He called himself Harry the Third.
‘A lot younger than you, Will.’
Born in ’73 – yes, I was only ten – his father was a Catholic and a queer (two dangerous dispositions) who’d done time for his part in the ’69 rebellion of the Northern Catholic earls, and who’d died young and mysteriously – maybe not so mysteriously – after helping Campion, and left huge sums of money to one Thomas Dymoke, a mere manservant – how exactly he’d served his master seemed clear enough to some.
‘I told you about leaving money to servants.’
Things moved quickly for young Harry after that. He became a ward of Burghley’s, and Burghley was never a man to waste time.
‘Poor old Harry.’
Poor little rich boy. Fatherless at eight, a freshman at twelve, a graduate at sixteen. Burghley sent him to his old college, St John’s at Cambridge, brimming with bards and bumboys, then straight to Gray’s Inn – where he benched with Bacon – to finish the business, with a marriage planned to follow hard upon. A quick march to the sacrificial altar.
‘Old Burghley would have made a good executioner.’
He was the executioner. The marriage he had in mind was naturally to his own grand-daughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, daughter of his dead daughter Anne (his favourite) and the wayward Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, he who ruined himself and his estates. The marriage to Southampton was to be her consolation prize. As Burghley’s grandchild the Lady Elizabeth wasn’t just any young tart of the court whose arse you’d grope behind the arras. And Southampton was meant to be grateful.
‘And wasn’t?’
Alas, no. At any rate that was the Burghley plan: a wedding for his ward at sweet seventeen. The lady was just fifteen. Harry’s mother was ecstatic – her son to marry into the family of the most powerful politician in the country. On top of which they desperately needed to secure the succession. A fourth earl had to be fathered, of that there was no doubt. And the filly was waiting for the foal, both to be groomed in the Burghley stables.
‘Where refusals could doubtless cost you dear.’
It was to cost young Harry very dear indeed. Burghley blew up when this ungrateful milksop informed him he’d have none of it, not just yet, he wanted more time – a year at least – to think about it and to enjoy his youth while he was thinking.
‘And you couldn’t blame him, could you?’
What? Tutored since he was three, no childhood to speak of, head down at college for five years after that – and now straight into marriage?
‘To hell with that for a lark at heaven’s gate, eh?’
He wanted to be a soldier boy and march in triumph behind his model of gallantry, Robert Devereux –
‘The Earl of Essex.’
Wedded himself, mind you, but glamorously so – to the fair widow of Sir Philip Sidney, dead on Zutphen field these four years, England’s chivalric flower, immortalised by a bullet and a bouquet of sonnets. He’d bequeathed Essex his sword and his wife.
Essex sailed for France, commander of the Normandy expedition at twenty-four. But Elizabeth kept Harry at court with a few well chosen words, of the sort you don’t question, not when they are wafted to you on the bad breath of ageing queens.
‘For your intent in going to Normandy, it is most retrograde to our desire, and we beseech you, bend you to remain, here in the cheer and comfort of our eye. I pray thee, stay with us: go not to Normandy. And let thine eye look like a friend on England.’
‘I shall in all my best obey you, madam.’
‘Why, ’tis a loving and a fair reply.’
She brought him out of his dumps and raised his eyelids.
‘But not his hopes?’
He gloomed again when she raised the subject of the succession. ‘Your seeds are no use to us, sir, scattered over Normandy. Southampton House must come first for you.’
And so to my dawn caller with the expensive gloves.
‘You see, Will, her Majesty herself talks of this. As for myself, I represent the Countess of Southampton, but the Countess spoke to Lord Burghley and Burghley spoke to the Queen, and her Majesty’s wish – ’
‘Is an order?’
‘Well let’s just say that it is part of my job to translate wishes into orders and orders into facts. So what we want you to do, Master Shakespeare, (I’d better be formal here), is to take up your pen and write. It will be worth your while. Be in no doubt of it.’
‘And so you became a sonneteer?’
In time, Francis. I was in no doubt of one thing: that right now I had to find an alternative occupation. The public that had poured into the playhouses were busy filling up the plague-pits. With the theatres shut I needed a patron. Now a patron had come knocking at the door. The highest in the land wanted me to write something for a young earl, something that might move his mind to marriage, not to war.
‘So Venus and Adonis came out of politics!’
And money. Everything comes out of politics, and money. Especially when you don’t have any. And you’re a political pawn.
‘I don’t see how it fits, though.’
It’s obvious enough, Francis. A young man rejects the lure of love, follows the call of action instead – and ends up dead, gored by a boar. The tusk is stronger than the tool. And you can call the tusk the plague of war or just the plague, or call it nothing but itself if you prefer. The point is that, for all his attractions and attributes, Adonis has left behind him no copy of himself for posterity to admire.
For he being dead, with him is beauty slain – and beauty being dead, black chaos comes again.
‘But that was an exhortation to marry – just what he didn’t want.’
I’d been asked – no – ordered to please an earl by persuading him to do the very thing he didn’t want to, and the likelihood ran high that he’d object furiously to a bumpkin actor and untried poet having the temerity to take sides with Burghley in the matter of his marriage. I needed to make friends, not enemies. And to antagonise a theatre-lover like the third Earl of Southampton at a time when the theatre was in dire crisis, seemed hardly the best thing to do.
But I was under orders and I got away with it. I’d made the case for love, not war, to the satisfaction of his mother and protector, and even her Majesty approved.
‘And he went for it.’
Straight for the sugar, ignored the allegory, accepted the dedication – and paid me handsomely. His mother paid me too, even more handsomely, if backhandedly. Maybe the Queen chipped in, or even old Burghley opened his purse and watched the moths fly out, who knows? It was all wrapped up in a fog and the same gloved gentleman apologised for that when he visited a second time. There was nothing airy about the purse of money that he slapped down hard on the table. In that silvery jingle I heard the bright ring of words. I’d made more in a month than I could have done in a whole year of theatre. Apparently I’d succeeded where others before me (Nashe notably) had failed. This business of writing for the rich was playacting of a different sort and much more profitable. Thank God for the plague, I thought – it had passed me by and raised me high.
‘Lucky Will.’
It didn’t end there. I was taken on as a member of Harry’s household, went into service as entertainments man at Holborn and at Titchfield, where from time to time I rode out the plague with Harry – teacher, talker, friend. The theatres were out of business but now I had my own private theatre, and the Southampton circle loved it.
That’s when I gave them Love’s Labour and the Shrew, and early stabs at the Merchant and Romeo. And I gave them the Two Gentlemen, plenty of bachelor boy matter, female love and their conflicting claims. Through Harry I was even known at court. I was high on Fortune’s wheel, and I floated like a bubble through the plague air. Little did I know the stage was set for betrayal. It seemed to be a golden time.
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Seemed. How often have I used that word? And not for nothing, as things are seldom what they seem in this stage-play world. Venus
had been a success in every way but one. It hadn’t sent young Harry leaping up the Burghley balcony and into bed with the virgin Vere to tread the nuptial dance. Public acclaim was mine but the private job was still undone.
‘And that’s how the sonnets got started?’
‘Several verses, if you will, sweet Will – or perhaps I should say Master Shakespeare, once again, as this is weightier business? – to sweeten the young bugger’s judgement.’
‘The same gentleman caller?’
The very same.
‘And you’ll be well paid for your pains.’
‘Pains? No pains, my lord, I assure you, I take pleasure in singing.’
‘Pleasure won’t keep the wolf from the door when winter comes. And that will come soon enough if the young sod doesn’t marry. We’ll all be wolf’s meat.’
Venus and Adonis was pastoral-classical-allegorical, all cloaked up, but now they wanted straight talking, with rhyming couplets pointing up the argument – for marriage. How to tell a not exactly straight young man in exact straight terms that it’s high time he got his sex right and got married?
I began with the traditional arguments. Don’t be a miser, a glutton and a hoarder, an enemy to posterity and to your fair self. Make a copy of it now, for when you’re old and cold, nobody will remember how lovely you once were. Besides, there’s a lady waiting, and her womb will be a wormery unless you plough it, a tomb, unless you break in there and people it with sons to carry on this proud world, and your own noble line. Otherwise, my lad, you’re a lost day, a withered plant, a blasted tree, a blank page. And thou among the wastes of time must go. It’s the only way. Even my verses can’t do you justice. They’re fruitless verses anyway and nobody will believe them in time to come, they’ll say I was a barren rascal, a hanger-on, a hypocrite and hyperbolist, exaggerating for the sake of gain. At best, they’ll say, it was a poet’s rage. But if you were to beget children now, your offspring would confirm the claims of these poor poems of mine and you’d live again, twice over: in these here lines, and in the lineaments of your brood.
‘Something of a lecture?’
It was. I even lectured him on wanking.
‘You didn’t!’
Why dost thou abuse the bounteous largess given thee to give? Fourth poem in. I got to the root of the matter early on.
‘And incidentally complimented him on the size of his prick.’
And explicitly chastised him for having traffic with himself alone. After which I appealed to fear: fear of time, which is what we fear most. Fear of being forty when you’re twenty. Fear of being fifty when you’re forty-five. Fear of being fifty-one – but of never seeing sixty. Or even fifty-two. Fear of not being any age, ever again, of becoming a subtraction, a nothing – hid in death’s dateless night.
‘Frightening stuff.’
And a strong card to play. The young don’t want to be old and the old don’t want to die. Think about it: the blackness of the grave, the white silence of bones. Total extinction. Unless you beget that son.
‘And did he?’
Breath into the wind. Waste of ink and paper. He was not to be quatrained and coupleted and rhymed and pentametered into a Burghley bed, and would not be sonneteered into marriage if you please.
‘But you got paid?’
Sixpence a sonnet. Why do you think I wrote so many?
‘It wasn’t a fortune.’
Exactly. That’s why I felt the close fist of the queen behind it.
‘She got her money’s worth.’
So did Harry. He didn’t like the content but he approved of the art. And of the immortality. The sonnets would be his mausoleum, a monument that would eternalise his name though I’d tried to convince him of the opposite. My lines are illusory, I told him. Time’s lines are all too real. A poet’s are a mere make-believe, a melancholy sham, a desperate rhetoric, a freak of fancy, a trick of the brain. Posterity will dismiss my claims as a poet’s passion, no more. My sheaves of verse will be straws in the wind, and I’ll be classed as a stretcher of truth, an invalid babbler. A sad old stylist with an antique pen.
‘Did you believe that? Do you believe it?’
Of course. But Harry didn’t. He thought I was a genius. And from now on he wanted me to celebrate not matrimony but himself, in all his glorious youthful beauty.
‘So the sonnets changed direction.’
You don’t argue with an aristocrat when you’re an out of work player and a sixpenny sonneteer. Make me immortal with a rhyme, he said – spell it out for posterity. And though I didn’t believe in that kind of spell, I was under another. I was under his. I’d fallen for his charm. I tried to keep it from myself but it was no use. One day I woke up and spoke the truth: I worshipped him. I was in love.
40
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
Oh, Francis! I was using the language of the heart. I was writing from the soul. I adored the little bastard.
‘So it would appear.’ Francis fumbling in his pocket.
What do you mean? What’s that you’ve got there?
‘O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow.’
Put that down, Francis.
There he stood before my bed, with Thorpe’s pirated edition of the sonnets – as good as pirated – in his fat paw, and thumbing through what suddenly felt like a lifetime of love, though it was only the matter of a year or two, a little more.
Where did you get that?
‘Mistress Anne.’
Ah, to twist the knife a little before I die. I see. She knows where I keep it. She can’t even read, you know.
‘It’s pretty distinctive, Will – and there’s your name, she can read that I suppose. On the title-page – Shakespeare’s sonnets, never before imprinted. Unless there’s two of you.’
There’s one of me, shortly to be none. And they never should have been imprinted. They broke my own secrecy rule. They were private pieces.
‘No pieces are private, especially if you put them on paper, and especially a public man’s. Come on, Will, you know that better than I do.’
They were the inner man’s, they were the key to my heart. They were me.
‘For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings… O! know, sweet love, I always write of you… It is my love that keeps mine eye awake… I love you so, that I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot… After my death, dear love, forget me quite… Love, love, love, what were you thinking of? I mean, if it had at least been a woman. Forgive me, Will, I’m a pretty straight fellow, forthright Francis, you know –’
With his eye on that last slice of pie, I know.
‘But what sort of – I can barely bring myself to say it – love – are we talking about here exactly? I mean, how far…if you don’t mind my asking?’
I don’t mind your asking.
‘Well then, in so many words – but not too many. You talk, I’ll eat, how’s that?’
Well then, as you say, I was smitten, and so was he. A self-smitten poser with a piece of petulance for a mouth. He was beautiful, sociable, selfish, susceptible, and proud, an arrogant sod who lapped up flattery like a cat.
‘Nice choice. Congratulations.’
He was also generous, impulsive, accomplished, and full of fun. He could throw condescension to the winds and chatter with princes and gravediggers in the same breath. He was a fatherless youth exposed to temptation, under pressure, on the verge of plenty, itching for action and audience, and in need of guidance. More, he loved the theatre, praised my plays, accepted my verses, enjoyed my company, sucked in my talk, drew me right to the heart of his charmed circle. Do you know what it means, Francis, to hear the polished flagstones of the courtyards ringing to your proud hooves as you ride out with the great ones? To see the sparks struck from the cobbled streets fly upwards to the stars? An earl’s hand on your shoulder when the oars dip and the sound of a lute sends a ripple over the Thames and a shiver up your spine? And even the queen’s pale fingers extending t
o your lips? I’ll tell you what it means, Francis. It’s the taste and smell of success.
‘But what kind of an affair was it?’
It wasn’t any kind of an affair. It was a loving friendship. It was a beautiful attachment, a fair fellowship. And the truth is that if these poems you’re holding there happen to survive, it won’t be the sonnets that immortalise a dead earl, it will be the dead earl that immortalises the sonnets. And who knows, the earl may even immortalise the writer.
‘Isn’t that the wrong way round?’
No, it’s what a writer wants most. Inspiration. That was his greatest gift to me. On top of which he gave me work, and much more than work – experience, circles I’d never have moved in, not in my best dreams. But for him I’d have lived on the fringes. Married too young, my father’s financial fall, those early struggles, success snatched away by the plague, it was Henry Wriothesley who opened the doors of a new world for me, not to mention a special gift – the money that would buy me a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and put me on the road to business. Yes, of course I worshipped him. Cash inspires. But I owed him something greater than gold. He was a golden lad. I was inspired to write about him, that’s all, words that bound the three of us together: myself, himself, the sonnets. He liked the idea of living forever in my verse. I liked the idea of my verse living through him. Not forever, of course, that’s nonsense. But we made sense together. We were Mercutio and Romeo, Antonio and Bassanio, Proteus and Valentine, Horatio and Hamlet, Falstaff and Hal.
‘O thou, my lovely boy!’
That says it all, Francis. Now give me back my book. And if you ask me to tell you why I loved him I can only answer, because it was he, because it was myself.
‘Nothing else?’
There was something else. We were two men in a whirling world and an insane city, each of us lacking something in his life. Harry was a young man without a father. I was an older man without a son. I’d been away from little Hamnet these six or seven years, seeing him all too seldom. I’d traded a family in Stratford for success in London, and had become father to a family of shadows, sons and daughters of the stage given life for a brief hour or two on wooden boards. Walking illusions. In Harry I saw something of the son I’d set aside for those strutting shadows of the stage, a son left fatherless in Stratford. The shadows were to take him sooner than I knew. O thou, my lovely boy…
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