Those who knew me often called me gentle – affable, amusing, urbane, a perfectly charming man. And such was my London self. It was a costume, which on this occasion I have chosen not to wear, though many have dressed me up in their own ignorance. You, my masters, are among the chosen few. You have seen something of Will, without the daily beauty wear. You’ve seen something of my feet of clay. I could tell you more. I was fastidious, over sensitive for my age – and Age – to many things. I loathed smoky lamps, greasy dishes, sickly foods, untidiness, sweaty armpits, bad breath, unwiped arses, dribbling dicks, lickspittles, lackeys, hypocrites, Hooray-Henrys, King Henrys, beadles and bullies, dogs obeyed in office, Puritans. I abhorred the abuser of power, the perverter of justice, the mob, instability. What else? A hatred of hunting, of violence, especially committed against all those who are weak and vulnerable – animals, children, the poor. Also a suspicion of change, a respect for the social order. Love may be an illusion, sex a cesspit, politics a bear-pit, religion a fairy-tale and chivalry a shadow and a dream. I had little time for such abstractions. But I never lost faith in the social nuts and bolts, in the lives of ordinary people, just living, just living.
As for the extraordinary ones, the movers and shakers, history for me was a rogues’ gallery. The angel of history is the angel of death. Idealists soon become tyrants and cheats, as power corrupts. Listen to them whine and bark. Their convictions divide the world and only an honest doubt can unite it again. But their minds are closed and moulded, they have none – no honest doubt – and that’s what makes them dangerous. Certainty is lethal. Conviction kills. That’s my credo. All I know is that I know nothing, and that truth is like January, Janus-faced, looking to a lost year and one to come. My father wore a Protestant face and my mother kept on her own face at home while her husband made his a vizor to his heart, so they were split, as man and wife often are, and he was fractured too, public and private, outward and real. And that split is the best key to the plays his son came to write. I saw that it was possible to be two people at once, to live a double life, and out of this came Hamlet, Iago, Hal, and many others, good and bad, including me, who mocked authority, aristocrats, land-grabbers, players, but strove for substance, standing, armorial bearings and theatrical assets, while regretting every inch that staged me to the public view and turned my art to profit.
And so the exterior me – discretion, moderation and reserve. How careful was I when I took my way, each trifle under truest bars to trust. I hid my beliefs in history, buried my voice in time and place, and like the Bay of Portugal had an unknown bottom. I was ever unquarrelsome – even abject, some would say, still begging each treacherous friend to spare me some crumb of love. Not one whose help you could clearly count on, because much of the time the man you thought you saw was never there. A playmaker who avoided the first person and in so doing became no person. A man who in writing about other men reprieved himself from the man he was. A man wanting a little self-confidence perhaps, except in plays. And outside the making of plays, a man even wanting in imagination, a compulsive acquirer, a land man, an Osric, burying his personal flaws in property, the safe palpabilities of earth and income, bricks and mortar, stocks and stones. A reversion, if you like, and a regression, back to the sucking dung that had clung to me and from which I’d longed to escape. The simple life. Yes, I could always smell the countryside through the squalor and the stench of London and the suffocating falsities of the court.
Yet, I longed for play, like any actor, and I longed for land, like any peasant. I loved beauty, especially woman’s, and I paid for the pleasure, loved children and birds and plants for their simplicity and innocence, and all who kept boredom at bay and conquered the empire of dullness. Life itself I found far more interesting than anybody’s opinions about it. I loved the surface of the earth and the whole process of human existence, which never ceased to fascinate me. I was enchanted by the maltworms and by the tapsters who served them. The human story was meat and drink to me. Osmotic, omnivorous, endlessly curious, that was me, that was your Will.
And the story of England?
I did create a myth of England, yes, but only a scurvy politician would believe it. Look at me. Look at my plays. Do you think Englishness stirred my soul? Abstractions like that were always anathema to me. And too much home is tedious. Give me the outsiders – Shylock, Othello, Mercutio, Thersites, Hamlet, the melancholy Jacques, and Caliban the Carib islander – not one of them English. I could be turned on by a handkerchief once my imagination had steeped it in other cultures and put magic in the web of it. Even in Scotland the rugged Russian bear appears, the armed rhinoceros and Hyrcan tiger, and all the perfumes of Arabia sweeten a home-grown hand. Even in the history plays you’ll find more fascination in the men of other nations, the Welshman Glendower, the Irish MacMorris, the Scottish Douglas – and old Northumbrian Hotspur.
Except of course for old Jack Falstaff, the real hero of the Henry plays – of all my plays. This is my Englander, with whom I am at home, not your leader who wages his wars of aggression, who invites Jack and all his countrymen to fight a cause and die for a lie. Or pay the terrible cost. No, never wave your national flags over my bones, or shake your gory war-locks at me, as many of your Jacks-in-office have done, for my England was a place, not an institution, it was a system of circles surrounding the little points of home. My England was the soldier Bates, it was Shallow and Silence chattering about the past and about bullocks and beefs and Stamford Fair. It was Mistress Quickly sitting in her Dolphin chamber – remember? – at that round table by a sea-coal fire on that Wednesday in Whitsun Week, and still being conned by honest Jack. All that yes – and that home of his, with the hollyhocks high in the garden on a summer’s night and the birds singing. That’s what a man really wants. He doesn’t want to be a hero and he has no time for abstractions or speeches filled with them, and even less time for those who make them, and that’s why Falstaff’s my man.
A man with his feet on English earth and his head in that green bible where all flesh is grass, and his dying memories are of green fields. He babbles about a green England that was far more enduring and moving than any imperialist images dreamed up by prating political pygmies that dropped their country in the gutter, lost their borders – and made my England bleed.
And so Elizabeth’s mighty state, characterless, grated to dusty nothing, just like Troy. Not waterdrops, not wars or lechery could accomplish this, not even time itself could have taken the greenness out of the land and the character out of the people, the poetry out of scripture. But scurvy politicians could – and did. And honest Jack Falstaff is betrayed.
An angry ghost? Yes, and a sad one too, the soul of an Age talking to an Age without a soul. Is that too hard? Remember, the dead may speak only the truth, even when it discredits them, and as truth in itself is never discreditable, this dead man has no fear of anything he may have said. Which of you, after all, even knows himself? So pluck out the heart of your own mystery, and pity me not, but let me go. Let us be thankful for that which is, and with you leave disputes that are above our question. Let’s go off and bear us like the time. And if I have offended you, gentles all, do not reprehend me. Remember I’m a shadow, nothing more. And think but this – that you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear.
What do you say, clap hands and a bargain? I’ve bequeathed you my story and thrown away my mask. My charms are overthrown. Now gentle breath of yours my sails must fill, for my project was to please you, so let your indulgence set me free. Prospero’s last request – and mine.
And so goodnight unto you all.
The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You, that way: I, this.
A note on anachronism, accuracy and language
The Great Cham once said of Shakespeare that a pun was the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world. Not everyone would agree that things were quite that bad. What is indisputable is that the Bard’s many anachronisms do not detract from his
plays, which are, in the end, about people, and not about what they wore, whether knickers were invented or clocks ticked in the sixteenth century.
In writing this novel about Shakespeare’s life I have followed the same principle and allowed the anachronism to boldly go wherever it led me. This relates to language. The Elizabethans did not think they were speaking ‘Elizabethan’, and so, while lacing the dialogue liberally with Shakespeare’s own lines and with sixteenth century mannerisms, I have also tried to impart a modern feel to the language, allowing Will to speak directly to the third millennium reader, who will not, hopefully, come away from the book thinking, ‘All very realistic, I’m sure – but why are they talking so funny?’ It was a matter of balance and I hope I got it right.
Finally, on the question of accuracy, I have only very occasionally tweaked a date or a fact to suit the plot, apart from which I have stuck faithfully to the Shakespeare story in so far as it can ever be known.
Acknowledgements
Like Prospero’s, my library was dukedom large enough. Off the shelves have come those old stagers, Bradley, Danby, Duthie, Granville-Barker, Wilson Knight, LC Knights, Dover Wilson, Harrison, Halliday, Hodges, Chambers, Rowse. I have also used more recent scholars such as Schoenbaum, Russell Fraser, Stanley Wells, Peter Levi, Peter Ackroyd, Frank Kermode, Park Honan, James Shapiro, Stephen Green-blatt and Jonathan Bate, as well as a host of writers on Marlowe, such as Charles Norman, Leslie Hotson, Michael Poirier, JB Steane, Harry Levin, AD Wraight, MJ Trow, Charles Nicholl. And hundreds more critics, biographers and Elizabethan historians. I could fill this entire book with the names of those I’ve read and who should be mentioned. My apologies to all those whose help has not been recorded, and I hope I have not leaned too heavily on any of those I’ve cited. They became an inseparable part of my thinking and writing over many years and I am grateful for the scholarship and wisdom they have imparted.
Writers and critics apart, I owe a huge debt to an exceptional English master, Alastair Leslie, who rescued me from ignorance and blessed me with his humanity, kindness, insight, intelligence and exceptional schoolmastering skills. As always I have enjoyed great support from my agent, John Beaton, my children, Catriona and Jonathan, and little Jenny in her own way; and massive tolerance and encouragement from my wife Anna, who typed out every word of this book from my longhand pencil scrawl and ink scrawl not once but many times in several versions over many years. In particular I want to thank my editor, Jonathan Wooding, for the enormous improvements he has made to the text, and Simon Petherick of Beautiful Books along with Jonathan for their incredible enthusiasm, confidence and faith, and their sheer speed and determination in getting this book off the ground.
Finally there is the man himself, the man Shakespeare. JK Rowling famously reported how Harry Potter simply strolled into her head one day. Will Shakespeare did not stroll into mine – he burst through the door blowing my mind. I was in my early teens – and my life changed dramatically, sowing the seed for a book that has been growing underground for nearly fifty years and now sees the light of day. The Stratford man has given me a lifetime of enjoyment and understanding, and I can only hope I have passed on enough of it, and done justice both to the reader and to my wonderful subject, Will.
Will Page 53
