Adherents of literary New Criticism are quick to separate the works of the Bard from the historical Shakespeare and his political, social, and personal context. But Shakespeare’s genius as a storyteller must be at least partly attributable to his very real-life experiences. Why, for example, dissociate the adulterous sexuality, the pain, the longing, and the homoeroticism of “the poet” in the sonnets from Shakespeare’s known or deduced real-life experiences with an older woman, a dark lady, and a fair youth? The examination of the events and emotions that made Shakespeare Shakespeare not only illuminates his work, but it illuminates ourselves; and that, surely, is the ultimate goal of both literature and literary criticism.
William opened the costume trunk and carefully removed the pieces for his role as the cuckolded husband in The May Girl. The scent of musty fabric brought back the day, six months earlier, when he had hidden in the very same trunk and, with the assistance of the Burbages, escaped Sir Thomas Lucy’s raid on his wedding and left Stratford — he thought forever.
But now the Earl of Leicester’s men found themselves again in Stratford-upon-Avon. They were engaged to perform at the town’s Whitsunday pageant. And William was with them. It was a stunning spring morning, with the scent of dewy grass, primroses, and daffodils in the air and fluff from the first dandelions floating across an electric blue sky. There was a quiet shuffling in the tiring-house as the players prepared to go on. William listened with half an ear to another group on stage: Davy Jones was mangling his way through the dire and dour arhythms of Anthony Munday’s The Death of Robin Hood. William noted with a smile that at least Arthur Cawdrey’s jolly Friar Tuck seemed to be getting a few good laughs.
Richard Burbage, lugging a basketful of props, elbowed William as he passed. “Taught you not your townsmen, during your days as a country schoolmaster, how to manage a line of verse?”
William smiled ruefully, “There is only so much to be done of a Whitsunday, with the verse of a witless Munday.”
Burbage laughed, “Ay, I hate Mundays.”
As William turned his attention back to his costume, he saw a hesitant, drawn face peeking through the curtain at the back of the tiring-house. It was his wife, Anne.
“William?”
William had been dreading this moment. He had built a fort against its coming. Keeping his attention on the costume piece in his hand — which, he noted with embarrassment, was a pair of cuckold’s horns — he said, “What ho, Mistress Shakespeare. How fares Henley Street? How does the dunghill grow?”
She ignored his long-planned barb, for she had long planned to let it pass.
“William, I beseech you, may we speak?”
William set down the horns and picked up his costume cloak, shaking out a wrinkle. He didn’t respond.
Anne persisted. “I would have you meet your daughter.” She pulled aside the curtain to reveal a newborn infant in swaddling clothes, waving its arms and spitting.
William came out from the tiring-house, and he looked at his newborn daughter, and then at Anne, and then at his daughter, and then at Anne. It was the twenty-ninth of May. His daughter had been baptized on the twenty-sixth. The fact that the corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon had booked the Earl of Leicester’s Men to perform at its Whitsunday pageant was entirely coincidental.
“Her name is Susanna,” said Anne.
“A Puritan name,” said William.
“Verily,” she said. “I would not have the one fruit of our barren bed be pluck’d untimely. But what’s in a name?”
William tried but failed to look away from his baby girl, whose entire left hand was in her mouth. “What of my father, and my mother, and my kin, and my mother’s kin?”
“Your mother, well enough. Though she hates your absence, the money you send adds warmth to her hearth. Your father, in slow decline; yet those days when he is himself, he is himself. Today he farted in church, where Mary had dragged him unwilling. I think she will not do so again. Gilbert and Joan are well, though Joan is subdued these past months.”
William tried to cover the gigantic tug at his heart at the mention of Joan.
“As for your mother’s kin . . .” Anne continued, but then she stopped.
“My mother’s kin?”
“Edward Arden’s gardener, Hugh Hall” — and she lowered her voice — “or Father Hugh Hall as all about know him, is arrested. Between his capture and that of John Somerville . . . it bodes not well for Master Arden. There is hope his wife, Mary, at least, may be spared the gallows.”
William felt a gaping hole open in his chest, at the thought of wise Edward Arden and the kindly gardener-priest, cut open and quartered. He didn’t let himself even think of beautiful Mary on the tree at Tyburn.
“William,” said Anne, “I must, for mine own content, expound to you my thoughts and deeds upon the day of our wedding.”
“What would you have me know,” said William, “that I did not see in all its swollen fullness?”
Anne bounced the baby in her arms and looked out over the archery range on the Avon’s banks. On stage, the players finished declaiming Munday, and William felt a flash of hatred.
“I loved Robert Debdale,” Anne said. “And had for years, ere you came to my bed. Robert was ever on fire for the Catholic cause. He burned — not so hot as John Somerville, yet he burned — to see all in Shottery worship as they would, for it was ever a Catholic town. He saw the evil that approached when no one else did, and went to Rheims, to be strong for us both . . . for my family . . . for the family we planned. In sooth, I loved him . . . and so long I waited, while he studied abroad . . . until I could bear it no longer. And there were you, in the flower of youth and quoting Ovid . . . ay me.”
She stopped for a moment, and brushed back a tear and a laugh. On stage, Davy Jones’s troupe had finished, and James Burbage belted out a prologue to The May Girl, and introduced its dumb show.
Anne collected herself. “I loved Robert Debdale, William, and was bitter beyond measure when I found that in his absence, and in my weakness, I had become quick with your child. He wept all the night he returned, all night and most of the next day. But it was less for my weakness, which he forgave me instantly, than for his own: for he had broken under torture. Yet all he spoke under duress, he did because he thought to save both himself and me, and thus secure our future. So, he spoke of the Ardens, and the Shakespeares, for he remembered your father from his days as bailiff, and knew him to be recusant.”
“O damned treachery! What weakness and sinful pride — ”
“Ay, with time’s keen sight we may call it so. But who knows, what one will say when put to’t upon the rack?”
William thought of his own weakness at Charlecote, and fell silent.
“They set him free,” she continued, “but only on the promise of future betrayals. And when he found I was to marry, to William of the Shakespeare-Ardens — William Shakespeare whom, I gather, he suspected of trespass and incitement to uprising and many other things beside — and in a Catholic rite, with many of the Old Faith there assembled — ”
“I know how this tale ends,” William interrupted. “All comedies end with a wedding; my wedding ended with a tragedy.”
“I know not what to say, but if this will mend: I am most truly sorry.”
“What of your true lover now?” William asked. “What of Robert Debdale?”
Anne shrugged, pale and cold as a tower. “Gone again. Arrested, I fear; if not yet, then soon. He was only let free long enough to lead the hunt to the Ardens — to our wedding,” Anne said, and she began to cry. William comforted her, and took Susanna when she, too, began to cry.
After a minute, Anne gathered herself. “William . . . I know you love Ovid. So against this day, I too have learnt lines, though not of my own composing, and which my tongue hath no skill to deliver. I will say them but from my heart, if you will hear them?”
“I will hear them with the same organ whence they are offered.”
Anne looked as though she was about to begin, but then she laughed through her tears, “I am sore afraid, for you are a player, and a poet.”
“And the father of thy child, and I am told, too gentle when giving direction. I will not berate your performance. Speak, and but suit the feeling to the word.”
Anne took a breath, and soberly she said:
“There Baucis and Philemon liv’d, and there
Had liv’d long marry’d, and a happy pair:
Now old in love, though little was their store,
Inur’d to want, their poverty they bore,
Nor aim’d at wealth, professing to be poor.
For master, or for servant here to call,
Was all alike, where only two were all.
Command was none, where equal love was paid,
Or rather both commanded, both obey’d.”
Anne looked at William without irony or rancor, and William looked back.
At that moment Susanna gurgled, a deep-throated gurgle of the type only infants and hanged men can muster.
“Would you raise her in the Old Faith?” William asked.
Anne replied, “I would have us raise her in the Old Faith.”
William reached out tentatively and stroked the infant’s cheek as gently as he could with the back of one finger, and even that seemed rough and rude. “Were I to raise her in a faith, it would be a new faith indeed,” William said, half to himself. “Anne, I have seen things. Things I do not yet in full measure understand. But I will not raise a child, yours, mine, or ours, in a faith that preaches love to its own but murder unto others; and so, it seems, do all faiths.”
Anne smiled faintly. “What faith, then, would you have your child learn?”
William thought for a long, long, time, and he stroked Susanna’s cheek, and she didn’t cry.
“I would teach her,” he began, “faith that her world will be better than ours, and in this life, not the afterlife. I would teach her that there will come a time when she might herself ascend the stage as a player without shame. A day when doctrine is debated, but not a cause for murder. A day when there is no subject so sacred or serious that it may not bring laughter. A day when races of east, west, north, and south vie not, but live and work together, and yet may jest upon each other, for laughter’s sake, and without offense. A day when bubbling, fruity drinks with hints of plum and anise are served from seeming bottomless taps. A day when physic is given not only to heal the sick, but to enlighten the quick.
“And,” he said, picking up his giggling daughter, Susanna, and flicking a finger at her nose, “a day when plays by Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon are played still, and all know them, and scholars study them, and writers expound upon their themes: a legacy and an intimation of immortality that might outlast even thee, my daughter.”
He held Susanna up and kissed her.
“She looks like you,” Anne said.
“Nay, she is too fair,” William replied. “I see your face in hers.”
On stage, The May Girl had begun in earnest. There came a call from the tiring-house.
“Will!” said Richard Burbage, and a moment later he leaned out from the tiring-house curtain wearing long lashes and a dress. “Your time is come! To the point, to the point!”
“I needs must go,” said William.
“I know it well. And yet though you go for a time, may you not also stay where three generations of your family reside — stay in spirit, if not in body?”
“What you propose . . . it would not be a simple life.”
Anne managed a pained smile. The darkness in the depth of her deep blue eyes was that of Robert Debdale. “What life is?”
“There is a woman of the Queen’s court with whom I am in love; hopelessly, I fear. And there is a youth — ” William said. But then he shook his head. “But of that I dare not speak. In short, I will be much of the year in London, where my weakness finds many temptations, both dark and fair, to further weakness.”
Anne thought for a moment. “For the sake of our child, and your mother and father of whom I have become most fond, and in respect of your wandering craft, I would condescend to keep warm your second-best bed. But not the third. There, I draw a line.”
William laughed softly. “Your honesty pierces sharp as Cupid’s arrows.”
“Will! Your cue!” came a frantic call from the tiring-house.
As William leapt up the stairs and donned his cloak, he said, “We leave for the Continent in a fortnight, for a three-month tour. Will you believe me when I say I shall think on’t?”
“Ay,” said Anne. “I take you at your word.”
Will made his entrance as the cuckolded husband . . . just a fraction of a second late.