Part 25

I wanted to talk to him about Spenser’s Faerie Queen, and say...Spenser...you know...no, Raleigh sailed to the Canaries, to Florida, Manoa...Hispaniola...cloak- thrower...knight...names...and his map, a large parchment, came out of the wall and stared at me, rebuking me: cloak-thrower...patron...names...John White said that he admired him...John White said...where was White now, now that he’s back from Roanoke?

Pushes hand through hair, coughs... I back away, wanting to put the wall between us. I shuffled down a few steps, disgraced, down to the street, cockroaches and rats scuttling, ivy blowing in the wind.

Let him finish his History of the World.

I had no right to disturb.

The blue cloak slips from Ellen’s shoulders and through the stabbed hole I see moon, stars, and fog, each flecked with red. Fog soaks the hole and then, then, there’s the face of an attacker, scarred, piratical. Something behind him fades into her face, so white. I see her smile her dazzling lover’s smile and I hear her laughter and the sound of her bracelets.

In the funeral procession

a small black casket is accompanied by Ann, Shakespeare,

his daughter in black, and others.

A flower falls from the casket and Shakespeare

picks it up and puts it in his pocket:

A church bell tolls:

Blue cloak over a tombstone.

I

buried Hamnet, buried father, buried myself... What is this death that eats our lives as if we were pieces of bread on a dirt plate, sacrificed to whim and time? Our crosses top a hill, row on row, a row for each generation, across fog hills, across sunny hills, Ital- ian, French, English, Scot.

Escape with me:

Now at the prow, now in the waist,

the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement:

sometimes I’d divide and burn in many places,

on the topmast, the yards, the bowsprit...

Henley Street

September 23, 1615

Now, now thought is closer to death than love: I live in it, longing for her, for intercourse, the ice of this winter-house aging me and the wind, poor wind, scuttling nowhere, nowhere to go.

Go to the oriel, then.

Henley Street

September 24

God, the rain, the rain at its cobble-sop, common rain on cobbles, rising out of them, climbing the ivy, moulding thatch, hurting places of the mind, shivering our secrets, insinuating with lashes, coming again and again, thieving.

The dropping of one drop can absorb a soul: its alchemy traps a man: so, we, reduced, debased, encompassed, are carried to sea, to finality, ourselves made useless, noiseless, like a million others.

I heard rain throughout the night, from lying down to getting up, no sleep, only this endrenchment, intent on obliteration, transforming life into a comedy of errors.

I was twenty-eight or so!

All morning I sawed wood for props; all afternoon I practiced lines; all evening I rehearsed. My costume didn’t fit: the crown was badly torn. At four in the morning, there was no food for us. That was life at the Globe, when I first tried London.

I estimate that I have earned less than a hundred pounds from my thirty-seven plays. When I divide that by thirty years of work, I see what it represents. At least I see that much.

Henley Street

1615

“Small coals! Small coals!”

“Hot peas!”

I wish I could hear those raucous London street hawkers! I’d like to see the Thames crowded with little boats. I’d like to see the people packed in front of St. Paul’s. I’d like to be back at the Exchange, for the armorers and booksellers and glovers. I’d like to stare off-stage at a thousand rapt faces.

I miss Burbage more than anyone. He and I worked hand- in-glove for more than ten years, seeing each other almost every day. He played Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and his was the finest Lear voice-transcending. Lear was Burbage and Burbage was Lear. There were no weaknesses. Weaknesses?

I have mine—so many weaknesses.

Today I have been up and round but last week I was in bed throughout the week. When I am up and about, I freeze. My sight fades. My heart bangs. I must get to the composition of my will, the final act in my play...no applause...no whistles...silence.

Burbage could take my lines and recite them for me, adding, subtracting, modulating. If there must be rewriting I knew, through his skill, what I must do to improve a scene.

What amusing letters he used to write home, when he was traveling with the Company. He and Alleyn were as domesticated as tea.

“Dear Jug,” he would address his wife. “Dear Mouse,” Alleyn wrote his.

“Dear Jug, let my orange-tawny stockings be dyed a good black, against my coming home in the winter,” Alleyn wrote.

He wanted his wife to sow spinach in his parsley bed at the proper season.

“...Sweet Jug, farewell, till All Hallow’s tide, and brook our long journey with patience.”

We brooked many a tedious journey with patience.

October 1, 1615

Gargoyles and ghosts: they are always a part of pain. Here is a prescription: pulverize a gargoyle in a deep mortar, shred one carefully, mix with ample wheat and milk, add salt, bake two hours, serve piping hot. Add surfeit of prunes, against the inevitable her.

Globe Theatre:

Elegant and seedy theatregoers.

Hand bills read Hamlet:

Actor Burbage mounts the stage

behind candles, rushes, torches.

Backstage, actors hustling, yacking.

A soldier outside pisses:

Curtain rises.

Henley Street

October 3, ’15

Evening – late

W

e players, playing in the provinces, walked all day to reach our destination, our horse cart lumbering behind us, stacked with costumes and gear. Sun blazed. Rains soaked. Chewets followed us. We walked from inn to inn, town to town. At two o’clock we played Tambourlaine, and the soft verse of Marlowe. Then, packed again, we walked until another two o’clock, somewhere along the way. Our comradeship on the road, sleeping in the same rooms, sleeping on the floor as often as not, eating at the same table—those were our bonds! Burbage, Alleyn, Kempe... I could name a dozen. Week by week, we played our plays, our Lord Chamberlain’s Men, banished by edict and plague, protected from jail by contract, cheered by the Puritans! We worried over money, badgered, confronted, schemed. We placated the constabulary and loved the annuncios—the children!

Sometimes we sickened of one another and quarreled, our masculinity distressing us: men and boys, men and boys— that was our disease! What women would have meant to us, in London especially, where the theatre was spoiled. What it would have meant to have a girl strut across the boards and smile a smutty smile. Chafing would have disappeared.

I longed to see Desdemona as a girl would play her; I wanted to see Cleopatra acted by a woman, Lady Macbeth by a skilled player—not castrated boys, our sexless wire- sounding temperamentalists.

Who wants boys primping, boys in women’s hats, giggling over skirts and bows? Scratching fleas in baboon areas? Crying for their mamas?

Our groundlings wanted women to go to bed with.

Lords, ladies, and soldiery wanted women.

Everyone is sick of boys!

Soldiers, in their half-armor, jeer at us!

It is afternoon—warm and sunny!

Women, wearing eye masks, are chatting and taking seats at the Globe. Hawkers, bright yellow bands around their waists, are selling books and cakes and ale, passing among the theatre crowd. Dandies are getting settled in an area close to the stage. Swords clatter as soldiers find seats; a captain bows to a Jesuit priest. Someone strums a zither and croaks a bawdy ballad. Workers shove their way past the gate, afraid to miss a word of the beginning.

Popping open the little door of the hut atop the theatre, a trumpeter blows shrill blasts; the play is about to start: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Henley Street

Sunday afternoon

Theatrical voices—commanding, secretive, beseeching, vituperative—are not voices I want to recall. I prefer the normal and kindly, an intimate Scot voice, a man’s educated speech, someone mouthing thoughtfully, an older person whose words show profound mellowing.

Ann’s voice was once full of witchery, stealing my guts and senses, leaving me hot. Marlowe’s was low and persuasive. Queen Elizabeth’s crisp. Raleigh’s burly. Hamnet’s birdlike. Ellen’s warm.

Not the regal! Not dotards and thieves, but a voice combining generosity, ease, and hope: is the voice I invent when insomnia takes me: for a moment it speaks out of the past.

I never enjoyed the children’s theatre—always wondering how they produced even one creditable play a season since they whipped their boys to force them to learn their parts. Clifton, I recall, was kidnapped and compelled to act. They whaled him, fed him badly, did sexual malice to make him perform—hardly the way to create a star. Clifton’s father had to appeal to the authorities for his boy’s release. I went to see him, at his home, and the tales he told me matched his tear-streaked face. His little hands trembled and his mother had to reassure him he wouldn’t be kidnapped again.

Whippings, threats, nagging—they were the stuff that kept the children’s theatre alive in London, while the council shrugged and patrons furnished subsidies for these odious and grossly amateurish entertainments. I talked and fought. Marlowe talked and fought. Alleyn and Jonson used their influence. The cruelty continued.

London was a place of whippings: the public whipping of offenders through the city streets and post whippings repelled... Jim was one of those I saw...and Hardy’s body hanging naked in chains...

Stratford-on-Avon

Wednesday

Damn them in Luddington and Walton, the groundlings who pelted us with fruit and eggs, those smelly coxcombs! That day in Luddington was blazing: the sweat ran down me as I stood on stage: then, the first egg struck, then a rotten orange: I waited, hoping. The play went on, drowned by laughter, and then, as if by prearrangement, a barrage of fruit and eggs hit us: our tragedy was hounded off the boards.

Walton had a couple of hecklers who were supported by the audience and broke up our play: we got eggs from many Waltonites: putrid, smelling a dozen feet away, saved, undoubtedly for our arrival: it was two days before we could play again since we had to wash and press our clothes. What a jangling of nerves that bred.

Why not give up the acting and the writing? Why not go back to Stratford and work with father? Why let these slovenly cruds, these barnyard bastards ruin my life? Days later, humor came slanting through. When we were well-received and the money tinkled we forgot; we called ourselves ninnies and threatened to arm ourselves with eggs for the next affront. We found goodness and warmth in lines well-delivered. We saw our comradeship, our triumph over slogging days: there was magic flowing through our blood: that fulsomeness, that nothing could tarnish or remove.

Globe Theatre is on fire...bucket brigades,

smoke around men with pails,

smoke around boys with pails,

smoke in trees, smoke in the rain:

Jonson talking and gesturing to Shakespeare:

Burbage screaming orders...

A wall topples...

Inside the conflagration

books and manuscripts burning.

J

onson and I watched the Globe burn—the afternoon cold, with rain falling. People crowded around; there was mud and water underfoot.

“Someone must have set our theatre on fire, Will! Jesus, how it burns!” Jonson cried.

“No. I was inside. I saw the thatch start burning.”

“Wasn’t there anything you could do to stop the blaze?”

“We tried! We got ladders and buckets!”

“Lord, look, now! A wall’s toppling. The hut’s gone. Why it has fallen off. Will, our props are afire. Our scripts! The flames are roaring...”

“Stand back!”

“Stand back or get burned!”

“How long has it been burning?”

“Maybe an hour...”

The flames seemed to meet in a giant peak, a peak that had at the top a great tree of smoke. It was raining harder now; the crowd had moved back.

God, wasn’t it enough to have to fight the plague? One month our doors were closed, next month we were open, next month we were shut again. That was bad enough, but no theatre meant no chance.

“Kemp is sick...the Globe is gone,” I said.

“Let’s go and get drunk!” Jonson said.

Later, Burbage told me it was a cannon, fired during my own play, that set fire to the Globe. We met in the street. Yanking his beard, swearing, he spat on the cobbles, and turned away.

Henley Street

1615 All Souls’ Day

Pain is gross companion, inducing lecherous thoughts, destroying temperance, stability, mercy, courage, fortitude. Craving release, I fought all day to remember better times. At night, with candles lit, blankets around me, I find ease... I remember...

I am in a lemon grove, naked stone pillars stabbing out of the tops of the trees, Greek pilasters by the sea. We are eating on a terrace overlooking the water, a lazy meal, with old wine. The moon rises, drunkenly, fat, water-distorted, closing in on us, in rhythm to the waves below. We hold hands. The moon spells urgency, urging us to the grove, where we lie side by side.

“Ellen...Ellen...”

The lemons are yellowish in the moonlight: there is something stage-like about their motionlessness: it is rather as though we were in a velvet box, facing the sea. Stars have something to do with the fragrance drifting about us, the only movement apart from the waves and rising moon. I suggest we go down to the beach, so inviting. Ellen says no and I forget everything but her fragrance and the fragrance of the lemons, her whispers, her kisses.

That Scot profile, so chiseled, that bluecap voice, so warm, that hair of hers, softer than Juliet’s... A great rock, a sea boulder, surrounded by waves, glows in the moonlight...her skin is whitened: a ringlet glows on her neck.

Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh, Spenser have had their days in jail; I have had mine—those county sties where pigs and dust ate my manuscripts and foetid odors ate my skull, jailed by the local thief who deemed each man a thief who thought:

If all the world and love were young...

But Raleigh it never was except in fancy and during the dead reckoning on paper: that is why the five of us stumbled backward in time, learning and escaping simultaneously.

We used to play chess, many of us, pawns, varlets, kings, knights, evenings, one play bastinadoed on another, Caesar against Titus, Hamlet against Lear, Portia against Cleopatra—always a gamble, along the stinking alleys, along the nocturnal slugtide Thames, along the turtle sea: stonehenge of concupiscence, murder vs. philandering, octogenarian vs. boy, sex vs. cuirass, check vs. cul-de-sac.

Everyman knows the exquisite desire for a woman; he also knows the ravening need...when there is no woman.

With Ann opposite me at supper table, I peered outside at the leaves, beyond the oriel, and denounced myself as I ate, enumerated my festering faults. I tasted little, wishing for sensible words and tranquil mind. But there was no shutting the door.

“Eat, Will,” she said, and I nodded, but dared not glance at her, to find the stranger and myself. I resented her as if her infidelities were yesterday’s, as if my side of life could be ruled out, as if we were young...

Patience has not helped. Only forgiveness can.

Leaves drop from the trees and the kettle bubbles and we feed ourselves, grieving. Our shields are in place but the lances were broken years ago. Our visors are down, our plumes awry. Our horses have been killed in the field. Without pennons, we move our gauntleted hands in rusty bewilderment, slow-gaited with many, many abysmal hungers.

Henley Street – ’15

I kept a stray in my London apartment: after feeding him while on one of my strolls along the Thames I could not shake him: Pericles had a soothsayer’s mug dripping with ignominious grey whiskers, a privateer’s baleful eye, a silver-grey hide, a black tail, three white feet, a black-booted foot, and a bark like a tin pot clipping the pavement. When it came to food, Pericles was greedier than Shylock for a pound; piercing me with piratical eyes, he sat up, wagged for pity, then slumped in grief, moaning better than any stage madonna. Pericles and Jonson became the best of friends: pieces of bread or cheese from Ben’s pocket ordained him lord and master. Along the Thames, Pericles flew after every bird, yapping incessantly; it seemed to me he could run all day and never tire. When left to guard the apartment, he kept to a mat inside the door, gradually sheathing it with a coat of silver-grey hair.

Shakespeare and Ashley meshed in fog:

They duel in a fog meadow.

Fog blows away before Julius Caesar’s ruined castle

among rocks and weeds.

Shakespeare’s dog tangles with Ashley,

caroms against Shakespeare:

Shakespeare falls.

November 7, 1615

F

og sopped the grass and weeds when I fought my duel, by Caesar’s castle. I could barely make out Jonson, Pericles, and friends, among the pines and bush below the castle ruins. Phantasma? I asked myself.

Ashley and I had quarreled over money: as one of the King’s Men he had cheated me roundly; now he faced me, privateer, poet, rich man’s bastard who would defy immortal Caesar: on twelve-foot legs, bearded, cloak over shoulder, rapier in hand, fog creaking against him, he closed in. On stage I had dueled many times; today I must put fakery to test.

As Ashley and I fought I heard Pericles barking and heard voices, saw Ashley’s men and my own, now in the fog, now out of it, shifting distorts.

My rapier hilt felt icy; the whip of steel on steel had a ring to it I had never heard. I hated the fog, telling myself I must make it serve me: it was to my advantage as well as his. Our blades spat fire. I drew back. The ruins caught the inserting sun and stood distinctly above us: in my inner sight Caesar’s legions were amused at us. Other watchers appeared—grinning. Death is always grin- ning.

Ashley drove me back, steadily, steadily, forcing me toward the base of the castle where blocks of stone menaced, strewn amidst thick weeds. I fought to keep my footing and tried to beat him off. He was fighting savagely: his blade had a whiteness about it I couldn’t understand. I felt that whiteness slice my white belly: so, stumbling over Caesar’s masonry I was to die.

But I am ’gainst self-slaughter and somehow drove him in front of me and got yards away from the wall, deflecting blow after blow. Ashley was fighting like a privateer with a cutlass, each blow shoulder-down. My wrist felt beaten. I parried a series of terrific blows and then staggered.

At that moment, Pericles hurled himself on Ashley, playing, growling, jumping joyously; with a bound he leaped at me and before I could call off the dog or beat him off, I fell. As I came to my knees, Ashley was waiting and shoved his blade into my groin.

The fog and woods...they were there in that pain, and Jonson’s voice was there...my rapier, I kept thinking, where is it? Will they pick it up? I felt that months had passed, that I had aged a multitude of years, like the stone, like the battlement: age, that alchemy, filtered through the fog and sun...

I remember them carrying me.

Henley Street

November 8, ’15

Jonson took me to his apartment in his carriage and bragged about his Holland duels and the men he had pinked. As I lay in bed, feverish, during the days to come, father appeared, expressing pity—the pity he had shared with the plague-stricken. “You there, you, boy, I’ve something for you. This will help you.” I understood. I cared. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to sit with him underneath our apple tree and feel the summer’s sun.

“The fault, father, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” I said to someone. “Yours is a fair name, fairer than mine...

“I am singularly moved when the sway of earth shakes like a thing infirm... this is not a dream, father.”

On Jonson’s bed, I went through hellish days—thirst, hunger, the bungling doctor bungling me, cold, cold remembering, sweatful forgetting, spouting delirious lines from plays... I accused the world of every crime, and managed to include my own.

I was afraid alone, yet distressed to have others overhear my ranting. The bed boards gaped and between each board I sweated another chill.

“Will, here’s your supper,” Jonson said. “Will, here’s breakfast. Will, I’ve brought you a book.”

Pericles licked my hands. Lying under my bed, he thumped his tail, saying: “Get up, master, there are birds to chase along the Thames.”

–S–

Without asking me, Jonson wrote to Ellen, and she came from Edinburgh. Was it her coming that pulled me through? Her care, beauty, her hands, her smiles of reassurance? Love put on its Oberon and scrubbed the grey out of the windows.

Quintessence.

She found a better doctor, brought me better food, got Bill McFarland to look after me, an old friend of hers, agreeable yawning fatness, eating half our food behind my back, gossiping with Jonson’s neighbors, bobbling and drooling his words, coddling me.

When I improved she took me to the park; later, we sailed the Thames...on shore larks sang... I was grateful and tried to repay too soon...on top of rolls of canvas at the stern.

At court there was a wedding celebration and a mock battle and fireworks spilled across the river: how the fireworks turned water into sky...the guns thundered.

“For us,” she said. “For your recovery,” she said. How like a paragon...

The diamond on her velvet blouse winked at me; I put my head on her lap: pain melted: seagulls mewed as our boat rocked gently.

–S–

So, Ashley and I settled our accounts. I saw him years later and we turned our backs on one another. I suppose he was embittered at my recovery.

The best of us is both participant and confusion, but I, I am stranger because estrangements have put a lie to my living, making it stranger still.

Stratford

Monday morning

While recovering from my wound, my brothers, Jim and Dick, paid me a call.

They seemed quite uninclined to sit, skeptical of Ben, afraid of Pericles, contemptuous of the apartment with its manuscripts and shelves of books. Wearing their farm clothes, they smelled of dung, dirt, and rain-soaked cloth.

Jonson, wanting to be friendly, told how Pericles acted during the duel, winking at me, falsifying his ferocity. Brothers—were those men my brothers? Long ago, they had washed their hands of my life, Pilatewise. Mother praised them when I visited our home, ah me.

“I had heard that ya killed that-tar man, in yer duel,” said Dick, pawing his kneecaps.

Jonson clapped him on the shoulder.

“Wish him better luck next time,” he guffawed.

Jim and Dick had brown, flat faces, flattened by hunger, by defeat, lust, work, illness and sorrow. They had lost their children during the plague. Their teeth were blackened, or missing. Their clothes...what is a bundle of dirty clothes topped by a voice and a dead mind?

The afternoon sun poured through the open door. “Your hair ain’t red like it was,” said Jim.

“You’re getting bald,” said Dick. “The hair’s slipping down your neck.”

Bells of London startled them and helped send them on their way, and I went to sleep, amused by Jonson’s mimicry and laughter, as he sprawled in his chair, head thrown back, one hand on Pericles’ mane.

Stratford

My brothers’ visit reminded me of our hometown Ned.

Ned used to lie on the ground with pads underneath his shoulders: an anvil, weighing two hundred weight, was lowered on his chest by huskies, and three men with sledges bent a bar on it as he lay there. Ned performed at every Fair, girls ogling. The picture of him and his admirers delights me: hero with anvil and hammer. How I used to envy him. Ann thought he was a wonder. He was. And now I wonder what became of him?

Henley Street

November 13, 1615