They wanted the magic, they needed the hell and heroics, God and Satan appearing in person, hoof and halo, and horns for cuckolds; to see the soul torn by questions and the body by devils. They wanted tears and laughter, big bold speeches, battles and blood. And the blood was sweated out of the spirit in bitter black verse: a great shedding of words.
The blood, the stage stuff, came from sheep and calves, as the spectators well knew – the blood of an ox or a cow was too thick – but if they wanted to see real blood these same playgoers would go down to the bearpit and watch the torn beast howl. For the bear had no words to melt their hearts, no power of speech to put honey in their heads. Howling was all there was. It’s what the bear did best. You’d think such howls would melt hearts. But not the hearts of the bearpit crowd. They heard heroes die with brave, beautiful words in their mouths, but they knew the pain was acted, unlike the bear’s that would have rent the heart of London – if London had a heart. But they were men of stones and their city was a beast without a heart, a city of cruelties, the whipping of blind bears, the lopping of hands and slitting of stomachs, the burning of bowels with the owner still alive, sites of pain, sites of pleasure, none better than the stage for the London crowd.
And so, getting a glass in their heads, they came and thundered at the playhouse, fought for bitten and bitter apples hurled down from the galleries with high scorn, belched out their herring and garlic breath, threw up their sweaty nightcaps, and roared out their displeasure if the play was too lofty or too tame.
It was the springtime of playing and the playhouses came out like primroses: the Bell and the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, the Boar’s Head near the Red Lion in Whitechapel, and the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill. When I came to London they were already putting up the Rose. By any other name it would smell as sweet, but as the moon shines with a borrowed light, so the Rose of London stole its scent from one name only, and it was the only one worthy to stand with the Burbage Theatre.
27
Let us now praise Philip Henslowe: dock-owner, rent-collector, money-lender, slum landlord, pub landlord, pawnbroker and brothel-broker extraordinaire. Across the river, in Paris Garden country, among the bearpits and brothels stringing the riverbank, and on the shittiest of sites which had once smelled sweet with the scent of English roses, Philip Henslowe, working with a fatfisted grocer – it was always a grocer – John Cholmley, built the first of the Bankside theatres and called it, not surprisingly, the Rose, erected on the site of a former brothel, and taking its name from the street term for a whore, appropriate enough for brothel-running Henslowe. It flourished over the existing shit and the air blew sweet again with the fragrance of English plays. The Rose grew to be the prime plot of drama, the hotbed of theatrical enterprise, Henslowe was the cunning gardener – and Christopher Marlowe was the migrant bird with strange seeds spilling from his beak. In the early nineties Strange’s Men and the Admiral’s Men married, like the incestuous buggers they were, and made the Rose their home. That was when the great Ned Alleyn came into his own. He divorced Burbage, who was up to his old hedgehog tricks again of milking the box in the night, threw in with Henslowe, lay with his daughter, married the young step-miss, and so became the dramatic darling of the southside. A smart card. But he couldn’t have done it without father-in-law Philip.
Turn up the lamp again upon this wondrous necessary man.
Henslowe from Hounslow, hirer of props and plays, dyer turned theatre-owner who became the power behind the London stage and the last refuge of scoundrels, including down-and-out playwrights begging for work – hackwork, patchwork, advances, loans, commissions, crumbs from the table, anything at all that kept body and soul from the long divorce. Henslowe ignored nothing that meant money, no job too small, no plea too poor, though it was well known that he was more particular about his prostitutes than his players. He even interviewed his whores and found some to be unsuitable if they smelled too sweet. ‘Aroint thee, punk! The customers will think you’re trying to wash off the pox. No need to sweeten your cunt. Men want the stink of sin.’ A Henslowe whore had to be horny. She could even be a man. But she had to stink.
When he renovated the Rose in ’92 he got twenty-four turned balusters for tuppence farthing apiece and the next two dozen at a farthing discount each. A flint-fingered financier was old Phil. But he didn’t stint on style. A new flagpole went up and a banner with a rose fluttering in the breeze. It had cost him twelve shillings, a tidy sum. He’d try anything, do anything, just for one brass farthing, and he liked to have writers under his thumb.
One thing, he would never see you stuck, always saw you round a hard corner. Drove you to regret it later, but without him there might never have been a later. He stood between some poor swine and suicide or the wolf at the door, and when times were hard in London I knew I could always go to Henslowe. He knew what he could wring out of me in return. ‘Your pen is mine, Will. Write me a bright speech, finish me that dull play and make it sparkle, conclude that Act. I have a scene here needs reworking for tomorrow and there’s no pen that speeds like your pen. Harry the Sixth? Harry the Sixth can wait. Harry the Sixth comes after Henslowe the First, Philip the Foremost.’ (Philip the Foreskin to his debtors). ‘Rank and file, Will – get them right and live well. Now how much did you say you needed? My purse is yours.’ He sang a new song, naturally, when my Harry hit the stage – but till that time came I had good reason to be glad of Philip Henslowe.
But Henslowe’s Rose was not then in season and when I walked from Hog Lane on that third morning and stood in Holywell, staring at the Theatre, I was looking then at the choicest London plum of its day, Burbage’s castle in the air. Little did I think when I stared at the bones and turds and the muddied puddles of yesterday’s crowds, that this would be the principal staging place for my plays for the next ten years. Little did I know I’d even write such plays. I watched a rat creep slyly out of the eyehole of a skull. The rat shot off, pursued by a dog, and from the other side of the playhouse I heard a sudden terrible scream. It went through me like a known knife. And even before edging around the building, I knew with dreadful certainty what I was going to see. Yes, there it was – the shambles. There stood the butcher with the knife, there the steaming pile of tripe under the buckling legs, the screaming ending in a terrified whimper. Jesus! Was this what I came for? Was there never to be an escape from it, the smell of the blood still? I’d lacked the courage to enter the Theatre but the sight and sound of the slaughterhouse lent me a courage built on cowardice. I fled – and went straight inside to look for James Burbage.
He was not to be found. Burbage was away, they said. No, they didn’t know where, or when he would be likely to return, and no, they couldn’t offer me any work at the Theatre, only Burbage himself could do that.
And that’s why I found myself back in the shambles. Back again among the tumbling intestines and the terrified eyes of cattle. I tried to sleep in the nearby cesspit I’d rented. But the blackness was alive with eyes, eyes alive and seeing, eyes white and rolling and red with dread. I screwed mine up as tight as I could, to shut them out and the screams ran like blood down the inside walls of my head. I was trapped there till morning, just like a beast, howling in my sleep, waiting for day.
Dawn bled through.
From Stratford to Shoreditch I’d come, from shambles to shambles, and I spent the next three weeks there, steeped in gore. The animals shat themselves as a rule, as soon as they smelled the blood, so there was always a vile concoction over your feet. It didn’t matter how carefully you stepped, you walked in filthy witness, and you could smell the fear from the beasts just as surely as they smelled death from you when they saw you approach with axe and knife and rope, Tyburn style. This was my world, the block and blade, and all that distinguished me from the hangman was that my victims were incapable of evil and incapable of protesting their innocence. They’d known no sin but they had no tongue. They were God’s lambs. I was the sinner,
and I betrayed the innocent blood. I played Judas in Shoreditch, just as I’d done in Stratford.
And play was the word. For I too wore a mask at my bloody work like the Tyburn man, a mask to keep Will from Will. Who else could it be, standing there, dyed in the Shoreditch blood and hauling on that rope? Hauling at lowered head and the helpless, dug-in hoofs, hoofs backing in vain, hoofs slithering through slime, away from the brandished steel, which smoked with bloody execution. Who else put in the knife and let out the life in that roaring torrent of red? Who was it who felt that huge shudder run through the bulk beneath his murdering hands? And from a creature whose most violent act was to chew meadowsweet and grass and trample daisies underfoot, the poor beast of the field, come to the block, where I waited with cruel knife, wore the mask and played the part. How else to get through the day?
My first job, then, as a London actor was not at the Theatre, it was next door. Will Shakespeare, slaughterer, trained in Stratford, practising in Shoreditch, and staying sane. Only the mad have stopped acting. It never troubled my father, though, the butchery. The apple-cheeked buffer I put into the ground fifteen years ago was a hard bugger in the back shop. He could stroke a lamb on the head while the other hand was slyly placing the knife at the point of insertion. What did it mean, after all, that treacherous caress? Calm down, old friend, I’m only going to butcher you. And if the beast turned stubborn he never troubled with the fondling, just grew angry and smashed the axe down on the protesting head. Hold still, you brute! I’ll split your skull for you!
So frowned he once when in an angry parle he smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
That was my father, a hero with the chopper, and not a man for talk. A man for action, not acting. A down-the-line man, an axe-and-slab man, made for alderman, but not for failure. An untheatrical man. Strange that he’s a king.
My father. Methinks I see my father…
28
‘Where, Will?’
Where what, Francis?
‘Where do you see him?’
See? Whom?
‘Your father. In your mind’s eye again?’
Why no, look you there! Look how it steals away, my father in his habit as he lived. Look! where he goes, even now, out at the portal…
‘Perhaps he came to chide you, to whet your almost blunted purpose.’
What purpose is that, Francis?
‘The will.’
Do not forget… I had forgot.
‘You need a good slice of great pie – when it comes.’
But thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart…
‘You need two slices of pie, a double helping. That’ll cure your heartache.’
He got what he wanted.
‘Who?’
My father.
‘What was that?’
His coat of arms.
‘Ah yes, he failed the first time, didn’t he?’
Unsuccessful. Apply again. And it cost me a groaning to take off his edge, to slake his ambition.
‘Recovered greatness?’
Something like that. What are sons for?
‘But why the groaning? You had the time of your life in London. You were the belle of the ball.’
Did I? Was I? I spent the first three weeks of July in the steaming heat of the Shoreditch shambles – until one day Burbage suddenly appeared, a big-nosed bugger on horseback, clattering past the slaughteryard. I pumped the blood and grease from my hands and ran after him, feeding him an ancient concoction of turds about seeing him when I was nine years old back in Stratford and how I’d lived in the glow ever since and now I wanted to work for him.
He gave me a withering stare.
‘Stratford? Fucking Stratford? Jesus, I remember that. Stratford wasn’t too hearty when it laughed, I remember that much. And you won’t get rich here either, shit-shifter, if that’s your trade,’ (waving the edge of his cloak theatrically at my blood-boltered clothes), ‘not that you’re ever likely to make much as an actor, by the looks of you. You’ll more than likely starve.’
He dismounted and looked hard at me, sizing me up, and shook his head. Clearly I didn’t improve under scrutiny.
‘I can tell a great actor at a glance,’ he said. ‘You’re not one.’
I turned away.
‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ he said, ‘I’ll be needing some of that blood of yours next week for a new play – a damned good play.’
I asked him what it was called.
‘Marvellous stuff. By a mad young bugger – and I mean bugger. Keep your arse to the post if you ever act with him.’
I asked him who’d written it. Burbage was the kind of man who always had to hold something back, even his excrement, such was his nature.
‘See Tamburlaine and die, Stratford man!’ he roared. ‘And remember – buckets of blood. In the meantime, hold my horse – and don’t fucking move!’
I held his horse and didn’t move – for the rest of the day. The horse and I had pissed once together and twice alternately before Burbage finally came back. And the horse had shat once but convincingly, decorating my shoes. They were not up to much by this time in any case, sodden with excrement and urine and the innards of the animals I’d killed. As I stood there I started to dream about a pair of boots. Burbage had on a beautiful pair. It was what had struck me most of all as I’d watched him stride off into the Theatre to tell his actors about this exciting new play. I thought about that too – how brave it would be to be able to march into that building in a new pair of boots and waving in your fist the manuscript of a bold new drama, one that would make the crowd go wild.
Burbage gave me my first job in the theatre, holding the horses for the booted gentlemen and for the idlers who couldn’t be arsed to cross Moorfields and Finsbury on foot, especially in the muddy weather and the ball-freezing frosts of early spring. Jesu. But country boy Will was a wizard with horses – I’ve always had a way with them. And I didn’t just hold them, I groomed them as well and filled their twitching ears with words, for the Stratford shit-kicker was a wizard with words too. I crooned sonnets into those listening manes. I leaped into the saddle and became a prince, a king of England. I saw young Harry with his beaver on, rise from the ground like feathered Mercury. Cantering about the cobbles that rang beneath the prancing hooves, sawing at the reins, I urged on my troops, the English army in front of Harfleur. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! I heard the shouts and drank in the applause of an audience enchanted by the horseman’s words. The owners came out of the Theatre well satisfied to find their steeds in such fine fettle. They paid me handsomely. I hired beggar boys to handle more. A boy can be got for a groat and a groatsworth of wit in business is all you need to spin a shilling out of a penny and a pound out of a shilling. I rented decent lodgings, bought a horse of my own, and, at last – a decent pair of boots.
It didn’t stop there. Burbage gave me more work. I carried for him – costumes, bread and beer, apples and oranges, cheeses, nuts. By this time I was inside the Theatre. In empty moments with nobody about I’d take the stage and I’d work on the imaginary forces of imaginary audiences. I was up there one day giving all I’d got when Burbage made an unexpected entrance.
O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
He stared at me, open-mouthed.
‘What the fuck’s that from?’
‘Just something I heard,’ I mumbled.
‘Well, I haven’t fucking heard it. You’ve got a good ear, friend. Let me hear more.’
I was a fair declaimer, he decided, not being much of an orator himself. From then on I assisted the prompter, marshalled the actors, kept them on cue, made up for sickness and slackness, hangovers and the pox, took on small parts, swept the shit from the stage, even looked after the box for Burbage and didn’t let any other bugger near it. Lord Burbage trusted me up to my ears and down to my balls. In short I too became a wondrous necessary man. Within fif
teen months I had become an actor.
A Burbage man.
‘And don’t tell me it wasn’t worth it, Will.’
It was without doubt the shittiest slog imaginable: the summer dust and sunburn of the provinces, to travel on the hard hoof from village to village for cheese and buttermilk and a shilling or two in cold cash, back to rainy London in cold October; then the cramped winter inns with their drunks and bugs, their thick smoke and thin rabble of yawning audiences; a brief chilly spring in the public theatres and out again on tour, through thistles and cowshit and itch, back to the bumpkins I’d come from.
And a hard grind it was rehearsing in the early mornings, performing every afternoon except Sundays, knocking up a different play every other day of the working week, fifteen shows a month and half of them new, taking on scores of piss-poor parts and storing them away in the ledgers of the brain, a feat performable only by the memorising freaks of the grammar schools. Weary with toil I haste me to my bed. By the end of my first season I’d stuffed out my player’s hide with a hundred different parts. I barely knew myself. And I was only one of the pale fruitless moons. A star of the stage kept five thousand lines a week in his skull.
Will Page 25