Grey skies blow mist upon the town, shivering the river and men’s souls. But not women’s it would seem, for my wife is running all smiles to gather fripperies for the wedding, new cloths and cushions for the Chapel Lane cottage, subtleties for the feast; and Judith grinning like a monkey too. Well shall she smile a month after this wedding, when she sees what she has married and why.
I will have none of it and so up here, to live in good memories, instead. Which one to choose? One as far away from this dreary day as possible.
A bright day, larks rising in the sky, the world aflame with hope, the second time I was on stage, though there was no stage to climb. It would be many years before we conjured one: a platform which every man could see, the gentry in tiers above us, and we raised above the groundlings.
Our small band of players met in the morn in the tavern room, but soon fled to a turnip field the better to rehearse, Richard carrying a sack of bread and cheese to be our dinner. But I did not feel the lack of the roasted meat at home nor gooseberry pie, for I had starved for words, and now I had them. I had written half the night, and flourished my harvest for the company in the turnip field: six sheets of parchment with ideas most brilliant to add to the play, for my words must be jewels to tempt the company to ask me to join them when they left.
But each of my rubies turned to cabbages, speedily dispatched as with a gardener’s knife.
‘How can we have a ghost descend?’ asked Matthew. ‘Will you have an actor dangle on a rope? From where? A tree, where all can see and laugh? You must conjure the audience gently, to belief.’
‘And this speech: you have the Princess and the hero’s mother both in the same scene, and only Rob to play both,’ said Richard.
It was a quick series of lessons they taught me, in that turnip field. As fast as I suggested, they tore my visions down. Then, slowly, as the turnips watched and the sun rose, the play rose too; the same play, but with a ghost now, not just at the beginning, but swooping in throughout the play. And the best of my speeches was uncrumpled.
‘To be or not to be, that is the question . . .’ Richard nodded. ‘Yes, that speech speaks well. But the hero pondering his death must speak it, not the ghost who has been severed from his life.’ Richard added, ‘That too is a good line. We will keep that in as well.’
Back to the tavern, through the back door. The front yard was already swollen with the crowd, who spilled out onto the green, displacing the geese that usually grazed there. The innkeeper had already passed the money-boxes around. For this, and for the use of his forecourt, he would get a quarter of our takings, though what he gained in ale sold would be even more.
The next time, we must play at a guildhall, I thought, where we pay a single sum, rather than share our bounty with the ale man. For surely today we will make enough to do so.
And then the play.
Once more the gong, then Richard, in doublet and fine cloak and moth holes.
‘List, O list!’ he cried.
‘For something is rotten in the state of Denmark now.
My father not two months dead,
My mother married to my uncle.
And now at midnight —’
He screamed, as I appeared, holding up his arms as if to ward off evil spirits. ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’
(An excellent line. I kept that, as the play grew stouter in the years to come, and the lines that followed too.)
‘Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.’
‘Mark me!’ I ordered.
‘Sir Ghost, I shall!’
‘My hour is almost come
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.’
‘Poor ghost,’ said Richard. ‘Speak, I am bound to hear.’
‘Bound you are, but you know not
How bound ye be.
I am thy father’s spirit . . .’
Someone shrieked faintly from the audience. I smiled beneath my sheet.
And so the play went on.
In truth, I remember little of that day’s play. I have written a thousand versions of Hamblet/Hamlet now, and each one different, cut to fit the audience, for Hamlet was a play that grew and changed as much as any babe, till at last it stood of fine stature and, like a son, may live a little even after I am gone.
But that day, even when the play was not yet fully formed, they shouted for us as we left the stage, called for our return.
We put the play on once more by torchlight, the better for a ghost to haunt. So great was the clamour for our show (for there was naught else but the turnip harvest to interest men that week), the next day we did two performances as well. My father came to neither, nor did any of his household attend any performance that I gave, or where words of mine were spoken, in the years to come.
My father might sell me to the players, for coin to pay his debts and give him comfort — for in truth he did sell me for coin to come, willing though I was — but he would never show the motley that he countenanced it. It hurt only a little, the smallest of rapier pricks, that he never felt pride in his son’s words, only in the status those words might earn him. But my heart was so filled with joy that night it bled only a pin head that my father was not there to cheer as well.
After the first performances I vanished into the crowd, leaving the audience to think that one of the cast had played the ghost, though any who could count must wonder how they did it. But in that final torchlight, after the motley cheered and cheered us, many having seen the play five times now, as Richard, Rob and Matthew strode out and bowed, I marched with them, my sheet around my shoulders, and bowed too.
Richard glanced at me in surprise, then grinned. He bowed to me, doffing his king’s crown as if it had been an apprentice’s cap.
The crowd laughed and cheered and stamped upon the ground. I heard the mutter as men recognised me in the flickers of the torchlight. Murmuring grew to shouts. I heard my name, as all made sure that each one knew there stood Will Shakespeare, glover’s son.
I gazed at Richard and he at me.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you announce yourself as a player.’
‘I do. These last two days have been as if a new sun poured into the world, showing for the first time that it has colour. The muse of fire, leashed like a hound sat at my feet, winging me upon time’s chariot not just through space but time, and to the vast palaces of Denmark. And I, all unwary —’
Richard held up his hand to stop my speech, laughter in his eyes. ‘You want to join us?’ He spoke under the yelling of the crowd.
‘I cast my muse, sir, at your feet.’
He clapped my shoulder. About us, Matthew laughed, and young Rob too.
‘They were trying to think of a way to coax you,’ said Rob. ‘Richard said we might give you the same portion of the takings as him, though you were new. And Matthew —’
‘Hush, brat.’ Richard flicked his finger at Rob’s cheek. ‘We can discuss terms with Master Shakespeare over supper.’
‘At my father’s house,’ I said. ‘For he has offered you his hospitality for this night.’
‘Feather beds!’ cried Matthew.
‘Is your mother a good cook?’ asked Rob. The crowd was melting back to their homes now, though some lingered, in case what happened next might be as amusing as a play, and even meatier gossip.
‘A most good cook. My wife as well.’
My last night in my father’s house, I thought, as lingerers called for more ale, unwilling to let this evening end, the summer sun low in the sky but the day still bright enough for men to see their way back home. My last night in Stratford town. It was as if my feet had grown wings already. My mind already slept in Elsinore.
Then I saw her. Judyth. She must have come with her brother’s family to see the play; see it for the second time perhaps, even the third, as had so many. I had not known her, hidden among the crowd under her veil.
But now she waited alone under the oak tree beyond the courtyard, her eyes greener than any leaves. She had not changed, except to be more herself. And suddenly in this courtyard I knew myself again: husband perhaps, and father, but poet to the marrow of every bone. And Judyth had known the true Will Shakespeare, when all else had seen the shadow.
‘Excuse me, sirs.’ I bowed.
As I walked away, I heard Rob ask, ‘Is that his wife?’
And Richard reply, ‘One thing you must learn, brat, is that is not a question you ask of any player. Our wives are where we find them, not where we leave them. Understood?’
Then I was there, beside her. It was as if no time had passed, or else a lifetime.
I said, ‘I leave with them tomorrow.’
‘Then I am glad.’ Her voice was still the same, sweet and low. ‘Did I not say that Stratford was not world enough for you, Will Shakespeare?’
‘Yes, my lady. You told me that.’ I met her eyes. I would my hands had met hers too, my lips met the soft mouth that it had tasted so long ago. ‘I would that you could come with me. Would that it had been you beside me all these years.’
I stopped, for how could I explain my father’s need; the duty that had caused me to sin in fornication and in lies, and to sin against her too?
There was no need.
‘I know,’ she said.
I wondered how much she did indeed know. For she was her brother’s sister, and he, a merchant, might know perhaps of the dowry brought to our family by Anne, and how my father needed it. But one thing shone like the moon on a dark river: she knew that I had loved her even as I wooed Anne; knew that I had married for my family. I had given Anne my body, but my heart was hers.
Her hand touched mine so quickly. It was as if a feather had brushed it, then blew on. But that touch burnt so deep that even today, I feel it still.
Her smile was sad, and yet she raised her chin: a woman of such pith and resolution that I have writ her a dozen times into my plays, and each woman true and steadfast. Portia, Desdemona, Cordelia, Juliet, each one is her. I, alone of all my fellow writers, have given women courage, for I alone perhaps have known one who had it writ into her soul.
‘You need use no words to explain to me,’ she said. ‘Soon those words will be heard across England, and one day, I am sure, they will come here too, and I will read them, clasp them to me and be happy, Will, for thee.’
My words left me. Then she was gone as well, too quick for scandal to attach to her name, or to mine.
And I turned back to Lord Knudson’s Men, no longer Will Shakespeare, glover, but player, poet and a man of words.
Dinner: my wife pleaded for Thomas Quiney to join us, and my daughter too, but there be time enough when he is legally our family, and to keep our family’s name I must at times invite him. It was a good dinner, and tasted better that Quiney did not eat it too. I think my wife doth tempt me to wedding gladness with my favourite foods: well-flavoured rooster, roasted, with black liver sauce (only Quiney’s liver would have pleased me better); a hedgehog of sausages; salt beef, boiled; roasted pigeons, fattened in our dovecot throughout winter on spiced grain; a loin of pork; a butt of beef (for with Lenten fast soon we need our meat); tarts; jellies; custards; medlars that had been laid in bran to keep; figs, dried then spiced in wine; French claret to drink, which still keeps good.
Bowels: still stopped entirely, but I hope the figs of which I ate a lot may be a cure.