‘Well——’ WS felt, in a kind of despair, the whole matter of bitterness and high feeling begin to slide off; he was always an actor quitting old parts for new. ‘We have been somewhat estranged of late. I sent sonnets, as you will know, and the sonnets bounced rudely back.’
‘I was instructed to return them,’ said Florio. ‘Nor was it in mine office to add aught that might explain his rejection of them. But, to speak plainly now, he was in one of these states of his — states that belong more to his rank than to the man that holds that rank. He is naturally, as you well know, free and honest. Sometimes, though, he must remember what he is, especially when great lords are going forth to wage war against the Queen’s enemies. Her Majesty would not let him follow my lord Essex to Cadiz, and that rankled. He would not have it then that he was sick. And he has been much importuned by small poets and smaller players. Then there was some question of a woman, not a lady. He has had her hidden away somewhere. There has been, in fine, a fit of revulsion against what he termed the lowness of his life.’ Florio gave an Italianate shrug. ‘Guilt is a word you might use. The English are given to guilt. It is something to do,’ he said vaguely, ‘with the English being a sort of twofold people.’
‘Tell me more of this lady — woman, I would say.’
‘I know little. Some very dark creature, I am told. He had her taken into the country. But he has been railing against drabs, poet’s drabs, as he calls them. There are times when he has a very low opinion of poets.’
‘And what of this poet?’
Florio sat back comfortably in his great leather chair, black legs crossed. Behind him was a table littered with the materials for the dictionary he was making; his shelves were full of fat books. It had been a good life for him, a watching life. Symbol of his philosophical content, a fat black cat slept by the spitting pearwood fire. Autumn was cold this year. He said:
‘Yourself? It is time, I would say, for you to be his friend again. The ranks close.’ He grinned at that. ‘Your respective ranks grow nearer, I mean. I think you have, looking back on it all, done him more good than harm.’ Florio did not know everything, that was quite certain. ‘You lacked authority to enforce your precepts, no more. I will send word that you have been. Do you send words, a sonnet or so. This time they will not be rejected, that I can promise.’
… And for his crest or cognizance a falcon his wings displayed argent standing on a wreath of his colours; supporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid set upon a helmet with mantels and tassels as hath been accustomed…. WS, gentleman, went back to Bishopsgate, his head buzzing with images. ‘Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come——’ It was a matter of looking back to that most balmy time, the mortal moon having endured her eclipse, peace proclaiming olives of endless age, but a month gone. Symbols of established order drawn from the great and public world to figure his own exaltation, to refigure what was, after all, an abiding love. As for olives of endless age, there was no such thing: fruit grew black and wizened; trees died. The lease of the Theatre was, in a year’s time, due to fall in; old Burbage was negotiating to buy that fencing-master’s hall in the Blackfriars, his aim being to create an indoor playhouse. Nothing stayed still. A man changed his lodging, his place of work, his mistress; between man and wife love could die, a man’s art and skill grew or languished or merely changed, and all beyond his control. Only between man and man was there hope of maintaining — beyond pure animal need that misted the eyes with blood — a love nourished by will and brain and a conscious art of forbearance. And so, his comedy of the Jew of Venice put by for a day or two, to sonnets of love’s renewal, his own past pain, the fresh pride of a poet who was also a gentleman:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
In a fever of creation he wrote twenty sonnets. They were sent in a wrapper whereon he himself had carefully drawn and coloured the blazon of his arms and motto. As Florio had foretold, there was this time no rude tennis-ball smacking back of the proffer; instead there ensued a reading silence.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
A somewhat timid, a sick man’s, note, of humble rather than gracious welcome came to him. WS rode, almost jump on its receipt, to Holborn. This time there was added, to the usual phalanx of flunkeys and butlers and stewards and chained staffed bearlike major-domo, a deep-bearded trio of physicians. Stay not with him over-long; he is soon made weary. I mark you. The great bedchamber was dark and musty, air excluded with shut casements, daylight with heavy curtains. A dim lamp, a votary’s lamp, burned by Harry’s bed. Harry himself lay thin-faced, languid, with WS’s bold black-inked sheets strewn over the silk coverlet. He grinned shamefacedly through the gloom.
‘So,’ said WS. ‘What is all this?’
‘They tell me I am not well. You too perhaps have been sick?’ He picked up one of the sonnets and read out: ‘ “Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink——” ’
‘Oh, that.’
‘—“Potions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection.” ’
‘Sick with not seeing you, if you like.’
‘I do like. I would you had not had the sickness.’
‘Well, I am better already. It is the honey of being with you that cures. The absence was all eisel.’
‘There is nobody quite like my Will. I think you will soon make me better. It has been some French pox or other. Sores and swellings and a fever. They have bled me and stuck foul poultices on.’
‘And you must be in the dark?’
‘Ah, let us have some light, for God’s sake. Fiat lux.’
WS strode over to the casements and drew back the fine heavy curtains. November sunlight poured in, a sudden crushed cask of light wine. ‘Air too?’ he asked.
‘It costs no more than the light.’ WS opened the window a fraction, enough for a November gust to send two or three of the sonnets swirling and sailing. Harry himself, with a sort of comic feebleness, blew out his lamp. The sickroom mustiness and foul sweetness of suppurations and electuaries was blown out also. WS picked up two sonnets from the floor (‘… Even that your pity is enough to cure me.’ ‘… A god in love, to whom I am confin’d.’) and stacked the whole batch together, saying:
‘I hope these were some little help.’
‘Oh, excellent physic. I think I could get up now.’
‘It is I your doctors will blame if you do.’
‘Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.’
‘You must have been very sick, then?’
‘Most inconveniently so. There is much going on at court these days and I am out of it. And I am fed on possets and broths and can have no wine. Nor women. It is strange, is it not, that a German monk first put that trio into words? Martin Luther. Wein, Weib, und Gesang. The Emperor’s language is a very uncouth one. But it triumphs here, I think.’
‘So women are out of your life?’ He had to know, but he would not ask directly.
‘An abeyance or intermission or some such thing.’ He was very languid. ‘Oh yes, there was the question of your own dark little doxy.’ A great lord, he could speak carelessly. ‘Heterodoxy. It was an experience, I will say that, and an experience we shared. That seemed very strange. I seemed closer to you than to her.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She wished to be a fine lady. She had, would you believe it, ambitions to marry into the English nobility, that black creature. And she comes crying to me that she is with child.’
‘With child? Your child?’
‘Who knows whose child? Mine. Yours. Anybody’s. It might well be yours from the time of her having it, if my calculating is correct. Though there are untimely births. But let’s talk of other things, not dra
bs and their brats.’
‘I must know this,’ said WS. ‘What happened?’
Harry yawned. ‘That wind blowing in makes me sleepy.’ WS did not get up from the chair where he was sitting to close the window. ‘Oh well, I see you are concerned. That I did not expect. I have heard all sorts of tales about her since, chiefly that her house and coach and servants were all paid for in Spanish gold and that her aim was to reach me through you——’
‘I did all the wooing there.’
‘Wait. And to reach Robin Devereux through myself and slay him. And even to slay other great ministers of state and then, when apprehended, plead her belly.’
‘Oh, that is all nonsense.’
‘There is a lot of nonsense talked these days, all, I would say, put about by the Spanish themselves — spies and equivocators, sent hither to cause confusion. She was really a harmless enough little drab, though black. She was in debt for her rent and for the payment of her servants.’ He grinned ruefully. ‘That, you would say, will perhaps teach me a lesson for the stealing of a friend’s mistress. You can understand that I felt very bitter towards you.’
‘You still have not said——’
‘I sent her to Cowdray to have her bastard. Oh, I am not all unkindness. I have been known to be generous.’
‘I know, I know. And then?’
Harry shrugged. ‘Well, there were other things. There was the triviality of a war with the Spaniards and His Eminence in Calais, for example. She has just passed out of everybody’s life. I sometimes ask myself whether I dreamt it all. And then I remember that smooth brown body very well and the rising hillock that rose yet higher day by day. Oh, let us call her part of our sickness. Let us also call for some wine. I swear I am cured now.’
But there was no wine. The trio of physicians, grave antithesis to Wein, Weib and Gesang, came to the ringing of Harry’s bedside bell. WS might come in a day or two again, but he must not excite the patient as he seemed to have done this time. And, see, he had let in light and air. ‘I know,’ said WS, watching servants scurry in to restore fug and gloom. ‘Light and air are great enemies.’
WITH the sharpening of the air and the coming of the festivals of light there was the restoration, through the sweet languor of convalescence, of the old friendship. Yet could it ever be truly recaptured, the former primaveral joy? Here was no longer a boy’s body, but the weak one of a man who had ailed with a man’s sickness; the free boy’s spirit had changed to the crafty, seeking, politic soul, tending to meanness and spite, that Essex was teaching men at court to endue. WS felt himself ageing, dissatisfied, life nagging like broken teeth, the gaps in his life presented to a probing tongue. Sweet-tongued, honey-tongued Master Shakespeare. Well, that final act in Belmont moonlight (a real moon pressed as an involuntary actor, though unable to disguise the wintriness of its shining down on the doomed Theatre) deserved the praise and commendation it got, though no laudator’s eloquence could touch the eloquence it lauded. They thought this out-topped all, but what could they know? Only he himself knew what might be done if the words and craft could descend in a sort of pentecostal dispensation of grace. He saw dimly, a vision lay coyly beyond the tail of his eye. This stuff was play. There was a reality somewhere to be encompassed and, with God’s grimmest irony, it might only be grasped through playing at play, thus catching reality off its guard.
The reality of life was dark; of that he was growing slowly convinced. It had more to do with evil and suffering and loss than poetry, born out of Hybla, would yet admit. A sort of masque of evil was being played out at court, but the mere fact of great seals and jostling for place, gold chains of office, the farce of worshipping as a sort of Titania a queen pock-marked, unwashed, posturing like a nymph before painted mirrors, reduced the quick scurrying nastiness to unhandily played mirthless comedy. There was this unpleasant business of Essex wishing to keep the ransoms taken at Cadiz, the Queen demanding them for her own purse, the screaming greedy old woman confronting the pouting shouting boy before ladies-in-waiting who must feign deafness. This lust for a few bits of Spanish gold grew into a faceless rage, quarrels for their own sake, the setting-up of factions. When Candlemas came round again the death of old James Burbage was much in the foreground of WS’s concern, but he heard indirectly of Essex and Harry ranged, with their hangers-on, against the Cecils and the Queen herself, of the Earl of Northumberland tremblingly challenging Harry to fight matters out with steel (but what matters? What was to be gained or lost? Would there be a mouthful of bread or a spoonful of wine the less or more for anyone whatever the issue?). What made the nagging and biting the more shameful was the fact of irresolution: threats and grasping of daggers but no blood spilled in animal honesty.
The syrup of recorders and viols, the candle like a good deed in a naughty world — they seemed out of place in this cobwebbed cellar. WS sighed to think he would always be, in some manner, unable to provide the right biting word, the shaming image, for the little evils of his own time. He stood, with Dick Burbage and his brother Cuthbert (new owners of the Blackfriars and the Theatre respectively since their father’s death), to take in a sour pennyworth of Chapman’s new play at the Rose. They scorned to pay good silver to a rival; they folded their arms under their cloaks and stayed near the gate, in the groundlings’ place but aloof from the groundlings, to taste an act or so of A Humorous Day’s Mirth — Count Labervele and Countess Moren, both jealous of their younger spouses; Dowsecer the melancholic in his black hat. It was the times, it was London people.
‘But,’ said WS afterwards as they sat over cheese and ale in the Dog, ‘they are not true people. They are not built out of warring elements, they are a sort of potion. Do you follow me? Human souls are not smooth mixtures like that, fixed for ever in choler or melancholy or amorousness. These creatures of Chapman’s are flat, like very crude drawings. They cannot surprise either themselves or others by becoming other than what they are. Do you follow me?’
Dick Burbage happily shook his head. ‘This is the new way,’ he said, ‘and it is rooted, so they tell me, in the teachings of the ancients. It is humours. Now I could do one of these melancholic humours very well——’
‘You could do any of the humours very well, as we know. But that is just singing one air over and over and then turning to another. But a human soul is not just one repeated air, it is many. Now even Shylock has many sides — sometimes to be pitied, sometimes laughed at, hated at other times——’
‘Shylock is a dirty Jew.’
WS sighed very deeply. ‘That is what the people wish to believe, they wish him to be a kind of Lopez. That is the way of satire, setting up a dirty Jew or an old cuckold or a young lecher or a fantasticated gallant. But satire is a very small part of poesy.’
‘It is in the mode,’ said Burbage, ‘whatever you may think of it. It is a kind of comedy we must give them somehow.’
‘Not my kind.’
‘If Chapman can do it so can you.’
‘I can make satire of their satire, no more. No less, should I say? The times change quickly. A play should be bigger than the times.’
‘That is like scorning yesterday’s hunger. But yesterday’s hunger cannot be stilled with tomorrow’s food.’
‘Oh, highly epigrammatical,’ smiled WS.
‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ prayed Burbage. ‘And money to buy houses withal. Settle this matter of your house, Will, and sit down seriously with your tongue in your cheek to out-Chapman Chapman.’
‘It is settled,’ said WS. ‘New Place is mine, the conveyance signed and all. Could Chapman buy the best house in his own native town, wherever it is? Chapman,’ he added loftily, ‘is very silent on his provenance.’
‘His——?’
‘Provenance.’
‘No gentleman,’ said Dick Burbage vaguely, ‘though he knows much Greek.’
‘Freehold?’ Cuthbert Burbage asked suddenly. He had not spoken up till now. He had been gloomily tracing geometrical tropes i
n spilt ale on the table-top.
‘New Place? Oh aye, freehold.’ WS knew what was in Cuthbert’s mind. He liked Cuthbert, a prim man some two years younger than himself, precise, thin of lip, steady of eye, lately much worried — as they all, indeed, were — over this question of a lease.
‘You talk of what plays to write and to act in,’ said Cuthbert accusingly to his brother. ‘You neglect the question of where. We need our own New Place.’
‘Oh, Alleyn may renew the lease,’ said Dick carelessly. ‘He talks of doing so.’
‘Not to me.’
‘We shall have the Blackfriars, a warmer place than any of our old playhouses. The dwellers there cannot prevail with the Privy Council. Why, my lord himself has told me——’
The noble residents about the new theatre had complained of the loss of amenity, the possible noise and undesirables milling to chew sausages at blood-bladders and tiring-house thunder. Dick was too sanguine; that was his humour.
‘We shall have two playhouses bubbling away,’ said Dick, ‘you may see else.’
‘And humours in both,’ said WS.
‘Talking of humours,’ said Dick, ‘Pembroke’s Men have this bricklayer writing something. I saw him doing a very loud Hieronimo. He is mad about humours, he has the whole theoric of humours pat, they tell me.’
‘A bricklayer?’ WS frowned.
‘Aye,’ said Dick Burbage straight-faced, ‘another poet that is no gentleman but knows Greek. He was shouting great drunken cartloads of it at the Dane’s beershop, but none would listen. Anacreon, Xenophon, everything. Then he vomited on the floor.’
‘A bricklayer that knows Greek?’
‘Oh, he was at Westminster School. He has been soldiering and says he took his spoils off the man he killed before both camps. In the Low Countries that was. Very Greek. His father or stepfather or somebody was a bricklayer and taught him the craft. I should think a bricklayer might build very strong plays.’
‘Stronger playhouses,’ said Cuthbert.
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 18