But not human greatness.
That’s the unexpected thing. The fading stars have seen something before they fall, something that places them on a higher plane which momentarily you are allowed to share with them. Only momentarily. Together you take a cosmic view of things and feel that wave of cosmic nonchalance wash over you, however bleak the business. You know that life is a succession of meaningless tomorrows going down to dusty death, and you review it all in your head, the brief candle, the walking shadow, the poor player, the pitiful tale – and gradually, magically, the sound and fury die away, leaving you unafraid to face the nothingness that awaits us all.
And it’s this, this combination of the real and the ideal worlds in the single new world of the play, autonomous, untouchable and true, but at the same time fragile, transient, tender and sad, that makes the theatre itself so magical and the tragic moment so mysterious and profound. You go home by Dead Man’s Place knowing that man is nobler than you thought him, but knowing that his defiance will be crushed by the cosmos anyway. It doesn’t seem to matter. You are on a cloud with a candle in your hand, a little closer to heaven, having just been through hell. A spark of hope in the darkness, then? Yes, in spite of everything. Even if for no other reason than that some mad dramatist in the fury of his heart actually took the time to sit down and put it all into words, simply for playing on a stage. There must be some good in us somewhere. And maybe even some meaning to it all.
One last thought, Francis. The hero has to die – we know that. It’s a fixed law of tragedy and I never tried to change it. But it’s the mental suffering that constitutes his real tragedy, what he has undergone. Othello has died inwardly long before he kills his wife, or indeed himself. Macbeth has long wearied of the sun and is tired of tomorrows. Lear dies on the rack of the tough world away back in the third Act – it’s a dead man who walks on stage holding a dead daughter in his arms. And Hamlet – his death is not due to poison – he gives up quietly on life shortly before he enters his silence. And yet he has to die.
Not because death is the end of all stories but because the death is artistically satisfying, that’s all, rounding off the sense that the wheel has truly turned, the clock has ticked, while on a more basic level than that his death quite simply satisfies the spectators’ taste for blood. It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood. They saw plenty of it and they could never have enough. Liver of blaspheming Jew, finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-begotten by a drab. Not nice? No, but that was their England, take it or leave it. They had no choice. Life was still a bear-pit and they wanted their penny’s worth, and that’s the truth of it.
64
As you get older you outgrow tragedy. You’ve become so used to it, if not inured to it, during the course of a lifetime, that now suddenly – contrary to all that experience has taught you and which you know to be true – you begin to hope that there’s something beyond tragedy, as life may exist beyond death. Some sort of redemption. You know it’s not so but you indulge yourself nonetheless. You can’t help it.
The odd thing is that this new mood, superseding the tragic, occurs at that time in your life which in one sense is the most tragic of all – the time when all your friends and family start to die, leaving you naked in your age. You find yourself attending more funerals than weddings. Seven funerals and one wedding in a three-year period gives you some idea of what I’m saying. And the three family funerals were practically within the same year. Even the occasional christenings, which ought to be occasions of pure joy, sharpen up instead your awareness of the gulf that divides the generations. Yes, Francis, you are a passenger in a fierce chariot, a journey going every day. And you’re heading away from the earth, with all its shapes and scents and sounds of beauty. You’re heading into the dark and you want a candle to take with you.
The deaths of colleagues are worse than family bereavements. Family losses are more affecting, naturally, and are harder to bear. But there’s something more chilling about the death of a business partner that makes you stand back a little and look at your own life and what’s left of it. All that work and worry – and for what? You start to measure out the grains of sand that remain in the glass.
Tom Pope had died back in the year of the new king. He’d retired by then, but Gus Phillips was still working when he fell ill in the spring of 1605 and drew up his will. He died in May, leaving a wife, Anne, and four daughters. Young Gus, the son, had stayed always young, dying in childhood, so as with Ben Jonson there was a bond between Gus and myself. Such kinships were hardly uncommon. Gus and his family had lived close to the Bankside theatre district in Horseshoe Court in St Saviour’s in Southwark, but he’d moved into his splendid new house at Mortlake in Surrey just before making up his will. This was the house I went to along with Condell and Cowley on a fine summery May morning to hear what Gus had to say to us from beyond the grave that hid him so well from the searching sun.
Something of the old Gus couldn’t be hidden, however. To his late apprentice, Samuel Gilbourne, he left ‘forty shillings, his mouse-coloured velvet hose and a white taffety doublet. Also a black taffety suit, my purple cloak, sword and dagger, and my base viol. And to my other apprentice, James Sands, also forty shillings and a cithern, a bandore and a lute at the expiry of his indentures.’ Yes, that was Gus, all right. You got the picture of him there, ruffing it well and cutting quite a caper in his dashing coloured clothes and his accompanying instruments. And that’s how we remembered him, resurrecting him for the sake of his widow and children in anecdote and accolade.
Five pounds went to the hired men, thirty shilling gold pieces to me, and to Condell, and Chris Beeston, and twenty shillings in gold to Fletcher, Armin, Tooley, Cowley, and Cooke. Heminges and Burbage each got a silver bowl worth five pounds. Tim Whithorn was left one worth twenty pounds. His sister Elizabeth came in for only five pounds but she’d married into the Company two years ago and was well provided for. Five pounds went to the parish poor. (Ten from me did we say, Francis?) And finally, on the strength of his newly acquired Mortlake property and land, Gus wanted to be buried in the chancel of the church, like a gentleman. How’s that for a will?
Will Sly also got a five-pounds silver bowl. He had three years left to enjoy it. Unmarried, he’d buried his illegitimate infant son not two weeks old in St Giles Cripplegate. He himself was buried in St Leonard’s Shoreditch in a blinding August sun in the plague year of 1608. He left his house in Holywell Street to the daughter of our fellow Robert Browne, the one whose whole family had succumbed to the plague back in ’93. But Browne had married again, if you recall, and Sly remembered him through his daughter. He remembered him for himself too, bequeathing him his entire share in the Globe. James Sands did well again – Sly left him forty pounds, no mean sum. Cuthbert Burbage didn’t need much; he inherited Sly’s hat and sword. And the parish poor got the forty shillings that were left.
And so, as the fellows die off and the bequests are read out, you begin mentally composing your own will, hoping there won’t be any need actually to call in the lawyer for years to come – and yet here you are at last, Francis – but all the same starting to turn over in your mind the bits and pieces that form the material mosaic of your life – houses, investments, furnishings, and how the whole is to be broken up and distributed and who gets what, even down to the silver bowls and the doublet and hose.
Whispers of mortality. They buzz all the louder about your ears when you help put into the ground somebody you slept with not all that long ago. Madame Mountjoy died the year after Gus and we buried her on the second last day of October, among swirling leaves that were already driving like snow into the cold hole that awaited her. I looked guiltily at the blind shrouded thing we were about to put away from us and remembered the rank sweat of the bed, a few furtive fucks in the Silver Street chamber above the shop, listening for noises from beneath, and the armpit smell of adultery. The haunches that had reared so wildly beneath my reining hands – so still and cold in
side that stiff sackcloth that was being lowered now into the silence and the dark. And all that excited French whispering and kissing, her tongue never idle. It was now, though. Jesus. In went the earth and we walked away and left her with the leaves flickering on her grave.
But sun and shadow are always at it, dancing down the years. The following year, 1607, my Susanna was married on 5th June, and in the February following I was at the christening of my first grandchild – her daughter Elizabeth. My mother had only half a year to enjoy her great-grand-daughter. She died two weeks too soon to see the arrival of a new grandson, Michael Hart. My sister Joan had married the hatter, William Hart, whose only accomplishment was to produce four children. Their three-year-old Mary had already died the prev-ious year. We buried my mother on the 9th day of September, and infant Michael was baptised on the 23rd.
‘What a brain for dates!’
What a brain, Francis! Never mind about dates. By then Mary Arden was one with the forest that bore her name. She had gone back to nature.
She who had borne eight of us and lost an early three, now lay unringed for us all to see, the winds’ blown toy in time. She had fed us, clothed us, wiped our noses, bandaged our bleeding knees, dried our tears. She couldn’t dry them now. All that exuberance and love reduced to a grey starch over lips, over lineaments that were no longer hers – they were the earth’s due and it was waiting for payment. I looked dumbly at the hands’ knot, the hands that had provided an arch under which we had all stood protected, to her best ability, for half a century of motherhood. An awful moment and a point of no return, when you confront the corpse of the one that gave you life, knowing that the knot intrinsicate of life itself has been unravelled and nothing will bind it up again.
But there weren’t five children standing round that stillness in the best bed in New Place that September day – only four. One had followed me to London to be an actor. And it was the loss of the twenty-seven-year-old Edmund, her youngest child and her favourite, that had begun the slow invisible unravelling of the knot over nine mysterious months. It was the reverse of her final pregnancy – a nine-month maturation of the wolf in the womb, at the end of which she herself was delivered, to death.
Edmund died in the big freeze of 1607, the hardest frost in my lifetime, the hardest to crack my heart. The Thames donned her stiff coat again and the ice piled up against the piers at the bridge. The river turned into a white marbled road, women crossed from bank to bank, as safe as in their parlours, fires blazed on the huge tract of glass that had been London’s waterway, and hawkers offered you pans of coals to warm your bitten fingers as you travelled by. Even the archbishop of London made this his route, passing from Lambeth to Westminster over water that Christ could have walked at any time and the archbishop trusted well enough in its frozen state.
A carnival atmosphere it was. Bowling on the frozen river, archery practice, skating, wrestling, football, booths with fruits and hot pies and roasted chestnuts. Barbers with their chairs set down on the ice and their signs hung out, cutting the hair and tearing out the teeth of any who cared to stop and be trim or toothache-free for the New Year. Blood spattered the ice around the benches but a good fire was blazing at their backs to comfort the clients in their pain. Most folk just stopped for the haircut, accepting a glass from the youths who burned wine and sack on the ice and made partakers out of all those with wintry stomachs that passed their way. A temporary tavern was even set up on wheels. It was all a festival.
Only the watermen, the fish, and the poor were losers. The ferrymen furled up their smoky sails. The finned population of the city, unused to lie under such thick roofs, were stopped in their courses in the frozen stream. And the poor froze too, as woodmongers and chandlers put up their prices when supplies fell well behind demand, even though fuel-laden barges coursed slowly over the ice, drawn by engines and pulleys. But the poor are always losers – poor folk are soonest pissed on, my mother used to say. And rich men never had more money and covetousness never less pity than at the time of the big December freeze.
It was an odd time for Edmund to die, especially of the plague. It had raged hard between July and November that year, killing his base-born son in August. We buried the infant in St Giles without Cripplegate, another anonymous number without a stone to his name, all the more anonymous for his illegitimacy – in the eyes of a cold church. But even the freeze didn’t kill the plague entirely. As a killer it vied with the frost, and the gravediggers ran with sweat, hammering at the iron earth with their picks and cursing like madmen, unable to crack a crust which they swore went deeper than six feet. Many went into graves so shallow they protruded soon after the first thaw and had to be reburied in the spring. It was in this abandoned atmosphere in which life danced with death that Edmund died of a last mad fling of the plague. While he was still together he begged me not to commit him to one of the shallow frost graves. I promised him I’d do better than that. He’d lie inside the church, like any gentleman.
He died on the Wednesday morning, 30th December, and was buried quickly on New Year’s Eve. And before the city bells tolled out the passing of the old year, a forenoon knell of the great bell tolled for the passing of my youngest brother, little Edmund. It was eight shillings for that knell and twenty shillings for the interment within the church. The lesser bell would have cost only twelvepence and what did it matter as he couldn’t hear it anyway? Well, it did matter. I could hear it, and that’s what mattered. Two or three shillings would have bought an earth grave in the churchyard but I saved the sexton’s sweat and paid the extra to pacify Edmund’s soul – and my own. Why do we spend good money on the rubbish death leaves us with, the churchyard remains? Money that’s grudged during our lives but that flows readily enough when death opens the floodgates. Guilt? Of course.
Tons of guilt, years of it, yes, years, years. My little brother who was so proud of me, who was always in my shadow and never needed to be, because he was a better man than me. Edmund, who shadowed me to London, wanting to be a player, wanting to be me. He was betrayed by a bitch, you know. She broke his heart. And I should have looked after him, shouldn’t I? Of course I should, I was his big brother, but something got in the way, life got in the way, didn’t it, as it always does, my own sodden life, and now he’s dead, and love that comes too late is the last futile flag of our humanity, run up in anguish to signal to a vanished soul that this is what we meant to say, for years and years – and never did.
And so instead of the gravedigger’s sweat on that last day of the year, it was the sweat of the lone bell-ringer who went up the tower of St Saviour’s, Southwark, and began to pull on the forty-six hundredweight of bell suspended above his head. His hands would have been blue up there in that freezing white air. Far beneath him the people on the Thames looked up – the foodsellers and football players and barbers and bear-keepers and the cold whores. The whores would have paid little attention. It was only the sound of another rich man’s funeral, apparently, if only they’d known, someone fat enough to have lain with flesh less diseased than their own, someone with sufficient cash to have paid for the knell of the big one. No whore’s ghost would ever hear that sound as the poxed corpse was shipped into the anonymous earth to the sound of silence broken only by the sextons’ spades and curses.
Edmund was buried in the actors’ quarter of the church, a shadow who never offended, a poor player who’d strutted less than his hour or two upon the stage. Just three days earlier we’d performed before the king at Whitehall. Our lines were still in our minds as we stood there thinking about an afternoon performance at the Globe that few would come to because of the cold. Players were a little better off than the fish stilled in the ice – at least we were alive, we who came away from Edmund’s grave that morning. But as for trade there was not much between us and the cursing watermen. It didn’t matter to me. Nothing much mattered to me after my little brother’s death. After that I was merely marking time.
65
Jack Frost
was not the only enemy to our livelihoods that year. There was a theatrical freeze on as well, a frost of fashion, Francis, settling on the kinds of play that had made my name, and tightening its white grip year by year. The stage had faded from the heyday of Faustus and Harry the Sixth. The grandeur and glory days had gone, and the drama no longer opened out for you a window onto the universe. It closed all the shutters instead and made you look in on a confined world, socially confined as in Ben’s plays, or spiritually, as in Webster. God and the Devil were no longer on stage. Nor were all their heroic opposites – just a collection of horrible or petty human beings, beetles with brains, and without souls.
Take Beaumont and Fletcher. They were the waterflies of the theatrical current. They’d written plays together and separately for the Children’s Companies and now for us, and they gave the middle classes the dreamy nonsense they wanted, weaving their pretty yarns and working the trick. Superficial writing is an easy winner with an idle and ignorant public.
Will Page 46