Part 21

Father gave me a northlight room, on the third floor. I will place my easel near the windows that face the Adda, face the little bridge where the Maestro used to fish for temolo.

I have hung my copy of his Mona Lisa on the entry wall and have laid his red velvet cloak over the back of a chair.

I am arranging some of his drawings on a center table.

There is ample space for his Anghiari cartoon on the inside wall. I have ordered broad shelves for his books and his small bronzes, his drawings and treatises, his brushes and pigments. I will purchase a leather box for his correspondence.

I will do what I can to bring order to his writings.

Under this stone are the

remains collected during

excavations outside the

royal chapel of Amboise.

It is surmised these are

the bones of

Leonard da Vincy

1452 – 1519

Author’s note:

This epitaph was placed on da Vinci’s grave in later years.

SHAKESPEARE’S JOURNAL

To my Elizabeth,

for her loyalty, love and genius

Henley Street

January 28, 1615

T

o invent can become an aberration, a mystery, at times a querulous searching to remedy an irremediable loss. Shall we say there is a larger purpose? Must there always be a purpose and justification? I can not believe that. Then, there can be stumbling, burial, burial violets around a grave, an absence. These thoughts must be weighed, re- assessed, subtracted from physical ailment and sickness of mind. Surely the stage was not intended for a single player.

  

Stratford

February 2nd, Candlemas – 1615

On Christmas last I sang carols with Ellen and her friends, in her London apartment, candlelight on her frosted windows where trees, like menhirs, listened. Some of her friends were drunk and raucous parasites; some were manikins; some were overly friendly; some, Countess Bardolph, Lord Fenton, Lady Page, were perfumed bores; the Irishmen were troublemakers...

The Captain of the Guard requested a dance, and musicians appeared on a small wreathed stage, a candlelit tree at one side. Sprigs of ribboned mistletoe decorated the window drapes and the frames of all Ellen’s paintings; she wore a sprig and her Scot mouth met mine under the portrait of a highlander. Caroling and wine went on and on:

Joseph and Mary walked

Through an orchard green,

Where were cherries and berries

As thick as might be seen...

Mummers paid Ellen a call, accompanied by a dancing jester wearing furs. By now it was snowing and the storm sprinkled the jester and the costumes of the torchlit merrymakers with him, as they trailed about, singing. A glass of wine with Ellen... Egypt, it seemed an easy dive to the bottom of the deep, to pluck drowned honor, but there was Ann, pinch-faced, wanting to scourge, and sting with pismires.

Joseph and Mary walked through their orchard bewitched, and Ellen’s thick tree burned with its candles; the Yule log burned and cat-spat; thick-eyed musing came with scalding wassail; then more dancing and then sleep at their side... Later, I’ll tell her about my play, my plans, secrets of the stage, boyhood delights... I’ll reveal the wildness of the world, and beyond this, the tranquility of poetry itself.

She’ll share her Edinburgh, her theatre, her books, her home by the lake, her work for the priory library.

She told me:

“Life is to hold warmly in our hands. It is to be made better for our passing.”

Her intense face considered mine: the fine lines of her mouth, those eyes, lochs, and then there were her dark, dark hair, her perfume, the pressing of her fingers into my sex...necessities and no better...

Carols continued while snow stuck to her window panes and the pine boughs put resin on the air...a day and then another, her hair on her pillow like a fern...and nothing else was needed.

On the blue frozen Thames

skaters zip past people, booths, flags.

A giant ox roasts on a giant spit.

Arm in arm, Shakespeare and Ellen skate:

Over a glassy spot in the ice they peer down

where a blue cloak floats:

fish below.

Singing carolers pass on skates.

Henley Street

February 8, 1615

O

ne year the Thames froze and above London Bridge it became a market, hobbled with ragged booths, stalls, flags and streamers, peopled with courtiers, beggars, soldiers, priests, merchantmen and their families. An ox was roasted—and as it steamed and smoked—walkers clustered around the carcass as if it were Holland. Skaters spun close, stopping to chat or buy and eat, then spun away over the ice.

For days the surface was free of snow and one afternoon I brought Ellen, and we skated arm in arm, the sky unblemished; we swished between ice-bound frigates, toqued sailors leaning over, waving and jeering. It was almost Christmas and carolers sang around bonfires. Royalty had set up tents and we were welcomed there, the tents and flags reflected in the ice, purple, red, yellow—pennants squares gay—men and wenches tippling— musicians trying to keep their feet warm, strumming bravely.

Ellen, in plaid scarf, yellow cloak and jeweled tam, stands alongside a striped purple and gold tent, laughs alongside the scabby hulk of a frigate, warms her hands before a fire. Ellen...your face is real... I can reach out and take your hands...you smile and sway in the wind.

Singing with the carolers, your breath puffs its toadstool alongside my mushroom, and we laugh and hug each other. Inside a carpeted tent, we toast “Wassail!” and glance at velvet cushions heaped in a corner.

Henley Street

Stratford

Mine was the wish to bind society together, expose the floor of heaven, make immortal real, show man’s folly and labor, extol faith and uphold beauty. Beauty, as I felt it at the outset of my career, is no longer here: it is a long way from Venus and Adonis to Henry VIII: there were grim diversions, rude and costly failures: my goal it seems is beggared: if I had the capacity I would reach back to beauty and carry it forward with greater maturity: I am thinking of poetic beauty.

Farewell! You were too dear for my possessing,

for such riches where is my deserving...?

I lost sensibility and communion in pursuit of plot and character for the ricochet of horror and death, for the mockery of crime and subterfuge.

At times, I was in sleep a king—but on waking, no such man.

I have been awake to my losses a long while: there was no recouping them in France and Italy, alone with hegemony of rocks, promontories, beaches, hierarchy of seas assailing nakedness...here in Stratford, here I have illness as exchange.

Sallow yellow:

Men, women and children dying in the streets:

Church bells tolling.

Three men drag a dead youth to the Avon River,

pitch him in.

Church steeple, reflected in the water, sways:

The church registry lists column after column of dead:

Not a sound.

I

n Stratford, the plague moved down Mill Lane, Butt Lane, Rother Street, jumped to Henley and then Church Street. Father and I worked on Mill Lane: finding Charles collapsed by the whipping post, we lugged him out of the sun...shivering...sweating...vomiting...and we could not find anything to cover him, and he begged us for a cover.

“Something to cover me, Will...just something?”

“But there’s nothing left for you.”

“Everything used up?”

“All used, Charles.”

“So many of us sick?”

“Lie still. I’ll bring you hot sack. That’ll help you feel better...there’s a rug...”

“I’ll see if I can find something to cover him.”

“No, you’re tired. I’ll bring hot sack and a cover.”

Pigeons swooped low, then rose: were they afraid?

Six people had died that day.

During the week twenty-six died, men, women, and children. Our town heard the bell toll morning and afternoon and evening. At times the tolling seemed to be right in my ears; at times I forgot it, bringing water or food, medicine or cover, anything to help. Father and I worked together as much as possible...his word or nod kept me going.

The Avon seemed blotched and diseased for there, there was the plague’s mucous caulking the water and the water was grey and beaten and unmoving, locked in its own foetidness, dead by the weir, dead by the church and underneath the bridge.

Stratford

February 14, 1615

I remember the plague, how, with our theatre closed, I worked to aid the sick and cart away the London dead. Appleton...I remember his red beard, his cough, his scared grin. Meerie, talking Irish, blamed us, saying “there’s narra a plague in Ireland—it’s your filthy London—you damn filthy foreigners!” Miller cursed the altar and the saints behind his head, as he struggled to breathe. And that gargoyle-like fellow, Fackler, crawled off to die or recover, we never learned: he said the open field was the proper place to get well, or die.

The Cheney twins died right outside the Globe: they had been working as stage hands: clever lads from Sussex, faithful, hard-working: they got sick on Tuesday; as the bells tolled on Thursday evening they were dead, dying a few minutes apart, their hands clasped, eighteen years old, flax-headed, tall.

Why did that young woman, with hair to her waist, run about laughing, eating handfuls of earth? Why did that Dorsetshire man stab himself with a dirk? How did the graves of the Boothby children get left open, deserted for days? Was God in the heavenly lectern those days...to save us of our sins!

For days the sun chewed us in Blackwell. It gave us a chance to kill some of the rats. Caesar, don’t let one bite you! Worms crawled out of the earth. Caesar, beware! Whenever I passed our cemetery I smelled new, raw earth— as terrifying as the death smell. ’Sblood, how many deaths does it take to satisfy the earth?

YOUTH—

What is this vomit, this black gunk pouring out of your mouth? Are you only fourteen...with death on your face?

This is our boy, Slade, who walked to school last week and fished where I fished.

“Papa, let’s carry him into the shade. We’ll cool his hot face and give him water. Our medicine has to make him well. We need him, to grow up and catch perch and pike, and marry Jenny.”

Papa is washing his face. There’s fruit. There’s sleep. There’s tomorrow. There’s kindness. There’s forgetfulness.

Best to cover him.

I’ll cover him. There, that blanket may keep him from shivering. His mother’s sick too. I’ll rub his hands and arms. Water, Papa, give him some. There!

“Papa, you get some rest, while I stay with Slade. You’d better go home and turn in. You didn’t sleep much last night. Things are better now. No. I’m not hungry. I’ll eat later.”

I’ll sit with you, boy, and we’ll deny harsh fortune. Did you ever see a play, boy? The play’s the thing: it takes you out of yourself. Listen...I’ll recite some lines for you...

Farewell! a long farewell, to all this...

This is the state of man: today he puts forth

The tender leaves of hope; tomorrow blossoms,

And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;

The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;

And, when he thinks, good easy man, fully surely

His greatness is a ripening, nips his root,

And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,

Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders

This many summers in a sea...

Farewell, he’s dead.

Papa, you and I have lost him. He’ll never race across the fields or pack his creel or kiss a girl on the bridge. The plague has killed him.

Was it you who wanted a new cap?

Now you’ll have a cap of dirt.

I throw my heart against the flint of time. O sun, burn your great spheres... I importune death a while. The passing of so small a thing should make a crack at least. Stained with his own blood...

Grey yelping dogs chase a coach through London fog:

Fog drips from coach lamps, from trees, iron railings.

Someone in the fog screams and

a cloaked figure stabs Ellen

as she gets into her coach.

Ellen’s cloak, blood, fog,

Shakespeare’s anguished face.

Henley Street

February 20, 1615

F

og, that old-year-treachery, steals round my house, thief at every window: renegade, despot, carrion-maker.

That night the fog mauled us after we left the theatre, Ellen and I. I thought of throwing my cloak around both of us, as we walked along: dark blue cloak in white fog. Instead of covering both of us I covered her...

The play had been well played, Alleyn up to form, Marlowe’s lines appreciated by a better than usual audience, some of them royalty. Tambourlaine usually appeals to royalty. This was Crown night, Christ’s crown, hell’s crown, fog on every thorn, thorns sticking through our laughter, to be remembered, in that cloak, bastard thorns.

Like dogs they followed us as we left the theatre, late, our arms around each other, the cloak flapping, fog leaving us inconspicuous. I saw her carriage approaching, inching the fog, fog through the spokes of her wheels. And then outcries, and Ellen beside me, falling, and as she fell I turned and saw my cloak slide with her, lantern and dagger on the road, misericord.

Here it is now: yes, here it is: I have it, pricking thing for future pricking, if need be: long, needle- pointed: Toledo steel: the right length to kill her—or me.

Laughter and fog, spines and theatre, the royalty of crime in a London gutter; time doesn’t remove them, can not remove them.

When we could we located guards—trustworthy men—and with a constable informed her servants and posted guards. Later, Jonson and I sat with her doctors and learned a little more about pain. I went for Ellen’s brother and he came, a cold young man who resembled Ellen, a slight fellow in handsome black. Hand on sword, he drew himself up, face ashen, mouth trembling...

“I’ll comb London for them...get them...”

Jonson often visited her, his words and thoughts the stuff for those days, my brain run dry, bats coasting out, Enobarbus memories:

Why, sir, give the gods a thankful sacrifice. When it pleases their deities to take a man’s woman from him, it shows the tailors of the earth; comforting therein, that when old robes are worn out, there are members to make new...so grief is crowned with consolation.

Did I write that?

Henley Street

February 26, 1615

I am not able to write poetry and yet I must write, must tell the teller, crush the shards of illness. What is life, the undone and the done, the foolish and the great? I hate drowning in real and invented apprehensions but mine is the stumbling, after the play, after the com- pliments and the celebration, a mixture more brew than sanity admits.

My pen jerks and my hand wavers and my head aches, and I watch faint light creep into the sky, exacting a promise from me to defy pain.

I hate sleeplessness on a foggy night like this, for there is something in the fog that makes death come alive, that sears the sordid into the mind...what was the cause: contorted memories? Am I afraid to die, be laid in straw or committed to a sulfurous pit?

Give me my rope, put on my crown...

Memory is for me acting in a dissolve, cloud of rain, concatenation of nothings, performing yet recalcitrant, ambiguous and poor. Here, in this town, this room smelling of spilled wine, the candles ugly, I see a woman, the filaments of yesterday’s straw tangled in her hair—selling love for a price. Why is love obtuse, ruthless, rain-buried, eerie and demanding, slinking one to the other?

Stratford

March 2, 1615

I write with rain across my oriel, and the fire almost out in my fireplace, and my loneness sniveling in its pot. I am sick of self-pity. I taste with wretched ap- petite, so be it! To be generous, hungry, guiltless, and free...what would I give!

Pincers, pinch harder at the rushes, keep the light burning as long as possible, for each of us.

At my age, I am guilty of longings that I can never realize: dreams hawsered to nowhere. I have been guilty of this all my life. I copulated with commas. I hunted dreams on paper—cheap privateer! I was priest, pharaoh, general, slave, glutton. Paper is a sickness, a sweltering fever, clammy forehead, thudding pulse, ague within ague: so I am a man of paper, elongated, soggy, contorted, multiple of calligraphic speculation: paper bones, paper heart, paper skull, paper blood, paper penis.

Listen, isn’t that time rustling a sheath of paper?

Snow buffets Shakespeare’s cottage:

Snow enters a window.

There are varnished ceiling beams,

varnished furniture,

books and manuscripts.

A stunning woman appears, smiles, fades,

beckons seductively, disappears.

Henley Street

March 5, 1615

Y

esterday it snowed, and during the afternoon I fell asleep and dreamed I saw King Henry and Shallow crossing the fields beyond my windows.

“O God, that one might read the book of fate,” I heard King Henry say, as I followed, hidden from view. “I wish to see the revolution of the times make mountains level, and the continents, weary of solid firmness, melt itself into the sea and, other times, to see the beach girdle the ocean...”

“There is a history in all men’s lives, figuring the nature of the times deceased...”

Was it Shallow who said that?

Though I am confused, I recall the gaunt face of Alleyn as he spoke those lines, that stormy night, when our theatre rattled. He was infirm with fever and yet played on; he seldom let us down.

Winter is here again, to make our beds uneasy. Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention, and return me to my youth!

This is a document in madness because pain seldom leaves me...

Oh, to be young and tumble a naked woman on a bed, quarrel desperately and make up, burn the night learning and unlearning lines, defy the elements, dally along the Thames, out-shout the gulls, see a mermaid behind a rock.

Youth has such powers! Youth’s rule rules his own court by championing a hundred causes, ordaining and cancelling, defying and acknowledging, digging canals, raising temples.

Slave of every beautiful woman he meets, he presents her with lasting riches and eternal potency. He conquers every country for her: his grail, his fleet battering an endless Armada to bring her into port, no gale too wild.

Henley Street

Monday, ’15

When I taught school at Snitterfield, Jonson came now and then to prime my Greek and Latin. He used to say, “You should have done a lot less fishing in the Avon, boy! Why, these fellows will never learn, not the way you teach. See, they grin at you. They love you. Call them churls, cane them; make them scat when you appear!”

Away from school, Jonson would slip into theatre talk and urge me to rejoin him: “Your poems are remembered. You have to come back, Will! I’ll find you a patron. Now’s the time to write plays... I’ll help you put them on the stage.”

I told him I was afraid of the London plague. He scorched me with a “haw-haw.” “Teaching’s your plague, man!”

Henley Street

April 20, 1615

Teaching was forgotten at Fair time, good food, acrobats, cockfights, gambling—there was something to keep us spellbound spelling laughter! Games and dances went on at all hours. Cinquepace was the fast, new step. How I liked it! There were plenty of pickpockets but I had nothing to pick but my loneliness. When I danced with a red-cheeked girl there was sperm in every movement— those giddy curls and hot hands, the smoke of sizzling fish, howls of the stinking bear baiters.

Stratford

Trumpets blared... I heard them days after the Fair.

I stayed on as long as possible in Snitterfield, to contribute what I could to my family’s upkeep in Stratford. Then came the day when the school board asked me to find another job; so it was back to London again, to Jonson and his half-ass promises, back to city trumpets, strumpets, rattle of carriages, pismire poverty, paunched patrons and perfumed snowballs for the Queen’s masque...

Stratford

While I was at Snitterfield, I had the companionship of a girl whose fourteen years should have been double fourteen to equal her double sight for fox, hawk, raven and snail: she was unreal because she could bring me to the brink of fantasy by gesture or word: “Hush, there, over there, in the grass by the stile.” Her flip-smile had the best of both pook and pagan. What she wore seemed a part of her blondeness, a blondeness often eerie with an eeriness that worried me, to be quickly saved by her smile or laughter. Her low voice set the stage for confi- dences—thread between goldenrod, rabbit lying in the entry of its burrow, lark rising.

Faith and I had lingering afternoons and saw the first of fog before dark, heard the last of bird sounds before sleep: her house next door to mine taught me, by window and door, the wretchedness of her life: her father’s drunken beatings, kickings, savagery: so, to escape the village clod we escaped together, to sit by a woodland stream and hear words by leaves as they sifted down. Faith had her legs in the water, up to her knees, or lay on the embankment, the color of her flesh gleaming. Her beauty was not a pair of breasts but a pair of hazel eyes and a dimple in her chin. She was tall, a cathedral figure in caenstone, the stone so alive yet ecclesiastical, erect, her posture one of graceful expectation: repose flowed from her: her thin hands lifted to her thin face: her hair straggled to her shoulders and down her back or was combed into a flaxen haycock. I thought my teaching infinitely poorer than hers and went with her whenever possible, helping her withstand the disgrace at home.

I thought many times of going back to see Faith Stanton but even the changeless changes and woodland jewels, claiming socketless eyes, reflect only images of the mind. Drunkenness outlives beauty—the clod burying haycock, bog and girl.

Henley Street

Goddamn my hair!

My hair, with its copper and red, used to say: This is your world, boy!

Damn my wrinkles! My gallows neck!

My face was once all right.

Now one cheek has begun to cave in under my eye, the wince of lechery, no doubt, and meteors, no less. Lines around my mouth give the impression that I have never had a good time—never laughed. My eyes, when I swivel them in a mirror, warn me that grave changes are taking place inside and that denials will get me nowhere: grey hairs, wrinkles, poor vision...they are the roistering gift of time, markings on the stone, to remind myself that I am here, that escape is never, that courage is all that counts, humor with its leg lifted on the monument, peeing on vanity.

The sullen bell called me to school and I went reluctantly, leaving my fishing pole behind the door, pike and trout lost to me. Early morning was almost beyond endurance; I rubbed my eyes and stumbled downstairs, to eat amid yappings, survive, survive.

I did not resent school when Hunt read aloud in Latin, reading masterfully, giving us Caesar, Antony, and Cleopatra. When he read, I wandered beside the pyramids, the Nile dotted with boats, ibis, and heron; I tramped battlefields, fought with black spears piercing the hot, dusty air. It was along the Avon that I sensed man’s struggle. I saw. Heard. As the water grew greener and greener and deeper and deeper, the air motionless, the past was there, Hunt’s past, Cleopatra’s...her barge, like a burnished throne, burnt on the water; the poop beaten gold, purple the sails, so perfumed that the winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, which to the time of flutes kept stroke...

When I dared I got away early and went to fish or loafed at the mill pool where I hung my feet in the Avon and counted dragonflies, my line thrown as far as I could throw it. Sitting on a mossy mound, I heard the warblers and lark spell morning into warm sun.

Thirty-five years ago!

Summer:

Naked swimmers, five boys, penis fun, laughter:

Naked girls in bushes along the same river bank:

Church bells in distance:

Behind a copse boy and girl kiss and squirm.

Henley Street

May 4, 1615

G