The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

by Jude Morgan

  And fifty miles away, over the Oxfordshire border into Warwickshire, in another town of church and grammar-school and dunghills, another moth flutters around the weak smoky flame of a rushlight, until a pair of white hands closes about it.

  ‘Why will they destroy themselves?’ Anne says, carrying the little dusty pulse to the parlour window. ‘No other creature does it.’

  ‘Except for man,’ says her father-in-law, smiling from the shadowed chimney-corner. Though the midsummer evening breathes as warm here as at Thame, a small fire burns: John Shakespeare has a fire every night. It is one of his things.

  ‘Tut, none of your gloomy thoughts,’ Anne says, freeing the moth, clapping the window to. ‘Will you take something hot for supper?’

  ‘Not for me alone. Where’s Will?’

  ‘Down to Sadlers’, to see if they can change that crown. He’ll not eat late, you know that.’

  ‘I will,’ yawns Gilbert, lifting propped tousled head. ‘What’s for cooking?’

  ‘He ought to eat more. He’s all bones,’ John Shakespeare grumbles.

  ‘You were the same at his age,’ says his wife, holding her needlework up to the light, squinting. ‘Lean and spare, it’s in the blood. Who gave the crown?’

  ‘I forget. Lord’ – rising, Anne listens – ‘never say that’s the twins waking?’

  ‘Cats fighting,’ chuckles Gilbert. ‘An easy mistake.’

  ‘Master Steels, at Snitterfield, for the belts and purses,’ John Shakespeare says. ‘No fear for the goodness of the coin. I knew his father well.’

  ‘Cats. Dear heaven, daughter, you should know your children’s cry,’ her mother-in-law says, wetting thread in scarcely smiling lips. ‘We want no hot eating at this late hour, I think. The kitchen fire will be out, besides.’

  ‘Not so late, surely. Is Joan not back from the Quineys’ yet?’ her father-in-law cries, stirring.

  ‘Those field mushrooms.’ Gilbert sighs reminiscently. ‘Broiled with leeks. I shall wake brother Richard before cockcrow, go find some more. That black juice.’

  ‘Never mind Joan, she will do very well.’ Wetted thread into needle: now stab, and yank and tug, as if administering just deserts. ‘My daughter knows right from wrong. I thank heaven.’

  ‘Aye, those mushrooms are good eating. And yet Will won’t even touch them.’ John Shakespeare looks across at his daughter-in-law. ‘Was there ever such a curiosity, my dear, as your husband?’

  She smiles back at him. ‘We shall win him over, one day.’

  Anne’s favourite time, the supper-hour. In summer the shadows seem to roll across to your feet like mild purple waves. With every trundle and creak, bolts and shutters create a soft castle about you. The Henley Street house is not like Hewlands Farm, where she was only alive at night. Here she moves round the household day as comfortably and steadily as the hour hand of a clock.

  In the kitchen Anne cuts bread and, after a glance at the hanging flitch and a mental calculation, a wedge of cheese. It is not that they are poor here, but money always matters: you feel it pressing and rubbing like a tight shoe. She has tried to help with innovations, like saving the old floor-rushes to light the fires. Her mother-in-law goes along with them, while seeming to find them faintly distasteful.

  But with her father-in-law, she is a favourite, has been since the first morning she woke up here as a bride, five years ago. She can see where he gets his reputation for being difficult; yet to her he is seldom less than tenderly chivalrous. A kind of alliance, even, has formed between them: an alliance about Will; slight yet strong, knitted together from frayed ends of suspicion, jealousy, fear. Sometimes Anne allows the thought: Will’s father likes me because I pin Will down, to this house, this trade, this town. And sometimes she looks at the thought properly, all round, its shape and shadows. Then Bartholomew’s jest on the day of their wedding shouts through the muffling of the years: Well, Anne, you caught him in time.

  But not for long, she does not allow it for long, because of what she has. Look, feel, so real and tangible: the husband, the children, the intense life she lives with them. Children beautiful and infinitely surprising; husband who is, still, husband, revealing no vice or foulness, unestranged … Well, go no further. She remembers her father teaching her, when a small girl, the rudiments of arithmetic. He counted fat plums into her stretching hands. And three more: ‘Now how many have you?’

  All she could say, in greedy surprise: ‘Oh, I’ve got lots.’

  No, she can see nothing to regret in her sole act of rebellion – giving herself to young Will Shakespeare: not when it has led to this. Perhaps in fact that rebellion was a necessary part of her. Whereas Will seems to have laid his by, like a trifling pastime once taken up. The Will she lives and works and lies beside is more phlegmatic than she could have imagined: pliable, measured, the least noticeable person in the brimming household. A swift maturity, perhaps, from marrying so young, fathering three children. Making him different from most men of – of what? Twenty-three? Yes. Somehow she always has difficulty naming his exact age. There is something elusive about it.

  And about him? No, no, her hands are filled with fruit, she has abundance, and she need not consider the question of whether she knows him less now than she did five years ago. Nor why, when Joan or Gilbert casually asks, ‘Where’s Will?’ she has an impulse to say he might be underground or in the roof or in the air all around them or anywhere, anywhere, for all they know.

  * * *

  ‘Knell was drinking before the performance,’ says Robert Wilson, in a low voice.

  ‘Well, don’t we all?’ shrugs John Singer: spindle-shanked, easy comedian, faintly mad eyes.

  ‘Ale, ale, to moisten. This was strong liquor. Missed a couple of cues.’

  ‘Towne thinks it’s all come about since he married that young piece in London,’ says Lawrence Dutton – too loudly: quickly they burble of new subjects, while Knell, solitary chair drawn up to the cold hearth, neatly stabs mutton slices with his knife.

  ‘He won’t even take a jest now,’ Tarlton sighs at last.

  ‘Not even funny ones? To be sure, you wouldn’t know about that,’ says Singer.

  ‘He’s absolutely indispensable, you know,’ says Jack Towne, at the table-end, drawing in spilled drink with his finger. ‘The sine qua non of our enterprise, Knell. Can’t do without him, as he is good enough to remind us. That’s why he carries it so high.’

  Glances pass and bounce round them. Tarlton waves the swooping moth away, frowning. He is the most acclaimed clown of the day, he has property in London, and, as long as he doesn’t go too far, is the favoured fool of the Queen herself; but he started out as a troupe player and still believes in it, the group, the way they hold together. ‘Nobody can claim that,’ he says. ‘Not in the Queen’s Men, nor in the poorest hedgerow company.’

  ‘But none of us are going to say that to him, are we?’ This is the youngest of them, Lionel Cooke, principal woman-player, usually bashful as any maiden, now bold with the wine. ‘Because we’re afraid to.’

  ‘Afraid of Knell?’ Towne, feet against the table edge, thrusts his chair back with a squeal. ‘Great God, I should hope not.’ He looks at the cup in his hand as if someone has just pissed in it. ‘Knell has many qualities, but beshrew me if ever I begin to fear him.’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean, everyone’s afraid of the noise,’ Cooke says. ‘It’s less tiring just to let him be.’

  ‘As for doing without him,’ Robert Wilson says carefully, ‘to be sure, we wouldn’t want to. But when he was laid low with a quinsy last season, John Dutton took his parts to admiration – and no, man, I’m not just saying that because you’re here. The company must come first.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ bursts out Towne, cradling his own face. ‘I know what it is now. I know what it’s all about.’

  * * *

  Stale and broken loaves, like days you lived and can’t remember living. Hamnet Sadler, charitable and prosperous enough to be so, gives
the last of them away to an old poor woman. Will, change in his purse, lingers with the midsummer light, helping Sadler put up the hinged shop-front, talking. Since his marriage he has grown close to Sadler, who stood godfather to his son. The baker is a big, curly-haired man who carries his flesh gracefully, like a dancer. Tender-hearted, he will weep at a sad tale or a song, and is known for it. Tearful Sadler, they say: ‘Oh, go stuff yourself,’ he will reply amiably. He blinks at the world in perplexity, but always with profound interest.

  ‘Master Eames, over to Clopton, you know him? They say he’s taken to wearing a hair-shirt and scourging himself night and morn. Can you understand that, now?’

  ‘The same impulse that makes you drink strong ale,’ Will says.

  ‘Ah, but that I enjoy.’

  ‘Has the ale never given thee a thick head as penance?’

  ‘Well, I’ll grant thee that. It’s a wonder, though, what wild things men will do.’

  ‘And never lack a reason for them.’ Guilt, Will thinks, is the real garment underneath that hair-shirt.

  ‘Little ones thriving? Judith suspicioned another for us, but it was just the full moon putting her out of order. Women are curious made, aren’t they? I never cease to wonder.’ Like Will he had married young. His wife is a pretty, high-coloured woman with a taste for finery and a formidable temper. Occasionally Sadler seems on the brink of saying something to Will about – well, about marriage, but though they are close enough friends to use thee, that step is never taken. Will wonders if there is something about himself that discourages it.

  Sadler sniffs the air as the light dies of its own redness. ‘A sweet summer. Pray God it stays.’

  ‘We’re owed a good harvest.’ Yes, he can do this; he can keep this part of himself working for a long time. ‘Well, best go.’

  ‘Aye, they’ll be sending after you, lest you’ve been stole away.’

  Will laughs at that. The laugh sounds a little wrong in the empty street.

  * * *

  ‘I know what it is,’ Towne says, snapping his fingers. ‘Damn, it was my fault. It was when we were running over Famous Victories this morning. John Cobbler saying farewell to his wife to go to the wars, and Dericke says—’

  ‘“Fie, what a kissing and crying is here,”’ says Tarlton, softly. ‘“Zounds, do you think he will never come again?”’

  ‘Damn. And I made a jest to Knell about it. Just one of those things you throw out.’ Towne glances over at Knell, going out on slightly unsteady legs to the close-stool. ‘I said something about leaving a young wife at home, and how she would never lack consolation.’

  ‘Ah.’ Tarlton grimaces, nodding. ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That is ominous.’

  ‘Will someone please tell me what you’re talking about?’ young Cooke cries, looking as if he might soon be sick.

  Wilson says: ‘Knell’s new wife, sweetling. Only – what is she? Sixteen?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ Towne says. ‘And now left behind in a fine house in London to sew and sing psalms.’

  ‘She might,’ Tarlton says. ‘She might be doing exactly that.’

  ‘Not what one hears, though,’ Wilson says.

  ‘Oh, you’ve heard it too?’ says Towne. ‘Shit. I didn’t entirely mean it – it was just one of those jests you make.’

  ‘One of those jests you make, certainly,’ says Wilson. ‘Look you, we must put him in a good humour somehow. He mustn’t think we’re ever talking of him.’

  ‘As we are,’ Singer says.

  Knell is back, with a slight dull smile, and a stare, and a thirst.

  ‘Knell, we were talking of digging up old Roister Doister for Oxford,’ Wilson says. ‘What think you?’

  ‘You weren’t talking of it,’ Knell says, pouring, his glance skimming Towne, ‘but let us pretend you were.’

  * * *

  Crossing the High Street, Will finds himself imagining a hair-shirt: the feel of it riding roughly against your skin beneath your clothes. Eventually, surely, you would get used to it – which would defeat the purpose. Perhaps then you had to leave it off to feel the required discomfort. Until you got used to that. Ahead he spies and catches up with Joan, returning from the Quineys’.

  ‘Didn’t they send a manservant with you?’

  ‘I made him go back. He vexed me. He has a wen and I can’t stop looking at it.’ Joan takes his arm.

  ‘Not wise, after dark.’

  ‘Why, I trusted to my luck, and here you are.’

  ‘Hm. And how goes it in the kingdom of Quiney?’

  ‘A dull spot just now. Too much occupied with marrying people off.’

  ‘Dull indeed.’ With a sideways glance he measures her expression. ‘You’ve too much sense to be in a hurry for that, I think.’ To him she is bright and pleasing as a robin; but smallpox has marked her, and there’s scant chance of a dowry.

  ‘A deal too much sense,’ she says sharply. And for a few moments they allow something to walk silently beside them. They have this ease. Both a little out of sorts, neither has to account for it, as you have to with lover, husband, wife: that constant diagnosis of intimacy.

  But, then, they were children together and, in a way, have never stopped being so. He reads it in Joan’s bemused look sometimes, when he hoists one of his own children on to his shoulders: Will a father, Will doing these great grown things? Surely not: surely this is a game of dressing-up. He thinks it himself sometimes.

  ‘Where is his wen?’

  ‘On his neck, and as big as a strawberry.’ Joan shudders. ‘And yet he is new-married.’

  Will smiles in the darkness. Hair-shirts, wens: perhaps, indeed, you can get used to anything. Suppose you committed a murder, but were so careful or lucky that not the slightest suspicion fell on you, and no evidence pointed your way. For a long time you would hardly be able to believe it: you would be on your guard every moment, suspecting every glance, never easy in your skin. But eventually, at last, you would have to relax: normality would force itself on you, and no longer would you wake every morning to the thought: I haven’t been found out yet. As Will still does, sometimes, blinking at the folds of the bed-curtains, next to soft breathing, a tumble of hair, a white still hand like a plaster-cast.

  As soon as he steps inside his mother’s face appears round the parlour door. ‘Will, you’re home.’ She seems to draw comfort from statements. ‘Anne’s seeing to supper. I said you’d want none.’ Another statement, heavier. He doubts his mother and his wife will ever be good friends. Not exactly that they are too alike, but they have the wrong similarities.

  His father calls him in. ‘Any word from Ditchley?’ He half mouths it, mindful of dozing Gilbert. Secrets and stratagems. Even Will – shaking his head – doesn’t know all of it. Only that Ditchley is something to do with wool, and that his father is on the edge of unlicensed dealing again. He remembers the stored wool in the barn last time, his father urging him to dig his hands into the greasy, muttony coarseness of it, then seeming to repent of showing him. Say nothing.

  Oh, needless instruction. Saying nothing is a rare luxury in this house of two generations and thirteen people. Will relishes release into silence, cultivates the art of effacement, of being ignored, for once there, the selfish mind is like a rich fabric kept folded away from the sun. Open it out, and your eyes dazzle at the brilliant complexity of the pattern.

  ‘Not for me,’ he says in the kitchen, at Anne’s look, knife over bread. ‘Just a cup of ale. Phoo, there’s no air tonight.’

  ‘I know. The twins won’t rest, I heard them again. Not cats.’

  ‘I’ll go up. Maybe open the window a little.’

  She nods. ‘Do it quietly.’

  Because his mother might hear, and she believes the night air dangerous, full of poisonous humours. So they balance it.

  ‘I do everything quietly,’ he says. They move about the kitchen without touching, but there is something not quite empty about the spaces b
etween them. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Aye, you are a very cat yourself. Save when you wake to use the pot.’ She glances at him, shakes her head. ‘No, not true.’ She picks up the tray. ‘You were long with Hamnet Sadler. What do you men find to talk of?’

  ‘Same as women. Babes and ailments. And then the state of the crops, and the crops of the state, and the price of the north wind and whether the goose-down will fall from the sky before the Dutchmen catch the end of last year in a net with no holes.’ He adds a smile: she is watching him with that look, faintly anxious, as if he is going out of sight. ‘Let me take that.’

  ‘No, no. He likes it from me.’

  ‘You spoil him.’ And yet he is happy for her to do so, isn’t he? Anne pleases his father: does that one job he has never been able to do.

  And he does so many things. Works leather, still, though at thirteen his quiet brother Richard – stocky, painstaking, father-adoring – is more adept in the shop and yard than he could ever be. Reckons accounts, chases customers for payment. Then the other work. Once a week he goes to his old grammar-school to teach handwriting, which the present master doesn’t trouble himself with. And when wanted, he earns a little more copying documents for a lawyer of Warwick, who is wealthy and rising and – so Will guesses from the things he copies and which the lawyer’s clerk is not to see – thoroughly corrupt. These are the things Will does: likewise being a husband, being a father. And he seems to belong to each of them, like a portrait that suits any frame.

  Upstairs, in the room adjoining theirs, he finds three small quiet mounds. The two-year-old twins, Hamnet and Judith, have settled to awkward sleep again, arms outflung, blond fringes soaked as if after furious exercise. Four-year-old Susannah sleeps decorously as ever, dark brows lifted as if her dreams amuse and surprise. Susannah: fruit of the wild courtship, born six months into wedlock, and never giving the slightest trouble from that moment: as if her work is done. (Will and Anne created her, but just as surely she created Will and Anne – what they are together, and must be, for always.) He decides against possibly waking kisses, and inches the window open. The clattering pail and tuneless song of the maidservant emptying ashes on the midden comes in suddenly strange and distant, the note of a foreign bird in a magic wood. Violently he jumps at the little hand touching the small of his back.