‘You sound like the Duke of Guise himself. That, you will remember, was when we first met, when you were with this Emperor of yours at the Rose. Machiavel,’ said WS. ‘I doubt it was poor Kit Marlowe or any other of us poor poets corrupted you.’
‘I am not corrupt,’ said Harry calmly. ‘I spy corruption in the State. The State is crumbling and collapsing with corruption. The young men must cleanse it.’
‘Harry,’ sighed WS, ‘I am ten years older than you—— No, I will not say that, I take that back, there is no virtue of itself in age. Let me ask rather if you would live to my age.’
‘Life,’ said Harry carelessly. ‘If there is no virtue in age of itself, then to live to be older is nothing. I would do things. If I die doing them, well then — I die. I might have died on this Islands voyage.’
‘You acquitted yourself well, I know. You were made a knight. Sir WH.’
‘Oh, there are a many Essex knighthoods.’
‘But death then would have been honourable. Would death be honourable if it were like the death of that poor Jew, a comic death with the crowd roaring, your flesh pulled aside like a curtain to discover guts for the pulling-out? I mean a traitor’s death. For, mark my words, I see that for you. Nobody will drag this queen off her throne. She will live out her days, and there cannot be many of them left.’
‘She will grow older and older and pull the country into more ruin,’ said Harry. ‘She mumbles over the farthings in her purse, eating bone-soup three dinners running. And we must lean to her stinking breath, her teeth are all rotted, and prate of her eternal beauty. She cackles, she confounds her French and Italian and Latin, she peers at little stories of love in her bedchamber, drooling and slavering over them.’
‘The French Ambassador was full of praise for her wisdom,’ said WS uneasily. ‘At least, I have heard so.’
‘Aye, you have heard this and seen that, but you know nothing. The Queen is a rotting heap of old filth. I know, I am at Court. What we want from you, Ovidian metamorphosis, is something, play or poem, which shall show what is wrong and what is wanted. Something that shall encourage the young and point the way. A play about some old mad champing tyrant that is deposed.’
‘When,’ said WS slowly, ‘I have written poems in the past, I have written them for your pleasure. I ceased writing them when it seemed that you took no more pleasure in poems, even in sonnets. I am not hurt by that — your time was come for taking your place in the world, with little leisure for poetry——’
‘Aye, aye, come to your point.’
‘My point is that I will write to give pleasure to you still, if you wish it, but only lawful pleasure——’
‘Ah, Jesus, our moralist speaks again.’
‘I will not write anything inflammatory. I will not make my pen a servant to treason. Oh, Harry,’ he said, pleadingly, ‘do not mingle yourself with these madmen at Court.’
‘Am I to go on scraping to a madwoman? And I will not have you continually using this word “treason”. Who are you, what are you, to be warning me against treason?’
‘A friend, a lover. I thought a friend had certain rights——’
‘In that you say you are a friend and lover,’ said Harry with a kind of prim grimness, ‘you may rightly talk of your rights. First, though, you must prove yourself both by showing duty.’
‘Duty,’ repeated WS with some bitterness. ‘Ever since I was a tiny boy I have been told gravely of my duty — to my family, church, country, wife. I am old enough now to know that the only self-evident duty is to that image of order we all carry in our brains. That the keeping of chaos under with stern occasional kicks or permanent tough floorboards is man’s duty, and that all the rest is solemn hypocrite’s words to justify self-interest. To emboss a stamp of order on time’s flux is an impossibility I must try to make possible through my art, such as it is. For the rest, I fear the waking of dragons.’ He saw the slack development of that metaphor ready to form on Harry’s lips. ‘And,’ said WS, ‘do not start talking of dragon-slayers, for out of dragon’s blood are formed new dragons. Let them sleep, all of them.’
‘It is much,’ said Harry, ‘the view of life of the small greasy citizen. Well, I ought to have expected it from you, old age creaking on. Rheum and plum-tree gum and all the rest. You will lend no words to leadership, for you are afraid. What you will churn out now is what the citizenry wants as its own badge and image. London Bridge built on woolsacks. Where is your furry gown and aldermanic belly and, oh yes, your young wife to be courted slyly by young men with flesh in their codpieces? There you break the pattern, true.’
WS smiled very sourly. ‘Oh, if you want your true toothless citizen’s picture you may have it. I can outdo all in patriot’s fustian and panting over gold-counting and even in cuckoldry. Behold one cuckolded by his own younger brother.’
‘Cuckolded——! By——’
‘You heard me. I saw it. I saw the nakedness and the leaping out and the shame and the shamelessness. The woman, you know, is never ashamed. That is a sentence to put down in your tablets.’
‘Tell me all, I must know all.’
‘I went back to Stratford when The Isle of Dogs shut the playhouses for us. Unannounced, unexpected. My brother and wife were busy with sacramental ceremonies, ensuring that New Place be a true house of love.’
‘Tell me all, everything, everything that you saw.’
‘I have told you enough.’ WS saw the seething of his friend’s laughter ready to raise the lid. ‘Too much.’
‘Too much!’ Harry’s mirth broke hugely. WS had never liked his laugh — high-pitched and maniacal; he had never liked the way the smooth face collapsed with laughter into an ugliness the more frightening because of the miracle of beauty it displaced: it was as if that beauty was nothing to do with either truth or goodness. ‘Ah, no!’ screamed Harry. WS saw the decay in a bared dog-tooth; the tongue was caked and yellow. ‘Too much, too too too much!’ The laughter tumbled out, an icy burn with the sun on it, then met sudden rocks of coughing. The thin body shook and throbbed under its finery. ‘Oh, God.’ He was weak, he lay back limp. ‘As you say.’ His arms trembled as he sought wine from the writing-table. ‘Much too much.’
‘The cuckold is always comic,’ said WS, sickened by the transport he had seen, a transport as obscene and shameless as the image that had been its first cause. He remembered Gilbert’s words, some odd country sentence twisted and transformed by Gilbert’s peculiar genius. ‘We know what we are,’ he said, ‘but know not what we may be.’
‘Oh, sweet Jesus, I ache all over.’
‘The goat and the giant codpiece,’ mused WS. ‘That act contains all. But why then cannot the cuckold be tragic?’
Harry choked on a mouthful of wine. Laughter buffeted it out, a bubbling spray. WS felt the wetness prick his face; a splash took the corner of his mouth and he tasted the sour sweetness like the end of friendship. He took a spotted handkerchief from the table and wiped and wiped and wiped. ‘I pray to God that you too will learn,’ he said. ‘The bitterness of life may make you a man.’
‘I have broke a rib.’ Harry groaned in the pain of laughter’s recovery.
‘You will learn about order in time. Marriage is order. One suffers but cannot break it. Learn from that. One suffers that order may be maintained.’
‘Well——’ Harry rudely grasped his friend’s handkerchief from the hand that still wiped; he mopped at his eyes, blinking away water.
‘The ambiguousness of tears,’ said the ready word-man.
‘— Order or no order, you have made me suffer.’ Panting, he felt his sore ribs.
‘One thing, then — you will today ask me for no more poems or plays on this theme of foul tyranny and the duty of usurpation. You will leave here bearing instead the picture of a cuckold.’
‘Cuck——’ That word was ready to flint fresh laughter. Harry set his lips primly and brushed down the breast of his doublet as though laughter had been a rich pasty shedding crumb
s. ‘Aye, well, you have diverted me from state matters. It is the brother, I think, that is the cream of it.’ Cream. His face moved once more towards disintegrating; he cracked the laughter to quiescence: down, wantons, down.
WS began to see that the final weariness was approaching, soft-footed down a long corridor. This boy, this great lord, had, in boy’s or great lord’s carelessness, bared a friend’s viscera like a hangman: see you, this sonnet here; herein he saith — Now here was a sweet story for the telling, God knew. It is the brother that is the cream of it. WS said coldly:
‘If you want all for your retailing, the brother’s name is Richard and he is full ten years my junior.’ It would not be carelessness next time, not that innocent manner of carelessness. ‘And now, my lord, you may go.’
Harry stared an instant. Then, amused, he said, ‘Oh, I may go, may I?’
‘It may be that a common player’s horns will be too lowly a joke for your great friends at court. It will serve, then, for your tavern acquaintances. Whatever it may be, you are heartily welcome to it. And now leave me.’
Harry got to his feet, laughing again, though not in the rich creamy ecstasy appropriate to the tale of a friend’s cuckoldry. ‘That is one thing I cannot do,’ he said at length. ‘I can never leave you. You have too august an impudence and pertness for me ever to take offence at aught you say. It is a kind of Tarquin superbity.’
‘Let’s not shut our eyes to the truth,’ said WS. ‘The long spring is over.’
‘Well, I see I must go,’ smiled Harry, ‘and come back when you are in a more loving temper. Do not say now that I am not yet grown up.’
‘Oh,’ cried WS, ‘can you not yet foresee what you will feel when you are truly grown up? You will understand the disappointments then. You will see where metaphors go wrong, that the door is most tight-shut when it seems most open, that we are condemned to dying more than to death. Let me tell you the manner of our dying away from each other, which is not yet a death. I must age and put off fancies and abstractions, you must feed a greater and greater appetite for power. There is no going back for you, as I see it. You will follow Lord Essex to the very block, for, by a paradox, the path up is always the path down. That is why it seems so delightful and easy. You will justify every treachery, every lust and minor ambition, by reference to some noble sentence, such as “It is for the good of the commonweal”. You will even conceive of an image of self-sacrifice when you are encompassing only self-indulgence, self-fulfilment, that self being not the self you think of, for your mirror will be as distorting as any of the Queen’s.’
‘If it is for this I must stay, you were right to bid me go.’ Harry wrapped his cloak about him, its encircling breeze driving a scrawled sheet from the work-table.
‘I cannot make myself clear on all this.’ WS picked up the sheet, groaning an old man’s groan, returning to the vertical in dizziness. Vertical, vertigo. Words. He felt a whinging nostalgia for words. ‘I feel only that if I cannot save your soul I must at least try to save mine.’
‘Back, as always, to cheesy Banbury cant,’ sneered Harry. ‘How you make me vomit, you new Puritan gentlemen, with your bit of wealth in candles and corn and dimity and plays. Go to it, then. Save your paltry little Puritan’s soul. I prefer my hell, if it is to be a hell. Save your mean little cuckold’s soul.’ He tossed his head, hatted Frenchwise, making the great black feather in it nod. ‘Beautified,’ he sneered, remembering an old jibe. ‘You cannot disguise the truth of a man’s nature. Capon,’ he added. ‘Not Without Mustard.’ He crowed a last laugh. ‘How they all mock you. You are more comic than all your comedies.’ Then he left, laughing not at all as he clumped like a departing coalman down the uncarpeted stairs.
WELL, then, let it be so, for he welcomed pain. It passed over his head, the gushing of Francis Meres (Plautus and Seneca accounted best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English most excellent in both kinds for the stage), the printing pirates after his work, the ‘Sweet Master S’ fame. We know what we are but know not what we may be. But he thought he knew what he might be could he but draw down on himself the right pain, achieve the right releasing agony. The goddess, he was convinced, abode in the air, an atomy, ready to rush into a wound, were but that wound deep enough. What did young Master Meres know about it? As for the world’s madness, his pain in it was diminished by the inoculation of foreknowledge; it seemed, as he packed his ‘humours’ about Falstaff, that there might well be an exact art of prediction of human folly — the Queen striking Essex over this matter of who should be sent to flay the wild Irish to submission; the paralysis of rule and the two thousand sent to their death in the foul bogs, ambushed by bog-dwellers. And Harry Wriothesly’s decent to folly and impending self-ruin was most predictable of all.
Yet was it not in a measure a folly rubbed off himself, as though poet had infected patron in the manner of his being ensnared? WS watched, with becoming show of sorrow, the slow-treading funeral cortège wind through the summer London streets. Burghley dead, the old times and virtues gone; Ireland near-lost. The flies buzzed. In pathetic optimism the kites wheeled far above that well-lapped corpse. But among the great mourners no sign of one who should be chief in his weeping. Ha’ you not heard? He is run off to France with a woman. Defunctive music brayed in the heat. Nay, he hath got a woman here with child, and one of high quality. Soft feet marching slow over the cobbles. But life always to balance death. (Mistress Vernon is from the Court and lies in Essex House. Some say she hath taken a venue under the girdle and swells upon it; yet she complains not of foul play but says the Earl will justify it.) A Royal Maid of Honour a maid no longer, not this year nor more. Seven months, is it? He had best be hurrying back. Maids of Dishonour. They say he is back secretly these four days and secretly hath——
WS hardly heard the bitter words of Cuthbert Burbage as they sat gloomily in the enclosed tavern heat, they two and Richard and Heminges and Phillips, Pope, Kemp. He was thinking of the calm gay words of Florio (black-suited but not for Burghley): ‘My lord is in the Fleet.’ A rehearsal for the eventual Tower; WS saw it all so clearly: two steps from the ultimate block. ‘Slow lechery and hasty marriage. Gloriana is not mocked. Her wrath, I hear, was terrible. One of her Glories, but think, and she kept unaware. But my lord played the man and is in the Fleet as his reward.’
‘The Fleet,’ said WS aloud. His fellow-players stared; Kemp giggled. Cuthbert said:
‘Had I my way I would have him in the Fleet, but his crime is against nature more than law.’ WS frowned, puzzled; then he recollected. Giles Alleyn. The lease. ‘I had feared it, I must say,’ went on Cuthbert. ‘Never trust an Alleyn. By making of these half-promises of renewal——’
‘It must be taken more slowly,’ grinned Kemp, ‘for our gentleman here.’ Keep away from the great world, WS was thinking. The new Countess too in prison. (‘She will get over all this, never fear,’ Florio had said. ‘The Queen’s Majesty, I mean. My lord is not to lie wasting in the Fleet while there are kerns jumping and howling in Ireland.’ But the next step the Tower, and after the Tower—— Words were safe, words, safer than reality.)
‘Half-promises of renewal,’ said Cuthbert patiently. ‘The lease of ’76 said the timber should be ours still if removed before expiry. Now he knows I will not accept of his new terms, that he knows. It was drawn up, this new lease, in that foreknowledge. So now he will break up the Theatre and call the timber his own.’ Richard Burbage growled.
‘The Curtain will not do for ever,’ said Heminges, chewing a little nut.
‘Kill Alleyn,’ suggested Pope. ‘These nights are without moon.’
‘Leases live on like souls,’ said Cuthbert sententiously. ‘It is more to the purpose to consider of where we shall find a new home. Dick here and I have walked this garden in Maiden Lane, a fair enough garden but we do not wish it for flowers. It is not far from the Rose, if we are talking of flowers.’
‘A new playhouse, then,’ said Phillips.
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‘We two,’ said Richard Burbage, jerking a sort of imperial thumb at his brother, ‘are to meet half. You five the other half, if you will agree.’
‘Wake up, Will,’ said Cuthbert Burbage.
‘The expense of building,’ said Heminges, chewing the bit of beard that curled up under his underlip. (It is right that I go visit him in the Fleet, WS was thinking. One does not dissolve friendships so easily. And what if he prove haughty and will not receive me? It is a terrible thing for one so high to be brought so low. He will squeal at the rats, he had ever a fear of rats.)
‘It must be met,’ Cuthbert was saying. ‘It can be met. We are talking,’ he cried to WS, ‘of a new playhouse and the building of it south of the river.’
‘There is no such thing,’ said WS, wondering at the confidence with which he spoke, ‘as the death of anything. There is no making new, there is only renewal. Can love really die?’
‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ prayed Kemp, rolling his eyes to heaven.
‘The earth turns and there is no new day, only a renewal of the old. In tomorrow’s bread there will be a piece of today’s dough. You can only build your new playhouse out of the old one.’ They stared at him. ‘Pull it down, set your timber on carts, send it over the river. Why should the niggling and nasty forces prevail? Alleyn rubs his hands. Cheat him.’
‘He is right,’ said Heminges. ‘By God, he is right.’
WS felt a sort of promise of the renewal of youth’s energy.
‘Yes,’ said Cuthbert Burbage, ‘he is right. That is what we will do. We will wait till Alleyn is out of town——’
‘What is the name of that builder?’
‘Street. A master builder. Peter Street.’
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 20