Nothing Like the Sun

  FEBRUARY 14TH

  THIS IS ST VALENTINE'S DAY, twittering feast of the low-bending blessing bird-bishop. Tawny bird with white bird on couch close-lying. Ah God, what fluttering tweeting tricks she has already taught me, lore and crissum and alula aflame. We fly, I swear we have flown, I swear we have taken wing and soared through a ceiling that has become all jellied air and floated then among puce and auriferous nebulae. It is the glorification of the flesh, the word made flesh. She calls down strange gods with strange names: Heitsi-eibib and Gunputty and Vitzilipuztli and the four archangels surrounding the god of the Musulmans. In a fever I take to my playmaking and theatre business. I write my few lines of Richard in despair of the power of words. I force myself to a mood of hatred of her and of what we do together, making myself believe that I am brought low and soon must come to ruin. I cleave my brain, writing of England's past, a cold chronicler that sees how all this will fit the nation's present temper, and at the same time a silken Turk on a divan. Her servants leer at me, my growing thinness, the black shadows below my eyes. I ask her to come to my lodgings, it is better so. In her bedchamber (I remember that past August) I am too aware of padding feet without, fancy the locked door not truly locked or full of eyes in knotholes. She says she will come.

  FEBRUARY 25TH

  MONEY MONEY. My presents are not enough (the bolt of silk, the dress of taffetas, the mask encrusted with brilliants). WS, prospering man of affairs, gives gold. Prices are so high, she says. It is on account of the crops failing last year. What does she like best to eat? Mutton stewed tender in spices, coughing with pepper. Odi et amo. Her smell, rank and sweet, repels my sense and drives me to madness. (And all the time poor Richard jogs on toward his foul death. Roan Barbary I have called her: that horse that thou so often hast bestrid, that horse that I so carefully have dressed. Then I see the twoness. She harps still on Burbage, a proper man. Well, that Bolingbroke shall never ride her.)

  MARCH 4TH

  LYING ON, IN, UNDER HER, I pore with squinnying eyes on a mole on that browngold rivercolour riverripple skin with its smell of sun, or else a tiny unsqueezed comedo by the flat and splaying nose. Her breath was sour today, too many squares of powdered marchpane. She did not want but, chewing the honey almond stuff still, all careless of my madness, she careless let me do. Then I hate, then I would strike her down to grovel like a bitch on her belly. She poutsays I must take her to fine places, go to feast as others do. But I am jealous; not even to the Theatre am I willing that she come, though masked and curtained from men's viewing. I question the wisdom of her coming now to my lodgings, though mobled up in her coach, her coach to return for her in two hours. Shall we set up house together, this lodging being small? She will keep her own house, she says, she would be free. I have not talked of my wife and children, nor she ever of marriage.

  MARCH 15TH

  I HEAR NEWS from Court that H plays no longer about among the Queen's flowers, that he, in his great man's new-found maturity, himself now tweaks the pink peach-cheeks of a lovely boy. Ah, how love, in all herhis manifold guises, doth take hold on us and squeeze us of our pride and lustihead. I am besotted with her, would eat her like a butter lamb. I tell her of my near friend's pederastia, thinking it may make her mirth, but she says men go only so an they lack a powerful woman to keep them to the proper way God ordained. She tells me Tales of the Wise Parrot, which she writes down in her language Hikayat Bayan Budiman, wherein serpents bite the toes of great princesses and are left as dead till some magical prince cometh to kiss them alive again. And then she asks a piece of gold for telling of the stories.

  APRIL 20TH

  SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S Defence of Poesy is out at last as a printed book. Well, we have done better than Gorboduc in the years since he penned it. He would have right tragedies and right comedies and delightful teaching &c. Yet if we are to hold a mirror to nature (I thank thee, nasty Chapman, for that phrase) we must see all in one. Thus, gibbering in my nakedness and approaching her with my cock-crowing yard, I see I am a clown, I see I am also a great king that will possess a golden kingdom. Tragedy is a goat and comedy a village Priapus and dying is the word that links both. Cut your great king's head off and thrust him in the earth that new life may spring.

  MAY 1ST

  WE WERE TOGETHER, she and I, in my bedchamber, she but newly arrived in a sort of hunting costume with feathered hat, then who should enter but H, whom I have but heard of these many weeks and hardly seen for any length of time since my few minutes of slobbering gratitude over the PS1000. She drinks him in, I see that, this striding-about-the-chamber lord with his ringflashing hands beating time to his loudly elegant eloquence of that and this and what Lady Such-and-such said and what His Grace observeth of the evil times and the approach of HM's grand climacteric. He is full of French -- bon and quelquechose and jenesaisquoi -- so that she listens to him in wonder. He then, as she were a Bart Fair show like a pigheaded child, praises her strangeness, her colour, her littleness. Oh bring her over, he says, we must exhibit her, my friends will be much taken. And all the time she quaffs him and, when he is gone, will not do what she is rightly come to do (or have done) but talks of his clothes and his deadgold swordhilt and his quicksilver words, Mercurio. He is gone now for his plump prostitute boy, I roughly tell her. Oh, dat believe I not, she answers, he is much a gentleman for de ladies; dat see I bwery clear.

  MAY 10TH

  IN FAIR SPRING WEATHER he comes to say how faithless lovely boys can be. This one (Pip he calls him) that had all his heart has treacherously gone over to my lord T, drawn by some pretty bauble. But, I tell him, loving is all fear: from loving to losing is but the change of a letter.

  --Aye, with women too, he says. Merrylegs all. Your own doxy is only a unicorn for her colour.

  --Meaning? (A great fear blew in upon me).

  --We in Europe cannot govern what a woman shall do, any more than a boy. The Grand Turk locks her up in his seraglio, eunuchs armfolding portily before the portal. We cannot.

  --Your particular meaning?

  --I thought I saw your Dick Burbage in a carriage with her. She cannot wash off that colour. Veiled, but a brown arm taking a posy from a flowerseller.

  --This is a trick to make me jealous and angry. (I have de flowers on me; I cannot see dee today den.)

  --Is she your wife? Have you claims on her?

  --I give the false bitch money.

  --My money that would be, in a manner. Well. But there is no signing of any indenture.

  MAY 11TH

  TO HER TO RAIL, BEAT, NEAR-KILL. She screams, her wrists cracking in my gripe, that she has done naught wrong but she will do wrong an she wishes. I rip at her bodice, tear, wrench, gnash, chew. Her maid, fearful for her mistress's safety, batters the locked door but I shriek terrible curses and she departs going oh oh, fearful for the safety of herself. The transports I now enter are a burning hell of pleasure. If before we have soared and flown, now we burrow, eyes and noseholes and snoring mouths filled with earth and worms and scurrying atomies, all of which are transformed to a heavy though melting jelly of pounded red flesh mixed with wine. We dig with pioneering wings down towards the fire that is the whole earth's centre, nub, coynt, meaning. At the seventh approach to dying, my loins scraped raw, she sinking to a howling sweat-gleaming browngold phantom, I fancy that the ceiling opens as by some quaint shutter-device to reveal a pearl intaglio heaven, watching, bright-eyed like a pack of foxes, God the Father beard-stroking (party-beard), saints with uncouth names like devils all about -- St Anguish, St Cithegrande, St Ishak, St Rosario, St Kinipple, St Pogue, plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne. Leaping around the bed is a cherub-demon that is Mr WH, crying do this and that and more, I would learn, I would be shown. I show him. And after, in a cold and rainy May evening, I sit in mine own lodgings feeling truly in a wretched dim hell of mine own making, spent, used, shameless, shameful.

  MAY 14TH

  THIS AFTERNOON I must to act. It is but the part of Antonio in The Two Gentleme
n. Speaking to Proteus I say:

  Muse not that I thus suddenly proceed;

  For what I will, I will, and there an end.

  I am resolv'd that thou shalt spend some time

  With Valentinus in the Emperor's court.

  And Proteus, my son, that is Dick Burbage, stands grinning there. I would shout at him: Tell me, tell me whether it be true. Here is the platform of truth and nakedness, I will have none of thy lying. Wert thou with her or no? And so I forgot the line following and must be prompted by the bookholder. Then my shame near makes me shiver with an ague. I look out on grinning faces among the groundlings -- few, very few, they like not this play well -- and up at the wooden heavens and back at the curtained study and think perhaps I am dead and already a ghost. Then I think I hear whispering and laughter from a sidebox: it is she, it is she with another. This will not do, it cannot be supported, I must purge her out. But I know I may not.

  MAY 20TH

  WELL, THERE IS no way out, for I must obey my lord and ring-giver. She has been leaping and cavorting and high lavoltaing these last days with the knowledge of what she sees as her entrance into the great world now coming in a trumpet-and-banner and livery-glittering barge-feast, Harry and his friends and their ladies (ah, they have learnt; I taught them; LLL was Learn Learn Learn) swan-sailing Greenwichwards with the kites soaring over in the unblemished May heavens. And so it is. Poor Will very sober-suited but she in a sort of flame-satin stepping aboard. Oh, Lord P and Sir Ned T and the Earl of K are much taken, the rose-and-cream ladies envious and shifting their best malice at this russet innocent from the land of four-footed men and women with their things cut at a strange slant. They mock her dis and dat and de udder ting, but she is brownly cool while they sweat. The lords surround her, bringing her slices of goose-breast in sharp sauce, veal-shape, a flawn on a silver dish. To H she flashes black eyes and teeth like serried snow-gems; his eye burns, drawn to, transfixed in, her brown bosom. I see his long fingers, all crusted fire, scratch at their palm. I see the two of them, in my fever, lying together, lordly silver moving in kingly measure upon queenly gold. He has not forgotten Willobie and his Avisa, the Islington trick; he knows he is at liberty any time to buy something with his thousand pound. Day's end in torchlight, the rowers' slower strokes, cob and pen and cygnets a preen or a sleep of silver, the kites no longer disfiguring the empurpled May heavens. The madrigalists sing of a silver swan, each voice married in perfection to a correspondent viol in a consort of viols. It is she has put hand in his.

  MAY 25TH

  AND YET THE STRANGENESS is that they may feed both my hungers best by showing those hungers so clearly separate and apart. For soul and body can never be fed together for all our pretence of the unity of love. For love is one word but many things; love is a unity only in the word. With her I can find the beast's heaven which is the angel's hell; with him, the body's hunger now able to be set aside, there is that most desirable of sorts of love, that which Plato did hymn. And then the devil within me says: Yet thou dost admire his beauty of form, it is an impure love. I dream of our somehow gravely dancing a pavane or sarabande, all three, in whose movement the reconciling of the beast and the angel may, in myself, be accomplished. I would, in some manner, wish to share her with him, him with her, but perhaps only a poet may think in these high terms, not understandable of either the soul (giver) or body (taker). And so I wait to be told that I lose both a mistress and a friend.

  MAY 30TH

  HE WILL HAVE HER, he says, for her newness, for her unicornity. He asks not; he doth take. She is ready to be taken. Take too, I say, what I have writ for her, by her unread. Add them to the odorous fellowship of that spicy chest. Take this sonnet also, of the perils of lust (hark to the dog's panting: had, having, and in quest to have). I am aware of a manner of glee in all this, the glee of the wronged man; it is a sort of cuckolding. The trick is to be glad and noble and to smile; better far, it is to wish this loss and conceive it as the child of mine own will. He will tire of her, and I must force in myself a willingness to take her back. And then I see myself as ageing, bald, rheumy, three teeth but newly drawn, a man who should think it foul shame to drivel and froth so in youth's lust. And more than mine ageing I catch a picture in sun and dust of the squalor whereto I, and all men in me, am condemned by reason of time and flesh and indolence: a louse I but now caught in the grey hairs of my chest, the Fleet's stink, a boil on my thigh, the wretched mound of rotting shit that lies to fester in the sun, the diseases that heave and bubble in pustular quietness all over the city and the world. It is time then to rise all above the body and live in a making soul.

  JUNE 2ND

  MY LOVE, my love. I dream I see them pointing and laughing at poor Will the creaking player. Play thou all old men, for that is most suited to thee. I dream of an old man cast off, owing a thousand pound, by a youthful prince that but played with him. Have I not great expectations, my lord? Aye, expect me to come and take thy black doxy away from thee.

  JUNE 5TH

  I SEE IN THE CITY RIOTS the riot in mine own soul configured. I have walked by the brawlers with staves. It is but a matter of the price of merchandise and they glow in a ferment of high principle and the shaking of souls. Teeth are broken and young bones sorely belaboured.

  JUNE 13TH

  THE PRENTICES handle the buttersellers roughly for that they sell their butter at 2d the lb too much. The whole city grows harsh and unlovely over this business. Jack has kicked in the head of Tom and left him to lie in street-filth, I found what appeared to be bloody brains staining the stones by Billingsgate, an old woman, torn and limping, went groaning home, her butterbasket abandoned. The Knight Marshal's Men are in their element, they have run a blubbery young prentice through with their swords, five sword-thrusts for one poor boy's body. Dead are A. Orme, H. Nininger, T. Neale, C. Knickerbocker, L. Gann, R. Garlick, C. Fox, C. Cousland, Ed. Crabb, G. Brace, Will Biggs, J. Seymour, M. Sewell, N. Wishart, Martin Winsett and others. Torched prentices street-marching by night, cracking glass, crying for the blood now of Jew tailors, equivocators, Dansker beershopmen, Flemish weavers, for aught I know W. Shakespeare. Ah yes, and in Clerkenwell they have beaten the negro trulls, stripping one and scrubbing her to clean off her black before using her foully. She at least, she she will be safe in Holborn or wherever he has removed her for his secret pleasure. There will be martial law soon. They have arrested five prentices and there is talk of hanging and quartering them on the scene where riot first started. All this is for 2d a lb on butter. Well, what was the agitation in the city of mine own soul but that? A finger-dip into butter-smooth pleasure and the armies and rioters trample through my veins, crying Kill kill.

  Buttered blood, the town is spread with it. And now the price has risen to 7d a lb, which is 4d above what is usual. Eggs will not be thrown now, as they are 1d.

  JUNE 26TH

  IT WAS TO BE EXPECTED, though there have been few enough brawling prentices at the Theatre. The playhouses are today closed by the Council's order. The term is two months, which brings us to plague weather, the gentry and nobility out of town, the mobled Queen (she is aware, for all her mirrors dim or painted with the reflection of a face twenty years gone, of her broken teeth) on progress. Shall I go home or not?

  I can hardly move, sick not in my body but only in my soul, centre of my sinful earth. I lie on my unmade bed listening to time's ruin, threats of Antichrist, new galleons on the sea, the Queen's grand climacteric, portents in the heavens, a horse eating its foal, ghosts gliding as on a buttered pavement. Were I some great prince I could lie thus for ever, my body washed for me, a little sustenance brought, cut off from the need to act. But there are plays to be written, images of order and beauty to be coaxed out of wrack, filth, sin, chaos. I take my pen, sighing, and sit to my work. But work I cannot.

  VII

  (Preached, ladies and gentlemen -- softe let me drinke before I go anie further -- in the dark church of SS Somnus and Oneiros any night before his mos
t despicable Lowness.)

  THAT LUST AND FILTHY FORNICATION and sodomy and buggery roam this realm, beating their lewd wings and raising a coughing and stinking and blinding dust to lead reason astray, you may be well assured, aware too of God's wrath in the dread portents of the times. Is not a new Antichrist Armada bristling about our shores? Yet will men not see their fault. Is there not fresh dissension between the French and the English? Yet will men not see their fault. Is not the Queen's Majesty entered a good way into the climacterical year of her age, seven by nine which is sixty-three and the grand climacteric when, as my lord Bishop of St David's saith, the senses begin to fail, the strength to diminish, yea, all the powers of the body daily to decay? Yet will men not see how little time there is to repent of their fault.

  You may take one man's sinfulness to be the type and pattern of all. There he lieth, tossing in the guilt of his lewdness, the primal lecher, neglectful of his duties to a fair wife but all too ready to plunge his sizzling steel into the slaking black mud of a base Indian. Well, he hath lost her now; there is leisure left for penitence, but penitence may be all too late, for if the occasion of that sin were to return would he shun it? He would not. There are examples enough of other poets and players who sought, when their powers failed for the enactment of sin, to whine to Almighty God of their deep and profound repentance. Yet call time back and they would be staggering anew in their drunkenness and grunting in beastly thrusting at their ragg'd and spotted drabs. There was dirty Greene and Godless Merlin or Marlin (no matter what his name; it is burnt with his atheistical writings and consumed in eternal fiery nothingness). I have news for thee, snorer. There is one, a God-fearing true Christian named F. Lawson Gent., who has been vouchsafed, by God's holy grace, a vision of these poets screaming in hell, the which he has set down in a treatise called A Watchword against Wickedness and the Lewd Trumperies of Poetified Sneerers, wherein he recounteth the horror of their deathless punishment in hellfire (as seen by him in his vision), a burning stinking brewis of venomed maggots and toothed worms that do gnaw to the very pia mater. Thou dost well to stir and sweat in thine unwholesome sleep.