‘Oh, I have no time now for reading sonnets,’ said Harry in petulance. ‘I have still to read the first you gave me. Place it in that chest there.’ It was a box of carven camphorwood, cool-smelling and spicy within, brought, he had said, from the Indies by a captain that had loved him but was now cast out. Jealously, WS saw other poems than his own, but, certainly, there was that first sonnet: ‘A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted …’ It was true, it was a woman’s beauty, but there was the swooning delight of its being on no woman’s body. Forward? There was not all the time in the world. He grew old, he would soon be thirty.
‘Today,’ said the lovely boy, ‘we are to go down-river.’ And the river it was, in joyful sunlight, paddling softly towards Gravesend, the grave watermen in livery, the barge new-painted with cloth-of-gold canopy above, the handsome laughing young friends of his friend deferential to this sober-suited poet who had taken the Inns and the Universities with his mellifluous conceits. Wine and cold fowls and kickshawses, and then, as the sun went in a space, distaste blew into the poet’s heart like a damp gust, he seeing himself again truly as an upstart, without birth or wealth, one plain ring only on his hand, his garments decent but no more, and a different distaste at the sudden sight of the open laughing mouth of this lord they called plain Jack, the teeth clogged with a powdery sweetmeat. They were idle, they were dying of ennui (a fine apt word from Master Florio), they hid diseased bodies under silk and brocade. Then the sun came out again and they were transformed once more to air and fire, the flower of English manhood. They were swans, but like the swans that sailed in the barge’s wake, greedy and cold-eyed. And the kites that flew to and from their scavenging in the June air, the ultimate cleansers of the commonwealth, they attested the end of all noble flesh.
‘When will the playhouses open again?’
‘Oh, the plague-deaths are still above thirty a week.’
‘I care not for plays. They are all bawdry and butchery.’
‘Well, there is always Lyly and his little boys.’ A coarse secret laugh. ‘Lily-white boys.’
‘May not a gentleman rise above carnality — blood and panting and close-stools? As for love——’
He would give them what they wished, redeeming his craft to art. He saw in his mind’s eye a fair-hung stage shut in from sun or wind, fair languid creatures like these discoursing wittily, no Kemp grossness, no blood-bladders or Alleyn ranting. He would provide, he would lend words to these elegant puppets. But he sighed, knowing himself to be caught forever between worlds — earth and air, reason and belief, action and contemplation. Alone among all sorts of men, he embraced a poet’s martyrdom.
‘YOUR sonnets harp more and more on marriage. Oh, it is nothing but marriage I hear from my mother and my grandad and my noble guardian that has a bride in store for me, and now you join them. My friend and own poet makes one in a conspiracy.’ He pettishly threw the poem on to the table. It fluttered in the fresh autumn breeze from the casement and planed gently down to the carpet (dryads and fauns greenly embroidered). WS smiled, peering with eyes that were growing near-sighted at the upside-down lines:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die …
He had come, he considered, delicately and discreetly to his burden. Besides, it was by way of a commission, engineered by the subtle Italian. He was no lord with estates and retainers; he must earn money. Her ladyship, the handsome ageing countess, all of forty years, had embraced his hands painfully with hers sharp and crusty with rings. My thanks, dear friend, my most grateful thanks. A matter of the songs of Apollo after the words of Mercury. Carefully he said:
‘A friend should speak what is in his heart, a poet even more so. It is waste I fear. Should I die now at least I leave a son. The name Shakespeare will not die,’ he said confidently. But, saying the rest, he felt the old self-disgust of the actor; he was earning gold through eloquent pleading. It was for lying, he saw hopelessly, that words had been made. In the beginning was the word and the word was with the Father of Lies. ‘But I am a mere nothing.’ He extended his hands to show them empty. ‘I fear so many things for you — death in the field, in the street. The plague took, this last week, over a thousand. And what then, with you gone? A few poor portraits, a sonnet or two. It is a perpetuity of flesh and blood that we beg for.’
‘Aye, the family first, as ever.’ He was bitter. ‘Wriothesly before Harry. Mr WH.’
‘There is nothing wrong in marriage. It is a thing a man will enter for his name’s sake. He can still be free.’
‘Are you free? If a man has to run away from his wife I see not how he can still be free. You dream in your plays of taming shrews.’
Aye, WS thought, I am always under-estimating him, magister artium per gratiam at fifteen, commended by the Queen herself for wit and beauty. It was the beauty got in the way. The Queen seemed to have stepped into both their brains, for Harry now said:
‘As for wranglings about succession and great houses in an uproar, the Queen has set all a fine example.’
‘The Queen is a woman.’
‘Part a woman. If the Tudors will die out let the Wriotheslys also.’ WS smiled at those heavy words coming from the pouting girl’s mouth. He said in banter:
‘Well, they say there is no worry over the succession. All will be taken care of.’ And, stepping to the window, as though to look carelessly out, he whistled a measure or two from a popular ballad. Harry knew it: ‘For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.’
‘You grow too familiar.’
WS turned, surprised. ‘Whistling? May I not whistle?’
‘It is not the whistling. Your whole manner is become too familiar.’
‘I have been schooled thereto by your lordship. I humbly cry your mercy, my lord.’ He spoke mincingly and ended in a ridiculous smirking bow. It was Harry who was ridiculous; he could be as wayward and petulant as a girl in her courses. ‘Dear my lord,’ added WS.
Harry grinned. ‘Well then, if I am dear your lord let us see more lowly abasement and fawning. First, you may pick up your sonnet from where it fell.’ He could keep no mood up for long.
‘The wind blew it, let the wind lift it.’
‘Oh, but I cannot order the wind.’
‘Nor me, my lord.’
‘Ah, but I can. And if you will not obey I will have you escorted to the dungeons to live with toads and snakes and scorpions.’
‘I have lived with worse.’
‘So. Well, you shall be whipped. I will apply a whip to thine ancient shoulders. I will raise first cloth, then skin, then blood. Tatters of skin and cloth and flesh all delicately commingled.’ Even in play he had a certain lordly cruelty. Power to hurt and he would do it.
‘Oh oh, whip me not.’ He wondered at himself, ancient WS. A friend, a lover, he saw himself an instant as a father; he carried on those ancient shoulders more than the weight of ten years’ difference. Falling into the game, he went down to the carpet creaking, going oh oh on cracking joints, kneeling. Harry at once was there, a delicate foot in delicate kidskin placed upon the sonnet. WS saw: ‘… or else this glutton be, To eat the world’s due by the grave and thee.’ Suddenly he thrust his arms in a tight hug round the slim boy’s calves. Harry’s voice, high up there, screamed. Then WS brought him down, not hard on that deep pile showing embroidered green wantonness, his arms striving too late for balance, laughing, breathless. ‘Now,’ went WS in mock gruffness, ‘I have thee.’ They fought, and the craftsman’s arms were the stronger.
‘No more sonnets on marriage,’ panted Harry.
‘Oh no, none,’ vowed that practitioner of lies.
HE could not altogether keep his old life out of this new.
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
‘Tu-who;
Tu-whit, to-who’ — A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
He could see h
er clearly, cleaning the trenchers in cold water after the Christmas dinner. It should be a good one this year: he had sent home enough sonnet-gold. He had not, however, as he had promised, sent home himself. He had had work to do, a resident playwright in a noble house, writing a play about lords who vowed three years’ abstinence from love and the comedy of their breaking of that vow. ‘How long will it be?’ Harry had asked. And he had answered: ‘Three ells.’ And, as there was no company at all in London then (the playhouses still being shut, though the plague had much abated), it must be a matter of lords playing lords. The first day of Christmas brought My Lord Sussex’s Men to the Rose (Henslowe recording a God Be Praised in his account-book), but that was too late. Lords must act even ladies’ parts, all for an audience of ladies, and Master Florio must do Don Adriano de Armado, because of his foreign accent, while Holofernes the schoolmaster was none other than —
(The twins would be nine years old at Candlemas. How fast time flowed away.)
‘… I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as hon- hon- honorif-’
‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus.’
‘Oh, I cannot say that.’ This was Sir John Gerrald, whose droll face singled him out for Costard. They were all remarking on the wit and the learning, the pedantry even, even when pedantry was not being mocked. This was what he wished, directing his lordly cast in the fine heavy gown that was a gift from his own lord, his friend. (‘In your time, sir, perhaps Oxford men were less sportive?’ A smile, a shrug in answer.) But, after a heavy night’s feasting that he was forced into, for he could not plead a weak stomach all the time, nor say he was in pain or had work to do, he was sickened, veering from Arden to Shakespeare and in a manner envying that Friar Lawrence that had already appeared, duly set in a new lyric play, out of some remote cave of his brain. To be cut off, to live austere, an eremite: he sighed for that. But then he remembered his mission here, the restoring of honour to a name that had lost it, along with family fortune. And there was this damnable love, this ravishment of the senses, bursting into jealousy that, in the quietness of his own chamber, he must unload into verse to be torn up after (Harry laughing with Lord This or Sir Such-an-one, hand-touching, hand-holding) or flowing in compassion, the manner of a world-woe, when he saw tears brimming down the soft, faintly translucent cheeks as a consort of viols or recorders discoursed. Lachrymae, lachrymae.
Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
‘There it is again,’ Harry scolded, ‘finding a pretext for a marriage sermon in everything.’
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual …
‘Ordering my life for me, all of you. And yet,’ said the cunning boy, ‘what would you say if I did now go a-courting and spend all my time with Lady Liza? I do believe you would be out of your mind with envious rage.’ WS smiled uncertainly. ‘Confess now,’ said Harry, leaping up with great nervous vigour from the couch where he had been lying. ‘You shall confess that you do all this to please others and not yourself at all. Does my mother, then, come to your chamber and stand over you while you write, telling you to say this and say that, only, an’t please your poetship, to use fine high phrases as befit a poet, and if you will not you shall out of this house and never see my son more, for, why, what art thou, thou art no better than a harlotry player?’
‘Harlotry is good,’ said WS, blushing.
‘Well, is it true? Have I hit it?’
WS sighed. ‘I have endeavoured to please all save you. I have done more sonnets on this same theme. I write many at a sitting but give you one only at a time. Well, I shall write no more.’
‘Why why why? Why do you sing their tune? Nay, why do you make the tune for them to sing?’
WS extended his empty hands like, he thought, doing it, some usurious Jew. ‘I did it for money. I must live.’
‘For money? Oh God, for money? Do you not have everything you want? Do I not give you everything?’ Harry stood, hands on hips, narrowing his eyes. ‘For how much money? For thirty pieces of silver?’
‘Oh, this is all nonsense. I must send money home. I have a wife if you have not and will not have. I cannot disown my wife, nor my three children.’
Harry grinned maliciously. ‘Poor Will. Will the married man.’
‘I have a son. My son must grow up a gentleman.’
‘Poor Will. My poor, dear Will. Often I feel myself to be so very much older. I could speak to thee like thine own dad.’
‘A son to grow up like you, though never to be a lord yet perhaps a knight. Sir Hamnet Shakespeare. I see in you what he may be. And often I feel that I may never live to see it, not in reality. Often I feel so tired.’
Harry came up to his chair from behind and embraced him, jewelled hands winking in the winter light as they lay crossed on the breast of his friend. WS took the right hand in his own and squeezed it. ‘I shall write no more sonnets,’ he said. ‘You have seen through the poor trickery.’
Harry kissed his cheek lightly. ‘Write me more sonnets,’ he said, ‘though not on that stale and profitless theme. And let us ride together ere spring comes to — to wherever it is thy wife and children are.’
‘Stratford.’
‘Aye, thither. And we shall take a fine present to Lord Hamnet.’
‘You are kind. You are always kind.’
‘But,’ said Harry, breaking away and striding towards the window, ‘thou shalt do something for me. Another poem. And let it be a revenge on women, the whole sex.’ Rain had started to fall. It was a grey day. Bare branches tapped, tapped forlornly at the window. ‘Especially on these women who are so holy on marriage and the sanctity of marriage. I wish to see another book and my name on it and to hear the congratulations of my friends.’
‘What I have done is yours,’ said WS. ‘What I have to do is yours. But I cannot be altogether so harsh against women.’
THEY did not go to Stratford. Instead, WS worked at his poem of Lucrece and Tarquin, and Harry took to low company, drawn into it, in life’s sly irony, by another poet. The poet was George Chapman, older by some four years than WS, and he had ventured on his first plays this rare time (rare in two years) of the Rose being open. He had done a ranting tragedy for Sussex’s Men — Artaxerxes, in which Cyrus the Younger, second son of Darius, had raving speeches which smacked of WS’s own Holofernes, though not in parody. Harry was much taken by his black-bearded loudness. Summoned to the Lord’s room, as WS himself had once been, again in a frosty January, he tickled Harry by being most undeferential. Florio did not like him. As for bonny sweet Robin Devereux, Earl of Essex, he was busy with things other than the pertness of poets and players.
‘Will,’ said Harry, ‘I am in love.’
WS put down his pen carefully. He stared for full five seconds. ‘In love? In love?’
Harry giggled. ‘Oh, it is not marriage love, it is no great lady. It is a country Lucrece in Islington. She is the wife of the keeper of the Three Tuns.’
‘In love. In love. Oh, God save us.’
‘She knows not who I am. I have been with Chapman. She believes I too am a poet. She will have none of me.’ He giggled again.
‘So the seed stirs at last. Well. He is in love.’ Then WS began to laugh. ‘And what thinks the husband of all this?’
‘Oh, he is away. His father is dying in Norfolk, and yet he will not die. It is a slow quietus. I must have her, Will, before he returns. How shall I have her?’
‘I should think,’ said WS slowly, ‘that your new friends will help you there. The Sussex men are, I hear, a wenching crowd.’
‘They are not. They are all for boys. There is a house in Islington.’
‘Well. Well, well. In love.’ He picked up his pen, sighing. ‘I have a poem to write, a commission of your lordship’s. My mind is wholly taken up with the harm that comes to those who force the chastity of nobl
e matrons. I should think like harm will come to the authors of lowlier essays.’
‘You mock me now. Write me a poem I can give to her. You have written sonnets enjoining me to love a woman, now write one that shall persuade a woman to love me.’
‘Your friend Master Chapman is perhaps less busy than I that he can take you drinking to Islington. Ask him, my noble lord.’
‘Will, I have no taste for this mockery. George cannot write that sort of verse. She would never understand any poem of his.’
‘Can she read?’
‘Oh yes, and write too. She has a good hand in making out of a reckoning. And as for George, he too is busy enough with a poem. He is lodging at Islington, at the Three Tuns, writing it. It is far out, he says, from the distraction of those who admire him.’
WS was amused; disturbed, a little jealous, but still amused. ‘The distraction of his creditors, he would say. I have a mind to come out to Islington to see this innkeeper’s wife who has all my lord’s heart.’ He had a mind too to see this Chapman.
‘Ah, she has such a white skin. And a very tiny foot. She has a waist a man could span his two hands withal. She is black-haired and black-eyed.’
‘She is out of the fashion, then.’
‘These great ladies chase a man. She does not. She thrusts me away. She thrusts all men away.’
‘Including Master Chapman?’
‘George is only in love with himself. That is why he amuses me. He too is writing a poem, as I say, though not to my commission. He says he will honour me with its dedication.’
So. He had very much a mind to see this Chapman. ‘Well, when shall we go thither?’
‘Tonight. This night. You shall see her this very night.’
It was a fair ride out to Islington, where Canonbury Tower was being new-built by the Lord Mayor. A cold ride, too, that sharp night, the road ringing. They were both glad of the warmth of the fire of the inn.
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 11