The main characters are still in the chancel of the church, inasmuch as we can be said to be there at all: myself; Anne on my left; Thomas Nash on my right, inhabiting the plot that had been reserved for Elizabeth, dead and buried at Abingdon; to Nash’s right John Hall; and to the right of her husband Susanna, now only an epitaph commemorating the bones that were so rudely moved. A family gathering, of memories and dust, around us the walls of Holy Trinity, the silver-swanned river, the narrow streets and lanes of Stratford, Henley Street, New Place, Snitterfield, Shottery, the old school, the bridge still leading to London, London itself and all the cities of the world from which they come to lay a flower and speak a line, see a play perhaps, before moving on to do Venice and Verona, knowing less and less as the world moves on, what to do with the real tissue, the heart of the matter – the poetry of soul, the soul of an age.
Anne had died just before the publication of the First Folio edition of my plays, brought out by my old fellows Heminges and Condell at the end of 1623. No great tragedy – I mean Anne’s death at that particular time. She should have died hereafter. And missing the publication of the first collected edition of my dramatic works hardly mattered much to a woman unable to read. I’m relieved not to have been there to see it myself, as the title-page features a frightful portrait of your author, executed by the engraver Martin Droeshout, whose grandfather hailed from Brussels. He was young, inexperienced in his art, and so came cheap. Look on his work, ye mighty, and despair! I have two right eyes and wear a coat with two left sides. It won’t take a painter or a Jewish tailor to spot those blunders. And the head on its ruff plate is monstrous, megacephalous. Even setting aside the hypertrophic horror of that head surmounting the dinky doublet, where did that fiddle-shaped face come from? It’s the portrait of a fairground freak, and while it’s recognisably me – the alert nose, the lips made for kissing and controlled courtesy, the large luminous eyes that took in life and reflected its glow, the balding domed skull, Will the egghead – I beg to inform you all that it’s little more than an identikit – can I use that word now? – put together by an unpractised apprentice hand.
Of what manner of man is he, then, your Will? Why, of mankind. If you really want an image of me as I was, look in the mirror and there you’ll see me, rather sadder and wiser than I’d have elected to be at my age, or you at yours. One of yourselves, that’s all, one of the race of human beings, good enough for neither animals in their innocence nor gods in their wisdom. I was marked out not in appearance but in fortune – which buckled a talent on my back, a talent for words. I died in words and rose again like the phoenix, transformed. Words were the element I flew in, illogical images, strange impossible leaps, words dazzling and dubious and less dependable than good old loamy Stratford clay. But I wrote them down in the same way as a woman speaks and thinks, all in one, and in one sentence the next was born. It was a continuous coupling, the words made love to one another, and the eternal mystery was the birth of plays, my prolific talent. I carried it around all my life and used it to the full. Old Ben acknowledged this, not without irony, when he advised you on the adjoining flyleaf to the engraving, Reader, look not on his picture but his book. He was no Adonis himself. He then went on to praise my memory and my parts in a poem which Dryden considered an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric – and Dryden was not the only one to hear whispers of aspersion between the lines. But to be called a monument without a tomb, the sweet swan of Avon, the wonder of the stage and the soul of the Age, besides being hailed as not of an age but for all time – well, who am I to complain? Ben wrote his plays to be printed; I wrote mine to be played, and he knew that better than anybody. Old Ben brought himself to do me as proud as he was able, and by Ben’s standards did me great honour. Of an old friend I couldn’t have asked or expected more.
Heminges and Condell also laid on the tributes with a trowel. They said of their old friend and fellow that his mind and hand went together and that what he thought he uttered with such easiness that they had scarce received from him a blot in his papers. They didn’t see the blots in my brain, of which there were as many thousands as even Ben could have wished when he elected to criticise me in conversation with William Drummond. But Ben was being Ben. You can forgive a man who will insult you in public and to your face while defending you in private when it counts. The First Folio counted. And I forgive my fellows, its editors, for all the boobs and botches in their work. These pale into nothingness compared with what they did. And Ben was right.
The Folio is a better monument than the effigy that was built into the north wall of the Holy Trinity chancel, just above my grave. It at least is better than what Droeshout did. I looked a little like Uncle Henry at the end of my life. It’s a tough old countryman’s face and it suits me. I could have been a butcher, not a bard. The tablet beneath is inscribed with praise indeed, and in Latin too.
Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem:
Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet.
Nestor for wisdom, Socrates for genius, Virgil for poetry. The earth covers him, the people grieve for him, heaven has him. There are six claims here, five of them large ones. One of them is for certain. Do you think they are all true? Even if that’s all you think about in the end, I’ll not have wasted breath.
I won’t have wasted ink either if you take my plays for what they are – plays. And nothing more. Lies and fancies, not statements of any sort to assist you in the running of your empires, institutions or your lives. They have no final point to make about illusion and reality, order and anarchy, self-knowledge, or about the darkness of man’s heart, though they’re full of all that, and more. They don’t even aspire to the condition of life itself, though they reflect it, except that they unfold and ripen like people, and then they end, as people do. There’s no necessary meaning. They’re entertainments, that’s all, sometimes dark ones. Sometimes there’s simply a bare figure on a stage, maybe two or three companions in a storm. They keep each other alive by imagination, by sheer will power and inward obsessiveness, not by message or morality, they are simply there, on the world’s stage, comforting one another with words, as do we all, comforting us who watch and listen to them. That’s the meaning of my plays. That’s the meaning of life. There’s no eternal meaning – either in a life which is a living drama or in a drama which is an imagined life. All that matters is the vitality, the fact that you’ve drunk that life to the lees, or that the drama has done its work. Yes, there are times in life and art when you think you know the truth – but these too are illusions, epiphanies, angelic apprehensions, however you call them. We turn away from the magic of the theatre and go back to our sad sensible homes, where we turn from the mystery of living and face death – which is no mystery at all, in spite of everything that’s been written about it. It’s life itself that’s the real mystery but there’s no mystery in finally knowing death because the dead, as you know, know not anything.
Ah, but just one moment, sir! Hold hard! – I hear you arresting me. How can you say the dead know nothing when here you are, addressing us all from eternity? And your voice loud and clear and well informed?
But only the groundlings among you will have asked that question. The rest – sit back, and take your ease. You know the truth of it, that all this has been yet another play and nothing more. And it’s ghost-written too, which adds to the lie. And so? Identity itself is play. Richard Gloucester says he plays many parts. Jacques says the same of man in general. Iago puts it even more challengingly. I am not what I am. Hamlet disagrees, and that leaves you with a question. Is there really an essential you, or are you nothing but the roles you play? Does truth exist in action or in thought? Hamlet or Iago, make your choice – they’re both convincing. As for me, all I can say is that no one has ever been so many men. Or women, gods and monsters, so many souls under my skin, so many spirits, half a life of organised illusion. Then one morning I got up and suddenly faced the tedium and the terror of being so many suffer
ing souls – leaders falling on swords, lovers expiring in tombs. And so I penned my farewell, sold up my shares and went home.
You know the rest. The son of a failed glover had become a gentleman – and not without right. I’d recovered the kingdom, triumphed over loss, the cause of human sadness, restored the king my father’s loss. In a society afraid of vagrancy I’d turned vagrancy into a virtue, made acting an ascendancy, a noble accomplishment. But the recovery is never quite what it means or seems. Someone is always sad, for some reason, there is always doubt and discontent, the fear of illusion, delusion, and the shadow of that loss never leaves the stage. The wind and the rain are never far away.
Still, I kept up the pretence. I dabbled in lawsuits and lands and loans. Counted plums. It was intolerable, this so-called real life. I’d been seduced beyond infidelity, by and to the theatre. That’s why I loved the theatre so much. It was the very essence for me of the play of life, short or long, the eternal pretence. You play the parts you have been given – by history, heredity, society, and you create others for yourself, your friends, family, foes. You weave plots, assign roles, invite the crowds, write scripts in your head, your life is your own, the future is yours. Or so you believe, or pretend. You fool everyone. Most of all you fool yourself. And you never forget that the sole purpose of words is to conceal thoughts. That’s the game I played all my life.
I was an actor after all. The play’s the thing. Is Gloucester really at the edge of Dover cliff? No. But he really is blind, because you saw his eyes gouged out. And that rustic really is his son because you heard him say so, heard him say that he was only pretending to be a peasant. But the eyes were put out on stage and that’s where Edgar spoke his lines. They were sheep’s eyes – and Edgar’s lines were memorised, they were conned. You were conned. Both father and son are actors in a play. It’s the same with Cassius, who with Caesar’s blood ringing his fingers imagines the performances of posterity. How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er, in states unborn and accents yet unknown. But the man who says this is himself an actor, looking not only forwards but backwards too – to the original Caesar who was also an actor on the world’s stage. Like all the men and women.
What is the purpose of drama? Escape – the liberating sense of being released into another world with its alternative sets of experiences. You quickly get used to that world and its characters, their imagined lives, and you yearn for them to experience a similar release. When it comes it’s a double dramatic pleasure, sometimes to the purpose – the box-tree, the play-within-the-play. Sometimes it creates atmosphere, irony, like the crow making wing to the rooky wood, or the temple-haunting martlet sanctifying with its breeding habits Banquo’s bird-watching soul and Macbeth’s apparently innocent establishment.
At other moments it’s freedom for freedom’s sake – as when Edgar brings his father to the edge of that cliff. For what? For nothing, really. Except for this sudden surge of release and exhilaration. You are now outside the drama. The play has disappeared. In its place you have fresh air, fishermen, seabirds, samphire-gatherers, sailors, and the muted murmuring surge of waves on shingle coming up from the shore below. A height so vast that the sea can’t even be heard, though you do hear it. In your mind.
You view this scene with nothing less than sheer joy because you have been liberated by the eye of the author, who shows you the workaday world carrying on with its business, oblivious of the tragedy that surrounds it, just like the ploughman in the picture, patiently earning his bread, and the sailors turning the ship away, even as Icarus falls from the sky, men ploughing a straight furrow, charting a course alternative to destruction, heading for home again, in spite of tragedy.
Can I take this further? Yes, because the one truth binding life and art is that all of life is an escape from itself, and that even as you escape to art, the art itself must record that escape, the constant flight from what is there. But it’s not a flight to fancy, it’s a flight away from it, back to the sanities of the very thing you flee from. You are released from life into the world of the play, and you are caught up in that world. But only for a time. Soon, with blessed surges of relief, the real world comes breaking in again, like the importunate sea. You can sense it in Romeo’s description of the apothecary’s shop, where the atmosphere, though one of grinding poverty and wretchedness, is an antidote to destiny and loss of faith. The apothecary himself now has hope. Romeo has come and has made him rich, Romeo for whom riches are now so many ashes and nothing more. But not for the needy apothecary. His abysmal interior will soon be brightened, his life will be transformed. You suspend for the moment your contemplation of contemptible beggary.
You experience the same thing with Macbeth’s dusky talk of rooky woods, yeasty waves, the multitudinous seas. Or in his hired killer’s unexpectedly quieter perception of the lated traveller, trapped in the darkened hemisphere of the globe, spurring his horse on, anxious to arrive at the inn. You hear no details of his haven from horror, but you can picture its polished settles reflecting the firelight, the gleaming pewter and ranged crockery, the sand-strewn floor on which sheepdogs take their ease, among the heavy unmoving boots of tired peasant farmers. Their lips too are unmoving – they’re wearing moustaches of recent froth, white on the crinkled contentment of thirsty faces. The lawyer and doctor, who have not had such a demanding day, are engaged in animated talk. A brace of young bloods eyes up the barmaid, nudging and winking. You know that one of them – perhaps both – will lie with her tonight. And you can go on from there to the crack of doom, peopling the minds of the patrons with all their own memories, aspirations, intentions, all conceivable devices and desires – it’s infinite, and it’s all there in that one word ‘inn’, decorated only by the single transferred and impersonal epithet ‘timely’, with all its weight of relief from the murderous dark without, and all its possibilities for speculation on the part of the playgoer, if he is a true playgoer. Yet the truth is that there are no settles or sheepdogs or farmers or fire – there isn’t even any inn. It’s all a fancy by a fancied character, a fiction to liberate you from life and art together at a tense moment in the drama, and to keep you there, slightly perplexed, always enthralled, by men and women who step up onto the stage with no real outward motives other than that inward energy that thrusts them on and makes them act as they do without understanding what exactly it is that lies at the heart of them. And if they don’t always understand, why should you, the shadow of a shadow?
These are the innocent glimpses that, more forcibly than all the rhetoric of darkness, disaster and despair, make you aware just how tragic is tragedy. Tragic figures are tragic because they have rejected this innocent normality of the fireside and the fields – the normality from which you yearn both to escape and yet to return to. You are always reaching out for such innocent perceptions, these brief sightings of how life could be. They are the narrow slits in the castle-walls of the known, and through them, as you ascend the spiral of the drama, you catch flashes of alternatives, an imagined happiness.
More. The playgoer inhabits the world you have created for him, and he makes it his, not just for the two hours’ traffic of the stage, but, if it is a living world, for as long as he has life and memory, for his need is never done. Always he requires to be liberated from his liberation, to fly from rhetoric to life, just as he needed to escape from life to rhetoric. This is what it means to be human. And thus conscience does make angels of us all, soaring like seabirds across a sea of troubles, God’s free messengers.
Freedom is the thing, and when it’s denied you, you weep with them that weep – with Macbeth, cabined, cribbed, confined, with Hamlet in his prison of Denmark, his nutshell of bad dreams, with Othello, trapped like a toad in the cistern, seeking the Pontic sea, and with Lear, bound upon a wheel of fire, hands and feet bound to the universal compass points. You have gone to the theatre and been freed, only to see great princes lie in prison, and to suffocate and suffer with them every one, wanting the
windows open again.
Opening the windows is the poet’s work, thrusting the shutters aside at the darkest moments of the play. So Gertrude’s gentle threnody when Ophelia dies opens up for us again all the innocences, rawnesses, and vulgarities of nature, far from the claustrophobic court, its sinister whisperings and dark fatal plots. In your frail fancy the passage frees you even as it puts fetters on the queen. Kate Hamlet dies again. But she goes back to the nature we all come from and return to, the crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, the long purples, and the willow-hung brook, the glassy stream, the Avon, the river that was never very far from my imagination. And for these two pathetic hours you sit in the playhouse and imagine that you are free.
You’re not free, no more than was I, your entertainer. We all sit in an empty space with a need to fill it. I felt that need overwhelmingly. Maybe there was a sense of lack, in the end. Campion had a certainty, heaven was his. As for me, I had embraced that emptiness, the theatrical dream, the illusion, the nothingness, the pattern of lies. But the answering compensation for that end-of-life disenchantment is the embrace of the everyday.
It was the everyday, after all, that had always inspired me, the stuff of ordinary lives, the earthiness, the face of honest Harry Goldingham behind the mask of Arion, the touch of the real, the dabble of dew on the trembling hunted hare, and the realisation of just how extraordinary ordinariness could be. In my beginning was my end, and in my end my beginning: family, a daughter’s love, a father’s anxiety, concern, the faint prospect of a grandson in posterity, a line of princes replacing the lost one, the escape of Fleance from fate’s clutches. That’s what I came back to in the end, what I embraced – that and the banality of those plums, ripened, rotten, fallen, but all mine, along with the tithes, the plough tilling the ground I’d bought, the sheep nibbling the land I’d enclosed, the land I’d made mine, part of England. I’d come back to it finally, what I’d wanted away from when I was young and with a young foolish need, recognizing at last my kinship with earth, that old kinship we all admit to in the end, the one that goes all the way back to Adam.
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