Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  Leave the Great Court if you have the entrée and go up the flight of stone stairs to the Guard Chamber, where his Majesties great Beefe-eaters are in attendance, which is nothing but to tell Tales, devoure the beverage, keepe a great fire, and carry up Dishes, wherein their fingers would bee sometimes before they come to the king's Table.

  Leaving thence we come out upon the Terrace, a cloister that runs round the open square known as the Preaching Place and connects the Royal Quarters with The Banqueting House, and which is now so rotten and ill repaired that it will collapse in a year and nearly kill the Spanish Ambassador, and where on a December night, a Masque being presented at court, one woman among the rest lost her honesty, for which she was carried to the porters lodge, being surprized at her busines on the top of the Taras.

  At Christmas along this Terrace or Taras, in furs and holly crowns, snow hissing in the cressets, the Court passes, newly come out of mourning for Prince Henry. There are to be plays and music, for this is the day of the betrothal of Frederick and Elizabeth, two handsome and personable young people who are actually in love, who fell in love at first sight; theirs will be the preeminent dynastic coupling of Protestant Europe, though it is whisperd hee is much too young and small timbred to undertake such a taske.

  Among the entertainments tonight the King's Men will perform a play of Shakespeare's, The Tempest, not a new play but newly mounted and with a Masque just composed and inserted by the author in honor of the royal match.

  The author happening in that cold winter of the Wedding to be in London, buying property near the Blackfriars Theater. Not having walked those streets then for years; no, not since 1610, when he came to make complaint to Thorpe for his printing of the sonnets, the which Thorpe got from that thieving rascal W.H., no ‘twere best he think not on't. On that visit, two years and more ago, he had gone up the river too, for to call upon old Dr. Dee in his Mortlake house, old friend and teacher of players and stage carpenters, to consult with him upon the pains and weakness in his legs; to find that the doctor had died a twelvemonth. Standing in the great room wherefrom the books, glasses, stones, staves, globes, maps, and all had been sold or lost or taken. Dead: dead after years of silence. His daughter there alone, who had nursed him as best she could. I knew him long ago, he said to her; I came here as a boy; I loved him and I honor him. And he had gone thence back downriver, a sharp wind blowing, blow away vanitie; and he bethought him, how a wise man, great doctor, midwife of nature's wonders, untrammeled in his powers, charger of spirits, might be driven to silence, retirement, abnegation. No, not driven neither: his powers unlost, but only put away; the spirits at length released that he had commanded. Ile burn my books. No, not that, not burned; poor Kit, not burned.

  Shipwreck. His mind harping on shipwreck those years, no marvel. A story of three realms—one of politic working, lords and plots and the world's business; one of magic such as Dr. Dee had talked of, had worked in too it may be, benign and fearsome, graves oped, noontime sun bedimmed; and one the realm of nature, plain, longed-for, impossible to restore.

  A year after that, The Tempest was at Blackfriars, Burbage giving fire to the rattling thunder, the kettles beaten in the cellarage, the isle full of noyses. And now this year, at Christmas, at court, the marvels and wonders it called for would be the more marvelous and wonderful, since Mr. In-I-go Jones of the jesting name would be the master carpenter. Disappearing banquets and flitting spirits and transformations to music. And Burbage had asked the author for a new little Masque too, a demi-Masque, for the betrothal of Elizabeth and her German.

  It was easily done. Waiting upon his lawyer in his chambers, he called for a pen and some paper. Nuptial blessings were certainly proper to the play, Ferdinand having passed all the tests set him by Prospero, including a solemn vow not to break Miranda's virgin knot before the wedding.

  I must

  Bestow vpon the eyes of this yong couple

  Some vanity of mine Art. It is my promise,

  And they expect it of me.

  Cold airs from the lawyer's window corner; coldest winter in years. Ile break my staff. John Dee's was long broken now. His own was merely the stick he leaned on in these London streets, where the younglings hurried laughing by. He scribbled. Not many more short lines like these left to make, and very likely he would not finish all that he had begun; but that he could not finish was not reason he should not go on.

  Now come my Ariell, bring a Corolary,

  Rather then want a Spirit; appear, & pertly.

  No tongue: all eyes: be silent. [Soft musick.]

  Later that month in the torchlit hall behind Inigo Jones's cloudie skies, all blue canvas and lath, three court ladies in dresses of their own designing take a deep breath, touch their bosoms, smile at one another. Three goddesses: Iris, Ceres, Juno. They descend, to applause, they step forth.

  Honor, riches, marriage, blessing,

  Long continuance, and encreasing,

  Hourely ioyes, be still vpon you,

  Iuno sings her blessings on you.

  Earths increase, foyzon plentie,

  Barnes, and Garners, neuer empty.

  Vines, with clustring bunches growing,

  Plants, with goodly burthen bowing:

  Spring come to you at the farthest,

  In the very end of Haruest.

  Scarcity and want shall shun you,

  Ceres blessing so is on you.

  Then enter certaine Reapers (properly habited:) they ioyne with the Nimphes, in a gracefull dance, towards the end whereof, Prospero starts sodainly and speakes.

  I had forgot that foule conspiracy

  Of the beast Calliban, and his confederates

  Against my life. The minute of their plot is almost come:

  Well done, auoid: no more.

  After which to a strange hollow and confused noyse, they heauily vanish.

  * * * *

  They vanish. Heavily, which is sadly or sorrowfully. Blown away in the midst of.

  Pierce, standing in the street before the Banqueting Hall—the new Banqueting Hall (1630) and not the old one, which has long been subsumed into the basements of the Ministry of Defence—said suddenly aloud, in grief and wonder, “He knew."

  The Banqueting Hall was Closed for Renovations. Blue plastic tarpaulins clothed it, ballooning softly in the cold smoky air, as though the building were under sail. Cloud of traffic around him moving up and down. “He knew,” Pierce said again. “It's as though he knew."

  It's as though he knew. As though Prospero knew, and therefore Shakespeare knew; as though he knew what he couldn't possibly have known.

  Pierce wrote this in his red journal in a Lyons tea shop, its windows steamed with winter, clatter of mugs, and smell of bacon and toast. He had the Puffin paperback of The Tempest, just acquired at a WH Smith stall, open to Act IV.

  Prospero remembers the conspiracy and crime afoot, and immediately he spoils his show, orders all of it away, even though he's just said to the children, Hush and be mute, or else our spell is marred. Which means the spell is marred. And when his new son-in-law Frederick, I mean Ferdinand, looks in movéd sort as if he was dismayed, then Prospero tells him that the revels now are ended; he says that the actors that blessed them were all spirits, not goddesses of love and plenty at all, and are vanished into air. Not only that but all his son-in-law's hopes and ambitions, and all the towers and palaces and temples, and the whole world—the great Globe itself, and all which it inherit—are no more substantial, and we are all such stuff as dreams are made on. How can he say that, what did he mean, didn't Shakespeare think who was listening just then? Was he talking to himself, or to them, and how could he know how that marriage and its hopes and plans would all end? That like this insubstantial pageant faded, it would leave not a rack behind.

  It's probably only that thing that Shakespeare does, how he infuses the most standard dramatic necessities with so much feeling, too much feeling for what's required. Maybe all he meant to do, dramatically
speaking, was to get the story back on track after this new masque; maybe in his day Prospero at this moment was played as a standard absentminded wizard, just catching up with his own plots. But that's not how it feels. No. It feels like the end of all blessing.

  Aboard the North Sea ferry, bound for the Hook of Holland and the Continent, cold ocean not far below his bed, his three cabinmates gently snoring, Pierce with his own tiny lamp lit, reading then writing.

  Why does Prospero abjure his magic?

  Wouldn't great magic like his have been a big help back in Milan, where he's headed? To build a better world, a new world? Is everything that he knows applicable only to this story on this island, and useless everywhere else? Nowhere does the play say so. What did Shakespeare know, and to whom was his warning issued?

  Gongs and bells and the low thudding of the diesels.

  Why is magic to be laid aside when the world's real work is taken up? Is that what I have to learn? Is it only that a story of magic can't end until magic is given up?

  * * * *

  From the Hook of Holland he went to the Hague aboard a local train or trolley; it passed magically from the city into the countryside, past tiny tidy farms damp brown and gray, stopping at crossroads for people dressed in brown and gray to get on and off. He got off where his directions told him, a gray suburb where up a street was a consular office of the People's Republic of Czechoslovakia. An undistinguished building that might have been a small clinic or even a private house. Inside just two young men in open shirts and leather jackets, universal young men, one bearded, who welcomed him without ceremony, and helped him fill out the forms he needed for his visa. Czech flag on the wall with hammer and sickle. They copied the numbers from his passport, they photographed him and asked an array of personal questions that had no relation to one another or to anything else, as though randomly selected to test his memory—or his truthfulness, maybe, he thought with a comic stab of paranoia. And they gave him his visa, with pleasure it seemed. His photograph within it, dark turtleneck, tousled hair, black piratical beard, glower—would it help or hurt? Troublemaker or fellow traveler? Did it matter? It was a sort of handsome fellow, though not himself maybe. The other riders on the tiny train into the city watched him study it.

  In the morning, sore and rattled from a night in a student hostel busy nightlong with comers and goers (no more of those, he vowed), he boarded a long sleek international train bound for Köln, which was Cologne, and the Rhine journey to Heidelberg.

  Absurd, but I am continually surprised that the Europeans celebrate their own historic sites, not only the big ones but the littlest and least, places I've known about only as I got their names and map coordinates from esoteric works. Come to find out that they and their legends are well known, they are advertised, you pay money to enter them, and you get pamphlets that explain them all. At Heidelberg you're told every rooming house Goethe stayed in, what moonlight walks to take up onto the castle ramparts, just where Goethe stood when he famously observed, etc.; stationery, souvenir plates, beer mugs, with the same pictures engraved on them. Why did I think it would all lie neglected, only waiting for me? Because I didn't really believe it existed?

  He hadn't; even as he walked it, it seemed to him that his own presence summoned this Old World into existence in all its solidity and fullness, a fullness at once expressive and as mute as stone, which a lot of it was, stone: churches and pavements and castle walls and apartment buildings where whoever lived: more mute and obdurate than he could have imagined in advance. He put out a hand and touched speechless stone and so caused it to come to be. It was unsettling. He couldn't make it stop. He got used to it.

  Far famed, Schloss Heidelberg is part ruin, part restoration. The restored parts are largely without interest, resembling a combination of a Swiss Stübli and the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner. Be sure to engage a Führer (official guide) if you wish to go through the maze of passages, rooms, belvederes, towers, and corridors, or you may never find a way out.

  He might have liked to see what the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner, or something resembling one, looked like; but the interiors were geschlossen for the winter months and there was no Führer. He wandered in the Schlosshof, the castle yard. A silver fog hung over the river Neckar and the toy town far below. Pierce followed the obvious way, down the sloping walks and the famed terraced gardens, beneath a great arch—the Elizabeth-Pforte, built as a birthday surprise (legend has it) in a single night by the besotted Frederick V for his English queen—and into a broad bare terrace. Where were the famed gardens?

  "Here,” said Dame Frances Yates. “The designer was Salomon de Caus, a French Protestant and an extremely brilliant garden architect and hydraulic engineer. He was on intimate terms with Inigo Jones..."

  Fine rain had begun to fall. She took from her bag a collapsible umbrella, pointed it like an épée, and pressed a button; the umbrella opened as it lengthened. Pierce held it over the two of them, for she hardly reached his shoulder. She told him how de Caus had blasted away the mountain with gunpowder to level it for his gardens, how he constructed grottoes where musical fountains played, and a water organ based on a design in Vitruvius, and a statue of Memnon that sang when the sun struck it, “as in the classical story,” which Pierce couldn't remember.

  Nothing of what she described—geometrical beds, obelisks, an airy palace, a maze, another maze—could now be seen; only a mossy and almost illegible river god at the entrance to a grotto. A cave. Empty. The dumpling-shaped tourist with umbrella and walking shoes who had reminded him of Dame Frances stared with him into the dark echoey silence, and withdrew.

  It was a ruin, more even than a ruin, a quasi-natural object, vine grown and shapeless, devolving from its status as a work of hands and minds to a complex lump of stone, disorganizing every day a little further in the entropy of hope and desire, which proceeds only one way. What had destroyed it? Lightning, said the guidebook, striking not once but twice, and a dynastic dispute with a French king in the following century. But Dame Frances said it was the two of them, Frederick and his Elizabeth, the might-be-happy couple blessed by Shakespeare's ambivalent mage. The two who in 1619 reigned for a winter as king and queen of Bohemia, a reign as brief and illusory as a masque: and who brought down upon their magic kingdom on the Rhine the tercios and the pikemen and the musketeers and the sappers and the end of everything.

  7

  She called him Celadon, after the shepherd-knight in d'Urfé's L'Astrée, that vastly popular romance about the Golden Age and the return of Astræa, goddess of Justice and Peace, ears of corn wound in her hair. Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna. He wrote his love letters to her in French; she never learned German. The marriage had been the work of the nobleman Christian of Anhalt, a ferocious little man with wild red hair, tireless bearer of a heavy destiny (so he believed), and the counselor closest to Frederick. Frederick called him Mon père.

  Anhalt was there to receive the Princess Palatine when she first arrived at Oppenheim in the Palatinate, and he brought her to Heidelberg, her new seat, by means of a series of masques and processions designed by wise workers to assure her and her spouse's health, happiness, and success, drawing down upon them the best astral and divine influences by the right arrangement of signs, persons, geometries, and words. She passed through arches covered with roses, with images of Church Fathers, Ancestors, Deities. A pretty boy gave her a basket of fruit in the name of Flora and Pomona—Spring and then Autumn, flower and then fruit—for Fertility; and she ate hungrily, and everyone laughed and rejoiced in her. Her husband came out to meet her in a wagon made like Jason's ship, sailing with the Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece. Music, in Venus's mode (the Hypolydian) and generous Jupiter's (the Lydian) and smiling Sol's (the Dorian), but not the melancholic Hypodorian; there would be time enough for Saturnine music later.

  She brought with her a troupe of English actors, for she loved plays and shows and let's-pretend above all things. They performed
old plays and new, Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won, The Merrie Divil of Edmonton, A Game at Chesse, which mocked the Spanish. Her Celadon delighted to see her laugh, delighted to see her delighted, and if plays delighted her there would be plays. No matter that his family was not only Calvinist but fiercely Calvinist: his father had once held up a consecrated host before the congregation and ripped it into shreds: “Fine god you are! We'll see who's stronger!” From then on it was tough bread and wooden mugs at the infrequent communions in his whitewashed chapel.

  Frederick and his Elizabeth were beings of a different order. Of course they stood for True Religion, of course they were Evangelical, but they were also Hope and Beauty and Conciliation and Possibility and Fructification and Peace; somehow this seemed obvious to all, all at least who came within range of the happy rays their persons emanated. There were two young men in the throngs when He and She first met beneath the Arch at Heidelberg: one was a peregrinating Lutheran pastor, Johann Valentin Andreæ, and the other a student at the university, a Moravian and a member of the Moravian Brethren, a gentle pietist sect—his name was Jan Komensky, which he latinized to Comenius. And both of them felt it: good stars in conjunction, the world going the right way after a long wandering, Saturnian cold hatred and Martian hot fury both abating. Sun and the scent of roses.