lad she’d lain with in the fields. I did, frequently, to that same lad, star-struck in Shottery, and asked myself the same old question. Where does it go to, that ocean of love we swim in when we’re young? The sea shifts in its chains but is always there. But love, my boy – what is it that lets it drain away till there is just nothing left of it? Not one drop. It goes, like the glory of youth that once glowed in us. Now there’s a cracked and dry sea-bed, barren as the desert. And yet once she spoke so wittily and loved so briefly well. Why do people let the spark go out of them? Why do they let the child in them die? Time takes the blame, as we won’t take it ourselves, and if the charge sticks and is just, then time has a lot to answer for.
Time was my worst enemy that first autumn, time that I’d played with, and that now played with me. My days were full of it and each day loaded more shackles onto the prisoner of retirement. Autumn ebbed into winter, and the white and black wave went over Warwickshire. Then the green wave of spring. And the golden wave of summer. And another autumn was on me again, like a cancer in the blood. Time to count the plums again. It was unbearable.
And I suppose old Hieronimo would have gone mad again, had it not been for the fact that relief suddenly offered itself like one of the plums of the past, the fruit I’d really been missing – the opportunity of a new play. It was forbidden fruit, of course, and I set out for London with a tight-lipped Anne fuming at the door.
‘Off he goes again, the old fool, and with his sword on too! Wouldn’t a crutch be better suited to his condition?’
Cold Lady Capulet. Not a complete figment of my imagination, Francis. Nothing was.
‘And to London of all places! He’ll not be satisfied till that stinking cesspit has killed him off like it’s killed half of England!’
It killed Prince Henry in November. At least, the poor boy died – and why shouldn’t London take the blame? It suited my wife’s black book of looks to say so. Poor Jamie’s only surviving daughter, the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth, was to be married to Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, prospective King of Bohemia. The wedding was to take place on St Valentine’s Day 1613 and the king wanted a new play ready as part of the celebrations. His key King’s Man of old was retired but not yet dead, so he had heard. Tell him to get his arse up here anon. It was always arses with Jamie. One last command. Very well, then, Will, every subject is a King’s man, retired or not, his Majesty’s wish etcetera, and the chink of cash was never unwelcome to my ears. But even more gratifying was the prospect of going up to London again after a year of spacious suffocation.
It was an even more changed place, theatrically, as if the rats had grown fatter for the absence of the Stratford cat. Ben was enjoying my retirement more than anyone. He was lording it over a stage on which a crowd of stars were showing their dim faces but seeming all the brighter for the lack of me – Chapman, Tourneur, Heywood. And black Webster – bright is hardly the word. Beaumont had given up the bachelor business and the stage business but Fletcher was still active, as I’ve said. And it was Fletcher and I that put our heads together and came up with an idea for a play suitable to celebrate the wedding of the king’s daughter. What better subject in the circumstances than Henry the Eighth? My idea. To crown all those history plays and bring England as safely into the present as I dare, Elizabeth now being dead and rotten for a decade. It seemed a decent interval. Any sooner and those old bones of hers might have rattled in their fury, deep in their echoing vault. Memories of great ones never die. And even their corpses must be pacified.
So there it was. I ended up writing most of it, Fletcher not being an historical animal – and I lent a tired hand to his Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio, among other things. But the hand was tired, I noticed it one day, scuttering and scrabbling on the page like a palsied crab. What was happening to me? And by that time in any case I was producing decent passages only here and there, a speech or two that glowormed i
n the dark. I dabbed at patchy scenes. Even in the good speeches I was going round the ale-houses again, repeating myself, the master falling back on his laurels, feeding on stored fat. The old rough magic was no longer there. I had abjured it. I was tired. Yes, I was burnt out. The Tempest really had been my last big blaze, and though I’d groaned in retirement, there really was nothing left for me but to groan.
Henry could have been a bomb, about tyranny and religion, but I fashioned a damp squib. Henry Tudor? He cut down monks alive from the gallows, tore off their arms so that they couldn’t cross themselves, then tore out their Catholic hearts too and rubbed them in their faces, because popery outside England was now piss in the conduits of religion, polluting his personal church – and he had a new breed of house-puppies to train. The man was a monster and I could have used the play to show the House of Stuart how far it had come. Instead I gave the king pretty much what he would have wanted for the occasion – a stiff pageant.
Or maybe he didn’t really care that much – in spite of the fact that by an irony of history we put on the play in the very Blackfriars hall where eighty years earlier the ecclesiastical court had sat to hear Henry’s divorce case against Katherine of Aragon, and the abyss opened up. What did that matter now to Jamie? The Henry play must have reminded him bitterly of his own Henry, who’d have been Henry the Ninth had he lived – but he’d never made it out of his teens and young Charles was not filling his empty shoes too well. God knows, I knew what it was to lose a son and to fear for the future. And I felt for the old dog when I saw those rheumy melancholy eyes cast bleakly on the King’s Men at their work. Not that I was actually working myself, merely spectating. The days of treading the boards had also gone from my life.
Will Page 48
