Nothing Like the Sun

  God is almighty and all-just. Yet, in his all-mercifulness, he will oft chastise and castigate and chasten the sinner in this life as a warning of what is to come if he leave not off. This poor play thou writest of King John -- it is no more than a quincunx of botched nonsense, creaking stuff. Account that to thy sin. Are not the personages therein still-born, ditch-delivered by a drab of a whining muse, even the Bastard a roaring emptiness of meaningless rant? Are not thy best lines, such as they are, filched from pamphleteers that write on the present troubles? 'Naught shall make us rue, if England to itself do rest but true.' Has not Master Covell written: 'England cannot perish but by Englishmen'? Did not C.G. of Cambridge say: 'If we be true within ourselves, we need not care or fear the enemy'? A manner of thieving. From one sin many may come.

  Thou didst flaunt thy pride in the possession of a noble patron and companion. 'To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed' (oh, vile!) 'Such seems your beauty still.' What response to that? None. He is gone to Dover with my lord Essex that they may take Calais, though Her Majesty will send him flea-eared courtward again. But, in any event, he says thou art as he formerly thought, namely an upstart, vulgar and over-familiar. Thou covetest thine old place as His Own Poet, but there be others now who are in his affections. Thou enviest Master Chapman his special new nearness to his lordship, as also his Blind Beggar of Alexandria at the Rose, taking the town by storm, this being accounted by many to be far better than aught WS can do. (Never fear, thou wilt steal for Dick Burbage what Ned Alleyn doth so well.) Anger comes. Good, tear thy bedsheets, throw thy water-jug out the window, rail at the little boy who brings thy penny dinner and halfpenny bread from the ordinary. And then slop into it, eating fast and beastly, sending out for more, fancying goose-breast richly sauced baked in a fat coffin of brown and flaky paste, herrings pickled in spicy eisel, a cheesy flawn with cloves and borage, nut-and-honey cake topped with cinnamon cream. Ugh, glutton. Then to thy bed, belching in sloth, to lie there, paper unwritten on save by random sprawling greasy greedy fingers, ale-drop jottings, dust settling on the pile. Aye, lie, conjuring images of lost Her, in postures of abandon before thee, moaning in nasty lust.

  Let England die. Let the Spaniards come to ravish our wives and daughters, egged on thereto by the traitorous French (Papists all). Thou hast done thine own poor duty in a dull pro-patria play. Let Master Doleman write his book about the next Succession to the Crown of England, dedicating it foolishly to my lord of Essex, loosing rumbling grumblings and privy fears. Thou dost snore. The men are pressed to march coastward against the threat of invasion. Thou dost snore. Calais is feared lost and the levies are dismissed. Thou dost snore. The bells clang in a glorious Easter Day, the churches are locked on the communicants that they may be pressed once more for Doverward shogging. Thou didst and dost snore. Wretch, cause of a country's decay. 'The imminent decay of wrested pomp' (stolen from Chapman).

  Wake to a great shaking.

  SO WAS IT. WS blinked back to the painful world on a hot morning, openmouthed at the strong mid-morning sunray infested with motes, wondering who this shaker could be. His mouth was sour, his head ached. On the table by his bed lay the greasy remains of his supper. He wished to retch. First, though, this shaker must be identified. He recognised the hand, stubby, ingrained with ink, a dyer's hand, a printer's hand. It was Dick Field's face that looked down on him, gravely urgent. But Dick Field was in Stratford, entrusted with money for Anne, a letter, presents for----

  'Yes,' said WS. 'Yes yes.' He smelt, he knew, rancid, sitting up now in a dirty shirt, rubbing his creased face awake.

  'Can you understand me? I am come back early at their request, at your wife's request I would say. It is the boy. There is a letter.' WS took the folded note, opened it unhandily, squinted against the mote-loaded shaft of sun, reading:

  '... He has been given what are called apozemes and electuaries but naught seems to shift it. He vomits all up that he takes and grows very thin. In his sleep sometimes he screams of devils. He talks of his father that he has not seen for so long ...'

  'Yes yes, I see,' said WS stupidly, sitting up in bed, reading and re-reading the trembling letter. It was, in its coldness and sheer fact, like the letter of some very distant relative. 'It has not been possible to go. I have sent money home. I thank you for taking the money. You saw the boy?'

  'He cannot eat. They say it is a fever out of Spain.'

  'I will be too late, will I not? He will be dead, will he?'

  Field, in his rider's cloak and boots, looked sweating and awkward standing there. But suddenly he cried out: 'It is your own son, man. Your own flesh and blood.'

  'Aye,' said WS, still in bed, scratching his baldness, examining the furfur in his fingernails. 'You have always said that a man should live with his wife and family. I had my plan of retiring to Stratford, a justice of the peace, a fair house, a competence.'

  'You seem not to understand,' said Field, sweating more. 'This is your son Hamnet. Dying.'

  'Hamnet.' It was the name that cut suddenly through the drug of sleep and indolence. 'My son.' The building for the future, the making of a gentleman that should come into his estates, range his deer-park, be dubbed knight. 'Sir Hamnet Shakespeare,' said WS. 'A proud name. He will talk of his father, who had built his fortune for him in the playhouse. Well, it is no more ignoble than the printer's trade. Would you not say so?'

  'Where,' said Field, 'are your riding boots? You must take horse at once. The roads are full of soldiers. The expedition from Cadiz is coming back.'

  'Cadiz. In Spain. And you say it is called a Spanish fever?' Then the news thrust properly in, burst the membrana, and flooded its meaning through him. 'Oh, God,' he said. And he was out of bed, clumsily searching his chamber for clean linen, moaning in double pain.

  'It is not for me to say,' said Field primly. 'I have often thought that---- It is full of distractions, London.'

  'I thank you, I thank you. A man should be with his family, you have said so already.' He saw himself in the small mirror, ill, old, dirty. He splashed himself in stale cold water, towelling himself till he was covered with bee-stings. It might be good for him, he thought, a swift ride through country summer.

  'I mean no harm,' said Field. 'For people of our kind there are things that can do little good. We are, so to say, in the suburbs of that world, we can never go into the centre. They have but newly read your Venus poem in Stratford, at least your father has. I was constrained to agree with him that it is----'

  'That it is not the poem that a Stratford glover should write. Nor a Stratford printer print. It is altogether too pagan, it is not a dirge of Brownist godliness.' WS was fumbling himself into his jerkin. 'So a good Stratford tradesman is corrupted by wicked London and his son starts to die.'

  'Oh, your father is no longer inclined that way,' said Field. 'He talks now of saints and candles. As for your mother, she will not look at your poems, nor will your wife. They are become great readers of tracts.' WS stared at him. 'Very ill-printed. But it is not perhaps stuff that good printers would wish to print.'

  WS grinned wearily. 'Poor Dick Field. We are all caught, are we not, between two worlds? Our sin and our sickness is not to choose one and turn our backs on the other but to hanker after both. Well, I am ready.'

  'I hope that a miracle may have happened by the time you arrive. They are praying every hour.'

  'Some to a God of tracts, others to a God of candles. And I cannot pray to either.'

  It was difficult riding out of London, what with discharged soldiers drinking in the streets, their doxies clinging to them, all, in their victory revelry, unwilling that any should pass through on his own business. The slobbering and shouting heroes, unbuttoned for the intense heat, invited gentlemen to dismount and quaff from this spilling tankard, see, come, let us drink to the Queen and to the final ruination of King Pip and all his saints and candles. They clawed at flanks and harness; some fell in their drunkenness and were n
ear trampled; some were whipped out of the way. The captains were little more decorous than the men, swaggering and singing, stroking their great Essex beards. Well, it was news worth celebrating: Cadiz surrendered; the Spanish fleet burnt, save for two galleons brought home; a heavy ransom taken. The impending death of a boy in Stratford meant nothing, his cries were muffled by the clanging of the Te Deum bells.

  As he rode north-west he remembered that former accession of insight (that time he had been riding back, not to) into the meaning and horror of fatherhood, the responsibility too great for any to bear. Eleven years old, that boy was dying now. Into what was he dying? Either into fire (for it was certain that God, if God existed, was unjust) or nothingness, and the road to both a road of pain. Better not to have been born, better not to bring to birth. Out of the gush of water came fire that could not be tamed to humble, sufficient processes; a thrust of opal drops in animal ecstasy unleashed a universe -- stars, sun, gods, hell and all. It was unjust, and yet a man was condemned to the injustice.

  But what he had somehow dimly previsioned in his son was the poem he himself could not make with words. He saw a young man, handsome, rich-suited, languid on horseback, falcon on fist, living out his own life surrounded by parkland. He would not marry, knowing that no woman could be trusted; he had once given his heart, though in the full knowledge that it would be belted into the rough like an old tennis-ball; he had recovered in gentle melancholy, his speech was full of sharp sad wit against the sex. He drank his wine in moderation, both pale hands (a single great opal on the left) about the dull-glowing goblet, talking with dim-faced friends, none of whom he trusted, about philosophy, half-lying and half-sitting in his throne-chair, loosely graceful. In him was fulfilled the true human aim of stoic awareness. Caught between the past and the future, he had no faith in either. He could not act, but he had no need to act: no violent assumption of commitment could ever come to disturb his sad calm. He read Montaigne after feeding his peafowls; he read Seneca in his bedchamber of an autumn night with the owls mousing; the intrigues of Machiavel or pseudo-Machiavel belonged to a world transmuted by art to a pearled emblem of all he rejected. This was a son who himself would be no father. But what of the name and its transmission to the far future?

  He then saw that he was willing into this image his own desire for a sort of sterility. The son was the father. What, in a sense, he had also been willing was that son-father's annihilation. This death was something that he, not fever, was encompassing. As for the perpetuation of a name, it seemed to lie elsewhere. Nor was it really the name that was important; it was the blood, it was the spirit. But he did not yet fully understand. By Maidenhead it burst out of him, the fabulous agonised cry of all bereaved fathers. But he could not pray that his son be spared; he could only pray that whatever hellfire, awarded by an unjust God, awaited that boy after death, he himself should embrace it on his son's behalf. If he could not die for his son, let him at least be doubly damned for him. He rode on hopelessly. At Oxford he went down for two days with a fever of his own. The hostess of the Crown in the Cornmarket nursed him well. By the time he reached Stratford the other fever had been resolved.

  HE sat with his father in the garden behind the house on Henley Street. It was glorious August weather. The pot of small ale in his hands were mantled with sun-warmed yeast-flowers. That sun that mantled the body in a pleasant light sweat, cooling deliciously as a breeze whispered, had played like a consort of jolly brass as the small coffin had gone under. The summer world had sung about the coldness of the church, the dull drone about ashes to ashes, the weeping family. It was a family to which he seemed not admitted, from which his own dry eyes alienated him. He had stood on the outer ring at the graveside, a cold London man in a fine cloak. The elder of the gravediggers had whistled between his teeth distractedly, then remembered himself, then darted an embarrassed smirk and a droll roll of eyes at the cloaked gentleman. And so earth took that poor boy. What could earth not take? He had shown, at the age of eleven, little promise of special distinction -- neither a lust for books nor a precise knowledge of birds and herbs, no mad quickness of thought expressed in boy's mean and ragged language; a tall boy tending to thinness, in face not unlike his uncle Gilbert. He had liked to spend his after-school time with his uncle Gilbert, hearing simple scriptural tales while the patient glover's hands worked away. He had seemed not to like his uncle Richard. His sisters had sometimes petted him, more often scolded, in the manner of girls.

  'They are two good girls,' said John Shakespeare, nodding. 'A help to their mother and grandmother. They will be good wives.' Good girls, thought WS, good wives. I have begotten good stodgy children. Yet Susanna was fair enough at thirteen, a young country beauty. Soon, his heart sank to think it, she would be enticed to cornfields to beguile the dullness of a country spring. Yet what could a father do, especially a father away? 'It is a comfort to have daughters,' said John Shakespeare.

  'Can you say that?' grinned WS. 'I always felt that you saw your children as somewhat of a burden.'

  'Oh, when a man is young,' said his father vaguely. 'I grow old now. It is good to have them all about me. You will be of the same mind when the time comes for you to settle.' He waited for his son to say something. 'Have you thought,' he asked at length, 'of settling?'

  'Of making a beginning,' said WS. 'I have spoken with Rogers about my buying New Place.'

  'New Place!' The old man's apple cheeks rushed, in a flash, through a whole autumn's ripening. New Place -- the hub and core and flag and very emblem of Stratford gentility.

  'A house for my wife and children.' WS thought an instant. 'Wife and daughters,' he emended. 'They have crowded you here a long time. For myself, it may yet be a long time before I can leave the stage.'

  'Leave it as soon as you can,' said his father with gentle force. 'I do not think it can do a man much good. And now Ned talks of joining the players. He is more like you than any of them, though he cannot write sonnets and poems about naked goddesses. He says he will act, and I say one actor is enough in the family.'

  'An actor who thinks of buying New Place,' said WS. 'Edmund could do worse.'

  'Aye, I see about the New Place. A house of women, though; a strange house. Of course,' said John Shakespeare, 'it is not too late to beget another son. Anne is not old. Edmund himself was born very late. I have been lucky with sons, myself, but my sons seem loath to give me grandsons. Gilbert will never marry.' He shook his head in some sadness. 'There have been people saying he has a devil in him because of the falling sickness. You can see that women will hardly look at him, poor boy. And Dickon is strange, he does strange things. I have begotten a strange set of sons.'

  'What strange things does Dickon do?'

  'Oh, he goes away for whole days, sometimes two or three, once a full week, and comes back with money. He will never say how he got the money, only that it was fairly earned. But he was seen one day in Worcester.'

  'Doing what?'

  'He was with some old tottering woman, walking through the rain. It was not clear what he was doing. One thing is certain, and it is that he cares naught for marrying. He is a well set-up boy, save for this one leg somewhat shorter than the other, and there are a many wenches that would be glad of such a husband. But he will have none of them. Nor will he aught of the trade here. He is strange, going his own way. But his heart can be very soft, for those last days of poor Hamnet's sickness he was a comfort to your Anne.'

  'Yes?'

  'Oh, he was ever ready to weep with her and comfort with kind words. And she was much withdrawn in spirit and would speak to none. But Dickon wept with her in her sadness.'

  'And I suppose,' said WS slowly, 'he said it was a great misfortune for her that her husband should be away.'

  'Oh, he knows how husbands must be away to earn money. But she is glad to have you here now. Her lord and master is home, and that is a woman's best comfort.'

  GLAD? Comfort? They lay together in that old bed from Shottery, the hot summe
r nights recalling others. It was always said, he remembered, that with the death of a son a light goes out between wife and husband. They lay on their backs, sweating, thinking their thoughts, so silent that each might well think the other asleep. At length he said, this night, 'What is it best we do? Will you come to London and bring the girls and we will set up house there?' He saw it, saying it: Master Shakespeare the citizen, with Mistress Shakespeare and two daughters, renting some decent house in Shoreditch or Finsbury; no more friendship with noble lords, no more furious writing midnights, no more freedom, no more---- He pulled a shutter down swiftly. He would relapse into a dull fat tradesman of botched plays. What would the gentlemen of the Inns say? Ah, hast seen his Juliet? His Adriana thou wouldst say, his Katherina. 'Will you stay here? By next year we shall have New Place.'

  'You wish it so. You have your own life there. Master Field spoke to your brother----'

  'Dickon.'

  'Aye, Richard.'

  'And what has he told you?'

  'What all talk of, he says, in London. I would not live there to be laughed at.'

  'So you believe all some prentice printer tells you?' He tried to gulp that back. 'Whatever it is, for I know not what. Belike what is always said by the vicious about poets and players, ever since Robin Greene died and Kit Marlowe was killed.'

  'I know not those names.'

  'Oh, according to the scandal-tattlers we are all atheists and drunkards and wenchers and we throw our money away on evil living. I ask you, would such an one be able to send home what I send and to talk now of buying New Place?'

  'I know not what money you earn. I know that you are seen smiling in silk with your fine friends. And I know that -- ah, 'tis no matter. Let me sleep. God knows I have had little enough sleep lately.'