by Jude Morgan
Home, sleeping, drowning in dream, he wakes to the sound of the watch crying the hour – or is it someone crying murder, murder? Or a gallant in jest, rapping his sword on the floors of rooms built crutched over the street? Oh, to be a lively capering self, taking on all the world, a Richard uncurbed. He suddenly remembers Wilson, his enemy in the Queen’s Men, muttering one day, ‘Ah, the gentle-Shakespeare act.’ If we only knew about each other. ‘Leave the world for me to bustle in,’ says Richard. And walking home from the theatre, with patterns in his mind echoing the patterns of lighted windows, Will lets himself think of everyone in the city, in the world, taking sick and dying. All dead. Now you could go in all these, rummage, know all of people’s lives. And how many, in truth, would you manage to pity?
‘He does these things,’ Will says, looking over Burbage’s costume, ‘because he can. He has a mind to imagine, and leaps after it. Such is humanity. What have we mortals ever thought of that we have refrained to try out? Torture engines. Never a one that man’s mind has balked at and said, “I have thought of this, but dare not build, or put it to use.” Put yourself in killing mood, my Rick. “Well, I’ll go hide the body in some hole.”’
‘Regular, there, your murderers are eloquent in their verse.’ Burbage turns over the crumpled pages of his part one last nervous time, fiddles with his wig. ‘You know they will not applaud your parade of ghosts, Will.’
‘Who?’
‘The high critical sort. The sort to cry down your learning, to lament the profuse lines too gorgeous dressed, to cry balance, sir, decorum, think o’ the ancients.’
‘Then I’ll take the applause of others. Won’t you?’
Burbage booms a laugh, cuffing him. ‘Your Richard is the very devil, and I love him.’
Is he, Will demands of himself, alive? That’s all. In the first performance of Richard III, his own proud, shameful, desperate work, Will plays King Edward, one of his typical parts – noble, a little ineffectual, soon leaving the stage to the vitality of wicked Crookback. Alive, that’s all that matters, alive as these people in the audience cracking nuts and peeping over shoulders, ugly, handsome, infinite. They don’t gape as they do at a Marlowe play: they look as if they are at home, forgetting where they are, on the edge of the bed just woken, themselves.
Richard – his king, his play, his man – is a triumph. They laugh and weep and shout: they palpitate with the story to its headlong conclusion. They do what the thing did to him when it went through him, and which is now only an odd dead echo of a sensation.
‘Ha, we stormed them, Lord, we conquered, what think you?’ cries Burbage afterwards, hump coming undone, clapping his great hands. Will is trembling and thinking … well, thinking of the next one. He pats Burbage’s back – and indubitably solid and fleshy as Burbage is, still the man seems a little less real now: a little less of him. The first indication that magic thins out the world. That this has a cost.
* * *
It begins with the plague.
Where the plague begins no one knows, though there are plenty of opinions. It is a miasma that settles from the upper air, having its origin in malign stars. It is brewed up by the villainous poor, living filthily hugger-mugger like and with pigs. It comes as a righteous punishment for greed, sin, luxury. For being Protestant. For being insufficiently Protestant.
Sometimes it goes away for years. Then it rises up suddenly and starts lopping lives, like a boy swiping dandelion-heads. London worst, but anywhere. A town is going quietly along, then it is burying a tenth of its population.
Anne: she can remember clearly the outbreak in Stratford when she was a girl. Her father stayed away from the town, even though he needed to send goods to market. Better lose money than bring that here. He urged Anne to pray for the poor souls of Stratford. She did, but she was frightened too; and she prayed that the poor souls of Stratford keep away from her. Bartholomew, she remembers, did a horrible imitation of a plague victim, staring and drooling. He said it sent them mad as well as making their flesh rot, and they were likely to seize you and kiss your lips so you would take the contagion. Only much later does she realise that the year of the Stratford plague was the year Will was born. His survival was then against the odds, which must mean something.
Will home – sun, and plague, earlier this time – but then she has stopped counting the summers now. He managed to visit in Lent too, but it’s not that. Counting suggests counting down, a tally to be struck across: some limit. But Will the London player, the part-husband, that is the reality.
There have been plenty of beautiful times. The arrival, that is always one, with the children cascading through the house at the first sound of his voice. Presents for them. Always presents. And then simpler moments like the first meal together. Even simpler, walking through the town with him, arm in arm, in the evening quiet, the sound of their footsteps on the bridge, honk and drabbling splash of waterfowl. Talking. Seeing him wash the travel off with pump and pail. You could still count his ribs.
It’s just this – knowing that coming home is part of his working life. Like rehearsing. (Like the writing he does when he is here, the making of plays, this new refinement of his career that baffles her more than anything in its silence, its remoteness from her, for he won’t talk of it except to say, ‘Yes, I turn my hand to it.’ And yet, good God, how it is filling the money-box.) It’s knowing that he’s home early this time because there’s plague in London; theatres closed because of it, and no tour ready yet. Not here because he just wanted to come home. Anne smiles; but behind it a feeling like a hailstorm, so hard grainy pelting it could brain you. Luckily hail never lasts above a minute or two, and melts as if it has never been.
* * *
It begins with plague; which begins with headache and chills and fever and, oh, God, the light, take that light away. Before the swellings in the armpits and groin, the suppuration, the bleeding from within. It begins with warning red crosses on house doors, the carrying of red wands in the streets: to say, it’s here. Perhaps it will falter and sputter, kill half a parish-worth, fizzle out. But no. This is a strong, lusty outbreak, a charioted Tamburlaine of sickness. By June the playhouses are ordered to close, because they spread infection, though the city fathers would love to see them like this permanently.
Choices for the players and the theatre people, some more stark than others. ‘They’ll keep them shut till Michaelmas,’ Richard Burbage says to Will. They are spending the afternoon at a bowling-green in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Probably these places will be closed too, soon. ‘Early to mount a tour, and then we must hope the country won’t turn sick of acting companies, as we’re all like to be out there.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Bugger. That’s a villainous shot, look at that rub. Oh, I’ll see what Father says. We’ll find something to do – the Theatre needs repairing and cleaning. What about you? Well, you’ve your family in the country, I know. Look you, I shan’t mind if you tour with Alleyn. If you can stand being on stage with the great bag o’ wind then luck be with you, man, that’s all.’
‘Home it will be. I’m never quite easy with either Henslowe or his crown prince, and besides…’ Will lets the thought go with the bowl, trundling away, to end where it will. ‘You know, there’s room in the theatres for you and Alleyn.’
‘I prefer to think not. A little competition, a little whiff of the adversarial, makes a man a better actor. Come, what’s amiss? Art afraid they’ll forget thee?’ Burbage claps his shoulder, making Will stagger. ‘Love thee no more?’
‘Who?’
‘Why, the public, who else? It’s poor luck to be sure, a closure just when your name on the bills is tickling the audiences. But the other poets will be silent perforce too, hirelings and grandees alike. The crowd will come back for you when the flag goes up again.’
‘Oh, the public.’ Will smiles, or feels his lips doing it. ‘I don’t fear them. They don’t know me.’
‘Write me another Richard,’ Burb
age says, with sudden urgency, squeezing Will’s arm. ‘Christ, man, what we made of your Crookback was something worth. Bating flattery, Will, there’s your golden vein, you please all about, the men and the women and the high and the mere. No more of your Titus, please you – not that it won’t go: it’s the prettiest piece of bloody Seneca that was ever carved reeking off the joint, but I only get to speechify.’
‘Another Richard? We’ve brought the Roses down to the Tudors.’
‘Nay, leave off the history now, if you will. Tap your vein of beauty. Tender and true, to make ’em weep. But it must be an actor’s piece and a crowd piece likewise, look you. Have an eye to what Marlowe’s about. Still waxing heroical? He turned his last piece after your example, I swear.’
‘Now you do flatter,’ says Will, grimly.
Where is Marlowe? Tom Nashe isn’t sure. Earlier this year he was abroad. Flanders, they say: arrested and sent back, they say – or is that what they want you to think? Certainly he has been in London lately, because he was bound over by Shoreditch constables to keep the peace. As ever Will wants to gobble up news of Marlowe and to spit it out. When Nashe said Marlowe came to hear Richard III, Will refused to believe him. ‘You are too sweet and gentle, William, or perhaps too happily secure in your triumph, to remark you proved me wrong.’ For he and Nashe worked together on a first draft of Henry VI, but Nashe extricated himself after one act. He couldn’t flourish, he said, shut in this historical paddock. It’s a space, Will said: that was all he wanted. As for Marlowe now, he may have gone out to the country as so many are doing, because of the plague.
This is how it begins: the great houses of the nobles with the gated gardens down to the river shut up, the deer lifting their heads in St James’s Park unmolested. Doctors stalk about in long gowns and conical masks filled with rue and bergamot, looking like great spectral birds: not many, though. They prescribe the treacle medicine made of viper’s flesh, vinegar, wormwood, but people keep dying; small wonder if they turn instead to drinking their own urine, to prayer. Or to blaming the foreigners. Yes: that will begin soon.
Will prepares to go home too. He has money, and so a breathing space. Because his clutch of plays have worked. Emulation, imitation, exultation. Knowing what he was doing and not knowing what he was doing. Why not? A player not a sniffing scholar. He stopped worrying about sounding like others when he realised there is no such thing as originality, except the originality that comes from synthesis. It all went in.
But he is more troubled by the interruption than he gives away to Burbage or Nashe, because he has just found himself and found a way, and now the gates are closing, for how long…? And he’s afraid he can’t go back to the person he was before his work became acceptable: the sheets pawed over, the nod, yes, it will serve, the heavy pouch in his hand, and then it was your words cutting and floating on the cool afternoon air before the ringing rockery of faces.
He hates it, hearing his words. He wants to run away and scream and hide. His fluency in writing is deceptive. Really he is running over the lines like a man running over a pit of coals. Only swiftness prevents the torture. Yet in words he is home and self and free as nowhere else, and sometimes getting up from the desk he cannot for a moment adjust to the world being physical and not made by him, and he wobbles, as if his legs are turning to phrases and his feet to metaphors. But hate or not he is caught. Essentially he would give plays under the sea or on the moon if there were a way, rather than not do this, be this Will any more. He is all made of steel about it. Yet loving too. Hot and fierce-handed for what he does, in London.
Home, then. He is accustomed to travel now – the long hours in the saddle, the impossibility of impatience on muddy or dusty roads, the fellow journeyers falling in with you, and how you spotted the ones who would be tolerable or a menace. At some point on the way he leaves behind the Will who exists in London, becomes the one who belongs to Stratford. Fancy a post by the road, a stone, this marks the spot. He shouldn’t think this way. It suggests splitting, damage, and he won’t believe that. Useful lesson in humility in it anyhow. Along this road he is just another mark for innkeepers, possibly highway robbers, especially now his clothes sing out a little his growing wealth. Where he comes from – meaning London – he is turning into a name: a public figure, in a small way. A person attracting dislike, envy, even hate.
How he recoiled from that. I shall never, he thought, get used to it. On first hearing the attack on him from a fellow poet, he felt himself inside leap back high in the air like a cat touched by surprise, fizzing, arched.
‘Oh, it’s not just you,’ said Nashe, who told him. ‘He has pitched into Marlowe too. And eke your humble servant who has ever accounted himself Robert Greene’s friend, since we were at Cambridge. But, there, what would you have? We go before the public, my friend, you upon the stage, I in print.’ (Nashe is fecund now in pamphlets and satires; anything odd, sharp-edged, provocative is likely his.) ‘We all stand up to be hit.’
‘I’m not happy about those either but, yes, I’m a son of Adam, my saltest tears are for my own woes, and it’s what he says about me that I resent. Have I met him, that he can traduce me as if he knows me? I’ve read some of his love-tales, but I don’t recall the man.’
‘We may have been in company together. You’d remember the look of him. Pointed red beard and most curious pointed red hair, you might fix his head up either way. But you’re not likely to have been in his company of late. Oh, Greene made a show of it at first, you know, like Marlowe multiplied – gambling, wenching, drinking. He found them a flavourful curiosity, these whores and rogues, and then at last it was as if they had fixed his taste, like a man dining every day on hot mustard and radish. And he has been writing every moment since university, in every mode and manner – writing for his bread. So he seldom speaks – shall I say? – measured.’
Players are a low, impudent set, was what he heard Robert Greene was giving out, and it was a shame when a gentleman had to lower himself to write for their capabilities, but at least it was done gentlemanly. Now you have a beggarly player like this Shakespeare taking the play-making out of their hands, copying their style, imitating their methods, garnering the applause for his second-hand glories. It was reported to Will thus from several sides. Bad things said about you never fall into abeyance: they are dropped letters that people are eager to pick up and pass on to the right place.
It stung; it stings him still in memory as he rides the Oxford road with half an ear for the garrulous old man at his side anecdotally reliving his youth, the scampish affair that old men’s youth always is.
In essence, Greene has said: You shouldn’t be here, doing this. Thou art a wrong thing in a wrong place, doing wrong. It beat at his temples, thinking of it: drummed like a confirmation of something.
Nashe excused and temporised. Marlowe, if he knew of it, would surely either laugh or reach for his sword. As for Will, he went to see Robert Greene.
Why? His scalp prickles with shame or embarrassment to think of it, but he was sure he walked down that Dowgate alley, in wharf-side stink, telling himself: I will make him like me, love me. The greatest of all defeat.
He kept thinking of Jacqueline Vautrollier – as she was then – issuing her simple invitation, among the innocent flowering plants. Temptation: surely it didn’t have to lead to this, to peeling, fish-head squalor. Greene had left his wife after he’d spent all her money, Nashe said, and set up with a mistress, Em Ball, sister of the notorious thief ‘Cutting’ Ball – rumoured to act as Greene’s bodyguard against the fellow writers he offended. There is a son of the liaison, a little boy called Fortunatus – call him Unfortunatus, Nashe said. Nashe loves words more than anything.
It was all so unreal. Cutting Ball. The bleak chamber above a shoemaker’s, where Greene received him reeking of wine and rotten guts, dressed in the remnants of a good set of clothes – except hose, showing, uncaring, bare, fleshless legs between breeches and shoes. And that wild red peak of hair and b
eard. Grief does not sit well on the redhead, or privation. Greene’s pale eyes looked as if flesh had been rubbed away to reveal the holes in him, his life, soul. There was nothing in the room but a couple of stools, a bottle, and paper. He was writing, writing crosswise on the back of bills and inventories. He did not appear surprised to see Will.
‘I can’t offer you anything. Nor would I, naturally.’ A glance at Will’s clothes. ‘My need is greater, a grating need indeed.’ Will flinched from his breath. ‘My apologies for the noxious mephitis: dying, thou know’st.’
Will glanced around helplessly.
‘Starving, no. I do eat. My landlady has a tenderness for me and brings soups and stews. But nothing stays in, and no flesh accumulates, hence my fair conviction that belling death is on my traces. But don’t let that stop you, lay on, you’re Shakespeare, after all, and have a good proper grudge. I’ve seen you play. We met once at Henslowe’s, but you didn’t take any notice of me, you were busy being flattered by someone. Sweet Master Shakespeare. You see, I’m piling it up so you can strike at me and get it over, for I’ve a lot of work to do. A play, ’midst other things, aye, I’m trying ’em too, though with what chance against you I misdoubt. Sir Crowd-pleaser. It can’t be right, you come along, supply yourself with some plain roast and boiled blank verse, a dash of Marlowe spice, and serve it up—’ Suddenly Greene was on his knees, retching into the fireplace. The stuff coming up was an unthinkable colour. ‘Your pardon. My bile punished with bile.’
‘I didn’t come here to strike.’
Greene wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘Why, then? To crow?’
‘For God’s sake, it’s not a contest. To ask you why you defame me. When I haven’t injured you. When I haven’t—’
‘Oh, it is a contest, as you well know.’ Greene chuckled, phlegm-cackling, struggling to his feet. ‘Why? Does it matter? I fucking envy you. Look at me, look at you. I’ve been writing for ten years, yards and yards of print, most indifferent, some indifferent good. I grind it out from the millstones of my brain for the printer, quick sale and forgot and then another. I’ve tried for the high style and the hand of a noble patron to lift me, one step, two, where it’s not so easy to fall back into the mire, everything I’ve done to be heard. We want to be heard, yes? And you – you are heard. And it hasn’t cost you anything. Sweet Master Shakespeare, he goes home to his loving family come Lent or summer in the sweet-smelling country where the sweet showers fall.’ Greene laughed. ‘Now that’s enough to make me sick again.’
