‘You are an old fox, Will. And don’t think I didn’t see the other object hidden away in that epitaph of yours.’
Really, Francis? What object was that, then?
‘Oh, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? If your grave is never to be opened, then your widow will never share it with you, when her own time comes. You’re excluding her to the last, shutting her out from your eternity.’
You’re a wise old fox yourself, Francis. We were never really one flesh and we shall never be one dust. The divorce continues, even after death.
‘A strange man you are, Will, underneath. And I’m feeling rather strange myself right now.’
Francis did look a little odd, I thought. Perhaps on account of the sheer amount he’d put away. But he finally clobbered off into the small hours. Trotting is not something a horse does with Francis on its back. And galloping with such a burden would be impossible, even for wingèd Pegasus.
72
But that was some time ago – wasn’t it? Ralegh was released the week before and told to go for gold. A fool’s errand. Henslowe died in January, they say. Easter came early this year – on the last day of March. The will was signed by then, as I remember. Brightness falls from the air. Will they quote Nashe when I go? And now it’s April again. It was always April. There’s talk of someone’s birthday. This day I breathèd first; time is come round, and where I did begin, there shall I end – my life is run his compass. Old Cassius still.
Cassius? How ill this taper burns. Ha! Who comes here? I think it is the weakness of mine eyes that shapes this monstrous apparition. The light burns blue. Speak to me. What art thou?
Thy evil spirit, Brutus.
Why then, it’s true. I’m dying. Let there be no noise, my gentle friends, unless some dull and favourable hand will whisper music to my weary soul. Music – bear with me, good my boy, I am much forgetful. This is a sleepy tune. O, murderous slumber! Lay’st thou thy leaden mace upon my boy that plays me music? Hamlet, O, Hamlet, what a falling off was there…
Why so, being gone, I am a man again. If I stand here I saw him, all of them. They were all here. Pardon me, sirs, these last larks of the brain…
But no, I’m clear again, and the crowded sheets and shutters free. I’m free to speak again. What would you hear? For they say the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony. Would you hear my confession? No, that’s for priests and torturers, and Francis has it safe. Even the dead are not safe – from priests and politicians, and those terrible diggers of bones.
Death, I hope, is an end to misery, it’s a sleep, dreamy or dreamless, it’s worms and rottenness and stench, the charnel-house, the sexton’s fart, the undiscovered country, cold obstruction, coral or clay or pearl. It’s the everlasting mansion… the mason, shipwright, carpenter… the house that lasts till doomsday, it’s the silence that has no end, it’s the rest we only dream of, it’s nothingness, it’s what remains, it’s the last enemy and the first real friend.
Oh, and the life to come. There is the bright day and there is the dark. No religion I know could ever fuse the two. When one is past you have to be ready for the other, whatever you think it is or isn’t. I took my fill of love and life, laughter and pain. And I’m ready – not for heaven or hell, I trust, but for oblivion or adventure.
Yes, I’m dying now.
Brother Gilbert died four years back, was it? – an unmarried haberdasher in St Bride’s. Like Edmund he followed me to London – a dangerous place for brothers. Dead at forty-five. We brought the body back to Stratford, as was his wish. Richard? Ah, Richard never left Stratford, died the next year. We were rehearsing, I remember, it was the royal wedding. He was thirty-eight, poor boy. And here am I, the only one of all those sons, and a single sister to push through the Shakespeare blood. And my two girls, alas, alas. Did I tell you Hatter Hart had died? And aunt Margaret, the last of my mother’s sisters, the earth has her. But maybe that was last year. Or the year before. She was the last of the Snitterfield folk.
Dying, yes.
Is that the chapel bell I’m hearing just across the way, tolling for my passing soul? No longer mourn for me when I am dead, the muddy vesture of decay, slipping fast away, than you shall hear the surly sullen bell give warning to the world, and I lie here and wait, revolving many memories, that I am fled, the Snitterfield flames, Agnes and Henry, the shithouse and the stars, Harry’s hand on my shoulder, Essex mounting the scaffold, the sunlight streaming through the windows of Whitehall, and Emilia at the virginals, dark and dangerous, Emilia coming on top, Emilia fading into Anne, young Anne, doing it in the fields near Shottery, first time for me, and the schoolroom, the shambles, the whores, the stink of sin, the crowds roaring for Harry at the Rose, the groundlings giving it all they’ve got at the Globe, death to the French! burn the Spaniards! open the bastard up! Hartley’s heart torn from the stalk as the geese ebbed overhead, winging their way over England, England, winter’s not gone yet if the wild geese fly that way, no, but I pray you sirs are those my daughters sitting by my bed? I am a very foolish fond old man, and not, I fear in my perfect…for if I am not much mistaken this is my son, my lovely boy, Mamillius, Hamlet, little Macduff, and my poor Perdita, my sad Marina, Miranda, my Imogen, my Alison, let me touch thy breasts, my little Alison, see, they’ve all come to say farewell, the walls are swarming with them, the furniture, the sheets, the shadows, take them from me, friends, they’re all over me, they’re weighing down my legs, yes, I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester, O, let me kiss that hand! The dyer’s hand betrays, what if this hand, what hands are these, will all the perfumes, here’s a spot still, a spot of mustard, no, let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality, as my mother would have said, yes, farewell dear mother, thy loving father, no, my mother, father and mother is man and wife, one flesh, and so my mother, my father, do you not come your tardy son to chide, that lapsed in time and passion…no, no, my father, he smote the sledded Polacks, axe in hand, methinks I see my father, alas, poor ghost, the bell then beating one, the bell invites me, silence, hear it not, silence that dreadful bell, the chapel bell still ringing, but ringing me not to school today, old Usher Higges, ushering me into eternity, all the way, Jesus, death is certain, Hamlet, the psalmist says, if it be not now, yet it will come, ripeness is all, for he was likely had he been put on to have proved most royally, he has my dying voice, absent thee from felicity awhile, speak loudly for him, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story, O thou, my lovely boy, go, go, bid the soldiers shoot, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, the best of rest is sleep, to die, to sleep, to sleep, to rest, the rest is silence, the rest is, the rest is, the rest –
Rest.
Rest, rest, perturbèd spirit.
Epilogue
It’s not the fashion, I know, to have the Ghost speak the epilogue, but being now freed from all temporal restraints, I am well placed to do so. And what better voice than the unfettered soul of the subject of this story? No more muddy vesture of decay, my masters. I can speak directly to you all – whenever, wherever and whoever you may be.
First you will want to know more about my death. Everybody does – I don’t know why. As I told Francis, there’s only one way to get onto the great stage of fools but there are a thousand exits. And why should the manner matter? They all lead the same way. You go out bowing, laughing, cursing – to applause, indifference, or scorn. It matters not how a man dies – but how he has lived. I could have died of the venereal diseases, caught in my hell of time. Or with the weather suddenly warming up in that third week of March, could have been careless in that last fling with Drayton and Jonson – too much liquor, a chill and a fever, and a visit from the old man’s friend to finish me off. Could have been a build-up of the London life: too much work, too little sleep, the solitary eating and drinking and scribbling, the midnight oil, the ill-dried lamps, fed with stinking tallow, the thick coarse folio parchment, the mind diseased, the shadows on the walls. No more the dr
inking and whoring about town with the roaring boys, to reel the streets at noon and stand the buffet with knaves that smelt of sweat – all that had long gone. But the respectable life took its toll too, the constant reading, writing, revising, acting, directing, managing, the touring circuit, head down amid the whirl. Or it could have been typhoid, or the palsy – or the plague come to get me in the end after so many miraculous near misses. But it wasn’t. No, I did suffer something of a stroke after Judith’s marriage and it was a slow downhill slide after that. But I was burnt out and tired by that time anyway – well through, as my mother used to say. In the end I died of being William Shakespeare. I died of forty plays, and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and some other things. If it hadn’t been one thing it would have been another.
And the birthday talk I heard with foggy ears as the casement slowly grew a glimmering square? That was accurate enough. I died on the 23rd – April had struck again, true to form – and was buried on the 25th. Anne placed the pennies on my eyes, saw me off to church and under the ground, then got on with the business of being a widow – one in which she did not lack practice.
A man’s last journey. There’s something infinitely moving about it, isn’t there? Death itself can be terrible, traumatic, tearful, tragic, or merely trite – a non-event. Which most philosophers would say it is in any case. But the cortège always strikes me as particularly touching, when the body is carried past those sights and scenes and through the streets the person knew so well. Mine was a simple enough passage: down Chapel Lane, past my old school – the bell then beating one, of course, the hated bell – and along by the willowy banks of the Avon, following the glittering river to Holy Trinity. They carried me among alders and limes, my ears deaf now to the lapping of the river-wave and the rustle of swans, and so in at the porch and up the nave to the resting place before the altar in the chancel, close to the north wall. And when all ceremonies were over, the sexton put me into the ground beneath the church full seventeen feet deep.
No explanations needed there. Deep six did for most folk in Stratford, but I’m glad to say I gave the gravedigger plenty of sweat at the time and something to chew on for the future. Yes, the epitaph, the famous quatrain, composed by myself. Francis took it down for me. And if anybody doesn’t believe that – and I can understand why they’d doubt a ghost – I tell them to go and stand by my grave in Holy Trinity and look at the stone. What strikes you about it, you who are already in the know?
No name. That’s what would strike me right away. Quite startling, considering it commemorates the greatest writer of all time – at last I can say it unboastfully – and with some surprise. Don’t you think that if I’d left my survivors in charge of my interment they’d have chiselled me into immortality with many an outward flourish? My name, my fame, my works, my years, my gentlemanly condition, the famous coat of arms. Not without right. But the fact that I chose an anonymous exit into an earth already well speckled by famous names is a sure clue to you that I arranged everything myself, just as surely as I wrote that epitaph and Francis took it down.
It’s a malediction and a ban – and one which has accomplished its purpose. My final revenge on a sexton who frightened a child. And on all such sextons. They’d come into churches, spade in hand, to remove the bones to the charnel-house, to terrify the Wills and Juliets of the future. My fears were justified too, when in due course even the bones of my daughter, Susanna, were turned out to make way for a tithe-holder. Imagine the indignity of it – to be knaved out of your grave and your skull become a drinking bowl, your bones turned into pipes through which these beer-swilling boors of pickaxe-men would smoke their black shag. Most horrible. That’s why my last lines are doggerel by the way – I composed them crudely enough to appeal to the rude capacities of clerks and sextons.
And it worked. The Stratford sexton, hearkening to the curse (who wouldn’t for safety’s sake?) and fearing for his successors (possibly his own offspring), laid me deep seventeen. Never to be disturbed. So that when Anne Hathaway died seven years later, earnestly desiring to be laid in the same grave with me, her last wishes were not granted. And that’s the way I wanted it. What I did not want was for my dust to mingle with the dust of the woman to whom marriage had been a lie. Would the companionship of bones for all eternity have compensated for a lifetime of separation? It would have been an eternal hypocrisy and a lie. But it was not to be. The curse prevailed. And the gravedigger, afraid to touch my stone, laid her alongside me nearby, as close as he dared, but in a separate grave, mine never to be opened to let Anne in, the two bodies kept apart, never the twain to meet, just as we had been during most of our lives, body and soul. The curse was more than a curse, it was an exile, imposed from eternity.
No cosy reunion, then, not even in death. The bed and the epitaph, a double snub – the last Act doesn’t always end like a play, does it? And it didn’t for Will and Anne. She’s simply there at my side as she always was – at least she didn’t desert me, as I had her. Unromantic but true. And as the river is only a few feet away and my dust has long since drained into its currents (that picked my bones in whispers) and trickled out to sea, everything of me that could die has long since gone from underneath that slab. No great sea-change either, no coral bones or eyes of pearl, and no punctilious sea-nymphs ringing my knell. That’s as rich and strange as it gets. I no longer lie alone. I lie nowhere. Or everywhere. My atoms are yours, my molecules part of you. You breathe me in. And out. And perhaps that’s richer and stranger than anything could be. Ben went on to call me a monument without a tomb. My Stratford resting place is a tomb without a body. But I’d best leave that subject before I’m led into making any grand comparisons. Let me just say that all writers are cursed – haunted by ghosts – but that all are blessed, as you are, who merely leave me in peace. I’ve told all there is to know. Any more – I don’t even know myself. So my last word is a curse, yes. But it’s also a benediction. For life is never simple.
Anne died on 6th August 1623 and was buried two days later, on my left. Her Latin epitaph, composed by Susanna with John Hall’s help, memorialises the mother who gave breasts and milk and life and in return got only a gravestone. But one day an angel may come and move it away and the occupant emerge to seek heaven. Or so they liked to imagine in those good old glory days. Anyway, the stone is still there.
I was right to keep Quiney out of benefit. He went on from his dubious start – drinking, illegal drinking with his cronies out of hours, watering his wine at The Cage. He held some local offices but was never highly esteemed. In due course he tried to sell the lease of The Cage but the few responsible members of his family stepped in and prevented him, safeguarding the interests of Judith and the children. Finally the tavern was made over to Richard Quiney, who died bequeathing his feckless brother twelve pounds per annum to keep him out of the gutter and five pounds to get him decently into his grave. Impossible. No grave was vile enough to receive him.
The astonishing thing is that Judith saw out her life with this useless – well, I’d say arse, but ghosts don’t swear and you’ll notice I’ve stopped. All the same, what is it that makes some women nail themselves to shoddy crosses such as Quiney? She gave birth to three sons by him, all of them dead before her: one in infancy – that was Shakespeare Quiney, the year after me; Richard in 1639, aged 21, no issue; and Thomas also in 1639, aged 19, no issue. Each time the great bell of Holy Trinity tolled for them it was tolling the death-knell of all my hopes – no grandson to live on after me and carry on the line. Within a generation that line was doomed to extinction. In this family the women did better than the men. Judith was buried on the 9th February 1662. She had lived till 77, having had no more children and having survived her twin brother Hamnet by 66 years.
Susanna had no more children by John Hall, who died in 1635. Their only child, my grand-daughter Elizabeth, went to church on 22nd April 1626, aged 17, to marry thirty-three-year-old Thomas Nash of Lincoln’s Inn. He died twenty-one years late
r – having given her no children. Two years later, when she was 41, Elizabeth remarried, becoming the wife of John Barnard of Abingdon, at Billesley, four miles west of Stratford. That was on 5th June 1649. Susanna died the following month. A year after Charles II was restored to the throne he made Barnard a baronet for his services during the Civil Wars, so that when Elizabeth died in 1670, aged 61, she died nobly. John Shakespeare would have liked that. But she also died childless. Baronet or no, John Barnard of Abingdon had failed to impregnate her. Hardly his fault. She’d had two marriages. Lady Elizabeth was as barren as a brick. Only Joan Hart’s offspring carried the Shakespeare genes and in due course came into benefit. Joan herself died in 1646.
And so in spite of the will, that desperate attempt to keep together the material profits of my art, to keep on living in some sense, as it were, nature defeated art in the end, and that was the Shakespeare story. As to the material goods, the stocks and stones, when Susanna died Elizabeth inherited the estate, including Henley Street and New Place, but she and Barnard ended their days at Abingdon Manor. Her father had left his study of books to his son-in-law Nash, the first husband, to dispose of them as he saw fit, and among these books were my own. When old Barnard died he bequeathed to his family all the books along with the paintings, old goods, and lumber. And so my library was broken up like bread, and the crumbs scattered to the birds and the winds, just as all my property slipped away like water through the Harts, becoming no more mine than the dust, once mine, that filtered into the river and went with the Avon into the wider world and the atmosphere and beyond. Exit William Shakespeare. And all his line.
Will Page 51
