after him?” She was afraid after Marlowe’s death. “Will
you write and reassure me?” she asked. “Edinburgh is
far... I’m sick with a cold...so much rain.”
And it was raining as Jonson read me her letter, in his
apartment. I opened a book of his and leafed through it,
standing by his window, the rain leaded on the pages,
long, grey, thin lines, tracing problems that threatened
us, a bond tying in with her concern, lessening that
distance between us.
The wall felt damp to my shoulder and I smelled stale
bread and stale cheese on Jonson’s desk.
“What came between us?” I asked.
“Are you talking to me...or to her?”
“To you.”
“Bad luck...the thing that comes between most lovers.”
“And what do I do to change it?”
“You know London’s soothsayers...they’re ready to help
you. Pay them.”
“How much?”
“Pay...oh, with your life, your work. Pay and she’s
yours.”
“It’s stupid to talk like that.”
“It’s stupid to fall in love. Just fuck and go.”
Stratford
September 9, 1615
When Raleigh was brought to trial by the Crown and
condemned to life imprisonment, I began a play, thinking
to defend him, troubled by the royal hatred leveled at
him, for his loyalty to England was unquestionable.
His trial was pure sham.
SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN
Scene I: Courtroom, in winter
Raleigh: You claim me guilty, but I am
innocent. In no way, at no time, have I
conspired against the throne. At sea, I
defended our country against all enemies. I
supplied ships for the Queen. In Virginia, my
colony is dedicated to all that England
stands for. Sirs, I protest!
Judge: Damned you are, damning our people
with your stinking guilt. You have conspired!
We have every proof...there’s not the
slightest doubt of your perfidy! You defended
Queen Elizabeth against the Earl of Essex but
he was the King’s friend, never his
adversary. You have every guilt upon you. You
are grossly guilty of plotting against our
nation and our King. King James sees fit to
sentence you...
Maybe the King had secret reasons for Raleigh’s
banishment but I doubt it. Some call Sir Walter the “King
of Liars.” His letters from prison no longer come and
Tower over me, filling me with guilt.
Should I burn his letters: could there be family in-
volvement at some unforeseen time? I should burn many
things—many memories!
Ocean Skimmer, you pilloried yourself. We were friends:
those were good days but not good enough to last. What
lasts?
The oriel outlasts us! Its quarrels outlast ours!
September 11, 1615
In my mind’s eye we meet at the taproom of the
Mermaid’s Tavern...
Raleigh: ...At sea, weeks away from port, alone on the
deck, rigging and sails creaking, I’ve felt it... I’ve
felt it in the smash of waves and moan of beams...felt it
in the expanse of sky...that there must be a god.
Marlowe: Should be a god! Put it that way.
Raleigh: No...let it go as I’ve said it. As you ride at
the bow, as spray hurls on board, there are certain
certainties, rebuffs of personal fancy, declarations of a
godhead.
Jonson: The Greek helmsman felt those same
declarations, and his god was Zeus.
Marlowe: I don’t go for such thinking on my part, Sir
Walter. It shuts me inside a cage and the cage has a door
with four heavy bars: f-e-a-r.
Raleigh: You know that each country has had a godhead.
Marlowe: Each country has its diseases,
debts...despots.
Shakespeare: Are you denying your “School of Night”?
Raleigh: I’m not on trial here. I was speaking con-
fidentially, no, intimately...that’s a better word. I was
trying to share an emotion and I ask you to respect it as
an emotion.
Jonson: You ask for respect. God be at your table.
Everyone’s highly respected here—even the waiters.
(Laughter)
Marlowe: Ah, shut up!
Shakespeare: We didn’t come here to quarrel.
Raleigh: Maybe we can do better with politics...or is
it too hydra-headed tonight? Let’s talk about Essex.
Cautiously.
Marlowe: But why cautiously?
Shakespeare: We’ll do better trying something else, not
so risky. Supper’s ready. Here it comes.
Jonson: Pour the ale, boy.
Marlowe: Hugger-mugger, my cage lost its bars. The bird
of fear has flown ...hunger picked the lock.
That’s how I remember an evening at the Tavern, Raleigh
in his finest, wearing green velvet cloak, red trousers,
black boots, black hat, sword; Jonson, Marlowe and me in
our snuffbox suits, wearing our swords because of recent
street fracases.
The Tower of London...
A cracked stone stairway leads to an open
door:
Inside, windowless, Raleigh sits at his
prison desk,
with maps, letters, books around him.
He is writing; he coughs:
Frail, he seems to be listening:
An armed guard trudges by and looks in.
Stratford
September 15, 1615
I
n ’10, sometime during the autumn I think it was, I
stopped outside Raleigh’s prison, thinking to visit him:
there he was, at his deal table, books, globe, maps and
papers piled about him. His door was flung wide: his pen
moved: perhaps he was writing his History. Sun lay on the
floor of his room. A wren sang. His hand stopped. I
stepped forward, then faltered. His hands moved over the
table: he leaned on his elbows now, coughing. He had on a
grubby red woolen cape, sleeves smudged with wax. He
coughed again—his shoulders shaking.
He was the one who had dared the wild and secret lands,
who had sweated men and ships to reach a goal. Winds
luned, storms crashed; yet he had kept on. He had wanted
to explore the world for himself, for mankind! Books on
board his ships, books in his brain: wind stirred
parchment on his table as I stood there and he read. What
if he should turn and see me? What if he should get up?
Would he recognize me?
I thought: who are his friends? The thought cut me: the
Great Lucifer is forgotten. Look around you. The liar is
captive, will die behind these walls. They say he
concocts an elixir, and gives it to his friends. No, I
was not included. He needed his elixir more than I.
His white head was dirty...where was his youth? No, he
had concocted hope. People said his rooms would be un-
guarded...so they were. But I made no sound. The ugly
Tower was still. What has happened to his Elizabeth: is
she memory?
I wanted to talk to him about Spenser’s Faerie Queen,
and say...Spenser...you know...no, Raleigh sailed to the
Canaries, to Florida, Manoa...Hispaniola...cloak-
thrower...knight...names...and his map, a large
parchment, came out of the wall and stared at me,
rebuking me: cloak-thrower...patron...names...John White
said that he admired him...John White said...where was
White now, now that he’s back from Roanoke?
Pushes hand through hair, coughs... I back away,
wanting to put the wall between us. I shuffled down a few
steps, disgraced, down to the street, cockroaches and
rats scuttling, ivy blowing in the wind.
Let him finish his History of the World.
I had no right to disturb.
The blue cloak slips from Ellen’s shoulders and through
the stabbed hole I see moon, stars, and fog, each flecked
with red. Fog soaks the hole and then, then, there’s the
face of an attacker, scarred, piratical. Something behind
him fades into her face, so white. I see her smile her
dazzling lover’s smile and I hear her laughter and the
sound of her bracelets.
In the funeral procession
a small black casket is accompanied by Ann,
Shakespeare,
his daughter in black, and others.
A flower falls from the casket and
Shakespeare
picks it up and puts it in his pocket:
A church bell tolls:
Blue cloak over a tombstone.
I
buried Hamnet, buried father, buried myself... What is
this death that eats our lives as if we were pieces of
bread on a dirt plate, sacrificed to whim and time? Our
crosses top a hill, row on row, a row for each
generation, across fog hills, across sunny hills, Ital-
ian, French, English, Scot.
Escape with me:
Now at the prow, now in the waist,
the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement:
sometimes I’d divide and burn in many places,
on the topmast, the yards, the bowsprit...
Henley Street
September 23, 1615
Now, now thought is closer to death than love: I live
in it, longing for her, for intercourse, the ice of this
winter-house aging me and the wind, poor wind, scuttling
nowhere, nowhere to go.
Go to the oriel, then.
Henley Street
September 24
God, the rain, the rain at its cobble-sop, common rain
on cobbles, rising out of them, climbing the ivy,
moulding thatch, hurting places of the mind, shivering
our secrets, insinuating with lashes, coming again and
again, thieving.
The dropping of one drop can absorb a soul: its alchemy
traps a man: so, we, reduced, debased, encompassed, are
carried to sea, to finality, ourselves made useless,
noiseless, like a million others.
I heard rain throughout the night, from lying down to
getting up, no sleep, only this endrenchment, intent on
obliteration, transforming life into a comedy of errors.
I was twenty-eight or so!
All morning I sawed wood for props; all afternoon I
practiced lines; all evening I rehearsed. My costume
didn’t fit: the crown was badly torn. At four in the
morning, there was no food for us. That was life at the
Globe, when I first tried London.
I estimate that I have earned less than a hundred
pounds from my thirty-seven plays. When I divide that by
thirty years of work, I see what it represents. At least
I see that much.
Henley Street
1615
“Small coals! Small coals!”
“Hot peas!”
I wish I could hear those raucous London street
hawkers! I’d like to see the Thames crowded with little
boats. I’d like to see the people packed in front of St.
Paul’s. I’d like to be back at the Exchange, for the
armorers and booksellers and glovers. I’d like to stare
off-stage at a thousand rapt faces.
I miss Burbage more than anyone. He and I worked hand-
in-glove for more than ten years, seeing each other
almost every day. He played Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,
and his was the finest Lear voice-transcending. Lear was
Burbage and Burbage was Lear. There were no weaknesses.
Weaknesses?
I have mine—so many weaknesses.
Today I have been up and round but last week I was in
bed throughout the week. When I am up and about, I
freeze. My sight fades. My heart bangs. I must get to the
composition of my will, the final act in my play...no
applause...no whistles...silence.
Burbage could take my lines and recite them for me,
adding, subtracting, modulating. If there must be
rewriting I knew, through his skill, what I must do to
improve a scene.
What amusing letters he used to write home, when he was
traveling with the Company. He and Alleyn were as
domesticated as tea.
“Dear Jug,” he would address his wife. “Dear Mouse,”
Alleyn wrote his.
“Dear Jug, let my orange-tawny stockings be dyed a good
black, against my coming home in the winter,” Alleyn
wrote.
He wanted his wife to sow spinach in his parsley bed at
the proper season.
“...Sweet Jug, farewell, till All Hallow’s tide, and
brook our long journey with patience.”
We brooked many a tedious journey with patience.
October 1, 1615
Gargoyles and ghosts: they are always a part of pain.
Here is a prescription: pulverize a gargoyle in a deep
mortar, shred one carefully, mix with ample wheat and
milk, add salt, bake two hours, serve piping hot. Add
surfeit of prunes, against the inevitable her.
Globe Theatre:
Elegant and seedy theatregoers.
Hand bills read Hamlet:
Actor Burbage mounts the stage
behind candles, rushes, torches.
Backstage, actors hustling, yacking.
A soldier outside pisses:
Curtain rises.
Henley Street
October 3, ’15
Evening – late
W
e players, playing in the provinces, walked all day to
reach our destination, our horse cart lumbering behind
us, stacked with costumes and gear. Sun blazed. Rains
soaked. Chewets followed us. We walked from inn to inn,
town to town. At two o’clock we played Tambourlaine, and
the soft verse of Marlowe. Then, packed again, we walked
until another two o’clock, somewhere along the way. Our
comradeship on the road, sleeping in the same rooms,
sleeping on the floor as often as not, eating at the same
table—those were our bonds! Burbage, Alleyn, Kempe... I
could name a dozen. Week by week, we played our plays,
our Lord Chamberlain’s Men, banished by edict and plague,
protected from jail by contract, cheered by the Puritans!
We worried over money, badgered, confronted, schemed. We
placated the constabulary and loved the annuncios—the
children!
Sometimes we sickened of one another and quarreled, our
masculinity distressing us: men and boys, men and boys—
that was our disease! What women would have meant to us,
in London especially, where the theatre was spoiled. What
it would have meant to have a girl strut across the
boards and smile a smutty smile. Chafing would have
disappeared.
I longed to see Desdemona as a girl would play her; I
wanted to see Cleopatra acted by a woman, Lady Macbeth by
a skilled player—not castrated boys, our sexless wire-
sounding temperamentalists.
Who wants boys primping, boys in women’s hats, giggling
over skirts and bows? Scratching fleas in baboon areas?
Crying for their mamas?
Our groundlings wanted women to go to bed with.
Lords, ladies, and soldiery wanted women.
Everyone is sick of boys!
Soldiers, in their half-armor, jeer at us!
It is afternoon—warm and sunny!
Women, wearing eye masks, are chatting and taking seats
at the Globe. Hawkers, bright yellow bands around their
waists, are selling books and cakes and ale, passing
among the theatre crowd. Dandies are getting settled in
an area close to the stage. Swords clatter as soldiers
find seats; a captain bows to a Jesuit priest. Someone
strums a zither and croaks a bawdy ballad. Workers shove
their way past the gate, afraid to miss a word of the
beginning.
Popping open the little door of the hut atop the
theatre, a trumpeter blows shrill blasts; the play is
about to start: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Henley Street
Sunday afternoon
Theatrical voices—commanding, secretive, beseeching,
vituperative—are not voices I want to recall. I prefer
the normal and kindly, an intimate Scot voice, a man’s
educated speech, someone mouthing thoughtfully, an older
person whose words show profound mellowing.
Ann’s voice was once full of witchery, stealing my guts
and senses, leaving me hot. Marlowe’s was low and
persuasive. Queen Elizabeth’s crisp. Raleigh’s burly.
Hamnet’s birdlike. Ellen’s warm.
Not the regal! Not dotards and thieves, but a voice
combining generosity, ease, and hope: is the voice I
invent when insomnia takes me: for a moment it speaks out
of the past.
I never enjoyed the children’s theatre—always wondering
how they produced even one creditable play a season since
they whipped their boys to force them to learn their
parts. Clifton, I recall, was kidnapped and compelled to
act. They whaled him, fed him badly, did sexual malice to
make him perform—hardly the way to create a star.
Clifton’s father had to appeal to the authorities for his
boy’s release. I went to see him, at his home, and the
tales he told me matched his tear-streaked face. His
little hands trembled and his mother had to reassure him
he wouldn’t be kidnapped again.
Whippings, threats, nagging—they were the stuff that
kept the children’s theatre alive in London, while the
council shrugged and patrons furnished subsidies for
these odious and grossly amateurish entertainments. I
talked and fought. Marlowe talked and fought. Alleyn and
Jonson used their influence. The cruelty continued.
London was a place of whippings: the public whipping of
offenders through the city streets and post whippings
repelled... Jim was one of those I saw...and Hardy’s body
hanging naked in chains...
Stratford-on-Avon
Wednesday
Damn them in Luddington and Walton, the groundlings who
pelted us with fruit and eggs, those smelly coxcombs!
That day in Luddington was blazing: the sweat ran down me
as I stood on stage: then, the first egg struck, then a
rotten orange: I waited, hoping. The play went on,
drowned by laughter, and then, as if by prearrangement, a
barrage of fruit and eggs hit us: our tragedy was hounded
off the boards.
Walton had a couple of hecklers who were supported by
the audience and broke up our play: we got eggs from many
Waltonites: putrid, smelling a dozen feet away, saved,
undoubtedly for our arrival: it was two days before we
could play again since we had to wash and press our
clothes. What a jangling of nerves that bred.
Why not give up the acting and the writing? Why not go
back to Stratford and work with father? Why let these
slovenly cruds, these barnyard bastards ruin my life?
Days later, humor came slanting through. When we were
well-received and the money tinkled we forgot; we called
ourselves ninnies and threatened to arm ourselves with
eggs for the next affront. We found goodness and warmth
in lines well-delivered. We saw our comradeship, our
triumph over slogging days: there was magic flowing
through our blood: that fulsomeness, that nothing could
tarnish or remove.
Globe Theatre is on fire...bucket brigades,
smoke around men with pails,
smoke around boys with pails,
smoke in trees, smoke in the rain:
Jonson talking and gesturing to Shakespeare:
Burbage screaming orders...
A wall topples...
Inside the conflagration
books and manuscripts burning.
J
onson and I watched the Globe burn—the afternoon cold,
with rain falling. People crowded around; there was mud
and water underfoot.
“Someone must have set our theatre on fire, Will!
Jesus, how it burns!” Jonson cried.
“No. I was inside. I saw the thatch start burning.”
“Wasn’t there anything you could do to stop the blaze?”
“We tried! We got ladders and buckets!”
“Lord, look, now! A wall’s toppling. The hut’s gone.
Why it has fallen off. Will, our props are afire. Our
scripts! The flames are roaring...”
“Stand back!”
“Stand back or get burned!”
“How long has it been burning?”
“Maybe an hour...”
The flames seemed to meet in a giant peak, a peak that
had at the top a great tree of smoke. It was raining
harder now; the crowd had moved back.
God, wasn’t it enough to have to fight the plague? One
month our doors were closed, next month we were open,
next month we were shut again. That was bad enough, but
no theatre meant no chance.
“Kemp is sick...the Globe is gone,” I said.
“Let’s go and get drunk!” Jonson said.
Later, Burbage told me it was a cannon, fired during my
own play, that set fire to the Globe. We met in the
street. Yanking his beard, swearing, he spat on the
cobbles, and turned away.
Henley Street
1615 All Souls’ Day
Pain is gross companion, inducing lecherous thoughts,
destroying temperance, stability, mercy, courage,
fortitude. Craving release, I fought all day to remember
better times. At night, with candles lit, blankets around
me, I find ease... I remember...
I am in a lemon grove, naked stone pillars stabbing out
of the tops of the trees, Greek pilasters by the sea. We
are eating on a terrace overlooking the water, a lazy
meal, with old wine. The moon rises, drunkenly, fat,
water-distorted, closing in on us, in rhythm to the waves
below. We hold hands. The moon spells urgency, urging us
to the grove, where we lie side by side.
“Ellen...Ellen...”
The lemons are yellowish in the moonlight: there is
something stage-like about their motionlessness: it is
rather as though we were in a velvet box, facing the sea.
Stars have something to do with the fragrance drifting
about us, the only movement apart from the waves and
rising moon. I suggest we go down to the beach, so
inviting. Ellen says no and I forget everything but her
fragrance and the fragrance of the lemons, her whispers,
her kisses.
That Scot profile, so chiseled, that bluecap voice, so
warm, that hair of hers, softer than Juliet’s... A great
rock, a sea boulder, surrounded by waves, glows in the
moonlight...her skin is whitened: a ringlet glows on her
neck.
Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh, Spenser have had their days
in jail; I have had mine—those county sties where pigs
and dust ate my manuscripts and foetid odors ate my
skull, jailed by the local thief who deemed each man a
thief who thought:
If all the world and love were young...
But Raleigh it never was except in fancy and during the
dead reckoning on paper: that is why the five of us
stumbled backward in time, learning and escaping
simultaneously.
We used to play chess, many of us, pawns, varlets,
kings, knights, evenings, one play bastinadoed on
another, Caesar against Titus, Hamlet against Lear,
Portia against Cleopatra—always a gamble, along the
stinking alleys, along the nocturnal slugtide Thames,
along the turtle sea: stonehenge of concupiscence, murder
vs. philandering, octogenarian vs. boy, sex vs. cuirass,
check vs. cul-de-sac.
Everyman knows the exquisite desire for a woman; he
also knows the ravening need...when there is no woman.
With Ann opposite me at supper table, I peered outside
at the leaves, beyond the oriel, and denounced myself as
I ate, enumerated my festering faults. I tasted little,
wishing for sensible words and tranquil mind. But there
was no shutting the door.
“Eat, Will,” she said, and I nodded, but dared not
glance at her, to find the stranger and myself. I
resented her as if her infidelities were yesterday’s, as
if my side of life could be ruled out, as if we were
young...
Patience has not helped. Only forgiveness can.
Leaves drop from the trees and the kettle bubbles and
we feed ourselves, grieving. Our shields are in place but
the lances were broken years ago. Our visors are down,
our plumes awry. Our horses have been killed in the
field. Without pennons, we move our gauntleted hands in
rusty bewilderment, slow-gaited with many, many abysmal
hungers.
Henley Street – ’15
I kept a stray in my London apartment: after feeding
him while on one of my strolls along the Thames I could
not shake him: Pericles had a soothsayer’s mug dripping
with ignominious grey whiskers, a privateer’s baleful
eye, a silver-grey hide, a black tail, three white feet,
a black-booted foot, and a bark like a tin pot clipping
the pavement. When it came to food, Pericles was greedier
than Shylock for a pound; piercing me with piratical
eyes, he sat up, wagged for pity, then slumped in grief,
moaning better than any stage madonna. Pericles and
Jonson became the best of friends: pieces of bread or
cheese from Ben’s pocket ordained him lord and master.
Along the Thames, Pericles flew after every bird, yapping
incessantly; it seemed to me he could run all day and
never tire. When left to guard the apartment, he kept to
a mat inside the door, gradually sheathing it with a coat
of silver-grey hair.
Shakespeare and Ashley meshed in fog:
They duel in a fog meadow.
Fog blows away before Julius Caesar’s ruined
castle
among rocks and weeds.
Shakespeare’s dog tangles with Ashley,
caroms against Shakespeare:
Shakespeare falls.
November 7, 1615
F
og sopped the grass and weeds when I fought my duel, by
Caesar’s castle. I could barely make out Jonson,
Pericles, and friends, among the pines and bush below the
castle ruins. Phantasma? I asked myself.
Ashley and I had quarreled over money: as one of the
King’s Men he had cheated me roundly; now he faced me,
privateer, poet, rich man’s bastard who would defy
immortal Caesar: on twelve-foot legs, bearded, cloak over
shoulder, rapier in hand, fog creaking against him, he
closed in. On stage I had dueled many times; today I must
put fakery to test.
As Ashley and I fought I heard Pericles barking and
heard voices, saw Ashley’s men and my own, now in the
fog, now out of it, shifting distorts.
My rapier hilt felt icy; the whip of steel on steel had
a ring to it I had never heard. I hated the fog, telling
myself I must make it serve me: it was to my advantage as
well as his. Our blades spat fire. I drew back. The ruins
caught the inserting sun and stood distinctly above us:
in my inner sight Caesar’s legions were amused at us.
Other watchers appeared—grinning. Death is always grin-
ning.
Ashley drove me back, steadily, steadily, forcing me
toward the base of the castle where blocks of stone
menaced, strewn amidst thick weeds. I fought to keep my
footing and tried to beat him off. He was fighting
savagely: his blade had a whiteness about it I couldn’t
understand. I felt that whiteness slice my white belly:
so, stumbling over Caesar’s masonry I was to die.