Love's Will

by Meredith Whitford

  “No, lodgings are enough. Unless you want a London house. No, a place in Stratford.”

  “But you love London!”

  “I enjoy it. I don’t love it. Stratford’s home. I’ll buy you a house, Anne, one suitable for you and the children. Something grand.”

  “Then you’d better get busy writing.”

  “Mmm, yes.”

  Anne would have liked to make love again, but when she moved against him and touched him, all she got was her hand held, and a rough draft of his dedication to Southampton.

  5.

  Two days later Anne heard a peremptory knocking on the front door of the house. Intent on mending the lace collar on her husband’s best shirt, she paid no particular attention; William paid it none at all, he probably didn’t hear it. He was writing and lost in the world he was creating. Then feet clomped up the stairs and the parlour door shook under the hammering.

  William’s friends usually breezed straight in. Half-afraid, Anne put down her sewing. She looked at William as the hammering came again, and this time a cry of “Open in the Queen’s name!” Even William heard that. He threw down his pen and signed to Anne to open the door.

  Three men stood there. A messenger and two men who were unmistakably guards. Armed.

  “William Shakspere?”

  “I am he.” William put Anne behind him. “What do you want of me?”

  “You are bidden to Lord Burghley.”

  “Burghley? Why?”

  “At once. Is this woman your wife?”

  Even in that moment of fear Anne noted that you could actually see someone’s hackles rise. Silently she begged her husband to be careful. He said, quietly enough, “This lady is my wife, yes.”

  “She too is bidden to Lord Burghley.”

  “But...”

  “At once.”

  “Are we under arrest?” William asked.

  “Not yet,” the messenger said. “You may fetch your cloaks.”

  “Our children?”

  “Tell your maid to watch them.”

  There was no time, or safety, for them to talk. Anne’s conversation with Kit Marlowe was burning in her. But if it was some such matter, it would have been Walsingham’s men who came for them, wouldn’t it? And their destination would be the Tower. Or perhaps it still was. Her hands shook so much she couldn’t fasten her cloak. William did it for her, and kissed her as he draped the cloak around her. She mouthed, “Kit?” and he shook his head. “It’s all a mistake, darling. Any imagined fault must be mine alone. Tell the truth.” Swinging his own cloak around him, he led her back to the outer room. “Are you sure,” he asked the messenger, “that my wife is sent for?”

  “His lordship’s instructions were quite clear. Both of you. Come.”

  They were marched, ignominiously under guard, through London. Word of this would get around within the hour, Anne knew. By dinner time Burbage would have William’s understudy ready for the afternoon’s performance. By supper time the landlady, weeping behind closed doors when they left, would have re-let William’s rooms and put the children onto the street. Anne glimpsed the lad Nol lurking in the crowd and mouthed “Burghley” at him. Let him make of that what he would.

  They were going westward. Not to the Tower, then. Away from London Bridge, where the severed head of William’s maternal ancestor Edward Arden had rotted for years, the treatment meted out to traitors. Perhaps William’s head would soon be there. A shame, people would say for a day or two, he showed promise. Then they’d tear up his plays and forget him. What a world we live in, Anne thought, where innocent people can be arrested without explanation and a case trumped up against them. Or perhaps it’s merely that something in one of William’s plays displeased the Queen and he is to receive an official reproof. But in that case, why send for me? O God, my children.

  But at Whitehall they were shown into a small ante-room and left alone. No thumbscrews, no rack. Yet. No torture but the silent waiting to play on their nerves.

  After almost half an hour, a quietly dressed man came in, said, “Master and Mistress Shakspere?” and directed them into another room. It was a pin-neat mirror of William’s room with books crowding the walls, orderly piles of papers on the writing table, a rich carpet, good chairs. It smelt of old leather, beeswax polish and lavender.

  Rising from the table, coming to greet them, was the Father of England. The Queen’s Right Hand. The Lord Treasurer of England. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was white-bearded, not tall, well but plainly dressed in a long robe. He looked tired and rather ill, but his eyes were bright with intelligence and a sharp and not unkindly interest.

  Anne curtsied as she would to the Queen. William bowed.

  “Master Shakspere. Mrs Shakspere. I am sorry to have to meet you here in my business apartments and not at Cecil House, but needs must when business presses. Pray take a seat. May I present my son Robert Cecil?”

  The dark, small young man bowed as well as he could with his twisted body and hunched back. His eyes too shone with interest, and gave them a small, charming smile. “I saw one of your plays once, Master Shakspere.” He sounded surprised at himself. “I enjoyed it.”

  William bowed, for once bereft of words.

  “May I offer you wine?” Lord Burghley said, and when they nodded dumbly a pageboy handed them fine crystal glasses of ruby wine.

  “Are we then not under arrest?” William asked.

  “Arrest? Of course not. What made you think so?” Lord Burghley sat down wrapping the skirts of his robe cosily over his knees.

  “With respect, your lordship, when a messenger comes with two armed guards and conducts one without explanation, in haste, to you, even the easiest conscience must feel unease.”

  “Yes, I see. But my intention was not to frighten you. On the contrary. Master Shakspere, my ward the Earl of Southampton tells me he has met you and your wife.”

  Burghley paused to sip his wine. Anne suspected it was a deliberate pause, as practised as any actor’s, for effect. Most people would rush into speech in the face of that pause, in the face of what had just been said. But William said nothing, studying this famous statesman; perhaps one day a version of him would appear in one of his plays.

  “Yes,” Burghley continued, “Lord Southampton told me of his visit to you. He has rarely mixed with ordinary people, and it was a pleasant time for him. He enjoys plays. He has a great love of literature as well.”

  “So I understand, my lord. He spoke of his time at your Cecil House school, of the fine education he received there, and of his time at Cambridge.”

  “Ah, yes. Yes, I have been at pains to give all my wards the best education. Lord Southampton is young, of course, and not yet wise in the ways of the world, but he feels some friendship for you.”

  “You object to that, your lordship?”

  “Not in the slightest now that I have met you and your wife.”

  Well, of course Burghley didn’t have to strike bargains with common people, but there was more to this than inspecting his ward’s friends. For a moment a glint of humour, or appreciation, showed in his faded eyes, and at his nod his son refilled their glasses.

  “You have been married some ten years, I believe?” he asked, glancing at Anne, who had the passing thought that he knew to the hour when they’d married.

  “Ten years in November, My Lord. We have three children,” she added when his look of gentle enquiry became a surprisingly warm smile. “A girl of nine, twins of seven.”

  “And you are often in London, Mistress Shakspere?”

  “For much of the year, yes. In summer I take the children home to Stratford-upon-Avon.”

  “Because in summer the players go on tour, I believe?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “But you have a son at school, I believe? Does your arrangement not interfere with his education?”

  Oh yes, this is normal, thought Anne, discussing education with the Queen’s chief minister. “He is a clever boy, Lord Burghley,
and does well at his books, and we believe that a boy should not grow up with only one parent. That outweighs the week or two of school he misses when we move.”

  With another smile Burghley turned back to William. “I have heard your mother is an Arden, is that correct? An old family.”

  “Quite correct, and yes, an old family. The Ardens were lords of Warwickshire before the Conquest.”

  “Indeed. Now, pleasant though it is to sit and talk, I’m sure you are a busy man, as am I, so I will be frank with you. You have the reputation, Mister Shakspere, of a clever man. Are you a discreet one?”

  “I can keep a secret apart from the rest of the world.”

  The dark Cecil son laughed. His father was a moment behind him in seeing the joke.

  “Ah, yes, a pun. Discreet, discrete. Words are your business, of course. So let us come to business. I feel great affection for my Lord Southampton and it grieves me that he has stubbornly turned his face against marriage. I gather he touched on the matter when he visited you. It seems you spoke so warmly of marriage and fatherhood that he came home with his mind somewhat changed; something neither his mother nor I have achieved.” Pulling his robe closer over his knees the old man said, almost petulantly, “It’s the boy’s duty to marry. And so, Mister Shakspere, I have a commission for you.”

  “Poems.” William said. He flung himself down into the chair before the fire and started to laugh. “Poems! To convince that boy to marry.” He reached for Anne’s hand, and together they gave themselves up to laughter. There was a wild edge to it that had nothing to do with amusement; they had been too much frightened. “After all that, being hauled to Lord Burghley, fearing for our lives, he wants nothing but poems.”

  “And offers the favour of the most powerful man in England, remember.”

  “Oh yes, yes. Yes, the entrée to the world of Court favour, of the aristocracy. And money. I was going to write Harry Southampton a poem that would live forever and make us both immortal, and now I’m a paid hack again, writing poems to make Burghley’s granddaughter a countess.” He broke into an excellent mimicry of Lord Burghley’s precise, pedantic tones. “‘The boy is susceptible to flattery, Master Shakspere and, straight talk of duty and honour having failed, we are disposed to try a more – ah – honeyed route. Lord Southampton likes and admires you, Master S, so let us see if your honeyed words cannot convince him to do his duty.’ Ha!”

  “You’ll have to do it, though.”

  “Yes, of course I will. I can’t afford to be in disfavour with Burghley. I’d bet that in that tidy desk of his he had a dossier about us. He probably he knows what we had for breakfast this morning. He might have turned to threats – cunningly veiled ones, of course – had he not summed us up and decided frankness was the better way. Yes, he decided not to mention that my father’s under some suspicion of recusancy or that he could ruin me with a word. Close down the theatres, disband the playing companies, forbid me London; whatever he chose. So yes, I’ll write his poems.”

  “And the one you planned for Lord Southampton.”

  “That will come all the sweeter for being entirely my own. Oh, I want his patronage, and some money would be welcome, but it’s not the same as this… commission.”

  “Your poems will be just as good.”

  “Probably. But it’s like being back at school, doing set work. Yes, they’ll be good. Won’t change Harry Southampton’s mind, of course.”

  “Lord Burghley doesn’t expect a miracle, Will.”

  “Just as well.” He rose and pottered over to his writing table. Staring down at the papers there he said, “After Kit read us his Hero and Leander the other night, I had an idea. A theme of Venus and Adonis.” Absently he reached for a pen and paper.

  “Not now, Will. Not if you’re to play this afternoon.”

  “What? God’s teeth, what’s the time? I’ll be late, Burbage will fine me. Anne, you’ll come? We’re playing Marlowe today.” In a whirl he seized cloak and hat, bustled Anne about, clapped her hat on her head and led her out the door. When she protested she’d eaten nothing since breakfast he said, nor had he, and welcome to the life of a jobbing actor. “I’ll buy you a pie at the cook shop.”

  “Better have one yourself or Kit’s finest lines will be drowned by your stomach rumbling.”

  “It’d be an improvement. Hurry, Anne. O for time; time to write, to think, to read.”

  At the playhouse Burbage, in a fine old frenzy, grabbed William and thrust his costume into his arms. “You’re late.”

  “Not my fault.”

  “Never mind that. Hurry. And make it good, Will. This could be our last performance for a time. I’ve heard there’s plague in the eastern parts of the city.”

  “Plague,” Anne whispered in fear. The great killer, the terror. It travelled on the breath, doctors said. You could even carry it on your clothes. If she took it home to her children… This was why she refused to live year-round in the capital, why she timed her visits here with care. Plague was usually at a different time of year, though it knew no rules.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not yet widespread. You’re in no danger. It may come to nothing. It may be some other disease.”

  “You’ll leave tomorrow,” William told Anne. “But Dick is right, there’s no immediate fear. Go watch the play, Anne, and don’t fear.”

  But it wasn’t plague that closed the playhouses. Anne never got the bottom of the matter, but there was some riot among apprentices and the City authorities leapt at the excuse to close places of entertainment.

  “Until Michaelmas,” William fumed. “What are we to do? Bloody Puritans, any excuse. An apprentices’ riot, nothing new there, but they’d like to get rid of the playhouses altogether. That’s why the theatres were built outside the City. In the Liberties where the City’s authority doesn’t run, we should be safe. But no. Christ’s nails, what are we to do? Go on the road again? Damned if I will.”

  “Well, my love,” said Anne, “you’ve been given your time to write your poems. Come home.”

  6.

  “William,” said his mother, “there is a gentleman downstairs asking for you. He says his name is Marlowe.”

  William swung around in astonishment, spilling ink over Hamnet’s Latin exercises. “Marlowe? Christopher Marlowe? Here? Small, black hair?”

  “Yes. Will he want to stop here? Shall I make up a bed?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll go down, Mother. Leave it to me.”

  Almost as surprised as William by Christopher Marlowe’s arrival in Stratford, Anne tidied away her mending. She was reassuring Hamnet about the spoilt exercises when the memory of her last long talk with Kit Marlowe froze the words in her mouth. John Shakspere was listed as a recusant. Marlowe worked for Walsingham. He wouldn’t have come here with a warrant of arrest – not Kit, not to William’s father – so perhaps he had come to warn them. All is discovered. Flee.

  “Nonsense,” she said aloud, and Hamnet stared up, hurt, his lip quivering.

  “The master will say I spoilt the book. He will! I’ll be beaten!”

  “What? Oh, no, darling, I was thinking aloud about something else. Daddy will make it right with the master, don’t worry.” All what is discovered? Nonsense.

  And William came back in with Kit, both smiling all over their faces, laughing at something. “Anne!” said Kit, bowing elaborately then kissing her. “I hope I see you well?”

  “Entirely well. And you? What brings you to Stratford?”

  “Oh, business.” His feline eyes read her face. “Between me and Will. Holloa there, young Hamnet, stewing inside on a lovely day like this? Ah, Latin; I remember. Susanna, Judith, you’ve both grown prettier. Here’s sixpence, go and treat yourselves to something your mother says you mustn’t have.” You always forgot that Kit was the eldest of several brothers and sisters, he was at ease with children. Anne’s three thought he was wonderful, not only because he always gave them sixpence. Anne had worried a little: Hamnet was seven: but Kit was
no pederast. He liked men, not boys. And certainly not his friend’s child. The thought would appal him.

  “And do I too get sixpence to take myself off?” she asked, watching the two men settle down in their chairs.

  “No, Anne, stay. It’s not private from you. But it’s a serious matter. Will, we have been defamed. Libelled. Belittled.”

  “What? We have? Kit?”

  “Yes. You remember Robert Greene?”

  “If you mean that snide, stinking, sneaking little ginger-headed whoremonger who imagines he can write plays, yes I do. Isn’t he dead?”

  “Yes, of the pox. God must be a critic. But before he went to his reward he found time to sit up in his beggar’s bed and pen a little tract, a pamphlet, a book. Here.” He whipped it out from inside his doublet and passed it across to William. “I have marked the relevant passage.”

  “A Groat’s-worth of Witte,” William read the crudely printed cover. “Yes, that’s about all Robert Greene ever had of wit.” He flicked to Kit’s marker. At the expressions playing over his face – amazement; shock, anger; disgust; petulance – Anne longed to go and read over his shoulder. Kit winked at her. “Listen to this! ‘Trust them not.’ He’s talking of people like me, Anne, men without university degrees who dare to come to London and write plays. ‘Trust them not: for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’ – beautified; beautified is a vile phrase – ‘our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out’ – bombast – ‘a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Fac Totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.’ The bastard, how dare he? It’s tantamount to accusing me of plagiarism. And it’s me he means: not only ‘Shake-scene’ but ‘tiger’s heart’. My Henry the Sixth, that phrase is from. Tiger’s heart wrap’t in a woman’s hide.”

  Anne hadn’t missed that. She thought it rather funny, but kept a straight face of shocked disapproval.

  “I own,” William went on, angrily pacing the floor, “that the story of that play was not original. Of course I used an old source as we all do. But I did not steal it.”