Will

by Christopher Rush

  ‘Yes, but the old businessman in you was still truffling about.’

  Ah, the Gatehouse, you’re right. It was when I was in London for the royal wedding that I saw a piece of property, the Gatehouse of the old Blackfriars monastery, not two hundred steps from the new theatre itself. It was a perfect location for a theatre man, heading the route down to Puddle Wharf where the wherries plied their trade taking play-goers to the Globe. Good for both theatres – you could be whisked between the two in no time. A man with a retired foot in Stratford and a working foot in London could look on it as ideal, after years of shuttling around among rented rooms, to have found his place of rest in the Gatehouse of a medieval priory. And an interesting place too – an infamously papist place, with many back doors and byways and vaults and dark corners and passages to the water. Notorious in its time as a foxhole for Jesuits, and priest-hunters kept an eye on it during the Topcliffe nineties. All good irony, if nothing more, though more to the point was that Burbage was quite close and so was the Mermaid. A possible bolthole, then, away from the uncounted plums and from cold Lady Capulet handing me the crutch. And those pointless dawns and slow angry sunsets of Stratford. And that stranger’s face staring at me from the glass. Anyway, I argued it out, it was an investment, a place I could rent out.

  Pathetic, isn’t it? An ailing man’s preparation for a future he knows is never going to happen. But I was so keen to push through the purchase I paid the owner a hundred and forty pounds for it, and mortgaged sixty pounds of the price, buying the property one day and leasing it back the next at the annual rent of a peppercorn – namely nothing. Heminges came along with John Jackson and William Johnson, host of the Mermaid, to join me in the indenture. Sold to Mr William Shakespeare, gent, of Stratford upon Avon, in the county of Warwick.

  ‘10th March 1613, it says here in your notes.’

  Anyway, I let it out to a friend, John Robinson, and came back here, mapping out in my mind plans for a return to the theatre. Like some poor old invalid, mumbling to himself about what he’s going to do when he gets out of bed. His eyes glow with the brightness of his frail determination. But it’s all a pretence. He knows he’s never going to get out of that bed. And I knew I’d seen the last of London. The rest is all in the past.

  And as if to symbolize the pastness of things, it was a performance of Henry Eight on 29th June that year that finally dissolved the great Globe.

  ‘Ah, the fire.’

  To mark Henry’s arrival at Wolsey’s house a cannon was fired. A single spark from the shot strayed into the thatch and started the blaze that brought down the theatre in flaming ruin. Thank God I was not there to see it. A lifetime’s work sucked into the sky in seconds and settling to ashes in minutes. The Globe timbers had come from the original Theatre and had staged my first play. Now they’d gone up in flames during my last. There seemed to be something darkly fitting about that. Leave it, Will, leave it, a voice said.

  The Puritans loved it. The hand of God – so they gloated – had given the filthy players a foretaste of the hell that awaited them. But hell is here and now. And that’s how it felt at the time – the hell of all those costumes and properties and laboriously penned prompt books and scripts going up in flames, and along with them the livelihoods of all those who still depended on them. This had been their place of employment, this new world that we’d hailed with our swords in that winter dawn on the frozen Thames at the end of the previous century.

  See the world’s ruins…

  So wrote Ben. But in under a year the tragedy was turned to apparent triumph when a new Globe stood in its place. It cost the shareholders a pretty penny. By that time I’d sold my own shares, cut my losses, and retired for good. That fire persuaded me the time had come, time to go home. And stay home. The theatre dream was over. After that day I never saw another play. And never will, except the last scene of this one.

  ‘What one?’

  Do you know a verse of Ralegh’s, Francis? I don’t suppose you do. It’s another of those poems like Nashe’s, that I wish I’d written. This is how it goes.

  What is our life? a play of passion.

  Our mirth the music of division.

  Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be

  Where we are drest for this short comedy.

  Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is

  That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.

  Our graves that hide us from the searching sun

  Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.

  Thus march we playing to our latest rest.

  Only, we die in earnest – that’s no jest.

  ‘There’s more to life than playing, old man.’

  Is there? It’s a sombre and melancholy feeling and it opens up in you a deep emptiness and the ache of an impossible longing – I mean knowing for certain that those scenes and images that have constituted all of your working life and have been the body and soul of your existence, you are quite simply never going to see again: the Mermaid in Bread Street, the bookstalls round St Paul’s, the spires and palaces catching the sun, the crowds flocking into the Globe, London Bridge, the Thames glittering on a May morning. And that stage – onto which I’d emptied my entire being, and which now stood emptied of me again.

  Farewell to it all. Not for the life of the justice or the slippered pantaloon, the serious reader or the country gentleman. I slipped into a seventh age of my own, listening to a wife who didn’t know who I was, talking to flowers, hearing old music in my head. And yes – counting the infernal plums.

  It wasn’t all boredom. Drayton visited from London. He had a friend in Clifford Chambers not far off, and brought news and gossip. Ben came down once or twice, even walked it once, waging furious but futile war on his belly. These were merry meetings, out of Anne’s hearing, but they were few. Respectability had cast its sacred mantle over the player’s hide and his house was seen as fit lodging for the visiting preacher giving the Whitsuntide sermon. Impeccably orthodox Will. Twenty pence subsidy from the Corporation for one quart of sack and one quart of claret wine to wet his throat and keep the good man in good voice for his address.

  ‘Implacably retired at last.’

  Retired? I started to retire a dozen years ago, when I wrote Lear. Retirement should be an ordinary everyday thing, a natural happy thing. Ah, but outside the castle gates is the bleak heath that awaits the retired man. Other things too await him there: loss of authority, loss of identity, loss of purpose, loss of reason. The antidote to this deep fear is work, work, and more work, more purchases too. The truth is I started to retire not twelve but twenty years ago, when Hamnet died. That’s when the retreat from happiness began, when I started to retreat from any possibility of it after that, to prepare myself for something else, something other than happiness. I was declined into the vale of years, the sere and yellow leaf, long before my time, and considering my end. And yet I was still at the height of my powers. But what did my power consist of? Creating and destroying worlds, arousing passion in men and women, awaking the dead to make war on the living.

  All that was over now. Now there were the little wars of the little world. There was a rowdy, loose-mouthed drunk called John Lane, who rumoured it abroad that Susanna had had intercourse with Rafe Smith, the haberdasher and hatter, and had contracted a dose of gonorrhoea. Susanna was about thirty years then.

  ‘And fidessima conjux without a doubt.’

  Without a doubt and with a child of five. But her husband John travelled a lot, so gossip about his wife left at home was to be expected to fester on vile tongues. Lane was a lout and his family was a blight on Stratford. He was also a rabid anti-Puritan and it infuriated him that even the anti-Puritans in the town respected John. So it suited his grubby little book to defame Dr Hall through his wife. Susanna prosecuted him for slander before the consistory court at Worcester Cathedral, 15th July 1613. Not surprisingly Lane failed to turn up and was excommunicated. Susanna’s name was cleared and the nine days’
wonder was over.

  The following summer there was a fire in Stratford that devastated the land and damaged more than fifty houses. After that the enclosures dispute started up.

  ‘Sheep do eat up men.’

  That’s what they said. But I couldn’t have cared less about sheep. The next thing was that I had Judith to worry about.

  ‘What is the Judith problem, Will? You said you’d tell all.’

  All is a lot to tell. Pass me a drink and I’ll make it last the glass.

  69

  Judith is thirty-two, Francis. Last month, desperate for a man, she married, as you know, a wretched apology for one, Thomas Quiney, twenty-seven. And why would a man in his twenties marry a woman in her thirties? I’d been there myself, remember? And I heard more than wedding bells ringing, when I first got wind of it. I knew the business.

  A no-gooder, a no-user and a no-hoper, that’s Quiney in a nutshell. He has so far reached the glorious heights of running a tavern of which he has only the lease. A glorified potman is my Judith’s provider. Not good enough. And hardly a cause for celebration in itself – if that were only the whole story, which I regret to say it is not.

  Quiney had been sniffing around Judith for years. He ran the Atwood tavern in the High Street at that time and ran it badly. I begged with her to wait and see how he turned out and she in turn pleaded her age. What could I say to that? Old Capulet said that one daughter is one too many. I made him a hard man for saying so but my daughter was well over twice the age of his, and waiting for Quiney to come good – it was a tedious prospect to say the least and one with small assurance of success. She went ahead, hard against my wishes.

  February. Because of the Lenten time of year it was a wedding arranged in haste by special and irregular licence. Do you hear bells ringing again? I did. The licence was from the local vicar, John Rogers, who claimed his own right hereabouts to grant such licences. The Bishop of Worcester disputed this, however – more bells – advising that he alone could issue a proper licence in this case, and summoned the happy couple to appear before the consistory court at Worcester. Quiney ignored the summons, failed to turn up, and was immediately fined and excommunicated along with his wife, meaning that they’d be unable to baptise their first child if the ban remained in force. A fine start to the estate of holy matrimony, a pair of reprobates with a child in limbo, and although the pair of them were partly responsible for the unhappy state of affairs, not a penny leaves my estate to go to a church that has seen fit so to defame my daughter! Are you clear about that?

  ‘Ah!’

  Ah! Indeed. And that, Francis, was just the start of the unhappy chain of events that now unravelled.

  After the ceremony in Holy Trinity I avoided the hypocritical handshakes, pleading that I was in pain and needed to take a turn or two. Bear with me, sirs, be not disturbed with my infirmity. I am vexed. My old brain is troubled… And I went off across the frozen February fields. The cold very quickly made me want to pee. An old ill man pees at a wretched pace. And as I stood and watched the pure white snow turning to a yellow puddle under the miserable dribble between my boots, I asked myself what sort of an end was this to thirty years of fatherhood? When a daughter that a dad has dandled on his knee leaves him at last to go to bed with another man, there’s a sense in which he feels he’s failed as a father, failed to keep her with him, even feels betrayed. Daft, isn’t it? Nevertheless an age of innocence has passed away, and the pure bond has become ragged and stained, like that puddle of piss. Brrr! I shook myself and put away my poor old prick.

  But when I did arrive indoors and took off my gloves I stared as dumb as any stone at my right hand. My gold signet ring was gone. It had slipped from my thin white finger when I’d taken off my gloves to pee. W.S. lay somewhere under the cold snow, as the man himself will soon enough. I’d lost my daughter, Hamnet’s sister, and in the same hour I’d lost the emblem of myself:a double blow. An emptiness opened up in me, even though I knew that old Will’s days were numbered anyway. But if I retraced my steps right now I’d find my ring, lying next to a tell-tale yellow hole in the snow. I went to the door and looked out. I was tired and breathing like a whale and darkness was gathering. And as I stood there, undecided, the first fresh flakes started to fall again. Within seconds I was wearing a shroud. I closed the door and sat down at the head of the empty table, shaking a little. Was I shivering or trembling? I couldn’t be sure. I was sure of one thing, though – my daughter had married an arse.

  Not long after the wedding he took his wife off to another tavern called appropriately The Cage. He should be locked inside it and the key thrown away. The ink was hardly dry on their apparently invalid marriage contract when worse trouble broke over our heads. The Margaret Wheelar affair. The Wheelars were the low-lives of Stratford, even lower than the Quineys and the Lanes – cursers and swearers and slanderers and lechers. And such was the company Quiney had been keeping while he was courting my daughter. Only a fortnight ago a member of this tribe, Margaret Wheelar, died in childbed and was buried along with her stillborn infant. Before she died she gasped out the name of the father of the wretched red shambles that had turned a childbed into a double deathbed and a bed of shame.

  ‘Thomas Quiney?’

  The very same, Francis. He’s due to appear before the bawdy court tomorrow.

  ‘And doubtless will be found incontinentia cum quadam Margareta Wheelar?’

  And will doubtless confess openly to having had carnal copulation with the said female.

  ‘Fassus est se carnalem copulacionem habuisse cum dicta Wheelar.’

  Lawyer’s Latin almost dignifies it. Yes, he occupied her. Let’s put it less legalistically, Francis. He was fucking her while fucking Judith – unlawfully intimate with two women at once. He’s married to one of them, if less than lawfully according to the Bishop of Worcester. But the other woman and the illicit fruit of Quiney’s lust are now in the same grave, and that will be not so good in the moral glare of the court, though it’s simply a legal footnote to his guilt. Tomorrow Quiney will have to face the church music.

  ‘What a disgrace!’

  Public penance:three successive Sunday appearances in church, wearing the white sheet, so that the preacher can shame him (and my poor Judith) in front of the whole parish – which will please some Puritans around here no end. Like father like daughter, to marry scum like that, and a filthy player gets no better than he deserves for a son-in-law, notwithstanding his grand New Place and his London airs. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. God is not mocked. Can’t you hear them?

  ‘Can’t you do something? Pull some strings?’

  I’m ahead of you, Francis. It has already cost me a deal of discussion with the vicar and a large cargo of claret to lubricate his larynx while he talked it through with me at length, including extra wine to take home with him for the better pondering a final judgement. I’ve been a busy man in this sick-bed and I think I’ve got Quiney off with a five shillings fine to be given to the poor of the parish, and a private penance to be performed elsewhere in front of another vicar and wearing his own everyday clothes. So he’ll go in his street clothes to the chapelry at Bishopton which falls within Stratford parish but has no church of its own and is well out of the public eye. So at least we’ll be spared the humiliation of his triple public exposure in white and the delighted whisperings that would have gone round Holy Trinity’s walls.

  ‘You are a genius, Will!’

  Dismissus. Quiney will wriggle out of it – he’ll escape the full wrath of the church, if not of the law.

  But not mine, Francis, not mine.

  ‘Well, we’ve seen to that, in good black legal ink.’

  I never doubted from the start what it was that brought Quiney panting around a poor unmarried Shakespeare bitch and it was neither love nor lust, but naked expediency and greed. He had his financial problems, and marriage to my only unwedded child must have seemed like a dream to him as he sat among the old soaks of Stratford and
drank small beer. Shakespeare’s lass on the shelf would be worth more than a pound or two when the old man finally shuffled off, leaving all that London loot behind him. Quiney was easier to read than the hornbook. Then he got Margaret Wheelar pregnant and he panicked. He had to be married to Judith quickly, before the birth of his bastard which he knew to be imminent. Hence the haste – and the improper licence. That landed him in enough trouble, but he must have reckoned that if he didn’t marry Judith in time he might be forced to marry Margaret, or that I’d refuse to accept him as a husband for Judith, which would mean a huge monetary loss to him in terms of the death he knew to be approaching and the terms of his future father-in-law’s will. It has been no secret in Stratford that I am dying. And Quiney wanted to be in at the kill.

  Well, he isn’t. He’s in all right, having made a good marriage, but there’s to be no killing, not for him. I’ve done the killing myself.

  ‘He’s dead for a ducat, Will, no doubt about that!’

  Steps had to be taken to punish him – Judith too, regrettably – and to keep his thieving whoring hands off my hard-earned money.

  Meantime what more can I tell you? Things are as they are and there’s no changing them. Susanna made a splendid marriage, Judith a miserable one, and it reflected their lives. Susanna a bright spark, Judith a foggy cloud, melancholy, brooding, the twin who’d lost a twin, always incomplete, always that reminder of a poor dead boy, poor girl, poor Perdita, lost girl, remembrancer of what had been rather than what still was and could yet be.

  And yet she wanted love, you know, wanted marriage, had not lacked suitors. Oh, there was no lack of young men coming to this door with hope in their hearts – and always the same story. Someone turned them away, didn’t he? The father who insisted on safeguarding his daughter from afar, from unsatisfactory suitors, the father who should have come from London to give his approval but either didn’t come at all or came too late. He’d already lost one of that precious pair to the shadows and cared too much for the other to lose her to the shadow of a stranger. He cared too much about the possible dangers, the betrayal of innocence and beauty, about faithlessness in love, about which he knew more than most men. But in the end he cared so much he was himself her betrayer. Love like this doesn’t always bring happiness from father to child, especially where another child gets in the way, alive or dead. She was too much in the sun. When the boy died I loved her not less but twice as much as before. Too much. The young men drifted away, married, grew older. Judith stayed unplucked till she was almost a matron. And then along came Quiney and supposedly took her by storm. It didn’t take much. He was her last hope.