Nothing Like the Sun

by Anthony Burgess

  WS threw down the libel on his bed. He looked out of his window, seeing nothing of the rising mist, the towers, the river. A poet had died with that curse on his lips. Upstart tiger's shake-scene. But wherein had he truly offended? By performing as well in his new craft as in his old? Johannes Factotum. Jack Do-all. He had pretended to nothing except the fitting of words like gloves to a story, but because of him a poet had died in bitterness.

  And yet, cooling as the day warmed, he felt a strange shameful pride. His name, though deformed and mocked, was there in a book to be read by all London. He was noticed; a dying poet had singled him out for his spleen, the rage of the pain of his rotting kidneys and the humiliation of his dead ambitions. But (he picked up the book, flicking through the pages to read again) there were those words that stung: 'An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.' The glover from Stratford who had been to neither university, presuming to the learning of a master of arts. 'Let these apes imitate your past excellence ...' Was it Nashe he addressed, or Lodge -- other failed playwrights who could read Greek? An ape. A crow. A tiger. He smiled coldly. A strange phantasma, indeed. A new sort of cockatrice. Well, he forgave Greene, but he would not forgive this Wright the printer, nor the hack Chettle who had put the poor angry book together.

  He looked sourly down on the manuscript play he was working on. Limping Richard and the cool Anne (a fire within) whom he courted. Marlowe's Machiavel but none of his poetry. Oh, he foreknew, they would drink it down and chew the very cup. Down with deformed Gloucester; God save the Tudor line. But he would show dead Greene (he seemed to grin up from below ground, a corpse's sneer) that he was something other than an ape, crow, tiger. Something other, too, than a play-botcher, an exciter of groundlings, a poor stumbling actor. The time was come to show he was a poet.

  LORD STRANGE'S MEN were back in London for Christmas. Drink, toasts, maudlin clawings. By God, we missed thee, Ned. As for Alleyn, he smirked and pawed his new wife all over. Aye, we open then before the old year shall have ended. With Muly Mulocco. Well, it is a fair play for opening. And then Hieronimo and the Jew and Titus. Friar Bacon? Poor Robin Greene. In memoriam, you might say. This new one of Kit's promises fair. The Massacre at Paris. They will take multitudinous bellyfuls of Machiavel. And who is or was this Machiavel? An Italian devil, that is called also Niccolo, or Old Nick. And there is Shake-scene reading all gravely with never a cup of sack before him. How dost thou, Johnny Fuckscrotum? Caw caw caw. What is this book he is agape at? Take it from him, Ned. Read us somewhat out therefrom to make us merry. How, will his little holiness have all up? He is not used to good Protestant ale, this Pope of ours. Read thou then, Neddy. Well, it is of Will here and it is called Kindhart's Dream. Oh, that we know. It is ancient fishy stuff. It is Chattle, Chettle I would say, with his Apostle or Epistle to the Gentlemen Readers. Nay, Will, an thou wouldst have it back thou must chase me for it. Whoop, round the table. La la la. Hold him then, lads, for all must hear. Hem hem. Moyshelf have sheen his (what's this word?) demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Nay, let us verse it. Lift me to yon table-top.

  Besides, divers of worship have reported

  His uprightness of dealing, which doth argue

  His honesty, and his facetious grace

  In writing that approves his --

  Well, then, amends is made. Will is no atheist, he saith here, and he is worry that he let dead Robin ever cry that out from his death-bed. Nay, it was never said that it was Will that was Godless; it was Kit that was the Godless one, and still is, God help us. They say he is having an atheist's Christmas, with a dog in the manger. No, it is Will that is the crow with the tiger's heart and the bombast. Look at him, sitting sober there, as quiet a man as ever fumbled at points. Kiss him, Joan, mount him, ride him. And so we give all a merry Christmas.

  IT was a hard January, smoky breath steaming up from the groundlings. These stamped and danced for warmth, beating their arms crosswise, blowing their nails. Still, they came to the Rose. Alleyn, as Guise in The Massacre at Paris, had to rant loud to be heard above the coughing:

  Now Guise begins those deep engendered thoughts

  To burst abroad those never dying flames,

  Which cannot be extinguished but by blood.

  But they liked it, the out-upon-religion, the whisper of hell, the torture, the treachery, the poison, the bursting ox-blood bladders. Yet it was not to this but to Harry the Sixth that a party was come, towards January's end, to fill the Lord's room, masked, holding pomanders to their nostrils (the plague was coming back, despite the cold), calling for a fire, for wine. Henslowe rushed about as he were scalded. But who is it? There are two noblemen with a man in black and a pair of pages. I can see no livery. What of their barge? They were rowed hither by common watermen.

  The play went not too well. The players were nervous, distracted by the coughs and laughter and talk that came from behind the closed curtains of the Lord's room. Kemp tripped over in the final jig. Rewarded by roars, he determined to keep in that trip in the future: much of a clown's best business came by chance. And then, after the prayer for the Queen, Henslowe came awe-struck up to WS in the tiring-house. He said:

  'You are sent for. They are asking for this Master Shake-scene.'

  'Who are asking? If it is to make sport----'

  'Sport or no, you are sent for.' WS shrugged, put down the pasty he had been chewing (some little trouble with a back-tooth), brushed crumbs from his doublet, and went. The groundlings had gone fast, no weather for dawdling. But, from the Lord's box, there came the sound of clinking and laughter. They liked to sit on with their fire and wine. He knocked at the door, he was bidden jovially to enter. Two young men, in warm doublets and fine ruffs, silver and the flash of jewels about them, sat at their ease in the small close room, their brows beaded from the fire. They wore no masks now; WS recognised the elder at once.

  'My lord----'

  'None of that, not today. I am Master RD and this is Master HW or, putting his family first as he is told he must, Master WH.' And Robert Devereux smiled a loose tipsy smile. 'A glass of wine for Master Shake-scene.' Master HW or WH said:

  'You are welcome hither.' He was young, hardly older than the two bobbed pages who, unawed, played a game of treading on each other's toes and giggling. Eighteen? Nineteen? He had a red pouting mouth and very white skin; his golden beard was sparse. There was something in his eyes that WS did not like -- a slyness, an unwillingness to look boldly. But he was beautiful enough, there was no doubt of his beauty.

  'If it please you, my lords,' said WS, 'I will not drink now. I have but a poor stomach for drink.'

  'A good stomach for blood and horror, though,' said Essex.

  'It was not this present play but that other that pricked curiosity as to what manner of man this Shake-scene might be.' And the eyes of Southampton still would not meet those of WS fully, darting from point to point as though they followed a fly's flight. 'That play wherein all happens that the most fevered dream of horror could make happen. The one with the black Machiavel and the boys baked in a pie.'

  'Titus Andronicus,' said WS. 'It is good, my lord, to know the name of anything, whether a play or a man. I may shake scenes together, but my forebears shook spears.'

  'Ah,' said Essex, 'so your stock is warlike. Yet you look mild enough, clerkly one might say.'

  'I refer only to my name, my lord.'

  All this while a dark Italianate man in black, standing behind Southampton, had been observing WS coldly, no shifting eyes here, rather the eyes of a hangman. 'A man must in time live up to his name,' he said. His speech was faintly accented with foreignness.

  'Shake-scene or Shakebag or Shakeshaft, it is all one today,' said Southampton. 'Today is a nameless day. It is so cold and dull it deserves no name.' And he pouted at the dying fire. The dark Italianate man now said:

  'Though perhaps it is from Jacques Pere, a French name. Perhaps he is of French blood. He has a French look about him.' He looked
coldly on WS as though he were a butterfly, something to be described, speculated of, perhaps caught and pinned to paper, but in no wise to be addressed directly.

  'Oh, Florio here is mad on French things,' said Southampton, smiling indulgently. 'He has done all this man Montaigne into English. Give him a penny and he will dole you out a tasty gobbet of gloomy French wisdom any time. Is that not so? Give us something now and you shall have a penny when my mother deigns to dig into her fisc for my spending-money.'

  'La vie est un songe,' said Florio promptly. 'Nous veillons dormants et veillants dormons.' He looked WS straight in the eyes as he said it, but it was as if the eyes were already dead.

  'Well, Jacques Pere,' said Essex, 'will you translate for us?' His tipsy eye mocked.

  'Oh, my lord, Devereux is an older French name than mine own. And your lordship is, I think, but newly come from France. Your lordship will know all about French pennyworths.' Southampton laughed, a girl's laugh.

  'Life is a dream,' said Florio, without expression. 'We wake sleeping and----'

  'Aye, aye, we know all that,' said Southampton rudely. 'We are tired of Montaigne.'

  'As he was of the world. Well, he has left it now.'

  'To return to your Titus play,' said Essex, ignoring Florio's epitaph. 'You had not, I think, quite everything in it. Neither, for instance, pederasty nor the raping of corpses. But you had all else. I have seen the Italian Seneca-men, but you went further. As for the French, Garnier and the rest -- well, no matter. And we see you what you are, a clerk losing his hair but a pert enough clerk, aye. I will give you French pennyworths.' To his friend he said, laughing: 'Well, I have won our wager so now we may dismiss him back to his writing lair. These poet-players are a very special and new sort of animal.' To WS he said, 'His lordship here said you must be some great roaring ruffian like this Merlin or Marlin the atheist. Well, he sees now you are not.'

  WS frowned. 'Where saw you this play, my lord? It has not, I know, been performed at court----'

  'Ah,' said Essex, 'we must whisper now. There are ever spies among you. You can never know who will be walking among you in disguise. Or standing out there among your citizens. And who,' he said to Southampton, 'is the most comely citizens' wife of them all?' Southampton blushed. Essex laughed softly, a sound that made WS cringe a little. Southampton said:

  'We had best be going back to Holborn.'

  Essex yawned and stretched. 'I had best first go piss somewhere.' Standing, he staggered. He was fairly drunk. 'I would piss out this fire,' he said, 'hated I not the noise of hissing.' And he went out yawning. WS gulped, suddenly delirious with an idea, and he looked down bashfully on this young nobleman who sprawled so carelessly, bored, pouting. He took courage and said:

  'My lord, might I beg a favour?'

  'Ah, Jesus, is there no man that does not want favours? Every man tries to use me. And woman too.'

  'This is a favour that will cost your lordship nothing. It is even possible it may bring honour to your lordship. It is but a matter of accepting the dedication of a poem.'

  'More poems. Always poems. Is it a good poem?'

  'It is not yet completed, but it will be a good poem. It is the story of Venus and Adonis.'

  'Old stuff always. Is there never to be anything new? Well, Florio,' said Southampton, 'shall we say yes or have him join the long line of petitioners?'

  'It can do no harm,' said Florio, shrugging. 'If it is a decent poem and not wanton.'

  'Oh, it is not wantonness I mind but only dullness.' WS looked down bitterly on this Adonis, so languid, so satiated of all his world could give. He saw himself taking him and stripping him of his silk and jewels and then beating him till he cried. I will raise great weals on thy tender delicate skin, puppy. He said, with a sudden loudness:

  'There will only be dullness in those minds that perceive dullness.' Southampton looked up, surprised. Then, in a quieter voice, 'I beg your lordship's pardon.'

  'Aye, do beg. Well then, I am chidden.' Southampton let his foxy eyes shift. 'There was something about a player's heart in a tiger's hide, if I mistake not. Let us have this poem by all means, Master Shake-scene.' He clicked his fingers at the two grinning pages. 'And you will drink a glass of wine before we go.'

  II

  'AND YOU, Will, drink a glass of wine ... And thou, Will ...'

  He walked London in a February of unwonted drought, dreaming, shaking himself out of the dream to tease out a new stanza. He knew, anyway, the triple chime of his name's homonym from that lordly and desirable mouth. The lips' pout, the red tongue's lifting lazily. As for the poem, there was leisure to finish it, the Rose, along with all the playhouses to the north of the river, closed on Candlemas Day. That was the birthday of Hamnet and Judith; he had sent a loving letter and money to Stratford; there was money enough in his strong-box to tide him over a few months' closure, relieve him of the need to join the others in the wearisome clop-clop of a country tour (fresh straw every night, but the same fleas; veal over-stewed; landlord, your sourest ale, an't please you). Meanwhile the company waited, nail-biting, yawning, quarrelling, rehearsing languidly, hoping for the plague to ease any day now, the Council to rescind its hard but necessary order. Will Kemp fooled, like the fool he was.

  'Ho, Ned, what is this in thine armpit? Beshrew me, but it sticks out a whole ell. Why, it is a great bubo.' And then he would prance and sing sillily: 'Bubo, bubo, bubooooh.' Henslowe was thunder-faced, as he might well be. One bawdy-house door slammed tight, a cross on it, the sign of the cross brought back from the times of pre-Reformation among those superstitious croshabells: Oh oh oh, we have been visited, see, Jenny is stricken and carried forth moaning on a shutter; oh oh, it is for our sins of the flesh. Henslowe said:

  'Here is no matter for japes and jokes. There be thirty plague-deaths a week still. You had best all be off on your travels and leave me to my pain.'

  'We will wait a little longer.'

  'Tarry if you please, but come not to me to borrow. I have, God help me, naught to lend.'

  'Ah, Will, Master Shift-scene, a small bit of silver only. My mouth is parched for want of a cold pot. I will do as much for thee, that well tha know'st.'

  WS would shake his head gravely, pen hovering above a troublesome stanza. 'I do not myself borrow, therefore I may not lend. Save,' he teased, 'perhaps on interest, say of a crown in a pound and a pound of flesh for the mortgage.'

  'You are nothing but a dirty Jew.'

  'Oh, a clean Jew,' smiled WS. 'See, I am new-washed all over.'

  'Ah, what bed is he visiting?'

  He was visiting no bed, no bed at all. He was done with women. Women were a deflection; he must push on to his goal. Meantime he pushed on with his poem:

  And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,

  Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles,

  How he outruns the wind, and with what care

  He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles.

  The many musits through the which he goes

  Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.

  It brought much back from those early country days. It was not just a toy, a bauble of flashy stones on an old string of myth, of the pretty and laborious order of Scilla's Metamorphosis by Lodge, nor was it a wanton lyric gale like that unfinished Hero and Leander of Marlowe. In a double figure it presented both a country poet set upon by a love-mad older woman and a pampered godling of an English earl nagged to leave his sports and marry (marry; it is thy duty to beget heirs; here is this fine girl Lady Elizabeth crying for thy love). In this image two men, stripped of their clothes and rank, became one. Coldly for a moment he saw that if there was to be love it must be love with advantage. He had suffered enough.

  It was in early April that he penned the last lines. He trembled with hopelessness and relief and fear. He read through the whole poem and was filled with such disgust at his own ineptitude that he was fain to tear it and scatter the fragments on the river (the swans would come, thinking
it food). And then he grew calmer and thought: It is not good, but it is as good as many. I cannot waste my whole life in longing for this man's art and that man's scope. If I am not made, why then I am not made; I return to my craft of glove-puppetry humbled. And then he walked the streets composing his epistle to the noble lord. It was far harder than any poem.

  'I know not how I shall offend ...' Spring waking in London, crude crosses still on the doors, but the wind blowing in the smell of grass and the ram-bell's tinkle. Piemen and flower-sellers cried. '... in dedicating my lines, no, my unpolished lines, to your lordship ...' From a barber-shop came the tuning of a lute and then the aching sweetness of treble song. '... nor how the world will rebuke, no, censure me for choosing so strong a prop ...' There were manacled corpses in the Thames, that three tides had washed. '... to support so weak a burden ...' A kite overhead dropped a gobbet of human flesh. '... only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised ...' In a smoky tavern a bawdy catch was flung at the foul air. '... and vow to take advantage of all idle hours ...' Pickpurses strolled among the gawping country cousins. '... till I have honoured you with some grave labour ...' A limping child with a pig's head leered out from an alleyway. '... But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed ...' A couple of Paul's men swaggered by, going haw haw haw. '... I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather ...' Stale herrings smelled to heaven in a fishman's basket. '... and never after ear so barren a land ...' A cart lurched, rounding a corner; wood splintered against stone. '... for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest ...' The sun, in sudden great glory, illumined white towers. '... I leave it to your honourable survey ...' A thin girl in rags begged, whining. '... and your honour to your heart's content ...' An old soldier with one eye munched bread in a dark passage. '... which I wish may always answer your own wish ...' Skulls on Temple Bar. '... and the world's hopeful expectation.' A distant consort of brass -- cornets and sackbuts. 'Your honour's in all duty ...' A drayhorse farted. '... WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.'

  'STRATFORD, then, has made this book entire,' said Dick Field. He spoke still with the Warwickshire burr, standing there, grave and bulky in his apron, a smear of ink on his fat cheek. A man was busy at the press, quietly whistling; at a corner table a boy was learning how to bind. Field had done well; he had married the widow of his master, the Frenchman Vautrollier, and taken the business over. But he deserved to succeed by virtue of his own skill in the craft: that translation of Orlando Furioso (Harington's, was it not?) was a beautiful book to handle. All questions of local patriotism aside, WS had done well to bring his poem here. He took the volume reverently from Field, handling it with a proper mingling of pride, humility, wonder, fear, smelling fresh ink and new paper in a sort of small vertigo. A book, his book. There was no doubt of it: a poem in print was somehow a different work from the warm, fingered, crossed-out, pored-on, loved and hated sheets that held one's own nature in every line (one's hand was indeed one's hand, part of oneself). Here it was, Venus and Adonis, cast on the waters: 'TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLY, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Tichfield ...' There was no going back now; the ship sailed. This book, this exterior thing, must take its buffets from a world as indifferent as the sea, knowing and caring nothing of the author, making no allowances; no actor could mediate to exalt with his own music or diminish (earning all blame) with stumbling memory or false accent. Here was WS in naked confrontation with the reader, with, above all, one particular reader.