‘Every man to his humour,’ said WS. ‘Trade, I mean.’ Then he remembered what his own trade was. ‘What has he written?’
‘Well, Tom Nashe started this thing for Pembroke’s but will not finish it. It is satire again, humours and so forth. Two acts only he did, then he would do no more out of fear. Then this burly Ben man comes in and says he will write the other three, where is paper and a pen?’
‘What name?’ asked WS.
‘He is called Ben. Ben Jonson.’
‘A good bricklayer’s name.’
‘Very strong humours. Nashe bites his nails in fright that it goes too far in satire. But this Ben says he fears no Greek nor anybody.’
‘Who is the satire against?’
‘Oh, everyone,’ said Dick Burbage vaguely. ‘City and Court and Council and everyone.’
A SMALL THING, another man’s play. Who could have thought that it might ease open a door best kept locked? An empty summer of work loomed, Harry off to harry the Spaniards with Essex. ‘A secret,’ he told WS. ‘But I will bring thee back some little gift of Spanish gold or a black Spanish beard roughly wrenched out or a donna or señorita or whatever they be called.’
‘Speaking of black women——’
‘They are not all black. Some are red-haired, so I hear.’ He drank off his Canary, belched like the hulking bulky warrior he was not, then said: ‘Ah, it is the sea that is calling. Tonight I ride to Plymouth.’
‘Beware of the fair maids of the West. To revert to that one of the East that is not fair and not a maid——’
‘I know nothing. She is not heard of. But she is much in thy mind still.’
Well, yes, so she was. So many paths of sensation led back to her body, as he wrote, as he lay in bed unsleeping because of the heat, as he wandered the City, marking types, faces, words, humours. And then the crass motions of public life, against which he could not encastle and moat himself, drove her out. What was this, who were these, fellowships and families of the ragged and near-naked tramping and limping on flat horny feet out of town? The beggars were leaving town. Why they were leaving town he did not know. He asked his barber.
‘Ha’ you not heard?’ said this onion-smelling man, snipping at WS’s crown, greying auburn. A little boy in the corner sniffed up snot between the phrases of his song; his father nudged him in irritation with the elbow of the hand that plucked tinny accompanying chords on his lute. ‘It is the Council that saith how all the old sojers and beggars and such are to be sent out to fight in Piccadilly——’
‘Picardy?’ frowned WS. The lutenist accompanied that with a final tierce.
‘Picardy is what I mean. I was thinking of somewhat else. And the Lord Mayor likes not these orders for he will not be ordered so by the Council, and he has let it be known what was ordered to be done and so all the poor folk and beggars have time to shog out of London. But there will be trouble yet, you may see.’ And he cut a lock viciously, like some small vital organ.
Trouble yet. What happened now bumped itself at the Chamberlain’s Men like a coalheaver’s sack; it did not have to be filtered through barber-shop talk. Dick Burbage came in shaking with news of what the Council was to do, and this in a plague-free time of good business. All the playhouses were to be shut down.
‘Shut down?’ squealed Laurence Fletcher. They were rehearsing The Merchant. Some small readjustments of casting. A line or two to be expanded. Things were going well.
‘This bricklayer has dropped his bricks on everyone’s toes,’ shouted Burbage. ‘I said that The Isle of Dogs was enough in its very title to have the Council growling.’ This was the satire on everyone he had spoken so mildly and vaguely about, full of strong humours. ‘Now they go mad and bite us all.’
‘It was the Mayor that asked the Council,’ said Augustine Phillips. ‘You may blame the Mayor as much as the Council, and they were at loggerheads over the pressing of the beggars.’
‘Trust none,’ said Burbage. ‘They are all the same. This fool of a bricklayer deserves not the name of player or poet or anything except clumsy ape.’
‘Come,’ said WS. ‘It is not just he, surely. He but completed the play, and Pembroke’s had their tongues hanging out to put it on.’
‘You have not heard all yet,’ said grim Burbage. ‘It is not just a matter of closing down till we are good boys again. There is talk of bringing in the breakers to demolish the playhouses altogether. The Justices are given their orders, so I hear.’
‘Over our dead bodies,’ said Heminges.
‘Oh aye,’ snarled Burbage, ‘over our dead bodies. They will smash playhouses and players together and hug themselves at the godly thing they have done.’
‘So much,’ said WS very quietly, ‘for your new mode of satire.’
‘What was that? What did you say? What did you say then?’
‘And what has happened with Pembroke’s?’ asked Harry Condell.
‘Nashe knew all this would happen,’ said Burbage. ‘He was wise and has gone to Yarmouth. But they have put this Jonson and Shaw or Shaa or whatever his name is and Gab Spencer into the Marshalsea. They could not find any of the others. And this Jonson lumbers over to the Rose before they seize him and joins the Admiral’s and begs four pound in advance out of Henslowe.’ Burbage suddenly let out a shout of bitter laughter. ‘Four pounds out of Henslowe, and no hope of aught in return.’
‘O rare bricklayer,’ murmured Fletcher.
‘This is the sort of man you have coming in now,’ said Burbage, back to his snarling. ‘Rude and loud and knowing no discretion. There was a time when we were all gentlemen’s sons. There was a time when things went well for us all.’ WS could not, to be honest with himself, remember such a time; there had always been something.
‘Well,’ said Cuthbert Burbage, ‘it is but a matter of ante-dating. We are losing the Theatre sooner rather than later.’
‘It will blow over,’ said Kemp. ‘It always blows over.’
‘But what do we do now?’ said Phillips.
Ride home, pay Stratford a surprise visit. New Place and a coat of arms: those were solid enough, those would endure.
‘Go home,’ said WS.
AND SO HE WENT HOME, and it would have been better, ladies and gentlemen, if he had not gone home. Days of gorgeous sunlight on the August roads, and a welcome from the mistress of the Crown in the Cornmarket at Oxford. And at last, his heart beating beneath his fine doublet with gentleman’s pride, to Stratford. Prepare, ye spirits of dead great Stratfordians, to do blue-lipped homage to a new son that hath made good. Bow down, town, about him. But first, entering by Shipston Road, there is the Clopton Bridge to be crossed. The spurgeoning of the back-eddy. Back to the strait that sent him on so fast. He smiles, thinking of Tarquin. He sees again the great white slack body, the misshapen southern king go to it. His smile is nervous; a cloud goes over the sun. Then the cloud unclamps the god of day and it is Clopton’s own thrown cloak he passes over. His chestnut glories in his rider. Bridge Foot, left to Waterside. Give you good den, your honour. God bless you and keep you, sir, credit to your town and country. Sheep Street, in fleecy sunlight, Chapel Street belled in summer heat, and there——
There it was, the peak and crown of endeavour. New Place, Clopton’s own house. It was the first time his fast-beating eyeballs had gazed on it as his own, the conveyancing having been done remotely, himself busy in London. His wife and two daughters had, he knew, moved in; he had sent them money for furnishings. The great door gleamed in the Shakespeare-honouring sun. Must he knock? No, he would not ask, not even with his fist, to enter his own house. The front door was locked; he passed, honeyed stone on his left hand, through the little wicket that led to the garden. It was overgrown, there was work to be done here. Underhill, its former owner, had neglected it. Hollyhocks, lupins, larkspurs, a shaped yew hedge; WS foresaw a neat pleasance. And in the centre of that lawn there a mulberry tree.
The kitchen door yielded to his unlatching. It was a fine cool kitchen, gleaming with copper p
ans, but no bare arms were at work, scouring, skimming. He passed through to the living-rooms. Plain furniture well-polished, a betrothal chest, simple hard chairs. He shivered a little, for it somehow seemed not to be a house for the living. Where was Judith? Where Susanna? Where was Anne? It was as though he had bought the house literally for himself. He walked softly to the stairs, as though his own corpse lay unhonoured in one of the bedchambers above. He mounted the stairs.
On the landing he surveyed, irresolute, the five closed doors. For some reason the name of John Harington came into his mind. Ajax. A jakes. A water-closet. Why there should not be in this house? It was a cleanly idea. He had a sudden unbidden image of Dick Burbage, in melancholy hat, disclosed seated upon one. He said softly, ‘Anne? Anne?’ At once there seemed to be an explosion of soft panic, whispering and rustling, behind one of those doors. Puzzled, he went to unlatch. He opened. He saw.
White slack nakedness gathering itself, in shock, together. ‘It was, she was, that is to say,’ twitched Richard, in his unbuttoned shirt, grinning, ingratiatingly smirking, trying to hide his, though it was fast sinking in its own bestial shame, instrument of. WS stood there, beginning to glow and shiver with the cuckold’s unspeakable satisfaction, the satisfaction of confirmation, the great rage which justifies murder and the firing of cities and makes a man rise into his whimpering strong citadel of self-pitying aloneness. He marked the bed, her bed from Shottery, nodding. She wrapped her ageing treacherous bareness, bold as brass, into a night-gown. ‘She was sick,’ went Richard on, ‘and lying thus for the heat and I came in now and——’ Suddenly, limping a pace, buttoned soundly, he changed his tune. ‘It was she,’ he said. ‘It was she that made me.’ He began to whine. ‘I did not want to, but she——’ He even pointed a trembling finger at her, standing, arms folded, bold as brass by the second-best bed of New Place.
‘Aye, aye,’ said WS, almost comfortingly, ‘it was the woman.’
IX
IT WAS THE WOMAN, it was the woman, it was the woman. He did not expect it, but he rode back to London in terrible calm. I thank you both for that cornuted manumission, there is naught like cuckoldry for the promotion of a man’s health and vigour, it is a kind of gift of money to spend on one’s own sins (nota: guilt, gilt, gild, geld, Danegeld). As for the abandon of rage and striking (even with that gentleman’s hanger that swung at his side, sheathed), did it not smack too much of the stage? I am paid to act, I act not gratis. That is why I bowed out, my dear wife, I will be back for supper and to have a word with my daughters, if they be mine. For you, my little brother, practice your trade of comforting elderly female flesh elsewhere, nuzzling worm, worming into abandoned holes.
Oh God, God, God.
Despite all, he was numb, only half-there. The business of London autumn impinged only in dream-voices.
ANDREW WISE
Touching the publication of this play,
Richard the Second, I the stationer
Wise, wise in my station, do propose
Prudently the prudent lopping-off
Of that tendentious scene which does present
The king’s deposing. There be Privy eyes
Glinting for hinted treason in these times
When e’en the whisper of the word ‘succession’
(What is ‘succession’ but a whispering word?)
Can, in a wink, swell to an autumn gust
To blow down heads like apples——
RICHARD BURBAGE
They have relented: we may play again.
Gain, though — what gain? Only the Rose hath gained
With three new petals that to us be thorns.
Spencer and Shaa and pestilential Ben
Have navigated the rough Marshal’s sea
And are three masts now for the Admiral.
ANDREW WISE
It doth well, marry, aye. In Paul’s Churchyard
At the Sign o’ th’ Angel they with silver clamour
To buy this tragedy of Richard’s death
And Bolingbroke’s — but that’s a dirty word.
RICHARD BURBAGE
’Tis gone, our Theatre’s gone, with lease expired
Vile Giles, the villain Alleyn, has prevailed,
Our art is homeless——
CUTHBERT BURBAGE
Yet there’s Curtain Close,
Its eponym the Curtain that our father
Did buy ten years back with that brainless, gross
Grocer John Brayne. Let’s welcome winter in,
Like to heap gold, like autumn, in our laps,
For plague’s in exile, Parliament is called,
The City will be crammed.
O God, God, God.
RICHARD BURBAGE
Not so, for newly come to Court is one
That says the Spanish fleet is on the sea,
A laggard captive searched, her papers read,
Wherein it doth appear a great Armada
By Falmouth hovers off. For Parliament,
It is adjourned, the City empties fast.
CUTHBERT BURBAGE
Fast is the Don dispersed, the rumour goes,
God striking, as in ’eighty-eight, our foes
With vengeful thunder: fifty ships are gone
Full fifty fathom down, the rest as one
Vile whining ragged pack turn tail for home.
ANDREW WISE
Oh, it sells well, since that my lord of Essex
Is back at Court, brawling his wrongs. See how
So many feign to see his lineaments
In Bolingbroke’s.
Oh God, God, God, God, God.
They do not even descry their own folly, not the folly of wrong but of poor art. For adultery, aye incestuous adultery, calls for craft in its enactment; to be caught is poor craft. But we expected not——No, and yet our plays are full of the husband returning unexpected, from Corinth or Syracuse or Stoke Newington, it is the very stuff of comedy. I can hardly forgive the ignorance, the rank folly, the want of craft.
If only I had not known, not seen.
And so, best release, into his own craft and the big buffeting wind of history and public events, wrapping his own wincing and withdrawing soul in a mountain of blubber, a jouncing armour against grief of every kind, save perhaps later for the treachery of a noble defecting patron.
‘YOU ARE BECOME altogether too moral,’ said Harry, one leg over the arm of the best chair in his friend’s chamber. ‘First you have Robin as Bolingbroke triumphant, then he must grow old and relent, and then you must have this Hotspur, which is Robin again, and he must die and be picked up by a fat coward and so dishonoured.’
‘I had not my lord Essex in mind for either. It was merely that Richard sold well and I thought I would be carried further by that wind. And,’ mumbled WS, ‘I was asked for humours.’
‘They are all saying that it is Robin,’ said Harry, pouring some of the Canary he had himself brought. WS would not have any. ‘And we all said, when we saw your Richard on the stalls, that we had found a poet for our cause.’
‘What cause? What do you mean?’
Harry drank, somewhat gloomily. Then he said: ‘This cannot go on. The Queen fleering and jeering of the Lord Admirable, as he thinks himself to be since his new earldom. Robin played the hero at Fayal, and fat thanks he has had for it.’
‘I heard that it was Sir Walter that took Fayal.’
‘Whose side are you on? Robin has been treated very harshly, and there are some who will soon pay for it.’
‘I,’ said WS gently, ‘am on nobody’s side. I mind my own business, a humble and disregarded poet.’
‘And no longer my friend?’
‘Oh, Harry — My lord — I have nothing to say about these big storms, being only in their suburbs, so to speak, and feeling mere little breezes. What have I to gain or to lose by speaking allegiance to this cause of yours, as you call it? And what, for that matter, have any to gain or lose by my speaking?’
‘There was a Roman poet,’ said Harry, turning his goblet between his fingers and using a rather mincing accent, ‘you may have heard of him, his name was Publius Vergilius Maro. He sang the glories of the Emperor Augustus——’
‘So my lord Essex is to be the Emperor Augustus, is he?’
‘You have no doubt, I see,’ grinned Harry, ‘that you are a sort of metamorphosis of Vergil.’
‘I would rather be Ovid.’
‘Aye, exiled among the Goths. Look, I would speak seriously on all this. The Queen grows into her dotage. These mad rages at Robin, the slights, the injustices, even — the other day — a blow; did you know that? — a blow on the face, and all for nothing, all these show her waywardness, the turning of her mind. Abroad we cannot hold what we have: look at the quality of the generals she would send to Ireland. Aught that Robin suggests is flouted. She is past rule.’
‘Treason, my lord, my dear dear lord.’
‘Treason in a poetling’s chamber, aye. And was that of Bolingbroke’s treason?’
‘Kings and queens are not to be deposed.’
‘Oh, hark to our grave-bearded preacher of divine right. None shall harm the Lord’s anointed. So Henry the Fourth was an usurper and it was right that Hotspur should rise — is that not so?’
‘Henry the Fourth was an anointed king.’
‘I will anoint that singing beggar out there in the street,’ said Harry. ‘I will have myself anointed as Harry the Ninth. This must be very precious ointment.’
‘Those old days are gone,’ said WS. ‘I have been reading of them in Holinshed to make plays out of them, the days when right belonged to the grasper. Those days ended on Bosworth Field.’
‘Aye, aye, I saw the play——’
‘We do not want them to come again, barons growling at each other for a gold hat that will not even keep off the rain.’
‘That is so the ointment may be washed away,’ said Harry. ‘You shudder at usurpers and rebels but your plays make them very eloquent and persuasive.’
‘There’s a devil in all of us,’ said WS. ‘We are full of self-contradiction. It is best to purge this devil on the stage.’
‘You may purge yourself, forgetting that you inflame others. They are at least logical that say to castigate folly you must first exhibit folly as a castigable thing, and in showing folly you thus cause more folly. Well, you may commit your own share of treason in a play about England’s history. As for treason and folly,’ said Harry, ‘they are but words.’
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 19