‘Is she not beautiful?’
‘Hm.’ Her eyes accompanied, in merry mockery, the chaff she was handing back to a table of three guzzling citizens (they had ravaged two whole fowls between them and were tearing at cheese and black bread); she was country-wholesome, a new experience for his friend. Well, he must learn that he could not have everything he wanted. ‘I would say,’ he said, ‘that she is any man’s meat. Perhaps you are somewhat too young and pretty. Perhaps she will take better to an older, uglier man.’ An older, uglier man came heavily downstairs, yawning, showing stained teeth, his black hair all a tangle. Jowled face, mean eyes. This was Master Chapman. He and WS eyed each other like fighting cocks.
‘Ah, Harry,’ said Chapman loudly. He took a seat at the rough well-scrubbed table near the fire, yawning. ‘Poetic labour is hard labour,’ he said. ‘I have been taking a nap.’
‘Homerus dormitat,’ giggled Harry. ‘Sometimes your verse reads like hard labour.’
Chapman ignored this. To WS he said, ‘When comes Alleyn back with the rest of the Strange snipperados?’
‘I hear nothing. I am cut off this whole year from playhouse news.’ WS grinned. ‘Snipped off, let us say.’
She brought sweet wine, glowing. She was certainly pretty enough. Harry did a furnace-sigh. Well, this was new: his lordship in love with an alewife. He must be cured; a good swift cure, like a Lowestoft herring’s. ‘This,’ said WS, ‘seems a cleanly enough inn. It would be cold riding back. Let us lie here tonight.’ And he closed one eye at Harry. Chapman said:
‘Your Venus poem had a good epigraph.’ He mouthed the Latin loud, sounding round brown vowels:
‘ “Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.” ’
Then he belched gently though long on his first draught of wine. ‘Whether a man can maintain two writing sides I know not. One will corrupt the other, doubtless.’
‘Perhaps the better will corrupt the worse,’ said WS. Harry’s eyes could not leave her. ‘Well,’ to Chapman, ‘I am glad you at least like the epigraph.’
‘Oh, the rest was well enough. There was a sufficiency of lusty country matter in it. Each of us has his own way. One way is not another. We must do as we can, remembering the parable of the talents.’ He then took a large swig and, his mouth dripping, looked Harry full in the eyes and declaimed:
‘Presume not then, ye flesh-confounded souls,
That cannot bear the full Castalian bowls,
Which sever mounting spirits from their senses,
To look in this deep fount for thy pretences.’
‘You are welcome,’ said WS, ‘to my full Castalian bowls.’
‘To Night,’ said Chapman, raising his near-empty Castalian bowl. ‘Night is my mistress and my muse. To her I drink.’
‘To her I drink,’ said Harry, flesh-confounded, languishing in ridiculous desire.
‘We will go to bed soon,’ promised WS, smiling.
THEY rode back to Holborn next morning in sharp sunlight, jewelled cobwebs on the bare branches, their breath going up, as they spoke, like the wraith of speech. ‘Well,’ said WS, ‘I knew it would be easy for an older man. It is very much a matter of experience. Women will ever go for the experienced man. They can oft see experience in a man’s eyes.’
Harry looked unbelieving, then aghast. ‘But you did not. You could not. Her chamber-door was locked.’ He was pale. ‘No no no, you are joking.’
‘To you it was locked, aye. I was not asleep though I snored. It was a fair counterfeit of sleep. I am, after all, a player.’
‘But you could not. She would not open for any man.’
‘I went out while you were sleeping fast.’
‘I was not sleeping fast. I hardly slept at all. I thought you were going to the privy.’
Not the privy, not all the time. A quiet half-hour by the embers below. ‘Oh, it was no trouble. I knocked and she asked who, and I said I was the Earl of Southampton, the older man who was growing bald. She opened at once. Ah, the bliss. Such warmth, such whiteness.’
‘No no, you are lying!’
‘As your lordship pleases. Well, I have shown you the way. All you need do now is to follow.’
That would teach the young puppy.
IV
‘ “… THE WARRANT I HAVE OF YOUR HONOURABLE disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours …” ’
Harry left off reading it aloud.
‘And now,’ asked WS, ‘what of Chapman?’
‘Chapman may stuff his tutored lines down a privy. This is better than Venus. I did not think it possible, but it is so.’
Yes, better. WS knew that, knew too he could go no further in that heroic vein. Restless, he bit his nails. The players were returning to London after so long a wandering absence. Alleyn had left Strange’s Men and was, only figuratively as yet, flying the old Admiral’s flag over a nearly new company; Lord Strange had become the Earl of Derby only to die of (so many said) witchcraft: Kemp and Heminges had come off tour to approach Lord Hunsdon for his patronage. Lord Hunsdon’s Men. But Lord Hunsdon was the Lord Chamberlain. WS had a hunger for a tarter diet than this perpetual honey of overpraise. Those of Harry’s friends who had read Lucrece in manuscript had swooned all about its author in a perfumed langour of adulation — oh, the commodious conceits, the mellifluous facetiousness. Now that manuscript had become proofs; in a week or so the proofs would be a book; the Inns and the University men would start their gushing. WS caught a momentary image of himself writing verse of a very different order: yes yes, it speaks well but must be cut, it holds up all action; I cannot say that, it is not in my character; what is this here? — why, man, they will never comprehend it. He had mastered a form, had proved himself to himself, but now seemed called to settle to living in a filigree cage, fed on marchpane (his back teeth ached), turning out jewelled stanzas for the delectation of lords, a very superior glover. Spring always brought this restlessness. Stratford had been in his mind. Even in the writing of Lucrece there had come Stratford images. ‘Back to the strait that sent him on so fast.’ The strange back-eddy under the Clopton Bridge. And he had gone to see it again, showing himself, an earl’s friend, in red cloak and French hat, mounted on an Arab.
Fine spring weather, the many days of riding — Slough, Maidenhead, Henley, Wallingford, Oxford, Chipping Norton, Shipston-on-Stour: many days for choice, to savour the leisured travel of a gentleman with gold in his purse. And then, gulping, Henley Street unchanged, his father and mother riper, Anne carrying thirty-eight stately years on her fine wide shoulders, Gilbert approaching thirty — still godly, prone to fall foaming, unmarried — and Richard a man of twenty. There were no children in the house now, only young men and women: Hamnet and Judith were nine, Susanna eleven, their uncle Edmund a sturdy voice-breaking youth of fourteen. Time churned steadily, silently, behind one’s back. There was shyness in the presence of this Londoner with the tired eyes, hair receding, who called himself son, brother, husband and father. It was to Richard his own children ran, nuncle Richard.
‘And so th’hast made thy fortune.’
‘Not yet. This gold is nothing. The fortune is to come.’
‘And when wilt come back for ever?’
‘Soon. Very soon. And I shall never go away again.’
There was shyness between Anne and himself, back in that old bedchamber from which he had watched out on the beating and driving of a witch, in which he had shrunk from her desire. They had lain together in the bed from Shottery, but in no marital embrace. Something had died that dry summer night with Tarleton’s men singing in the tavern, poor Madge whipped, sobbing for breath. Well, the wife had done the function she had pressed him to. Sitting up in bed in the morning, he told stories to his son, embracing the boy’s thin body with hopeless love.
‘And what is there in London?’
‘Shall I go to London?’
‘One day. Meantime there are duties here. Thou must look after thy mother.’
‘Tell me a story and let me be in the story.’
WS smiled. ‘Well, once there was a king and he had a son and the son’s name was Hamnet.’ He thought of Kyd’s crude play; strange, this matter of the name. And of dead Lord Strange with his north-country voice: ‘I’ll play Amloth with thee, lad!’ Meaning that he would go into a rage (it was with a servant, not a player) like the hero they half-remembered in Yorkshire from the old days of Danish rule, only his rage had been a feigned madness to discover who had killed — ‘And the king’s father died but his ghost came back to tell the prince that he had not truly died but had been murdered. And the man that had murdered him was his own brother, the uncle of Hamnet.’
‘Which uncle — Uncle Dickon or Uncle Gilbert or Uncle Edmund?’
‘This is a story only. The uncle wished to marry the queen and become ruler of all the land.’
‘Oh, it would be Uncle Dickon then.’
‘Why Uncle Dickon?’
‘Oh, he says he is King Richard now that William the Conqueror is away in London. And Uncle Gilbert says that he should be king, for he is eldest, but Uncle Dickon says there never has been a King Gilbert, but Gilbert can be the, the——’
‘Archbishop of Canterbury?’
‘Aye, that. It is all joking. Uncle Dickon laughs because it is all joking.’
RIDING back, presents and money bestowed and duty done, WS saw the terrible mystery of fatherhood clearly in the spring weather but, more than that, the horror of its responsibility. An actor, a playwright, he turned himself into his son an instant, a sleeping being called out of the darkness to suffer, perhaps be damned, because of a shaft of enacted lust. Out of the urgent coupling, the stave, the chord of summer morning, the melting of the night island of winter heat, he came, crowned with more than was asked for. Only from them, the makers, was hidden the enormous pulse of the engines, whose switch they touched by an alien curse concealed in the fever of rose or apple or mirror. One would ask only a candle, whose doomed flicker was grateful enough; but that other gift embarrassed, fire that could not be handled or tamed to humble sufficient processes. With that passage from intolerable heat to water there was remembered the ocean in runnels, the ocean in the corn, in the fruit-skin’s pressure, and death might be thought the desirable crown of the foul river. But instead it was fire that was found, ironically bestowed, waiting, rehearsing, with a smothered laugh, lurking in the comfort of light. The fuse of water sooner or later led to the ghastly miracle implosion which would not blast its frailest tabernacle. When the warning bell announced to the crouched hearers the wafer suffused by fire, there could be no escape, nor could the burden be purged in news (poets dead, thieves hanged, traitors torn to pieces) that cast no shiver over dawn sleep. Oneself was the storm’s centre, the heart of the giant flower. The smallest room he could rent, though with only a single friendly door fronting the light and music of traffic or carnival, would at length — when the picture was burned, the mirror with its dream panorama shattered — still in a speck of dust open the desert and the howl of the time wind.
Calmly, he thought, before sleep in the inn at Oxford, that all over Europe and the Antipodes and Cathay and Cipango and the fabulous Americas, the gods were detonating. Yet there was only the one personal burden of being the source of the whole, the centre of the projection of shadows into the real that, bigger and undying, yet moved as oneself moved, in the mock court of an endless sterile reign to truckle and mow.
He woke in the spring morning to clutch the receding dream: in all the wood there was one leaf or acorn which, touched or gathered, would release the spring that fired the great trees on the outermost ring, and the circled fire closed in to him, trampling down, dissolving to heat and light all but the finally known — that when flesh, heart, lungs were quite wrung to irreducible ash, the exact centre would be proved in a gush of water.
But the morning wreckage floated on the raw flood and the day probed and had to be answered, a nightmare of many parcels. Multiplicity was sickness. In either fire or ocean only rest lay, when the point of light could grow and renew the known globe of air. Blood and renewing cells and the body’s river flowing over the stone of mole or naevus called to the dance and the climb or the descent, but the son, himself, was rooted in that dead tree, left arm stretched to a world it might be death to finger, right arm signposting to a new land. There the fiddler stamped on a floor where the wineskins were never emptied, where saffron ladies moved in a calm pavane, and tomorrow was certain as the grave and happy laws, and a string would strike always the note expected, the word flung in the pool pulse out its steady circles. His son, then, inherited the curse that stilled the present to a mouldering picture hung in every room, he hanging in that picture, caught in paralysis, the nerveless arms held on a crossbar flush with the river’s flow …
‘You are not well this morning, sir,’ said the landlord of the inn.
‘Bad dreams only. Bad dreams.’
‘WELL, I must to court then,’ said Harry, putting down the proofs of Lucrece.
The mock court of an endless sterile reign. ‘Yes, we hear there is much going on at court. Alarms and excursions.’ Incursions too. Harry, WS knew this, was worming into that delectable flower-bed of the Queen’s pert Glories. It had to come. Life, after all, was not a limiting but an expanding. The love of men and the love of women could co-exist, nay had to.
‘It is all this business of Lopez. Lopez is this physician that is also a spy, the Jew from Portugal.’
‘Yes, I know all about who Lopez is. Even tame poets hear court news.’
‘The Queen would not have it that Robin was right about his treachery. Well, she must believe it now.’ There was excitement in his girl’s-face, the excitement of one who was privileged to be near the centre of great things. WS felt very old, very weary, looking at him. ‘He is condemned, and these two others, Tinoco and Ferrara, are condemned too. And yet, out of spite to Robin, she will not have the sentence carried out.’
‘Before you go,’ said WS slowly, ‘I would beg one small word.’
‘Well, quickly then.’
‘I think I am no longer welcome here.’
‘Oh?’ Harry opened his mouth at him. ‘Have I said aught of your not being welcome?’
‘No. But I hear things from your secretary. I think he is disappointed in me.’
Harry laughed. ‘Florio is disappointed in everybody and everything. Florio is Florio. And also my secretary, no more.’ He pouted, quick in his moods. ‘But I will not have this. I will have Florio in now.’
‘No. No, wait. I think her ladyship your mother has been speaking to Florio. Has she also been speaking to you?’
Harry rubbed his chin. ‘She has said some things, very gently. She talks of time wasted on sonnets that seem to have persuaded me the way opposed to what she wanted. Well, she is a mother, only that.’
‘A mother that no longer approves of her son’s friend, not since he ceased to write sonnets on the duty of marriage. And I think that Master Florio, in his subtle way, knows of what we do together.’
‘Florio is immersed in the dictionary he is making. I think you worry too much.’
WS took a deep breath. ‘Everything points to my leaving. I have thought of this much. I do not mean my withdrawing from our friendship, for I will ever be what you wish me to be, since what you wish I wish also. But I have chosen a craft and, with the opening of the theatres again, I must follow it. Some, seeing me as a poet, forget I am a player. Well, a player cannot lodge here.’ He extended his hands briefly to indicate the rich hangings, the crystal, the gold inlays.<
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Harry looked bored and tired. ‘We will talk of this at another time. You are making a great ado about very little.’
‘And I fear that you yourself may, one of these days, report to me the sneering of your friends at a player being close to you. And Sir Jack and Lord Robin will, of necessity, mean more to you than poor Will. I have to prove myself yet. To have a ready pen is something, but it is less than to have land. I must work to the having of possessions.’
‘You have my love,’ Harry laughed.
‘I must pay for it. It is a dear thing to pay for.’
BUT summer came and The Rape of Lucrece raped the senses of its exquisite readers, overcame them in heady dispensations of rose-leaves and honeysuckle, though many saw in it a sterner moral core, a stiffer and maturer view of virtue (not the seeming virtue of the innocent but the achieved virtue of the experienced) than in the earlier poem. WS knew that the players who were once Lord Strange’s but now the Lord Chamberlain’s had united with the Lord Admiral’s Men to act at Newington Butts, but he heard that things went poorly. His play of Roman atrocities and his play of shrew-taming had both been presented to yawns and near-empty houses. Cosily, he remained the poet; he stayed in his friend’s house; the sheaf of sonnets in the camphorwood box grew thicker. Those were poems by which he would never make any public name as a sonneteer: they were for one reader’s eyes only. Sidney had told the world of his wrecked love for Lady Penelope Devereux, bonny sweet Robin’s sister, now poor Penny Rich; Daniel had published his Delia and Drayton’s Idea was going from hand to hand; but, though there were rumours of Mr WS’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’, those rumours must never sharpen into exterior knowledge. There were some things that must remain secret.
But, one hot day in June, Harry said: ‘We are to go forth together. I will take you to see the best play in the world.’
‘A play?’
‘You may call it that.’ He was excited. ‘No more questions.’ WS had not asked any. ‘It far outdoes any of your Senecan stuff. It has no title as yet. You and I will give it a title after.’
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 12