But to him it seemed right now that he should leave and re-enter, after so brief a bed-slavery, into the manumission of his old bacherlorhood. It would be wrong, in this lack of love, to live a whoredom there in his father’s house; he must forsake the bed that was hers. And to leave to seek other employ would appear duty too in another sort: Gilbert could make gloves after a fashion, a fashion of infra- or supernumerary fingers, for he could not count well, and oft no thumb, as it had been bitten off, but he would learn; Joan could help too with this work, as her kitchen-helping was less than before, thanks to her new sister; even Richard, now nine years old, might be pressed into some service of limping delivery. It was right that WS go to some other town, to fatten, however thinly, the poor Shakespeare fisc. But he delayed, he delayed. There was a fascination in hate; moreover, it seemed to him that, in those shameful bedchamber antics he could not leave off, he grew, at the moment of annunciation, somehow close to that goddess he had all but neglected (there was a dark way that was shown to him, but he was fearful of entering it wholly; he knew not properly what it was but it was to do with evil). This was especially true of some of Anne’s new inventions, which entailed kneeling and a show of pious prayer. So summer died and winter lashed in, and he heard that Anne Whateley had married in Banbury.
That winter Gilbert dreamed a dream and came to his breakfast on a grey frosty morning to relate it, saying:
‘I ha’ seen heads, aye, all cut off and bloody, and great birds that did come down to peck at now one eye now another eye, aye.’ Joan laughed sillily. Gilbert shook into an unwonted fury, spilling his little boy’s pot of small ale. WS shivered, he thought not for the cold. ‘Aye,’ cried Gilbert, ‘in London ’twas, and he is a ligger that saith I lig, for it was on like spikes these twain heads were and I did see all. And there was waters and a great bridge behind, aye. And one head was like unto her head here.’ He looked on his mother as she were a stranger. None laughed, not even silly Joan now. Their mother had grown very pale. She said:
‘God help them that are left,’ crossing herself. In their father’s voice was the thick redness of blood. He said:
‘So will it be visited on all the Ardens. They are fools to cry up the Old Faith by dying for it. A man will best keep his faith alive by himself keeping alive, not by this hatching of plots that are found out. Now, trust me, there will be a harrowing.’
Anne smelt the fear round that table, for she clasped her husband’s hand and her eyes had grown large. WS knew this plot his father spoke of to be one in which the Arden family had made a part, and of those two heads visioned by Gilbert one was doubtless that of Edward Arden, who had stopped once in Henley Street for a cup of wine on his riding south and had spoken fierily against the times and tyrants and usurpers. For it had been noted then how the Arden colouring and bones could be deduced from a comparison of this cousin and their mother. The other head, as news by Christmas was to tell, had belonged to John Somerville. WS shuddered, at that morning table, to see in his mind the tugging by greedy scavenging birds at the loose skin and flesh (a bird perched, eating angrily of a chap, on a wall near which a rosy housewife hung out clothes, singing) and then the eternal terrible truth of the skull disclosed at the feast’s end.
‘My Lord of Canterbury will remember well who he knew in his old diocese,’ said their mother. ‘And he knew no harm of any Mistress Shakespeare. Thou need’st not fear any visiting of this house on mine account.’
Their father bit his lip, his rose-mottled cheeks according ill with his troubled eyes. But two years back he had been crushed with the burden of a fine of forty pounds (he had sold a messuage to find that sum) on account of a charge of recusancy. One hundred and forty Midlanders summoned to the Queen’s Bench in Westminster on that same charge, but John Shakespeare doubly recusant in not appearing (Edmund’s birth had been a difficult one). And now, in bow-ye-down-and-lick-my-dirty-shoe elevation at Canterbury but newly this year, was that Whitgift who had been a double scourge from that see of troubles Worcester, a whip in either gripe — one for the Papists, the other for the Puritans, a voice quacking of eternal fire through the gate of temporal fire for all that followed not the Holy Middle Way of the True English Church, God being an Englishman. And John Shakespeare favoured what he termed the cleanness and honesty of the New Faith (bishops, also, had ever been Antichrist), a religion for good men of trade. It was a time, that winter, for gloom and fear and stirring not much abroad; they hugged their comforting, not punishing, fire.
But WS kept quiet about his own weak faith in anything, except perhaps what might be found after crawling through a dark and narrow tunnel.
VII
THEN SPRING RETURNED to prove winter but a bad dream, and once again the roads beckoned. But still he delayed. He descried in bitterness that he must be pushed to everything, all will relegated to his name. He came to his morning’s work (or lack of it sometimes) weary as though she had sucked out his very marrow. And one day in June it was made clear to him that she was with child again. This time, he felt, he could be sure of his paternity, though he had not had (as he had had that time in August of shuddering memory) the sense of a catching and holding fast of his seed for planting and growth, and all this bred in him a conviction that the beloved Susanna (and was she not perhaps the real reason for his loathness to depart?) was not his.
One day in late June a gentleman riding home to Gloucestershire from Warwick called, being in need of riding gauntlets. ‘After this model,’ he said, showing one. ‘The other I lost on the road. I have been directed here by one I asked on Stratford’s outskirts. Master Shakespeare, is it not? I have a kinsman in Ettington to visit, some two days only. May the gauntlets be brought to me at the house of Master Woodford?’
So. Master Woodford, that disbarred lawyer and decayed gentleman, a widower of a few acres.
‘My own name is John Quedgeley, Justice of the Peace.’
‘That,’ said WS, ‘is a place in Gloucestershire.’
‘And my name derives from it,’ said Master Quedgeley. He had a full black beard and a wet red nether lip; he was above forty, old, yet big-shouldered as a smith and near two yards tall. He had bright brown though grave eyes. ‘Some remote and all forgotten forefathers did formerly live there. But now we are near enough to Berkeley.’
‘Where there is a castle.’
‘Where there is a castle. Well then, this you know. And what more do you know?’
‘Of Gloucestershire?’
‘Of anything.’ He smiled at WS as if he in some sort despised the pretence of a mere glover to have even the meanest learning outside his mean craft. ‘You are, then, a young man that has travelled.’
‘I have travelled in books, sir,’ said WS, in too loud a voice. ‘I have read of matters bigger than where castles may be and whence a gentleman’s name may come.’ Then he recollected his place and blushed and was silent.
‘And Latin, too?’ said Master Quedgeley. ‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume. I love the sweet tunes of P. Vergilius Maro.’
‘Horace,’ said WS, ‘as I think, sir, you must know.’ Then he must perforce smile at the other’s smile, for this seemed in some sort to be a test.
‘Yes, yes, Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Well, would mine own boys knew as much.’
John Shakespeare had come back to the bench with skins to be chosen for cutting. ‘My son here is a good scholar and also a poet. He has writ fine verses. Show the gentleman some of your verses, Will.’
WS blushed again. He would not. ‘He is come for gloves, not verses.’
‘Yes. Well, then,’ said Master Quedgely, ‘when he brings my gauntlets he may bring also his verses. And with that I give you good day.’ So he left. But, when WS took the Banbury road on foot the next afternoon, he carried gloves only. Ah, he dreamed an instant, that other Anne, my former beloved now another’s, lies at the end; I will walk to her. But he turned into the court of a tumbledown gaunt farmhouse, much punished by weather and disfigured with unhinged doors
and swinging windows. Two farm-men were lying idle on straw in the good summer sun, their eyes closed to it: swine nuzzled and honked at rubbish; a cock ran treading his dames, but his crow was a desolation. A chewing servant in a foul smock came to the ratatat, a mutton-bone in his dirty fingers. He stood sucking out the marrow. Then he said:
‘Aye aye, thou wilt find ’em both in one room or another. Me and my fellows, today we make holiday.’
‘What holiday?’
‘I know not the saint’s name. Saint Turd, mayhap, as this is Turdsday. Every day there is some saint.’
‘You were best to watch your manners.’
‘My friends brought me up as they were able,’ he said, in a mincing way, hand on hip. ‘When manners were in the hall I was in the stable.’ And he bunched his face up and belched and left WS with the open door, returning to a dark region at the corridor’s end whence came the sound of bucolic merrymaking. So WS went in and two little dogs came at him yapping as they would tear great collops of flesh from his calves an they were bigger, and their master, this decayed and grey Woodford, came out tottering. WS told him his mission; he bowed WS drunkenly in, saying:
‘Here is Liberty Hall, where all take liberties. Down thou, down, thou great beast. What, Bell? How, Grinder?’ And he aimed jocular kicks, missing, while the dogs barked, tails mad with a great joy and love. WS followed man and beasts into a dark chamber all dusty, folios and harness and stags’ antlers sitting on chairs like Christians. And there was this Master Quedgeley, unbuttoned, waving a spilling pot and droning. He called:
‘Ah, it is the gloveman that knoweth all Gloucester and environs. Good, we are three gentlemen and may troll a catch now. This fellow here is too low to sing with esquires, begging his pardon and his master’s. Fill our glove-poet a quart of cider, thou.’ A misshapen leering rogue limped from the room’s dark corner with a jug. WS demurred, stammering. He was not well, he had done with drinking, he had made vows, it did his stomach great harm …
‘Take,’ said Master Woodford, ‘for this is heart’s ease and the lover’s — I would say liver’s — joy. More, it is all we have. How, are you so nice that you will sniff at it, wishing sack and canary in a poor man’s abode? You are too good for us, then. Odd’s my little life, how they start up at their betters.’ And he handed WS a great pewter pot, all greasy without, and he must needs drink to avoid offence. ‘Nay, all down in one gollop,’ cries Master Quedgeley, as comfortable as this were his own home. And then he started a catch and Master Woodford broke in, cracked as a crow, as vox secunda, and then both stopped and shouted for WS to follow as tertia. So follow he must, though this was a rude and poor catch he had not heard before:
‘Pox take thy ballocks, thou reechy varlet,
Thy dad a cuckold and thy mother a harlot,
And squeeze the cheese from thy filthy nog.’
The apple-vinegar like gut-needles made WS go shudder shudder, but it allayed the dusty thirst, thirsty dust of his brief drouthy journey. He had more. At one point, later, he was standing on a table and declaiming lines of Seneca:
‘Fatis agimur; cedite fatis.
Non sollicitae possunt curae
Mutare rati stamina fusi …’
‘There is words,’ nodded Master Woodford. ‘There is orating, what the Greeks called rhetoric. Now, that was plays that were read before the patricians, and good plays, not like the stink and ordure that passes for plays in our shameful time. Poor vagabonds all. Ah, long long agone. But there were two, and things once promised fair. Aye.’
‘Well, then,’ said Master Quedgeley, far gone in his cider, ‘let us have ancient Rome here and now. Let’s call in your girl Betty or Bessie or whatever her name is and have somewhat of an orgy. God help me, I must be back shortly to behave cleanly, as fine a husband and father and justice as ever shivered in his short shirt of a frosty morning.’ Then he looked up at WS, who was still upon the table, sighing: ‘Aye aye, a life’s but a span. But these young bullies will carry on my name. Yet what’s the use? They will not learn. A name’s but a name when all’s done.’
Master Woodford said sharply, ‘You, sir, down from there, you are no centrepiece.’ So WS leapt down, very merry. ‘The two I spake of were the two Toms. Give us somewhat of Gorboduc. They were,’ he said in explication to Master Quedgeley, ‘Tom Sackville and Tom Norton, and that was done, as it might be for a sort of latterday patricians, in the Inns of Court. The inner Temple it was, and some twenty years agone. Before, I daresay, this young makeshift or hockey-eater was born. I was there, by Jesus’ mass, I saw all. They were our English Seneca.’ To this he drank. WS said pertly:
‘Two Englishmen to make one Roman.’ For he believed then in his heart that there was naught in English plays but poor ranting and sorry bawdry, and all in the open, in sad rain or word-greedy wind. He had seen in Stratford but one play that had set the flue on his body to bristling, and its name he had forgot, though not the company, which was the Earl of Worcester’s Men, nor the chief actor, which was Alleyn, and he two years younger than WS. Now he said to Master Quedgeley: ‘Berkeley. But this last year there were Lord Berkeley’s Men in Stratford. And so I know of the castle.’ But now Master Woodford was on his feet, peripatottering in drunken discourse:
‘I say again this. I say that if there is to be an English poesy worthy the name then it must be framed of true sounds, the throat all open, and not of mumblings in chambers or the impostures of the eye. It is the ear that is poesy’s organ. And so, an we would learn, we could turn that freshet of the two great Toms (it was but abortive, that I admit, aye, abortive) into, into — what did I say then? Aye aye aye, a great rolling river of words.’
WS smiled at this, in youth’s superior wisdom and the effects of the cider. Master Woodford saw the curl of his lip and turned on him as to belabour him, saying:
‘Fleerer and mocker, what dost thou know in thine ignorance? Country hilding, that hast never seen the flower of cities nor the glory of sweet words in a great hall with a great fire and all light blazing.’ It seemed then that he would weep, as remembering a past much different from his present. WS said, bold cider-boy and crony of justices and scholars:
‘Words in such form surely I would not see but hear. As for acting, is it not all lies? A boy is made a woman, a short man will add a cubit with stilt-shoes——’
‘Chopines,’ corrected Master Woodford.
‘— A living man will say he is dying. Now I grant that in Seneca there was none of this, for his plays were not acted but read aloud.’
‘Oh, God preserve us from cheesy cant,’ said Master Quedgeley. ‘That is Banbury talk.’ WS saw at once that it was, that it was his father with his Geneva Bible and not the sweet Hellenic scense of Plato. ‘Life,’ so went Quedgeley on, ‘is in a sense all lies. We watch ourselves act every day. Philip drunk and Philip sober. One is inside the other watching the other. And so I am John Quedgeley and Jack Quedgeley and Jockey Quedgeley and Master Quedgeley, Justice of Peace, and all. It is all acting.’ And WS saw that this was true, revolving it in the murk of the bottom of his cider-tankard. Had he not himself watched WS and WS watched Will? Where was truth, where did a man’s true nature lie? There was, as it were, an essence and there was also an existence. It was, this essence, at the bottom of a well, of a Will.
Things became all confused thereafter and he woke to hearty kisses and face-licking from the little dogs, himself groaning from deep cidrous sleep on the floor. Somebody had let in these little dogs. They saw him eye-rubbing and heard him painfully gape and smack at his mouth’s horror, then went to the other two, who were sacklike in chairs, dead men save for their antiphony of cracking snores, and they responded not to the licking nor to the barking. WS rose in great pain and guilt and limped out of the chamber. It was light still, but there was the sadness of summer evening in the light. In the corridor outside the chamber a serving-girl met him with ready bare bosom and blackened smile (yes yes, of course, he knew her, but not in that other sense). He g
roaned and shook his head and left by the open front door. The walk, he hoped, would shake him sober.
Well then, another holy vow never to carouse more, a meek face to Mistress Virago, and an end to Master Quedgeley. But he was already home and undressing himself to the pipe and tabor of Anne’s complaining when he found the gauntlets still lying snug buttoned in his bosom, the true office of his going unperformed. So next morning Gilbert, his elder brother being in a foul crapula, was sent thither, though only after much repetitious instruction and even the drawing of a map. He returned late and hungry, having belike met God in a coppice, and to him it was given to speak the next stage of WS’s destiny.
‘Aye, then ’tis all done, aye. And here is the money for the gloves and for myself a penny. And the man saith he will come for thee early the morrow as the riding will be a long one, aye.’
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 5