"Who brought the galleys and said all this to you?" Will said with some jealousy.
"Some man of the Westminster company – Bodkin or Pipkin or some such name. No whit abashed at the prospect of seeing God's work buffed and polished in a foul and pestilential prison. The apostles, he said, were in prison before being variously crucified."
"That will not be your fate. Whatever your fate is, it will not be that. That is the fate of the godly." And then, before they entered the Dog Tavern, "Is it you only of all our secular versifiers that are bidden trim the sails of the galleys?"
"Oh, there is Chapman, also Jack Donne – not properly secular, there is talk of his taking holy orders this year. Marston's name was mentioned but I was quick there. If, I said, you want a Bible that beginneth with In the ininalities of the mondial entities the Omnicompetent fabricated the celestial and terrene quiddities, then have Jack Marston by all means. There were others mentioned, smaller men."
"Was I," Will asked, "mentioned?"
They sat down not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both. When the jug of canary came Ben was able to have his laugh out.
"Why do you laugh? What is risible in me or others or elsewhere?"
"There were special orders that you should not be brought in. No Latin or Greek nor Hebrew – that was brushed aside as of small moment. But the King has a long memory and himself said that he would not hae that quick laddie that was perm with his imperrrtinencies."
"How do you know this?"
"There is some foolish rhyme fathered on you about the King sticking his lively harding andrew up the translators to make them come quicker and threatening to cut off their old and new testicles if they did not. It could not be you, it is too corky and bad even for you. But I will be kind. You shall not be out in the cold like the foolish virgins. I, Ben-oni, the Benjamin that Jacobus loveth, though he cannot keep me out of jail, I am ready to deliver sundry psalms into your palms."
"Is there money in it?"
"Honour, glory, perhaps an eternal crown."
"I am done with all writing," Will said, "even for money. I grow old, I grow old. I am forty-six this year. I will retire to Stratford and hunt hares and foxes."
"You would rather be hunted with them. And you have said this too often before of being done with writing. You will go and stay a week and then be back here thirsting to write some new nonsense. I know you."
"You poets," Will said, "may keep your Bible. You may stuff your old and new testes up your apocrypha."
"There speaketh sour envy. Well, we will keep it and be glad. For the day may come, some thousand years hence, when even the Works of Ben Jonson will be read little, but the bright eyes of Ben Jonson will flash out here and there in a breathtaking felicity of phrase from the green Eden of God's own book that may never die."
"You may stick your holofernes up your methuselah."
"Master Shakespeare," said Frank Beaumont timidly, "there is a matter we would talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here."
"She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three."
"I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedy called Out on You Mistress Minx which must be ready for rehearsing some two days from now and not yet started though the money taken. You are quick, sir, as is known. A night of work with Jack and me as amanuenses and it can be done. We can pay a shilling. It is safe here in a little bag in Kitty here her bosom."
"I have done with writing," Will said proudly. "I go to tend my country estates. All you poets may stick your zimris up your cozbis."
"Well bethought and à propos and a proposito. We were held up in our playwork by the need to work on the Song of Songs that is Solomon's for Dekker that hath an ague. Kitty here gave us a good phrase. Love, she said, is better than wine. Is not that a good phrase?"
"She carries two fair-sized flagons on her, I see. If by love she means comfort more than intoxication, then she is not right."
"Comfort me with flagons," Beaumont said to Fletcher. "Flagons is better than apples. Make a note."
"You may all," Will said, getting up, "comfort your deuteronomies with your right index leviticus. I go now."
"It is jealousy," Ben said when he had gone. "He has no part in the holy work."
Will rode to Stratford nevertheless with three or four psalms in galley proof in his saddlebag, a gift from Ben Jonson. He was to see what he could do with them; to Ben they seemed not to offer matter for further poeticization. But for Will there would be much non-writing work in Stratford, save for the engrossing of signatures. The hundred and twenty acres bought from the Coombes which Gilbert was managing ill: these must be worked well. Gardeners needed for gardens and orchards. The tithes in Old Stratford and Welcombe and Bishopston. He, Will, was now a lay rector, a front-pew gentleman. Thomas Greene, the town clerk, together with his bitch of a wife and the two beefy squallers named Grayston and Hamnet, Gray and Ham, should be out of New Place by now, the lease up on Lady Day, 1610, this year. Forty-six years of age. Four and six make ten. One of the psalms in his saddlebag was number 46.
New Place, when he got there, was bright as a rubbed angel, Anne his wife and Judith his daughter yet unmarried having nought much to do save buff and sweep and pick up hairs from the floor. The mulberry tree was doing well. Anne was fifty-four now and looked it. Ben was right: his home was a place for dreaming of going back to; he would be back in London before the month was up, nothing more certain. On his second day home a murmuration of blacksuited Puritans infested his living room. Anne gave them ale and seedcake. They had a session of disnoding a knotty dull point of scripture, something to do with Elijah or some other hairy unwiped prophet. When they came out of the living room to find Will poking for woodworm at a timber in the hall, they sourly nodded at him as if to begrudge his being in his own house. The following day they came again for a prayer meeting. He spoke mildly to Anne about this black or Brownist intrusion.
"While I am here," he said, "I will not have it. Tell them that, tell them I will not have it."
"They are godly," she said, "and a blessing on the house."
"I can do without their blessing. Besides, their aliger faces show no warmth of blessing."
"They know what you are."
"I am a gentleman with an escutcheon. I am, moreover, one of the King's servants. I am, I do not deny, also a player and a playmaker, but that was the step to being a gentleman. Will they begrudge me my ambition?"
"Plays are ungodly, as is known. They will have no plays in this town. Nor will it avail you aught to flaunt your king's livery in their faces. They know that kings are mortal men and subject to the will of the Lord."
"Genevan saints, are they? Holy republicans? What do they say of Gunpowder Plot?"
"They said that it showed at least a king might be punished for his sins by an action of the people, though to put down the Scarlet Woman of Rome is no sin and the voice of a papist is no part of the voice of the people."
"God help us, Christ give us all patience."
"You blaspheme, you see, you are in need of the power of prayer."
"I am in need of nothing, woman, save a quiet life after a feverish one. I would have some seedcake with my ale."
"There is no crumb left and there has been no time for baking."
"If you must give up your hussif's duties in the name of dubious godliness, at least there is an idle daughter who could set to and bake."
"Judith hath a green melancholy on her. It is a sad life for the girl. None asks for her hand."
"Ah, they cannot stomach to have a player as a father-in-law. Well, at least Jack Hall takes me as I am. Jack is a poor physician but a good son-in-law and husband and father. Susannah, thank God, has done well."
Susannah came next afternoon, with her husband Dr Hall and little two-year-old Elizabeth. Will played happily with the child and sang, in a cracked baritone, "Where the Bee Sucks".
Anne said with suspicion:
"Is that from a play?"
"Not yet. The play that it is to be in is not yet writ, but it will be, fear not." "
"I fear not anything," Anne said, "save the Lord's displeasure." She called to Judith to bring in ale and seedcake. Seeing married Susannah and the child now drowsy on her lap, Judith let out a howl of frustration and left. Anne said:
"It is the father's office to seek a husband for a daughter. Judith is ripe and over-ripe."
"So ripeness is not after all all," Will sighed. "I will go seek in the taverns and hedgerows, crying Who will wed a player's brat?" He turned to Jack Hall, whose lips were pursed, and said, "Will you come stroll a little in the garden?"
Jack said, after a strolling silence, "Your book has been read here, you may know that."
"What book?"
"The book that is called Sonnets."
"But God, man, that is old stuff, it came out all of a year ago, and I have disclaimed the book, I did not publish it, it is pirate work. What do they say that read it, not that I care, does it confirm them in their conviction of Black Will Shakebag's damnation?"
"It is a book of things that a man might do in London," Jack Hall said gloomily. "It is pity that Dick Field brought home a copy."
"Ah, poor corrupted Stratford. So you too join the headwaggers?"
"There is such a thing as propriety. Dick Field has been long a London man like yourself, father-in-law, but he has ever shown propriety. He hath printed foul stuff enow in his trade of printing, but he hath not the filthy ink of printed scandal sticking to him. You will, I trust, forgive the observation of one who is, besides your daughter's husband, a professional man and also your physical adviser."
"Dick Field is a man tied to a cold craft, not one like me who has had to make himself a motley to the view and unload his naked soul to the world." Then he said, "What has being my physical adviser to do with the book that is called Sonnets?"
"I have wondered at times about your cough and your premature baldness. Now I read records of licentiousness in that book."
"You mean," groaned Will, then gasped, then growled, then cried aloud, "I have the French pox, the disease of that pretty shepherd Syphilis of Fracastorius of Verona his poem? Oh, this drinks deep, this drinks the cup and all. And what thinks your sainted mother-in-law?"
"She knows nought of it. The book has been kept from her and from her friends the brethren. The bridge of the nose," he said, squinting, "seems soft in the cartilage. That is an infallible sign. Do keep your voice low. It will crack if you shout out so and not easily be mended."
Will howled like a hound and strode into the house to his study, passing his womenfolk on the way. He growled at them, even at gooing little Elizabeth. In his study he took from a drawer the galleys of the psalms that Ben had given him. He took them, waving in the draught of his passage, to shake like little banners at his family, crying, "These, you see these? The King's new Bible that is not to appear until next year, given to me in part, along with my brethren the other poets of London, that the language be strengthened and enriched. You think me godless and a libertine but it is to me, me, me, not the black crows of Puritans that daily infest this house and shall not infest it more that the task of improving the word of the Lord is given. You see," he said to Anne, "you see, see?"
"A new Bible," she said. "It is all too like what one may expect of unreligious London, where the holy Geneva Bible is not good enough for them. That it is the King's Bible renders it no whit more holy. Nay, less from what we hear. Even kings are subject to the law."
"The King," Will cried, "is my master and bathed in the chrism of the Lord God. Generous and good and holy." Then he stopped, seeing he had gone too far. "The King hath his faults," he now said. Yes, indeed: ingratitude to Ben and himself: pederasty; immoderate appetite; cowardice, but half the man the old Queen had been. "But still," he said, and then: "All men have their faults, myself included. But I deserve better of the world and of this little world, and, by God, I will have my eternal reward."
"That," said Anne, "is the foul sin of presumption." Jack Hall was now back with them, listening to his father-in-law rave, grow quiet, rave again: infallible symptoms.
"My name I mean, my name. My son, poor little Hamnet, dead. And the name Shakespeare dishonoured in its own town and soon to die out along with the poor parchments that put innocent words in the mouths of players." Jack Hall shook his head slightly: self-pity too perhaps a symptom. "Wait," Will cried. "Do not leave. I, your king, lord of this disaffected small commonweal, do order you to wait. Wait." And he sailed back to the study, galley pennants flying, and took the forty-sixth psalm out of the bundle. He sat to it, calling "Wait wait" as he dipped quill in ink and counted. Forty-six words from the beginning, then. It would do, the change improved not marred. He crossed out the word and put another large in the margin. He then, ignoring the cry or cadence Selah at the bottom, counted forty-six words from the end, felt awe at the miracle that this forty-sixth word too could be changed for the better, or certainly not for the worse, by the neat mark of deletion and the new word writ clear and large in the margin. "Wait," he cried. Then he was there to show them.
Anne's jaw dropped as in death. Susannah, whose sight was dim, squinnied at the thing he had done. Jack Hall said, "This is also a -," and then kept his peace.
"You see, you see? To do this I have the right. I am not without right, do you see? Now another thing. On Sunday I will read this out in the church, aye, in Trinity Church during matins will I, and eke at evensong if I am minded to do it. For I am a lay rector. Not without right. And I have a voice that will fill the church to the rafters, not the piping nose-song of your scrawny unlay rector, do you hear me? Non sanz droict, which is the Shakespeare motto, and the name too shall prevail as long as the word of the Lord. Now, mistress," he said to Anne, "I would have supper served, and quickly." Then he strode out to stand beneath his mulberry tree, granting her no time to rail.
On Sunday morning he stood, every inch a Christian gentleman in his neat London finery, on the altar steps of Trinity Church. Family, neighbours, the scowling brethren, shopkeepers, nosepicking children filled the pews. His voice, the voice of an actor, rose clear and strong:
"This Sunday you are to hear not the Lesson appointed for the day but the word of the Lord God in a form you do not know. Next year you will know it, for it is His Majesty King James's new Bible. But now you have this for the first time on any stage, I would say any altar. The word of the Lord. The forty-sixth psalm of King David." He read from the galley expressively, an actor, clear, loud, without strain, so that all attended as they were in a playhouse and not in the house of God:
"God is our refuge and strength: a very present helpe in
trouble. Therefore will not we feare, though the earth be
removed: and though the mountaines be carried into the
midst of the sea. Though the waters thereof roare and be
troubled, though the mountaines tremble SHAKE with the
swelling thereof. Selah.
There is a river, the streames whereof shall make glad the
citie of God: the holy place of the Tabernacles of the most
High. God is in the midst of her: she shal not be mooved;
God shall helpe her, and that right early.
The heathen raged, the kingdomes were mooved: he uttered
his voyce, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.
Come, behold the workes of the Lord, what desolations hee
hath made in the earth. He maketh warres to cease unto the
end of the earth: hee breaketh the bow, and cutteth the
sword SPEARE in sunder, he burneth the chariot in the fire.
Be stil, and know that I am God: I will bee exalted among the
heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is
with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah."
/>
He ceased, looked fearlessly on them all, then stepped down, with an actor's grace, to return to his pew. One man at the back, forgetting where he was, began to applaud but was quickly hushed. Before Will arrived at his seat, Judith said to her mother:
"I wonder that God has not struck him down."
"Wait," Anne said grimly. "The Lord does things in his own good time. Fear not, the Lord will repay." Will sat down next to her. Then, having looked on her and Judith and Susannah and Jack Hall and Mrs Hart his sister with a peculiar lingering hardness, he knelt and prayed. He prayed long and with evident sincerity, so that his wife grew tight-mouthed with suspicion. Then he got up, looking much refreshed, sat down and waited till the dull long sermon was finished. Then he said very clearly to Anne and, indeed, to any on the pew that would hear:
"I am minded to turn papist."
"God forgive you. Keep your voice down. This is not place nor time for atheistical japes."
"I will turn papist." He tasted the term gently then gently spat it out: tpt. "I will not say that. It is a word of contempt. More, it puts overmuch emphasis on the Pope of Rome. It is the faith that matters."
"Be quiet," she said in quiet fury. The service was continuing, and eyes were on Will, ears striving to pick up his words.
"Catholic," he said. Then he said no more. She remained tight-lipped. He did not speak of the matter again in the two days more he remained in Stratford.
When Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare's lodgings in Silver Street. Before he could say aught of going out to drink, Will said:
"I have writ this new play. It is called November the Fifth, but Burbage will doubtless change the title as he always does. It is based on Gunpowder Plot."
Ben sat down carefully on a delicate French chair. "It is based on -"
"Gunpowder Plot. There is a king that is a fool and an ingrate. He believes that God exists but to confirm the holiness of his kingship. Conspirators led by a poet seek to destroy him for his blasphemy."
"A poet?
"I had you much in my mind there. Not a very good poet and most apt for meddling in state matters. His name is Vitellius. Here is one of his speeches. Listen."
Enderby's Dark Lady Page 3