The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

by Jude Morgan

  ‘I am in earnest,’ Will said, not quite looking into his father’s eyes.

  ‘Well, but thy father speaks of possible things only,’ John Shakespeare said, drawing Hamnet into the big-sleeved crook of his arm. ‘A grant of arms, that makes a man a gentleman, and all his issue after, and so thou see’st, it’s no light matter. Thy grandfather made application some years since – with right, with every right – but it’s a long and ticklish business, trust me.’

  Hamnet did; but now it was to Will he turned his fidgeting eagerness. ‘You will get it, all the same, won’t you, Father?’

  ‘I want it,’ said Will, considering. And then: ‘I do seem to get the things I want.’ So quickly and awkwardly he made it sound like a sickness.

  * * *

  Simply, she had never been so far from home once they were ten miles past Clopton Bridge. From now on every moment was new ground, in every sense.

  She felt alone with it. The children, she discovered, loved the new more than home. Hamnet rode before Will, Judith before Anne: both wriggled and shouted with unflagging pleasure. Susannah rode her own mount, dainty and straight-backed, like, Anne thought, some abbess from the old time.

  Looking at new places, the new places looked at her, and revealed an Anne Shakespeare she had not suspected. Along the road she was treated with respect as a gentle dame – London-dressed, husband plainly a man of the world: probably not to be trifled with, suggested the lowered eyes of inn-servants. But surely that isn’t me. Inside I’m young and a fool.

  At the inns the children, excited beyond sleep, frightened each other in the unaccustomed night: hear that sound, what is it, it’s someone digging your grave. Hush now. At Thame there was no room, or little, at the inn so they bundled together in one bedchamber, Will and Anne and the children cramming into the bed, Edmund lying on the floor. And all caught giggles, couldn’t stop. Hush, hush. Anne was a little afraid of the innkeeper.

  ‘Why, we’ve paid,’ Edmund said from the floor. His voice sounded odd and froglike from down there and set them off again.

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ Will said. ‘I shan’t pay till the morning.’ And that seemed so absurd they squealed and gasped, and Judith said she would wet herself as the bed shook with laughing.

  And this was good, this worked. Anne thought: Let’s do this for ever, never halt, keep endlessly travelling.

  But London had to come. She had been picturing its immensity for so long that inevitably, when the city rose or lazily shouldered up on the horizon, it didn’t seem so very large. And she found a moment to smile at Will’s pride in pointing out the landmarks; the Abbey, St Paul’s, look there. It was touching – men and things. Like Bartholomew with his new hay-cart, walking all round it, noting the painted wheels. And then suddenly fear stopped her chest and she couldn’t feel her fingers as her mount wagged its steaming neck through streets and streets. When they were held up by a slipped girth she found herself staring at a house across the way, a single tall house and its smoking chimneys. No different from those of Stratford or, indeed, any of the other towns on the way here. And yet: she would never know the inhabitants of that house, or what they put on the fire that made that particular smoke – and that was certain. The world was bigger than she could ever understand. And now it was done, the drawbridge had been pulled up. Now I have to make myself.

  ‘Here we are.’ Will seemed fresh as they dismounted outside a house in a long, noisy street that seemed to be all inns and stables. Anne felt exhausted. She felt half rubbed out, like that chalk obscenity on the wall yonder. Why draw such a thing? ‘Don’t stare,’ Will warned Edmund, who was doing so, vastly, rocking on his legs. ‘They don’t care for it hereabouts.’ In confirmation, a groom leading a string of horses swore and spat. Edmund laughed. Wonderful. Like hearing a lion roar, she supposed: satisfyingly expected. Will slipped his arm around her waist. ‘What do you think?’

  I think I can never live here. But not to be said. ‘Handsome.’ Squeezed in with narrow windows, and hard to tell where it ended and the next house began. But she just wanted to get indoors, away from this strange outdoors where everyone seemed to be shouting, a little angry or exultant. No mellowness; like a world in which there was only ever blossom or thorn, never fruit.

  And then it was better, it was like travelling again, the exciting feeling of trying to fit in, this is us in a foreign place. The children loving it, questing up and down the stairs, look here, see this. Water-work on the walls. The Quineys had it, but nothing like this. Highly coloured birds and mythical beasts twined amid impossible branches and pillars.

  ‘There aren’t any real birds like those,’ said Hamnet, sturdily.

  Will laughed. ‘Thou art in the right,’ he said, ‘and why paint birds that never were?’ He scooped his son up for a piggyback around the clattering house. And Anne thought: I should stop being selfish, thinking of me. If this brings Will closer to his son, then no complaining.

  The first night in a new home was always difficult. Will’s hand stroked hers, while he talked of what they would do, see. Impossible to cry denial, say, I don’t want to do anything. At last he subsided, his breath buzzed. She got up to peep out of the slit of window. Dry stale air, no hint of season. Outside a scattering of lights burned. Footsteps clicked on mysterious errands. A watchman wailed the hour, sounding in pain. Somewhere a horse kicked and kicked at a stable door, like a wild thing out of place.

  * * *

  Engaging servants, that was one of the new things. Both maid and man. The latter for when she went out, as Will explained. The gentle dame with her manservant, my God. These new things, at first, reflected their newness on her and made her feel new likewise. In the bedchamber stood a looking-glass, clearer than she had ever known. I look, she thought, not so very bad. If I can just shake those old eyes with their foreboding, their expectation of no good.

  The first time shopping for provisions, she was intimidated by the aggression of choice. Prices seemed high, and she wondered if they were swindling her. But there was no one to turn to you knew: that was grim. You took what you could see, untrusting. She would get used to it, perhaps. But the sights they saw intimidated her too: the Tower, the array of prisons south of the river, the spiked traitors’ heads on London Bridge, even the Exchange with its thick-thronged merchants in furred robes, like commercial animals, and its parading ladies – or were they whores? – white-painted, frizzed, giant-shouldered. The things they did to people here, as if people were like food for a great cook, who stuffed larks within fowls, made ingenious transformations. But, then, perhaps she would get used to it.

  They would need a tutor for Hamnet. From slow beginnings he was quickening in learning. Susannah could read and write after a fashion; Judith yawned and protested at the sight of a page. Not that learning was much use to women, but … Will scratched his head. ‘I ought to have taken a hand in it,’ he said.

  ‘But you weren’t there. You were here.’

  ‘True. Now we’re all here … and so things will be different. You don’t regret coming, do you? Look how well they’ve settled. Look at Hamnet: he has so much more address.’ Look, look at something else, look anywhere but here.

  True about the children, though. They went abroad in those labyrinthine streets with far more confidence than their mother. Their talk became so quickly London-flavoured she could hardly follow it. What d’ye lack? they cried, in hoarse imitation of the shopkeepers and street-sellers, fresh cowcumbers and medlars: they talked of the fairest price for a wherry across to Southwark, of which grandee was staying at Durham House. They are going to belong to this, she thought, in a way I never can. I mustn’t hold them back. In Hamnet she could even see a future sketching out in Will’s eyes. He had made an appeal to the College of Heralds, as he had told his father: gentleman status might await, and Hamnet, as a gentleman’s son, could go much further than the moderate dreams of Stratford council-chamber. One evening Will was talking of an acquaintance who had been educated in a noblem
an’s household: Hamnet’s head went up.

  ‘He went when he was eleven?’

  ‘Aye, though it can be any age. I mean, it needn’t be so young.’

  ‘It’s not young,’ Hamnet, eleven, said staunchly.

  ‘Young to go away,’ Anne said. But he was taken with the idea, she could tell. Of course, it was natural for your children to grow beyond you. But she thought: Leave me something of them. A stupid thought, and she was careful with it, like many of her London thoughts, keeping it deep within, far from her tongue, far from her expression.

  Will needed to be from home a lot, and straight away. She could tell he was trying to stay while she settled in, not to leave her too much. But of course his work called him, and it was not like going across the yard to the workshop. One day she went past a glover’s and the familiarity of the smell hit her with incredible force of longing. Which was ridiculous, for she had never liked it. It showed how the mind worked: it was treacherous, it would weep for anything gone. So she tried to be robust. If she got lost in the streets, what was the worst that could befall her? But she preferred not to answer that.

  ‘Go, go,’ she said to Will. ‘You can’t always be keeping your fireside, you have a deal of business to attend to.’ Which he did, now that he was a sharer, even when he was not acting, or rehearsing, or writing. And that he did at night. She wouldn’t hear him get up from the bed. Just suddenly be aware that his shape next to her had been replaced by coldness. And then, if she listened hard, she could just hear the quill, like a little creature furtive and determined.

  ‘But you know, he’s a wonder, your husband,’ said Richard Burbage. He came to the house early on simply to pay his respects (others, she knew, to get a look at her). He brought a basket of flowers, sweetmeats for the children. He seemed decent and sincere: though all was seemings nowadays. ‘Such fertile invention. Such succulent sweetness of wit. Yes, yes, I’m flattering him, because we want our new piece from him. He has no rivals, you know.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Will said: the words decorous, his face oddly thunderous.

  ‘Oh, others write, but they don’t please like him. Well, what now, man? You do please.’

  ‘Perhaps I could do more.’

  Burbage shook his head at him, as if he were a stubborn child. ‘Never blots a line, mistress. Well, that’s our boast and jest. Lucky thing too, with his handwriting.’

  Will’s work: a man’s world entire, she had forgotten how much, though she knew there were no women on stage. It struck home to her when she went with him to the Theatre during rehearsal. Burbage was courtly, but plainly they were not used to having a woman about them. Even Edmund forgot about her there. And watching the youth rehearsing a woman’s part made her feel strange. He was good, natural – almost too natural. It seemed to make you unnecessary.

  Edmund came back to himself gradually on the way home. His eyes lost their shining, blinded look. Oh, it was where he wanted to be, she could tell. But could he do it? His voice had broken early, so he was no good for those roles. (She was pleased about that, for some reason.) And then what would John Shakespeare say? She must remember he was far off, in every sense. Here they were removed from his influence completely. And yet, curious thing, she wasn’t. He came often into her mind. As for Will, if his father was mentioned he stiffened so slightly only she could see it.

  Gilbert came to Bishopsgate to sup. In him the Shakespeare good looks, visible in adolescence, had altogether disappeared in a sallow adulthood. But he was out of his time, practically running his master’s haberdashery business, and doing well: rings on the fingers with which he gave her a cursory handshake. ‘Never fear, sister, you’ll soon have the London squint, half down your nose and half on your purse. Then you’ll never look straight at anyone again.’ He certainly had it; and a cough like a donkey. But she always seemed to be hearing that in London, and for all the children revelled in the new life she did not think them in broad health: they sniffled and had no colour and sometimes their breath was not sweet.

  All Gilbert’s talk was of the city. At the Fields’, Richard went out of his way to talk to Anne of Stratford, which she supposed was kind of him. (Though did it show so much that she was gasping and flexing on the bank?) Mistress Field she could not take to. Though it was interesting to meet a Frenchwoman, no doubt. Yet Anne wished she could just have these interesting experiences over, like the diseases of childhood. And Mistress Field had too good a figure for a woman who had borne children, and you could tell she thought so. And too many wise words about teething and the care of linen, as she smoothed her enviable flat belly. I never get along with the wise, Anne thought. A pity her husband was plainly frightened of her. No one could say that of Will. But perhaps she should be exercising a little fear over him. Be a little of the termagant wife. Was that what others did? She never used to care what others did, disdained it, even: felt that behind their closed door she and Will lived by their own rule.

  She wondered a lot of things, and they jangled in her head so much that sometimes she followed Joan’s prescription. Before coming to the Fields’ she had had the maid bring her up a cup of wine, and now as Mistress Field offered her almond-milk or sack, she had no difficulty in choosing. It helped a little: the mind found one thing to fret about instead of several.

  One thing it dismissed. As they rose to leave the Fields’, another woman came in, a dark, frowning, half-pretty woman who looked, as so many did here, as if she ate and slept badly. ‘Isabelle, my dear,’ Mistress Field said.

  And the woman looked up at Will and said: ‘Master Shakespeare.’ But gave his name a peculiar pronunciation, which made Anne conclude she was French likewise.

  ‘Madame Berger, your servant,’ Will said.

  The Frenchwoman took no notice of Anne at all. ‘You must come and see me again,’ she said. And Will bowed, not looking much enthused. And Anne thought: Well, my God, if there were anything, it wouldn’t be as fearfully obvious as that.

  Still, she said as they walked home: ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘A Frenchwoman. A silk-weaver’s widow. I helped her once, when there were disturbances against the foreigners.’ He added: ‘She’s mad,’ as easily as one might say, she lives up the hill. Nothing there, she thought: surely.

  Naturally his work took him away. Away from the house – or just away. Once he said, ‘I must go,’ and soon afterwards she found him upstairs, writing. And his look seemed to say: Well, it’s as I said.

  She watched him with the theatre people, heard dimly their talk. Box-takings up. This latest broadsheet from the Puritans attacking the theatre, poorly writ but, Lord, what a siege-train of citations from the Bible. Trouble ahead from the lease of the land the Theatre was built on: well, we must shift somehow. Clowns improvising, man, that belongs with slashed doublets and rhymes, we want none of it, the words as writ on the page or else. Two lionskins and a bearskin and a tree of golden apples, all lost: well, someone’s stealing properties, that’s all there is to it … He was so much a part of them: but did any of them know him? she wondered.

  This man, perhaps, more than any other: Ben Jonson. At first she was relieved when he came to Bishopsgate, square and stocky and shovelling up food and drink with his big work-cracked hands, and taking very little notice of her as he talked to Will: for a space she almost felt she was with Hamnet Sadler, moored in a quiet Stratford afternoon where nothing was expected of her. And she was glad – though she would not have said so, just then, under torture – that he was apparently nothing to do with the theatre. She heard him talk of his day’s labour, of his wife’s coming confinement, and thought: Finally, something that hasn’t been crowded out by the theatre, the grand brute that pushes life with its elbows to the unregarded edges.

  But soon Jonson’s talk climbed winding into the high and learned, where she could not follow, and where even Will sometimes seemed hardly bothered to pursue him. And then Jonson offered to hear Hamnet’s lesson.

  ‘Who is this governor
you’ve appointed to the whelp?’ Jonson boomed. ‘I’ve never heard his name.’

  ‘Tutor only, not governor,’ Will said, smiling, ‘and allow me respectfully to suggest, Ben, that you haven’t heard of everyone.’

  ‘Everyone worth knowing. Well, come hither, boy, I shan’t bite thee, saving thy Latin is villainous, and then I can’t answer for myself.’

  That was when Anne began to be in two minds about him. Plenty of people used ‘thee’ for children they didn’t know, but she had never liked it. Nor did she entirely like the way he loudly challenged Will on things to do with learning, arts, poetry. Perhaps she didn’t wholly understand: she could see it was a sort of fencing, and that Will seemed to enjoy the exercise, and he never ended up banging the table as Jonson did. Still, she felt curiously oppressed when Ben Jonson called, as if the room were suddenly overheated.

  But that might have been something else at work. A sort of transferred fear. Because from what she could gather, Jonson was in the process of leaving real life and entering the theatre. And Will was – what? Helping, responsible, involved? (To blame?)

  Another friend of Will’s – a long, lank, inwardly smiling man named Tom Nashe, whom she did not like at all – was there when they talked of it. Will, it seemed, had directed Jonson to Master Henslowe: and she had picked up the word about him: beside Burbage he was the other power in the London theatre. A little like the two big farmers about Shottery, always looking to buy up a morsel of land, and win out.

  ‘And so you are employed, fruitfully, dutifully employed, by Henslowe?’ Nashe said. ‘And pray tell which of your bollocks did you have to hand over to his keeping to seal the contract?’

  ‘Pah, the man’s gentle as a sheep with me,’ Jonson said, big bristled chin jutting. Anne sat by, knitting hose for the twins, though Will urged her simply to buy these things in London.