Mistress Shakespeare (24 page)

My second problem was that John Davenant was still fast friends with my erstwhile suitor Nicholas Clere, who was back from France again and avid to court me. He believed that I was playing coy to become all the dearer. I feared I might even have to leave the Davenants’ house to avoid him.

Finally, another problem was Jennet. I had foolishly assumed that when she successfully brought a living child into the world, she would stop drinking to excess. But she didn’t; I could smell sweet wine on her breath right now as she helped dress my hair for my visit to Sir Walter Raleigh’s house for the premier performance of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
.

(I had been invited to attend by both Henslowe and Will. Henslowe had turned down my offer to sell him Maud’s cushions for the Rose and had—the bootless blackguard—given the order for them to his wife instead. People oft took other’s ideas for their own, since there was no protecting such, whether it was seat cushions or plots, characters or lines from plays. As for Penelope Henslowe, I had heard she made “royal” theatre clothes from secondhand ones, so she was in Henslowe’s money books already. Still, I held my tongue because he was wild for Will’s work. He tried to pretend they were run-of-the-mill to keep his cost down, but Will knew better and bargained accordingly.)

As Jennet fussed overlong with the way my heavy tresses pressed on my standing ruff, the most expensive one I’d ever owned, I dared to ask, “Do you not think that all that wine you drink could get into your mother’s milk and that’s why Kate sleeps so much?”

“Nonsense, or the milk would surely turn as dark as the claret.”

“Urine doesn’t.”

“Anne—really! But that reminds me, I was wondering if you’d let me keep a few bottles of it up here—wine, not urine,” she said with a jerky laugh. “John’s become such a nitpick about counting bottles. He says, if we lose one here and there, it will set back our savings for a country inn. Oh, I long to rear little Kate and whatever brothers or sisters may come, Lord willing, in a smaller town.”

“I would let you my cottage near Stratford, but you’d need much more room, and there are already four inns in the town.”

“Oxford, John says, a university town with many passing through and droves of ever-thirsty students.” She dusted my ivory-hued taffeta leg-o’-mutton sleeves with rose powder. “He has a lead for a place. So what about just a bottle or two stored up here?”

I stood and turned to face her with my polished, bronze-faced mirror still in my hand. “Jennet, I want only the best for you and John and, of course, Kate. So you must try to stop drinking as much as you do—”

“You’re in league with him, aren’t you?” she cried, her voice suddenly dripping venom. Anger contorted her lovely face, and tears glazed her eyes. “Here I share my home, my heart, my child with you, and you can’t do that much for me!”

“I fear it has become a crutch. I know it helps smooth over bad or sad feelings like—”

“Like that time you tumbled in here all sotted up after a tumble with Kit Marlowe!”

“You’ll not say that. I did not have a tumble with Kit Marlowe! I told you I escaped before—”

“That’s not what he says!”

“What? Kit Marlowe’s been here? And he dared to say—”

“He’s very charming, isn’t he? Yes, a month or so ago, just about the time Will sold Henslowe those first plays. I don’t know how Kit found us, but maybe he just came to buy wine. John was busy, and I talked to him, amused by how he flattered me. He’s been very helpful to me and—”

“Helpful? What do you mean?” I cried, seizing her shoulders with both hands. I knew now Kit had slandered me, as well as trying to harm Will. What if Jennet, in her cups, had hinted to Kit the truth about Will and me? Will had said that Kit had thrown a raving fit over the fact that Henslowe had tried to talk him into taking a lesser fee because he had “stiff competition now, and someone from the shires and not the universities too.”

“Let me go!” Jennet cried and twisted from my grasp. “You’re not the only one with a good head for money, you know.”

“Money? You’ve taken money from Kit Marlowe? For what?”

“Never mind! Just never mind!”

“Jennet, I’m sorry we have quarreled. I only want you to consider trying to drink less and—”

“You just fix your own hair and collar next time you go prancing out with your Will to a fine lord’s home!”

“I’m not going with Will. I’m sitting with Philip Henslowe’s wife as Will is acting too. Jennet, please—”

She backed against the wall and pressed her hands over her ears and shook her head like a child in a temper. “Jennet—Jennet—Jennet,” she mocked my voice. “Just go with Henslowe’s wife then, and she can be your new friend!” To my dismay, she flounced from the room and slammed the door.

The sound reverberated in my heart that evening, throwing a pall over the excitement of visiting the mansion of one of the queen’s closest courtiers along the Strand. Here the great lawns rolled out like sheared emerald velvet from the front doors to the ornate water docks on the Thames not far from the palace. In the gardens of Sir Walter Raleigh’s grand Durham House, fountains played and peacocks, as good as watchdogs against intruders, screeched and strutted.

As I was offered my choice of wines in Venetian goblets from a silver tray, I caught my breath: this was another world, one right in the heart of London, and Will and I were experiencing it at the same time—if not quite together.

It turned out that Penelope Henslowe and I sat near the back of the large performance chamber—a formal dining hall, it really was—far behind the chattering special guests in their carved chairs. Only household servants allowed to peek in stood behind us. But I didn’t mind, as I could soak it all in—the performance, the performers and the spectators—without craning my neck and making a country fool of myself.

I thought Sir Walter Raleigh one of the most well-favored men I had ever seen. Ah, the queen did know how to pick her favorites. Still unwed, he was the only member of Lord Strange’s coterie without a lady. Tall, dark-haired and sporting a pointed beard, Raleigh commanded everyone’s attention. His gestures were bold, his speech cultured and learned.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it,” Penelope whispered to me, “that our host is a second son and a self-made man? The queen adores that ilk, I warrant, every whit as much as the titled ones.”

“Is it true that he laid his cloak over a mud puddle to keep her dry-shod?”

“So I hear, and he brings her exotic gifts from the New World land he’s named Virginia in honor of his Virgin Queen, so who could not be swept off her dry-shod feet by that?”

“And that older man with the long, unkempt beard?” I asked, nodding from behind my ostrich feather fan.

“Dr. John Dee, Her Majesty’s brilliant strategist and astrologer—and, some say, spy on his foreign travels. I overheard that he’s just come back from the Continent, though public word is out that he’s still away. ’Tis also said,” she went on, obviously relishing her role as town crier, “that he believes in visions—contact with angels—who speak with him, something or other about looking in a strange mirror.”

“Hmm, it seems to me Lord Strange would be the one for that.”

She giggled as if I’d made the wildest jest. “Oh, for a certain, Lord Strange is entranced by odd and secret things too. Who knows what they really discuss at their meetings of all men?” She lowered her voice but lifted her eyebrows. “Even witchcraft and the use of elixirs and poisonings, some claim. The School of Night indeed!”

I would have tried to draw more information from her, but I held my tongue. Richard Burbage, who was to play the lead role of King Ferdinand, walked out on the elevated dais to begin. Tears stung my eyes to realize this was the start of Will’s London career as a playwright. Soon the masses at the public theatres would see this play and his Roman drama
Titus
, and he was working on a sweeping historical saga peopled with England’s ancient royalty and nobility.

I jumped when someone bent to kiss the side of my neck, smashing the edge of my ruff.

I spun in my seat, expecting Will, wondering why he wasn’t ready to walk on in the role of Berowne. Kit Marlowe grinned at me like a grotesque gargoyle and made a mocking bow. He darted several rows up to take a seat, though not with the guests.

Penelope sputtered, “A prodigy but a popinjay, that one!”

“What’s he doing here?”

“’Tis said he’s on the fringe of the School of Night too—the fringe of everything, if you ask me.”

I tried to enjoy the first act. How I longed to tell Kit off, to warn him to stay away from Jennet and not to slander me further. Soon the characters and words I knew so well swept me into Will’s play. After the first act, Philip Henslowe darted out from behind the makeshift curtain—two tapestries suspended on poles—rubbing his hands together with a proud smile until he saw Kit had come in late. Henslowe frowned and hissed something his way. Kit only gave him an obscene gesture as Henslowe came to sit on his wife’s other side, laughing too loudly and tapping his toes at any snatch of song.

Thank heavens, the front-row audience laughed when they should. Blessedly, the ladies loved it. Even, it seemed to me from here, Kit nodded now and then as if the play were his.

I noted things for the first time when I saw it acted rather than read. The theme of being truly able to see things clearly stood out. The poetry was powerful, the sonnets witty, the songs sweet and bouncy, especially the two with country lyrics in honor of Spring and Winter that ended the comedy. I tried to ignore Kit Marlowe’s clenched fist hitting his knee in beat with the familiar, final dance, even as the ladies and their husbands applauded.

My Will was on his way! Surely now, nothing could befall to halt his climb to wealth and fame.

I was thrilled
for Will.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and
Titus Andronicus
were popular enough, but the first two plays of his historical trilogy
King Henry VI
took London by storm. It was the patriotic passion in them, I reckoned, the battles with the French and final victory over them, but it was the wonderfully human characters rising to meet their destinies too. The groundlings and the galleries alike stood and cheered, but for me it was two nonhistorical rants in the plays that stood out. In the first drama, Will wrote these lines:

 

In part three, even more to the point, he wrote, “Hasty marriage seldom proveth well,” and on it went in all his later plays, should anyone care to consult them—if I pray, Will’s work is still performed when you do read this work of mine.

But as for what Will called “the contrary,” meaning willing wedlock, I cannot say our times together were “a pattern of celestial peace.” We argued heartily and far too often.

“Now that Leicester’s moldering in his grave and Lord Strange has become our company’s patron,” Will said as we took a wherry across the Thames on a Sabbath afternoon, “that doesn’t mean I still don’t need a noble patron to support just my plays and poetry. I do, desperately so, to give myself more time to write.”

Patronage was also of key import for an ambitious poet—which Will was also—as it provided income and social recognition. And for the patrons of poetry especially, the flowery dedications praising them elevated their position even more among courtiers and scholars, even university students.

I sighed and leaned back on the cushioned seat as the banks of Southwark skimmed past. “So many of my hopes for you have come true,” I told him, “so why not dream big dreams? Should Her Majesty command a performance at court, dare you ask her to be a patron?”

“I might dare, but I don’t want her.”

“Will Shakespeare, whatever is wrong with you? You sound as if—” I cried, until he held a finger to his lips and darted a glance toward our boatman. After all, if actors and astrologers can be spies, why not a man bent over his oars?

But as soon as we alighted at Paris Gardens, I was not to be put off. “You didn’t mean it—that you would turn down patronage by Her Majesty. Surely not!”

“After what has happened to my family, to my shire, to my country, why not?”

“But—in a way, you speak treason.”

“I speak nothing of the kind.”

“She’s only listening to her counselors, Walsingham, Cecil and the like when she strikes out against her enemies.”

“She’s the queen, Anne, so ultimately, she is responsible. I may bow and smile before her in a play at court—even my own play—but you may bet that the bow and smile are my best acting.”

“Have you been invited to play at court? Oh, Will, if so, I want to go!”

“Ever rhyming couplets, my Anne, even when things get out of hand.”

“What gets out of hand? I adore our queen and have since the day we first saw her at Kenilw—”

“A dreadful day burned in my brain. I was grateful when the players’ having to spy for her went by the wayside with Leicester’s death, so let’s leave it at that.”

There were other worse rows between us, especially when he played
Love’s Labour’s Lost
at court with Lord Strange’s Men and didn’t tell me until after. “Did you think I would beg you to go?” I questioned him when he told me. I was furious and vowed I’d ask his fellows the Burbages and the clown Kemp what it was like there, since Will said nary a word of it.

“Beg me? Rather,” he said, frowning, “I thought you’d dress like a boy and slip right in with us, much as you did into Kit Marlowe’s arms—I pray not his bed too—the day I sent you the tickets to his play, more fool I.”

“He’s not been spreading lies about me again, has he?” I questioned, jumping in front of him as he walked me home, so he had to stop and face me. “I know he’d love to disparage you and your talents. He’s jealous of you, Will, and it pleases him to taunt and hurt you, that’s all.”