'I must know this,' said WS. 'What happened?'
Harry yawned. 'That wind blowing in makes me sleepy.' WS did not get up from the chair where he was sitting to close the window. 'Oh well, I see you are concerned. That I did not expect. I have heard all sorts of tales about her since, chiefly that her house and coach and servants were all paid for in Spanish gold and that her aim was to reach me through you----'
'I did all the wooing there.'
'Wait. And to reach Robin Devereux through myself and slay him. And even to slay other great ministers of state and then, when apprehended, plead her belly.'
'Oh, that is all nonsense.'
'There is a lot of nonsense talked these days, all, I would say, put about by the Spanish themselves -- spies and equivocators, sent hither to cause confusion. She was really a harmless enough little drab, though black. She was in debt for her rent and for the payment of her servants.' He grinned ruefully. 'That, you would say, will perhaps teach me a lesson for the stealing of a friend's mistress. You can understand that I felt very bitter towards you.'
'You still have not said----'
'I sent her to Cowdray to have her bastard. Oh, I am not all unkindness. I have been known to be generous.'
'I know, I know. And then?'
Harry shrugged. 'Well, there were other things. There was the triviality of a war with the Spaniards and His Eminence in Calais, for example. She has just passed out of everybody's life. I sometimes ask myself whether I dreamt it all. And then I remember that smooth brown body very well and the rising hillock that rose yet higher day by day. Oh, let us call her part of our sickness. Let us also call for some wine. I swear I am cured now.'
But there was no wine. The trio of physicians, grave antithesis to Wein, Weib and Gesang, came to the ringing of Harry's bedside bell. WS might come in a day or two again, but he must not excite the patient as he seemed to have done this time. And, see, he had let in light and air. 'I know,' said WS, watching servants scurry in to restore fug and gloom. 'Light and air are great enemies.'
WITH the sharpening of the air and the coming of the festivals of light there was the restoration, through the sweet languor of convalescence, of the old friendship. Yet could it ever be truly recaptured, the former primaveral joy? Here was no longer a boy's body, but the weak one of a man who had ailed with a man's sickness; the free boy's spirit had changed to the crafty, seeking, politic soul, tending to meanness and spite, that Essex was teaching men at court to endue. WS felt himself ageing, dissatisfied, life nagging like broken teeth, the gaps in his life presented to a probing tongue. Sweet-tongued, honey-tongued Master Shakespeare. Well, that final act in Belmont moonlight (a real moon pressed as an involuntary actor, though unable to disguise the wintriness of its shining down on the doomed Theatre) deserved the praise and commendation it got, though no laudator's eloquence could touch the eloquence it lauded. They thought this out-topped all, but what could they know? Only he himself knew what might be done if the words and craft could descend in a sort of pentecostal dispensation of grace. He saw dimly, a vision lay coyly beyond the tail of his eye. This stuff was play. There was a reality somewhere to be encompassed and, with God's grimmest irony, it might only be grasped through playing at play, thus catching reality off its guard.
The reality of life was dark; of that he was growing slowly convinced. It had more to do with evil and suffering and loss than poetry, born out of Hybla, would yet admit. A sort of masque of evil was being played out at court, but the mere fact of great seals and jostling for place, gold chains of office, the farce of worshipping as a sort of Titania a queen pock-marked, unwashed, posturing like a nymph before painted mirrors, reduced the quick scurrying nastiness to unhandily played mirthless comedy. There was this unpleasant business of Essex wishing to keep the ransoms taken at Cadiz, the Queen demanding them for her own purse, the screaming greedy old woman confronting the pouting shouting boy before ladies-in-waiting who must feign deafness. This lust for a few bits of Spanish gold grew into a faceless rage, quarrels for their own sake, the setting-up of factions. When Candlemas came round again the death of old James Burbage was much in the foreground of WS's concern, but he heard indirectly of Essex and Harry ranged, with their hangers-on, against the Cecils and the Queen herself, of the Earl of Northumberland tremblingly challenging Harry to fight matters out with steel (but what matters? What was to be gained or lost? Would there be a mouthful of bread or a spoonful of wine the less or more for anyone whatever the issue?). What made the nagging and biting the more shameful was the fact of irresolution: threats and grasping of daggers but no blood spilled in animal honesty.
The syrup of recorders and viols, the candle like a good deed in a naughty world -- they seemed out of place in this cobwebbed cellar. WS sighed to think he would always be, in some manner, unable to provide the right biting word, the shaming image, for the little evils of his own time. He stood, with Dick Burbage and his brother Cuthbert (new owners of the Blackfriars and the Theatre respectively since their father's death), to take in a sour pennyworth of Chapman's new play at the Rose. They scorned to pay good silver to a rival; they folded their arms under their cloaks and stayed near the gate, in the groundlings' place but aloof from the groundlings, to taste an act or so of A Humorous Day's Mirth -- Count Labervele and Countess Moren, both jealous of their younger spouses; Dowsecer the melancholic in his black hat. It was the times, it was London people.
'But,' said WS afterwards as they sat over cheese and ale in the Dog, 'they are not true people. They are not built out of warring elements, they are a sort of potion. Do you follow me? Human souls are not smooth mixtures like that, fixed for ever in choler or melancholy or amorousness. These creatures of Chapman's are flat, like very crude drawings. They cannot surprise either themselves or others by becoming other than what they are. Do you follow me?'
Dick Burbage happily shook his head. 'This is the new way,' he said, 'and it is rooted, so they tell me, in the teachings of the ancients. It is humours. Now I could do one of these melancholic humours very well----'
'You could do any of the humours very well, as we know. But that is just singing one air over and over and then turning to another. But a human soul is not just one repeated air, it is many. Now even Shylock has many sides -- sometimes to be pitied, sometimes laughed at, hated at other times----'
'Shylock is a dirty Jew.'
WS sighed very deeply. 'That is what the people wish to believe, they wish him to be a kind of Lopez. That is the way of satire, setting up a dirty Jew or an old cuckold or a young lecher or a fantasticated gallant. But satire is a very small part of poesy.'
'It is in the mode,' said Burbage, 'whatever you may think of it. It is a kind of comedy we must give them somehow.'
'Not my kind.'
'If Chapman can do it so can you.'
'I can make satire of their satire, no more. No less, should I say? The times change quickly. A play should be bigger than the times.'
'That is like scorning yesterday's hunger. But yesterday's hunger cannot be stilled with tomorrow's food.'
'Oh, highly epigrammatical,' smiled WS.
'Give us this day our daily bread,' prayed Burbage. 'And money to buy houses withal. Settle this matter of your house, Will, and sit down seriously with your tongue in your cheek to out-Chapman Chapman.'
'It is settled,' said WS. 'New Place is mine, the conveyance signed and all. Could Chapman buy the best house in his own native town, wherever it is? Chapman,' he added loftily, 'is very silent on his provenance.'
'His----?'
'Provenance.'
'No gentleman,' said Dick Burbage vaguely, 'though he knows much Greek.'
'Freehold?' Cuthbert Burbage asked suddenly. He had not spoken up till now. He had been gloomily tracing geometrical tropes in spilt ale on the table-top.
'New Place? Oh aye, freehold.' WS knew what was in Cuthbert's mind. He liked Cuthbert, a prim man some two years younger than himself, precise, thin of lip, steady of eye, latel
y much worried -- as they all, indeed, were -- over this question of a lease.
'You talk of what plays to write and to act in,' said Cuthbert accusingly to his brother. 'You neglect the question of where. We need our own New Place.'
'Oh, Alleyn may renew the lease,' said Dick carelessly. 'He talks of doing so.'
'Not to me.'
'We shall have the Blackfriars, a warmer place than any of our old playhouses. The dwellers there cannot prevail with the Privy Council. Why, my lord himself has told me----'
The noble residents about the new theatre had complained of the loss of amenity, the possible noise and undesirables milling to chew sausages at blood-bladders and tiring-house thunder. Dick was too sanguine; that was his humour.
'We shall have two playhouses bubbling away,' said Dick, 'you may see else.'
'And humours in both,' said WS.
'Talking of humours,' said Dick, 'Pembroke's Men have this bricklayer writing something. I saw him doing a very loud Hieronimo. He is mad about humours, he has the whole theoric of humours pat, they tell me.'
'A bricklayer?' WS frowned.
'Aye,' said Dick Burbage straight-faced, 'another poet that is no gentleman but knows Greek. He was shouting great drunken cartloads of it at the Dane's beershop, but none would listen. Anacreon, Xenophon, everything. Then he vomited on the floor.'
'A bricklayer that knows Greek?'
'Oh, he was at Westminster School. He has been soldiering and says he took his spoils off the man he killed before both camps. In the Low Countries that was. Very Greek. His father or stepfather or somebody was a bricklayer and taught him the craft. I should think a bricklayer might build very strong plays.'
'Stronger playhouses,' said Cuthbert.
'Every man to his humour,' said WS. 'Trade, I mean.' Then he remembered what his own trade was. 'What has he written?'
'Well, Tom Nashe started this thing for Pembroke's but will not finish it. It is satire again, humours and so forth. Two acts only he did, then he would do no more out of fear. Then this burly Ben man comes in and says he will write the other three, where is paper and a pen?'
'What name?' asked WS.
'He is called Ben. Ben Jonson.'
'A good bricklayer's name.'
'Very strong humours. Nashe bites his nails in fright that it goes too far in satire. But this Ben says he fears no Greek nor anybody.'
'Who is the satire against?'
'Oh, everyone,' said Dick Burbage vaguely. 'City and Court and Council and everyone.'
A SMALL THING, another man's play. Who could have thought that it might ease open a door best kept locked? An empty summer of work loomed, Harry off to harry the Spaniards with Essex. 'A secret,' he told WS. 'But I will bring thee back some little gift of Spanish gold or a black Spanish beard roughly wrenched out or a donna or senorita or whatever they be called.'
'Speaking of black women----'
'They are not all black. Some are red-haired, so I hear.' He drank off his Canary, belched like the hulking bulky warrior he was not, then said: 'Ah, it is the sea that is calling. Tonight I ride to Plymouth.'
'Beware of the fair maids of the West. To revert to that one of the East that is not fair and not a maid----'
'I know nothing. She is not heard of. But she is much in thy mind still.'
Well, yes, so she was. So many paths of sensation led back to her body, as he wrote, as he lay in bed unsleeping because of the heat, as he wandered the City, marking types, faces, words, humours. And then the crass motions of public life, against which he could not encastle and moat himself, drove her out. What was this, who were these, fellowships and families of the ragged and near-naked tramping and limping on flat horny feet out of town? The beggars were leaving town. Why they were leaving town he did not know. He asked his barber.
'Ha' you not heard?' said this onion-smelling man, snipping at WS's crown, greying auburn. A little boy in the corner sniffed up snot between the phrases of his song; his father nudged him in irritation with the elbow of the hand that plucked tinny accompanying chords on his lute. 'It is the Council that saith how all the old sojers and beggars and such are to be sent out to fight in Piccadilly----'
'Picardy?' frowned WS. The lutenist accompanied that with a final tierce.
'Picardy is what I mean. I was thinking of somewhat else. And the Lord Mayor likes not these orders for he will not be ordered so by the Council, and he has let it be known what was ordered to be done and so all the poor folk and beggars have time to shog out of London. But there will be trouble yet, you may see.' And he cut a lock viciously, like some small vital organ.
Trouble yet. What happened now bumped itself at the Chamberlain's Men like a coalheaver's sack; it did not have to be filtered through barber-shop talk. Dick Burbage came in shaking with news of what the Council was to do, and this in a plague-free time of good business. All the playhouses were to be shut down.
'Shut down?' squealed Laurence Fletcher. They were rehearsing The Merchant. Some small readjustments of casting. A line or two to be expanded. Things were going well.
'This bricklayer has dropped his bricks on everyone's toes,' shouted Burbage. 'I said that The Isle of Dogs was enough in its very title to have the Council growling.' This was the satire on everyone he had spoken so mildly and vaguely about, full of strong humours. 'Now they go mad and bite us all.'
'It was the Mayor that asked the Council,' said Augustine Phillips. 'You may blame the Mayor as much as the Council, and they were at loggerheads over the pressing of the beggars.'
'Trust none,' said Burbage. 'They are all the same. This fool of a bricklayer deserves not the name of player or poet or anything except clumsy ape.'
'Come,' said WS. 'It is not just he, surely. He but completed the play, and Pembroke's had their tongues hanging out to put it on.'
'You have not heard all yet,' said grim Burbage. 'It is not just a matter of closing down till we are good boys again. There is talk of bringing in the breakers to demolish the playhouses altogether. The Justices are given their orders, so I hear.'
'Over our dead bodies,' said Heminges.
'Oh aye,' snarled Burbage, 'over our dead bodies. They will smash playhouses and players together and hug themselves at the godly thing they have done.'
'So much,' said WS very quietly, 'for your new mode of satire.'
'What was that? What did you say? What did you say then?'
'And what has happened with Pembroke's?' asked Harry Condell.
'Nashe knew all this would happen,' said Burbage. 'He was wise and has gone to Yarmouth. But they have put this Jonson and Shaw or Shaa or whatever his name is and Gab Spencer into the Marshalsea. They could not find any of the others. And this Jonson lumbers over to the Rose before they seize him and joins the Admiral's and begs four pound in advance out of Henslowe.' Burbage suddenly let out a shout of bitter laughter. 'Four pounds out of Henslowe, and no hope of aught in return.'
'O rare bricklayer,' murmured Fletcher.
'This is the sort of man you have coming in now,' said Burbage, back to his snarling. 'Rude and loud and knowing no discretion. There was a time when we were all gentlemen's sons. There was a time when things went well for us all.' WS could not, to be honest with himself, remember such a time; there had always been something.
'Well,' said Cuthbert Burbage, 'it is but a matter of ante-dating. We are losing the Theatre sooner rather than later.'
'It will blow over,' said Kemp. 'It always blows over.'
'But what do we do now?' said Phillips.
Ride home, pay Stratford a surprise visit. New Place and a coat of arms: those were solid enough, those would endure.
'Go home,' said WS.
AND SO HE WENT HOME, and it would have been better, ladies and gentlemen, if he had not gone home. Days of gorgeous sunlight on the August roads, and a welcome from the mistress of the Crown in the Cornmarket at Oxford. And at last, his heart beating beneath his fine doublet with gentleman's pride, to Stratford. Prepare, ye spir
its of dead great Stratfordians, to do blue-lipped homage to a new son that hath made good. Bow down, town, about him. But first, entering by Shipston Road, there is the Clopton Bridge to be crossed. The spurgeoning of the back-eddy. Back to the strait that sent him on so fast. He smiles, thinking of Tarquin. He sees again the great white slack body, the misshapen southern king go to it. His smile is nervous; a cloud goes over the sun. Then the cloud unclamps the god of day and it is Clopton's own thrown cloak he passes over. His chestnut glories in his rider. Bridge Foot, left to Waterside. Give you good den, your honour. God bless you and keep you, sir, credit to your town and country. Sheep Street, in fleecy sunlight, Chapel Street belled in summer heat, and there----
There it was, the peak and crown of endeavour. New Place, Clopton's own house. It was the first time his fast-beating eyeballs had gazed on it as his own, the conveyancing having been done remotely, himself busy in London. His wife and two daughters had, he knew, moved in; he had sent them money for furnishings. The great door gleamed in the Shakespeare-honouring sun. Must he knock? No, he would not ask, not even with his fist, to enter his own house. The front door was locked; he passed, honeyed stone on his left hand, through the little wicket that led to the garden. It was overgrown, there was work to be done here. Underhill, its former owner, had neglected it. Hollyhocks, lupins, larkspurs, a shaped yew hedge; WS foresaw a neat pleasance. And in the centre of that lawn there a mulberry tree.
The kitchen door yielded to his unlatching. It was a fine cool kitchen, gleaming with copper pans, but no bare arms were at work, scouring, skimming. He passed through to the living-rooms. Plain furniture well-polished, a betrothal chest, simple hard chairs. He shivered a little, for it somehow seemed not to be a house for the living. Where was Judith? Where Susanna? Where was Anne? It was as though he had bought the house literally for himself. He walked softly to the stairs, as though his own corpse lay unhonoured in one of the bedchambers above. He mounted the stairs.
On the landing he surveyed, irresolute, the five closed doors. For some reason the name of John Harington came into his mind. Ajax. A jakes. A water-closet. Why there should not be in this house? It was a cleanly idea. He had a sudden unbidden image of Dick Burbage, in melancholy hat, disclosed seated upon one. He said softly, 'Anne? Anne?' At once there seemed to be an explosion of soft panic, whispering and rustling, behind one of those doors. Puzzled, he went to unlatch. He opened. He saw.