The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (15 page)

But Ben found other places to go, beyond the pages of a book, and they were what kept him braced and alive, ready to believe that the world, if properly managed, was a glory. They were plays, and women.

One led to another.

Though his stepfather had been once or twice to a play, like many he preferred the Bear-garden, over the river at Southwark, for when he had leisure and spare pennies. Ben found the spectacle of bear-baiting repetitive at best, but while the blood spurted and the white guts uncoiled there was time for a little philosophy: to study and reflect on the much more instructive spectacle of the audience, their merry cheeks and nightmare eyes. Going to the play was a different matter. He started with the White Hart at Southwark, where they were still putting on plays in the galleried inn-yard. The piece he saw made no sense: the verse was lumpily ill-writ, and the players gabbled their lines and bounced off one another at every entrance and exit. But he stayed till the end. He had to find out what became of these pretend people, tissue-thin though they were: they lived, they mattered.

Soon he was regularly attending the new purpose-built playhouses, tramping north to the Theatre at Shoreditch, south to Newington Butts among the archery-meadows. He found it piquant that they bore such a strong resemblance to bear-pits with their circular structure, rings of galleries, open space in the centre; piquant, too, that the godly citizens banished them beyond the city walls. Even his mother shook her head a little over the morality of these brash new places.

But by fifteen Ben was his own man. His stepfather might growl when he packed up his tools at the sound of the theatre-trumpet, but he was not going to risk another hiding. As for his mother’s fears, they were right, in a way. It was at the play that he encountered his first lover – or made his first conquest, perhaps, though he wasn’t sure who conquered whom.

She was a citizen’s wife, her husband perhaps one of those Puritan worthies who would have these sin-palaces levelled. But he was surely in his Cheapside counting-house and she was here in the gallery, no more than thirty, prettily dressed, showing a great deal of creamy neck, and somehow failing to catch the eye of the principal player. Ben knew that restless ladies often invited their favourite players to supper and a private performance afterwards. Perhaps this one was already promised, or else his tastes ran in the other direction. Whichever, it was Ben’s gain. When he first realised her eye had wandered to his, he was startled, then violently curious, then thought, Why not?

‘What say you to the piece, madam?’

‘Do you address me, sirrah?’

Was this part of the game? He guessed it was, and didn’t mind it. He was in the yard, she at the front of the lower gallery; he was tall enough to be on a level with her notable breasts.

‘Aye, madam, I do. You seem something distracted. It’s a mouldy sort of piece, is it not?’

‘And you are a judge, are you?’

‘Of plays, I hope. I am no more than an honest prentice,’ he glanced down at himself, plain stuff suit, bands without lace, ‘but even I can tell they have taken an old piece of Terence, lopped and cropped it, and added some jig-jog rhymes for the lovers, which set my teeth on edge. Yes, I am a judge, as I am of beauty: that’s why I look your way.’

Being a matter of words, this was so easy, and he was fascinated by the blush that started at her cheeks and spread downwards. ‘Faith,’ she said, looking away, ‘I really care nothing for the play, or for what you think on it. I’m only parched with heat.’

The usual hawkers were going round the crowd. Ben bought a half-pint of perry.

‘It’s over-sweet,’ she said, sipping; but she drank it all, watching him, while he watched the movement in her throat. When she had done she handed him the mug; he did not move. ‘Well? What do you wait for? Oh, to be sure – you are a poor prentice, you will want paying.’

He said: ‘It’s not a matter of money.’ Why not say it? At the very worst, she would snatch the mug and hit him round the head with it, which was nothing. But she did not.

She took him to her bed late that afternoon – not in Cheapside, but neighbouring Poultry. She made a great deal of the favour she was doing him, so he let her believe it. He found, from this and the subsequent encounters with her and numerous others, that he had an eager, undiscriminating appetite; that, though he was not at all handsome, it didn’t matter as long as he didn’t think about it; that the titanic gloom and disgust which overwhelmed him as he rolled aside lasted only a minute; that he enjoyed lust very much, without being misled into finding it interesting in itself. The women were variously beguiling, but he did not much revise the opinion he had formed in that sweaty room above the stable.

Usually there was a husband somewhere. Oh, a brute, my sweetling, a mere stock; a silent clod, a chattering monkey; negligent, impotent, overbearing, weak. It was hard to imagine how women with such charms as they were all convinced they possessed could have ended up marrying these monstrous men. Strange misfortune. Often meeting them at the play, watching comedies of disguise and concealment, Ben would find himself later acting the piece in reality, hiding in closets or bundling out of windows in his shirt.

This was an education of sorts, he supposed. The many faces of folly. But what he really liked about the act of lust was the way it was at once so compelling and so meaningless. The theatre was a different matter – though to what degree he could not decide. He spent hours standing in the pit in exacting attention; seldom was he stirred, as Nicol was.

‘The players must make the best of the lines writ for them. And likewise the finest lines ever writ must take their chance with the players. It’s an image of imperfection to place, look you, beside mankind’s fallen state. We can aspire to heaven, but our mortal frailty pulls us back as we reach up to it. So with our almost-great stage.’

That was Nicol: like Ben an apprentice, a haunter of the theatres, a scholar, and – though neither of them said as much – an expert in disappointment. He was apprenticed to a vintner, but the Church had been his desire before his father had run into debt and hanged himself for it. Now at nineteen he was the self-appointed high priest of the London theatre.

‘Where, then, is the remedy? Who will learn the players not to rant, and the poets not to write fustian?’ Ben said, or rather shouted. Nicol was half deaf, as a result of going to sleep in a snowdrift last winter, for a dare. The sin of pride, he said proudly. Now his ears forever ached and bubbled, and he could hear his beloved plays only if he pushed to the front of the pit.

‘Perhaps, to pursue the analogy, the drama will be redeemed when a saviour comes along,’ Nicol said, spitting nutshell. ‘So, what was it in
The Tragedy of Elidure
that displeased?’

Emptying his pint-pot, Ben said: ‘The tragedy was no tragedy. Aye, tragic things happened, but they tumbled out like an ill-tied bundle.’

‘Why, man, the trouble is you don’t
give
yourself to it. Besides, you’ve not heard
Hieronimo
yet. When you have, then you’ll confess what work a mere play can wreak on a man’s mind and soul. See yon long fellow in the green? I swear he’s with the Admiral’s Men. I’ll go ask if he knows when it comes on again.’

This Shoreditch tavern where they met was often frequented by players. Also bullies and their whores, fences, card-sharpers, rogues various; the Puritan citizenry, much as Ben despised them, did have a point. So, he admitted at last, did Nicol, when he attended a performance of
Hieronimo,
as people called it.
The Spanish Tragedy,
as the playbills posted about the city properly proclaimed it.

‘A tear, a tear, I saw a whole tear trickle,’ exulted Nicol, dancing round him. ‘Now say if it is not sublime.’

‘It is full of faults and absurdities, and sublime,’ Ben said, wiping his eyes. ‘Say, then, who is this Master Kyd, where does he come from, how does he do it? I suspect his learning. Showing off those great stretches of Latin.’

‘I’ll tell thee what, thou art heart-sick with jealousy. Where the man comes from I don’t know, but I know he is young, well favoured, with all the wit and learning you’d expect. See how the piece held that crowd, made ’em stare, even kept the fool groundlings quiet. And then deny, thou whoreson, that here is art incomparable.’

Ben did not; and the grieving madness of Hieronimo, finding his beloved son hanged, kept interposing itself between him and his work. More surprisingly, it fretted him when he was with a lover. He tried to speak to her of it, but she shrugged: she assumed he was losing interest in her, which happened to be true, so he could not deny it. He went home, having wiped the spit from his face, and found his stepfather snoring before the fire, one hand down his breeches. He thought still of Hieronimo weeping for his murdered boy: he wondered what it was like to have a father to weep for you. Then he wondered if his own father’s spirit watched over him, and suddenly doubt put its brute shoulder against the door of belief and charged it down, shouting that there was no spirit, that his father was dust and nothingness. He called up swift arguments and got the beast out, but the echo of it lingered. He decided then it was dangerous, morbid, to investigate one’s feelings.

As for discussing the theatre with women, beware of that too – though he fell into it once more, over
Tamburlaine.

That was during the summer of the Armada, when fear and death were in the hot air, and London was madder than usual. Along with hundreds of other apprentices, Ben drilled twice a week on the green at Mile End, preparing to meet the Spanish tercios if they landed. Privately he suspected it would be a brief meeting. He at least had a pike and knew how to use it, but Nicol had been given a bow and arrows, though he had never shot one in his life; and some of the captains still wore their aprons from smithy and shop. Still, when the hilltop beacons flared to say the ships were coming, Ben felt more uplifted than fearful. This was grand, this was vivid.

‘And is it not all empty vaunting?’

She was a goldsmith’s wife; she could read and write; she liked to climb aboard Ben but could push him off to drift once the booty was taken; and they had seen
Tamburlaine
together.

‘All of it, empty,’ she said. ‘Men and their soldiery, Spanish or English. Drums and trumpets and vainglory. And Tamburlaine making his fine prodigious speeches.’

‘You said they excited you. In fact, I saw the evidence of it.’

‘Aye, aye, the first time,’ she said, moving his hand away. ‘Then afterwards, you know, one falls a-thinking. And in truth all that splendid noise hurts the ear. They say we women are loose with our tongues, but men are the noisy sex.’

‘Hm. Will you call it empty vaunting, when we stand between you and the Spanish ravishers?’

‘I thought they were coming to make us popish, not ravish us.’

He had to smile, but he was needled. She seemed intent on making the world smaller, when
Tamburlaine
had made it so much greater. Everyone who went to the play was on fire for
Tamburlaine
that season. The Scythian shepherd, rising through sheer will to become conqueror of half the world, made furious conquests of audiences likewise; they gasped and swooned and fell before him. Ben bowed with the rest. The hero was barbarously cruel and you knew that in reality he would have mown you down and slaughtered everyone you loved. But you followed it all with ticking blood, followed him on his sky-striding course, because the words would not be denied. Just words. A gunpowder discovery, a pregnant secret. A man called Marlowe was behind it.

‘What’s best, then?’ he asked the goldsmith’s wife. ‘Welcome Sir Spaniard when he lands? Melt down every sword? Put an end to all that’s heroical? Live prosy, live long and tamely?’

‘Well, at least that means staying alive.’

‘“And with our sun-bright armour, as we march,

We’ll chase the stars from heaven, and dim their eyes

That stand and muse at our admired arms.”’

‘You men,’ she said, absently opening her legs.

It lasted a little longer – not much. Her violet eyes, faint lisp, habit of undressed thinking all fell away from his esteem, though they were later the occasion of reminiscent cock-stands.

The Armada loomed menacingly on the horizon of the mind. Rumour darted about the town, like harrying English ships. Nicol, deaf and impatient, sought only for news of the true conqueror, Marlowe: was he writing a new piece, when would it come on? In the Shoreditch tavern a group of players, well in their cups, humoured him a while.

‘Who are we to know? Master Marlowe gives out the lines, my friend, as you’d throw bones to a dog,’ said one, fire-faced and baleful with liquor. ‘You wouldn’t get down on the floor and mumble ’em with him, now would you?’

‘Oh, for shame, you’re unfair on the man,’ said another, palely lounging. ‘Kit Marlowe’s a very pretty fellow, and if he carries it a little high, who’s to blame him? He comes down from Cambridge the complete scholar
and
with a play under his arm that sets the whole town by the ears. All this prodigy – and no older than Will here.’ He touched the ear of a lean young man in unadorned black who gave a moment’s smile and returned to rolling a broken spill between his fingers, absorbedly, as if it might mend, as if something might happen. Ben hadn’t even noticed him there.

‘New piece or old piece, just let us be allowed to play something,’ groaned a fourth, head in hands. ‘With the Spaniard on the waves we can’t go about. Let him land or sink, so long as we can get a crowd.’

‘Jesting, mere jesting and poor,’ the lounging player said, with a quick glance at Nicol and Ben, ‘for we are loyal subjects, naturally, and no one should think otherwise.’

‘What?’ snapped Nicol. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, we’re prentices, not Walsingham’s spies. As for that, I hear the Queen has a ship ready to fly if they land, and is going to throw herself on the King of France’s mercy.’

‘A wild libel,’ said Fire-face. ‘The one thing you can rely on, if the Spanish land every papist in the kingdom will rise to aid them. We’re all like to be murdered in our beds.’