Ben told it all over the fishbones and pasty fragments. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the King will have it that he foreknew all. Let them, says he, get in theirrr Godless butts of gunpowderrr and I myself, laddies, will marrrch thither with guarrrd and witness to prrrove it was no tale. So he did, and so he says that he has singlehanded saved the rrrealm. Will you come to the hanging?’
‘I will not.’
‘Squeamish as ever. Twelve men swinging aloft in the sun and enow guts and blood and hearts ripped out to feed the King’s kennels a whole day. There is a little book to come,’ he coughed modestly.
‘I thought you were waiting to print all your plays, such as they be, in one great book called Ben Jonson’s Works, mad notion. Or is it epigrams and corky expatiations all in Greco-Latin?’
‘I will let pass your pleasantries. This little book will have no name of author below the title, though all shall know from the mastery whose it is. The title is to be A Discourse of the Manner of the Discovery of the Late Intended Treason.’
‘That is too long.’
‘Have a care, man. It is the King’s own. And it is to be spread abroad that the King’s self had the writing of it but was too royally modest to set his name thereto. It is a terrible false world.’
Will now quoted from something he was writing. ‘We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.’
‘You sound as though you cite somewhat from some new kennel of misery you are hammering together unhandily.’
‘A tragedy, aye. About a king that insists on divine right and knee-killing deference and fulsome fawning and will not have the plain truth. He is cast out into the cold and goes mad and dies.’
‘A care, Will, a care.’
‘It is for the court.’
‘O Jesus, O blood of Christ not really present on the altar. You will be hanged and quartered like any Guy Fawkes.’
‘I care not. We have seen the best of our time.’
When Christmas came to court, Lear, done by Dick Burbage, ranted and tore his beard, and Queen Anne slept or woke and pouted at what seemed most unseasonable for Yule, a time of drunken showing of one’s legs in some pretty wanton masque, while James drank steadily and chewed kickshawses offered by a succession of lords on bended knee. After the play he ranted. The Grooms of the Royal Bedchamber were there, in livery after their acting, yawning, Will among them, hound-weary, half-listening.
‘Therrre ye see, my lorrrds and ladies and guid laddies a’, what befalleth a king that trusts too much in human naturrre. It is the trrragedy of ane that insisteth not enough on his divine rrricht. He lets gang the rrrule o’s rrrealm tae ithers. Weel, thank God though I hae drrrunken sons I hae nae ambitious dochters of yon stamp. Aye aye aye.’ Then he suddenly shouted: ‘Kingship, kingship, kingship,’ so that many of the drowsy started full awake. ‘I was but rrreading in the Geneva Bible this day, aye, and find therrre mickle to offend, aye. Much flouting I find of the divinity of kingship in the saucy marrrgins therrreof. Aye, I was in the rrricht of it, the divine rrricht I may say, to hae thrrrown oot of the rrrealm a buik nae matterrr hoo holy that hath been defiled by the pens of Godless rrrepublicans, aye. It is verrry parrrtial in its notes and glosses, verrry untrrrue, seditious, and savourrring tae much of dangerrrous and traitorrrous conceits. When, my lorrrd arrrchbishop, shall we see our ither, our new, our Godly?’
‘They are hard at work, your grace,’ said the Archbishop of Canterbury, huge archiepiscopal rings of weariness under his eyes. ‘All fifty-four translators, all six companies. Andrewes and Harding and Lively report well of the progress of the holy work and say but four years more will see it sail gloriously all pennants flying into port.’
‘So Harrrding looks lively and Lively labourrrs harrrd, eh, eh?’ There was loud and immediate laughter that went on long while the King beamed around and said: ‘Aye aye aye.’
Will could see that his majesty was looking in vain for a pun that should bring Lancelot Andrewes, head of the Westminster translating groups, into his fancy. Without premeditation, Will came out, in a firm all too audible actor’s voice, with:
‘Each Bible scholar, so the ungodly say,
Works lively hard Englishing for no pay
The royal Bible, aye, and rewes the day
When such an unholy labour came his way.’
There was a terrible silence into which the King waded rather than leapt. He said:
‘And wha micht ye be, laddie? Wait noo, I ken, I ken, ye are he that wrrrit the play of this nicht, are ye not?’
‘Aye, William Shakespearrre, yourrr majesty,’ Will said, hearing with horror an effortless parody of the royal accent.
‘Ye maun wrrrite it doon, you saucy blasphemous irrreverrrent and impairrrtinent lump o’ clairrrty doggerrrel, that all may see, laddie.’
‘I have forgot it already, your royal majesty,’ Will said, hearing in horror the faint traces of the sobbing Danish intonations of the Queen.
‘Aye.’ It was clear that James did not know well what to do. Will had often met this situation when being unpremeditatedly pert to the great. He now willed the King out of his problem. Be sick, great greatness. ‘Aye, ye and yourrr saucy rrrhymes.’ He looked green and began to heave. It was, indeed, the usual end of a court soirée. Some writer of music for the virginal, Tomkins or somebody, had spoken of producing a tiny sequence consisting of the King’s Rouse, the King’s Vomiting, the King’s Rest. ‘I maun gang,’ the King said, very green. ‘I mind ye, laddie, I’ll mind yourrr sauciness.’ Then, on the arms of two simpering earls, he was led away to the Harington water closet, invention of the late Queen’s godson, Britain’s contribution to the civilization of Europe.
‘By Christ,’ Burbage said, ‘you get away with murder.’
‘What Ben Jonson says. Thank God our revels now are ended, aye.’
When, much much time later, Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street and said:
‘Let us drink.’
‘Ben,’ Will cried. ‘Your ears are untrimmed and your nose whole. I’m glad to see you well.’
‘But thirsty.’
‘Drink water then. It seems to me that less and less of wine makes in you more and more of oppugnancy. If this drunken watch-beating continues it will be a matter of one day’s holiday between longer and longer lingerings in the Clink.’
‘The Marshalsea. Listen. It was a strange time. I worked on the Bible.’
‘What?’ They went down the stairs, past Mountjoy scolding his daughter Marie for loving the apprentice Belott, into the street, demoted to lead by the dull day. There were more drunk about than usual, belike because of the dull day. ‘The Bible, this I know, has already been worked on, nay worked out. They are at the great final stage of the galleys. And it is Harding and Lively and Andrewes, not you, that had the making of it. You are a man of some small reasonable talent, Ben, but you are no man of God. It is work for men of God that gratuitously or necessarily know Greek and Latin and Hebrew.’
‘I know all those tongues,’ Ben said. ‘I can Hebrew you as well as any clipped rabbi. It is, indeed, the work that comes before the final launching that has made lively my days in the stinking rathole of the Marshalsea. For, since I am a poet, they brought to me the poesy of the Bible. Meaning Job and the Psalms and the like. You are a poet, they said. Tickle our sober accuracy into poetic life. So I dip quill in horn and correct the galleys to a diviner beauty.’
‘Who brought the galleys and said all this to you?’ Will said with some jealousy.
‘Some man of the Westminster company – Bodkin or Pipkin or some such name. No whit abashed at the prospect of seeing God’s work buffed and polished in a foul and pestilential prison. The apostles, he said, were in prison before being variously crucified.’
‘That will not be your fate. Whatever your fate is, it will not be that. That is the fate of the godly.’
And then, before they entered the Dog Tavern, ‘Is it you only of all our secular versifiers that are bidden trim the sails of the galleys?’
‘Oh, there is Chapman, also Jack Donne – not properly secular, there is talk of his taking holy orders this year. Marston’s name was mentioned but I was quick there. If, I said, you want a Bible that beginneth with In the initialities of the mondial entities the Omnicompetent fabricated the celestial and terrene quiddities, then have Jack Marston by all means. There were others mentioned, smaller men.’
‘Was I,’ Will asked, ‘mentioned?’
They sat down not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both. When the jug of canary came Ben was able to have his laugh out.
‘Why do you laugh? What is risible in me or others or elsewhere?’
‘There were special orders that you should not be brought in. No Latin or Greek nor Hebrew – that was brushed aside as of small moment. But the King has a long memory and himself said that he would not hae that quick laddie that was perrrt with his imperrrtinencies.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘There is some foolish rhyme fathered on you about the King sticking his lively harding andrew up the translators to make them come quicker and threatening to cut off their old and new testicles if they did not. It could not be you, it is too corky and bad even for you. But I will be kind. You shall not be out in the cold like the foolish virgins. I, Ben-oni, the Benjamin that Jacobus loveth, though he cannot keep me out of jail, I am ready to deliver sundry psalms into your palms.’
‘Is there money in it?’
‘Honour, glory, perhaps an eternal crown.’
‘I am done with all writing,’ Will said, ‘even for money. I grow old, I grow old. I am forty-six this year. I will retire to Stratford and hunt hares and foxes.’
‘You would rather be hunted with them. And you have said this too often before of being done with writing. You will go and stay a week and then be back here thirsting to write some new nonsense. I know you.’
‘You poets,’ Will said, ‘may keep your Bible. You may stuff your old and new testes up your apocrypha.’
‘There speaketh sour envy. Well, we will keep it and be glad. For the day may come, some thousand years hence, when even the Works of Ben Jonson will be read little, but the bright eyes of Ben Jonson will flash out here and there in a breathtaking felicity of phrase from the green Eden of God’s own book that may never die.’
‘You may stick your holofernes up your methuselah.’
‘Master Shakespeare,’ said Frank Beaumont timidly, ‘there is a matter we would talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here.’
‘She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three.’
‘I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedy called Out on You Mistress Minx which must be ready for rehearsing some two days from now and not yet started though the money taken. You are quick, sir, as is known. A night of work with Jack and me as amanuenses and it can be done. We can pay a shilling. It is safe here in a little bag in Kitty here her bosom.’
‘I have done with writing,’ Will said proudly. ‘I go to tend my country estates. All you poets may stick your zimris up your cozbis.’
‘Well bethought and à propos and a proposito. We were held up in our playwork by the need to work on the Song of Songs that is Solomon’s for Dekker that hath an ague. Kitty here gave us a good phrase. Love, she said, is better than wine. Is not that a good phrase?’
‘She carries two fair-sized flagons on her, I see. If by love she means comfort more than intoxication, then she is not right.’
‘Comfort me with flagons,’ Beaumont said to Fletcher. ‘Flagons is better than apples. Make a note.’
‘You may all,’ Will said, getting up, ‘comfort your deuteronomies with your right index leviticus. I go now.’
‘It is jealousy,’ Ben said when he had gone. ‘He has no part in the holy work.’
Will rode to Stratford nevertheless with three or four psalms in galley proof in his saddlebag, a gift from Ben Jonson. He was to see what he could do with them; to Ben they seemed not to offer matter for further poeticization. But for Will there would be much non-writing work in Stratford, save for the engrossing of signatures. The hundred and twenty acres bought from the Coombes which Gilbert was managing ill: these must be worked well. Gardeners needed for gardens and orchards. The tithes in Old Stratford and Welcombe and Bishopston. He, Will, was now a lay rector, a front-pew gentleman. Thomas Greene, the town clerk, together with his bitch of a wife and the two beefy squallers named Grayston and Hamnet, Gray and Ham, should be out of New Place by now, the lease up on Lady Day, 1610, this year. Forty-six years of age. Four and six make ten. One of the psalms in his saddlebag was number 46.
New Place, when he got there, was bright as a rubbed angel, Anne his wife and Judith his daughter yet unmarried having nought much to do save buff and sweep and pick up hairs from the floor. The mulberry tree was doing well. Anne was fifty-four now and looked it. Ben was right: his home was a place for dreaming of going back to; he would be back in London before the month was up, nothing more certain. On his second day home a murmuration of blacksuited Puritans infested his living room. Anne gave them ale and seedcake. They had a session of disnoding a knotty dull point of scripture, something to do with Elijah or some other hairy unwiped prophet. When they came out of the living room to find Will poking for wood-worm at a timber in the hall, they sourly nodded at him as if to begrudge his being in his own house. The following day they came again for a prayer meeting. He spoke mildly to Anne about this black or Brownist intrusion.
‘While I am here,’ he said, ‘I will not have it. Tell them that, tell them I will not have it.’
‘They are godly,’ she said, ‘and a blessing on the house.’
‘I can do without their blessing. Besides, their aliger faces show no warmth of blessing.’
‘They know what you are.’
‘I am a gentleman with an escutcheon. I am, moreover, one of the King’s servants. I am, I do not deny, also a player and a playmaker, but that was the step to being a gentleman. Will they begrudge me my ambition?’
‘Plays are ungodly, as is known. They will have no plays in this town. Nor will it avail you aught to flaunt your king’s livery in their faces. They know that kings are mortal men and subject to the will of the Lord.’
‘Genevan saints, are they? Holy republicans? What do they say of Gunpowder Plot?’
‘They said that it showed at least a king might be punished for his sins by an action of the people, though to put down the Scarlet Woman of Rome is no sin and the voice of a papist is no part of the voice of the people.’
‘God help us, Christ give us all patience.’
‘You blaspheme, you see, you are in need of the power of prayer.’
‘I am in need of nothing, woman, save a quiet life after a feverish one. I would have some seedcake with my ale.’
‘There is no crumb left and there has been no time for baking.’
‘If you must give up your hussif’s duties in the name of dubious godliness, at least there is an idle daughter who could set to and bake.’
‘Judith hath a green melancholy on her. It is a sad life for the girl. None asks for her hand.’
‘Ah, they cannot stomach to have a player as a father-in-law. Well, at least Jack Hall takes me as I am. Jack is a poor physician but a good son-in-law and husband and father. Susannah, thank God, has done well.’
Susannah came next afternoon, with her husband Dr Hall and little two-year-old Elizabeth. Will played happily with the child and sang, in a cracked baritone, ‘Where the Bee Sucks’. Anne said with suspicion:
‘Is that from a play?’
‘Not yet. The play that it is to be in is not yet writ, but it will be, fear not.’
‘I fear not anything,’ Anne said, ‘save the Lord’s displeasure.’ She called to Judi
th to bring in ale and seedcake. Seeing married Susannah and the child now drowsy on her lap, Judith let out a howl of frustration and left. Anne said:
‘It is the father’s office to seek a husband for a daughter. Judith is ripe and over-ripe.’
‘So ripeness is not after all all,’ Will sighed. ‘I will go seek in the taverns and hedgerows, crying Who will wed a player’s brat?’ He turned to Jack Hall, whose lips were pursed, and said, ‘Will you come stroll a little in the garden?’
Jack said, after a strolling silence, ‘Your book has been read here, you may know that.’
‘What book?’
‘The book that is called Sonnets.’
‘But God, man, that is old stuff, it came out all of a year ago, and I have disclaimed the book, I did not publish it, it is pirate work. What do they say that read it, not that I care, does it confirm them in their conviction of Black Will Shakebag’s damnation?’
‘It is a book of things that a man might do in London,’ Jack Hall said gloomily. ‘It is pity that Dick Field brought home a copy.’
‘Ah, poor corrupted Stratford. So you too join the headwaggers?’
‘There is such a thing as propriety. Dick Field has been long a London man like yourself, father-in-law, but he has ever shown propriety. He hath printed foul stuff enow in his trade of printing, but he hath not the filthy ink of printed scandal sticking to him. You will, I trust, forgive the observation of one who is, besides your daughter’s husband, a professional man and also your physical adviser.’
‘Dick Field is a man tied to a cold craft, not one like me who has had to make himself a motley to the view and unload his naked soul to the world.’ Then he said, ‘What has being my physical adviser to do with the book that is called Sonnets?’
The Complete Enderby Page 59
