in front of me and got yards away from the wall,
deflecting blow after blow. Ashley was fighting like a
privateer with a cutlass, each blow shoulder-down. My
wrist felt beaten. I parried a series of terrific blows
and then staggered.
At that moment, Pericles hurled himself on Ashley,
playing, growling, jumping joyously; with a bound he
leaped at me and before I could call off the dog or beat
him off, I fell. As I came to my knees, Ashley was
waiting and shoved his blade into my groin.
The fog and woods...they were there in that pain, and
Jonson’s voice was there...my rapier, I kept thinking,
where is it? Will they pick it up? I felt that months had
passed, that I had aged a multitude of years, like the
stone, like the battlement: age, that alchemy, filtered
through the fog and sun...
I remember them carrying me.
Henley Street
November 8, ’15
Jonson took me to his apartment in his carriage and
bragged about his Holland duels and the men he had
pinked. As I lay in bed, feverish, during the days to
come, father appeared, expressing pity—the pity he had
shared with the plague-stricken. “You there, you, boy,
I’ve something for you. This will help you.” I
understood. I cared. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to
sit with him underneath our apple tree and feel the
summer’s sun.
“The fault, father, is not in our stars, but in
ourselves,” I said to someone. “Yours is a fair name,
fairer than mine...
“I am singularly moved when the sway of earth shakes
like a thing infirm... this is not a dream, father.”
On Jonson’s bed, I went through hellish days—thirst,
hunger, the bungling doctor bungling me, cold, cold
remembering, sweatful forgetting, spouting delirious
lines from plays... I accused the world of every crime,
and managed to include my own.
I was afraid alone, yet distressed to have others
overhear my ranting. The bed boards gaped and between
each board I sweated another chill.
“Will, here’s your supper,” Jonson said. “Will, here’s
breakfast. Will, I’ve brought you a book.”
Pericles licked my hands. Lying under my bed, he
thumped his tail, saying: “Get up, master, there are
birds to chase along the Thames.”
–S–
Without asking me, Jonson wrote to Ellen, and she came
from Edinburgh. Was it her coming that pulled me through?
Her care, beauty, her hands, her smiles of reassurance?
Love put on its Oberon and scrubbed the grey out of the
windows.
Quintessence.
She found a better doctor, brought me better food, got
Bill McFarland to look after me, an old friend of hers,
agreeable yawning fatness, eating half our food behind my
back, gossiping with Jonson’s neighbors, bobbling and
drooling his words, coddling me.
When I improved she took me to the park; later, we
sailed the Thames...on shore larks sang... I was grateful
and tried to repay too soon...on top of rolls of canvas
at the stern.
At court there was a wedding celebration and a mock
battle and fireworks spilled across the river: how the
fireworks turned water into sky...the guns thundered.
“For us,” she said. “For your recovery,” she said. How
like a paragon...
The diamond on her velvet blouse winked at me; I put my
head on her lap: pain melted: seagulls mewed as our boat
rocked gently.
–S–
So, Ashley and I settled our accounts. I saw him years
later and we turned our backs on one another. I suppose
he was embittered at my recovery.
The best of us is both participant and confusion, but
I, I am stranger because estrangements have put a lie to
my living, making it stranger still.
Stratford
Monday morning
While recovering from my wound, my brothers, Jim and
Dick, paid me a call.
They seemed quite uninclined to sit, skeptical of Ben,
afraid of Pericles, contemptuous of the apartment with
its manuscripts and shelves of books. Wearing their farm
clothes, they smelled of dung, dirt, and rain-soaked
cloth.
Jonson, wanting to be friendly, told how Pericles acted
during the duel, winking at me, falsifying his ferocity.
Brothers—were those men my brothers? Long ago, they had
washed their hands of my life, Pilatewise. Mother praised
them when I visited our home, ah me.
“I had heard that ya killed that-tar man, in yer duel,”
said Dick, pawing his kneecaps.
Jonson clapped him on the shoulder.
“Wish him better luck next time,” he guffawed.
Jim and Dick had brown, flat faces, flattened by
hunger, by defeat, lust, work, illness and sorrow. They
had lost their children during the plague. Their teeth
were blackened, or missing. Their clothes...what is a
bundle of dirty clothes topped by a voice and a dead
mind?
The afternoon sun poured through the open door. “Your
hair ain’t red like it was,” said Jim.
“You’re getting bald,” said Dick. “The hair’s slipping
down your neck.”
Bells of London startled them and helped send them on
their way, and I went to sleep, amused by Jonson’s
mimicry and laughter, as he sprawled in his chair, head
thrown back, one hand on Pericles’ mane.
Stratford
My brothers’ visit reminded me of our hometown Ned.
Ned used to lie on the ground with pads underneath his
shoulders: an anvil, weighing two hundred weight, was
lowered on his chest by huskies, and three men with
sledges bent a bar on it as he lay there. Ned performed
at every Fair, girls ogling. The picture of him and his
admirers delights me: hero with anvil and hammer. How I
used to envy him. Ann thought he was a wonder. He was.
And now I wonder what became of him?
Henley Street
November 13, 1615
One night, Pericles and I got into a talk: he squatted
by my bed and we went over the business of writing for a
living... He said the market was poor. He said my plays
were very wordy. He said he had it tough before I took
him on and suggested I see if I couldn’t buy stock in a
Company, one that was really enduring, he said. “No use
getting in with one that is here today and gone tomorrow.
Wisdom,” he snuffed, “is a thing you get when they crowd
you off the dock into deep water, or when you grab for a
mutton bone and it isn’t there.”
Our talks were not long as a rule. Pericles could drop
asleep when I was in the midst of telling him something
interesting or trying out a few lines on him. If I
offered him a chunk of bread his interest quickened, and
there was tail action too. He could listen attentively to
a stanza, let’s say, if I held the bread (or piece of
cheese, preferably cheddar) above his head, just out of
his reach. I sometimes did this to improve his mind.
However, a week or so later there seemed no sign of
improvement. Perhaps dogs, like some people, are
impervious to poetry.
Shakespeare, Stratford sleepwalker, walks
about his bedroom,
stumbles, tries door handle, raises window:
Ann, in clumsy breasty gown, wakes him
angrily:
“What on earth were you trying to do?”
“I was listening to Burbage and Alleyn
recite lines from my plays.”
November 15, 1615
A
gain I sleepwalk, from room to room, standing in
doorways, waiting before windows: I wake and there I am,
unseeing, window, door or wall in front of me, the crime
of myself, the assassination of my past confronting me.
All the perfumes...all the words...all the concern defeat
their purpose and I ask myself when will I get up next
time and walk the floor, to disturb and be disturbed—for
what reasons? Reasons for the unreasonable, reasons for
the sickness of a mind—how can they be called reasons?
I wake to remember a dream, or wake to find the moment
as bare as slate, or I feel that I am somewhere in the
past, with my father, bending over people stricken by the
plague, the plague bell tolling, the rain streaming over
my face, someone weeping.
“Where is my new cap...where’s my new cap?” The dying
boy pleads, huddled against the church wall.
Alleyn—on the stage at the Globe—informs me of the
plague and warns me in his stentorian voice to leave off
helping people, let them die; then, he carries away Puck.
Alleyn stalks across the stage, his voice cutting the
dark, my sleep, my sleepwalker’s darkness. Dressed for
Tambourlaine, forked beard over red cloak, he swings
through lines, a torch gleaming, smoking behind his
shoulder.
Henley Street
November 18, 1615
When to the session of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past...
It is not love-making I call to mind but an August
afternoon, the paths that led us on and on, underneath
giant oaks and elms, the ground wet with sun, our
happiness as sure as the trees. We walked through groves
and across fields, the pathway winding past cattle and
horses at pasture, men at work scything grain. Sitting on
a rock fence, we listened to the swish of their scythes,
their friendly calls to one another. Wandering, we ate at
a farm, the people happy to have us. Butterflies and
children were part of that farm: it was as simple as
that, and since it was so simple I would like to have
that afternoon back again, a small favor to ask of time,
just an afternoon and a lunch at someone’s farm, dogs
lolling on the ground, a cat on Ellen’s lap.
Like as the waves make toward the pebbled
shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end...
I have not found a way to cheat the end: my glass is
broken and the sand has sifted through. I am too much i’
the shadow, it seems.
Confidence diminished as my memory failed: this began
in a certain way: during one of my plays I could not
speak: power of speech gone, I forgot my lines: this
double confusion occurred while I acted in a play by
Jonson, given in Bewick, when we were on a summer’s tour.
How vividly I remember that smoky inn—the crowd, the
torches. In Chester, my lines once more escaped me:
utterly perturbed, I gaped at the audience standing and
sitting in the August sun: I wiped away sweat: how they
stamped and jeered. Confidence might have returned, after
later successful performances, except for another lapse:
memorizing lines for Othello, I began to speak them,
alone in my London apartment: again there was nothing, no
sound, no memory: I had been emptied, as a rapier can
take care of a wine sack: only the sound of rainfall, as
I stood in my apartment: in my writing, too, lapses
sweated me: there was no one to help: I told no one:
soon, I thought, I’ll suckle fools and chronicle small
beer.
How easily I memorized, as a youngster, swallowing the
lines of a play in a night or two. Now I know that
impotence can assume many forms, between the legs and
between the eyes.
Henley Street
December 4, 1615
So the plays evolved, week by week, line by line, the
crabbed scrawl, poem and song, comedy and tragedy; so the
characters came into being: Agrippa, Iago, Ophelia,
Troilus, Falstaff, King Henry, bearded and beardless,
slut and angel, lady and commoner: they gawked across my
sheets of paper: I see them here, about me, crowding my
candle’s niggard flame.
But look, they have become phantoms!
Never again, king or coward, never Romeo and Juliet,
never a pair of lovers to kiss and die beside a tomb. It
was the nightingale and not the lark that pierced the
fearful hollow of my ear...
Phantoms.
Let me be taken, let me be put to death, and not wait
here, await the hand of tyranny, the slow grasp of this
town’s sod. I am to lie inside the church. The bell will
toll. They will carry me. On my grave they’ll cut these
words: I decree:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here:
Blessed be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
YOUTH—
Was there youth?
I sometimes think of the Avon that summer,
thunderstorms booming, the river very high. Cousin Will
was trying to yank a calf out of the water, when the
river sucked him under. Kathlene Hamlett played at
Ophelia—letting defeat suck her down. That was a summer
of defeats for most of us, the loss of my father’s
property, theatres closed because of official
disapproval, weeks of suffocating heat, the sun caught in
the trees, frying our brains, flies buzzing...
Cousin Will was a cheery, responsible boy, with a
pitiful limp. Good at lots of jobs, he was thinking of
marrying. Fishing was his love...poaching too. Kathlene
was good and capable but tried making love before she was
old enough...
I miss their smiling faces.
Ben writes such an elegant hand: he has that Italian
influence to perfection: his scripts are damnatory of my
provincial scrawl, I who can’t remember whether to write
Willm, Will or William...thank God for copyists, those
drones, our skull-down, penny-quill calligraphists. Too
bad someone is not dotting this.
Stratford
Gossip hangs over me, leaving me naked as vulgar air:
home gossip, precipitated by Ann, when Philip drops by,
then Blanch, then Longworth, then Melun, then Peter, then
Elinor, then Pembroke: Elinor has had a severe cold;
Longworth has lost his mare; Melun’s wife is down with
pleurisy. Philip’s face is so emaciated he can’t carry a
rose over his ear; Elinor has to be helped with a pick-
up. “When is another doctor coming to practice here?”
Pembroke asks. Ann knows—and tells. Ann thinks there’s a
possible rape of the church, no less. Blanch’s face
puckers in disgust. Longworth asks for a glass of water.
Peter talks genealogy. Their arrows are carefully wrapped
in leaves: all afternoon they talk in the shade, under
the apple, trotting in and out of the house, moodily
conferring in knots or pairs, then sauntering back to
leafy conference. There is a consensus of opinion that
the bridge over the Avon may be too poorly built... “it
can’t last... Sheriff Grimes has been appropriating tax
money...he must go...”
Someone objects but when Ann objects he objects and she
objects to his objection and the objections because I
object are more objectionable and this objectionable
quality leads to further objections...on a summer’s
afternoon.
Henley Street
December 7, 1615
Not long after Hamnet’s death, Ann removed Judith from
school, against my wishes. Though fond of school, Judith
became slaved at home. Later—in a year or so—Ann needed
Susanna, another home puppet. She further alienated us by
this decision. I still say that ignorance, like horse
piss, stinks, cankering the mind. Example: Ann.
I have had more visitors, five Stratford puritans, who
attacked my play writing. I got very angry yet tried to
conceal my anger; remembering the smallness of my town I
said little to the women; as if in the wings I waited,
remembering:
“How unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play on
me; you would seem to know my stops; you’d pluck out the
heart of my mystery; you’d sound me from my lowest notes
to the top of my compass...there’s music in this little
organ and yet you can’t make it speak. Why?”
I talked to them as best I could and then a fat wench
bleated, jerking at her gloves:
“You talk in riddles, sir. Your plays ridicule us. You
disesteem our monarchs, King Richard for one. Your plays
attract the vulgar. You praise the rotten...”
By standing, I asked them to leave: perhaps they felt
the pain I felt; then my sickness grew worse after their
visit.
An apple tree shakes out a boy:
The boy, Linnus, performs acrobatics in the
branches:
He’s fourteen.
Laughter:
Then King Lear’s voice:
“Never, never, never, never...”
Henley Street
Stratford
L
innus, whose gypsy father is an acrobat, visits me these
days; with his father in jail he has to wait for his
release. Dumpy, leather-skinned and wild-eyed, Linnus is
fourteen, and has a four-year-old brother, Peter. Their
mother is dead.
My old apple tree is Linnus’ home, when he is here; I
sit outside while he performs tricks he has learned from
his father, tricks I have never seen. Peter yawns on the
grass or stands between my legs or pods my lap, thrilled
by his brother’s arm and leg cleverness...the sun warms
the three of us.
His tricks done, glad to rest, Linnus stretches on the
ground, to incline me a little of his wanderings, the
hunger, always the hunger: it’s as if he never had a full
meal. They are scourged out of town, thrown into jail,
entertained at castles, fed on cakes and ale, left to
starve on a farm. Linnus points to Peter, asleep on my
lap.
“Why do you like him? He’s ugly.”
“He’s ugly but he may change and grow to be handsome,
perhaps become an explorer, like Drake.” And I talk to
Linnus about Drake and the Armada and as I talk it seems
to me I’m talking to Hamnet, or is this Hamnet on my lap?
It doesn’t matter.
Linnus and Peter matter, and after a while we rig
fishing gear and go to the river and fish, dawdle all
afternoon, Linnus croaking gypsy songs, Peter in and out
of the water, dashing after magpies and crows, gabbling
berries, every problem forgotten.
Home late, Linnus prepared supper for us (Ann away for
a few days): he was quick and clever in the kitchen,
reminding me of an actor familiar with his part.
Henley Street
Stratford
December 11, ’15
Linnus described a play he saw last summer and I was
reminded of the first play I saw, as a boy, performed by
gypsies who told a tale of Scottish intrigue and murder
that ended with the beautiful heroine’s suicidal plunge
into a loch. Those swarthy actors seldom left my mind for
weeks, waking me, haunting school and play. I can yet see
the sheriff torturing the girl accused of stealing: words
have gone but not the actions.
That evening, Papa and I walked home together. He would
not talk about the play. Mama disliked plays and never
attended, damning them as “lucifers.” I suppose the gypsy
play was a “lucifer.”
Henley Street
Stratford
December 12, 1615
One of my bitterest experiences was seeing Pericles
killed by a sheep herder. On the outskirts of London,
Pericles burst into joyous yappings and began to frolic
and nip sheep, an immense herd, stretching for blocks. I
saw him tangle with a black ram. The herder, rushing at
Pericles, mistaking his fun, struck him with his crook
and beat him to the street; then, before I could shove my
way through the herd, flailed him over the head with the
butt. Yelling, pushing, I knocked down the man but
reached Pericles too late... I wanted to leave the city;
I wanted to spit on mankind. I wish I could have my
friend to talk to, eat meat from my hand: there’s plenty
of meat for you now, boy.
Midnight
What is it that has embittered me?
I felt the bitterness long before someone tried to kill
Ellen. Did the bitterness come about through attempting
the impossible in my acts of creation, losing life in
work? A tree is tree now. Once it was wonderful. My
spleen stems from the sleepwalker’s for I am sleepwalker-
without-taper, from Romeo to Shylock, king to clown, hero
to villain. I can see distinctly: there’s no mirage about
cottage, family, friends, and Avon. Stratford is Act 5. I
wait my cue! Go to, what are your lines, Yorik?
Caesar’s battleground kept me from a sane life.
Drinking stronger than ale I kept company with the bloody
horde...rape in my heart...thief at hand...deceit as
friend...murder as bed...
Someone beats on my door; that’s Burbage: “Let’s go,
Will,” he yells. “It’s almost one o’clock; you have to be
at the Globe in half an hour.”
The hour, the play, the scene, the glass running out,
faster, faster, faster!
Henley Street
Stratford
December 20, 1615 Evening – late
Most of all I shall miss a beautiful woman, her smile,
the eyelids and features faintly powdered, the white of
her hands and arms, the sense of longing, her voice’s
mystery, the carefully rounded breasts, their softness,
her light gait, her voluptuary whispers making slave, the
weight of her at night, her softness underneath in the
morning...
So I never saw her again...writing was my coition...my
fake living...no, I never saw her again; that was fate,
or...to never see the wanted is that phenomenal
blindness; to never have the beauty is pismire.
Our old friend sits on her throne, above marble steps,
wearing blazoned robe, her crown straight—and neck
straight, too, the lidded concern apt, antique scepter
beside her: her awareness is aware of certainties,
watching earl and captain, bawd and bugler.
We are to love her, do collective obeisance, beseech
her favors. And she, with her rufescence, shall free us
of every plague, down to smallest poverty, and, like
Merlin, give us castles for cots, hope for despair, money
for thought.
Sleeve lifts pontifical hand and blesses with its
kissing ring. Rays of sun, through lozenged windows, fold
leaded shadows over troubled brows.
Ah, Queen, your majesty is unparalleled, you are our
patron of the arts, generous in every particular,
particular to man’s freedom, eschewing stock, pillory and
scaffold.
As she rises, sequins and braid tremble, every motion
capsuled in scarlet, the very velvet of confidence—the
robe quite long, ruffs and ruffles fresh, the jewels
paying their worth: she walks, our Queen walks: we
remember her mother scaffolded for adultery.
Henley Street
Shylock was less persistent than I to own, fief vs.
chattel, clown vs. crown, thoughts vs. dreams: with such
a goal, a man stoops, a man batters, a man astonishes
himself with crudities that some might call vitality:
this is the sighing, buying, signing: and when I began to
own more land and houses I owned less and less time: that
was my mortgage, paid over and over by less writing.
Henley Street
December 24, 1615
Scene: Seashore
Lord Thomas
Was it yesterday?
Philo
No—it was the day before—at night.
Thomas
When...when was it?
Philo
Speak lower...they’ll overhear us!
Sssh!
Thomas
I didn’t bury her the day before. No
man buries love at night, only hate.
You saw me carry her to her room—lay
her down tenderly. You share the
secrets of our lives...and now the
secret of her death. ’Sblood, that
is that remains for each of us, hide
carefully, forgetting intrigue,
forgetting Scotland...
But I can no longer write!
Snow beats on the windows and winter chills me, cold
hands on my throat. Where are my faithful players? Where
is Alleyn—speaking divinely? If I could talk to him I
might be able to write again. If this storm did not
batter this house so treacherously!
Green lozenges of light penetrate the oriel,
green drinking mugs,
green on table decanter,
Shakespeare and Jonson drinking.
Stratford streets in the late afternoon sun,
sounds of a carriage,
sounds of kids coming home from school.
Jonson quotes a line,
Shakespeare quotes a line.
Henley Street
January third, 1616
I
t does no good to rage at my impotence and yet I
rage...come bird, come...come, heart, perform your art.
Yesterday, I was carried out of my private madness by
Ben Jonson’s visit: we drank and laughed, his thick cloak
thrown off, his broad shoulders broader, voice kindly,
eyes the eyes of one acting well-remembered lines, hands
relaxed on his lap or gesturing easily.
“Now that the night begins with sable wings to
overcloud the brightness of the sun, and that in darkness
pleasures may be done...let us to the bower and pass a
pleasant hour...”
He said those lines years ago, and that night Ellen
came to me, and waited backstage, there, with the dusty
props and dirt. Ah, her beauty: I saw it against the
sticks and pricks of make-believe! I felt its warmth. I
asked her how she was but she wanted kisses, not
civilities.
(Vapid lines out of the Spanish Tragedy seemed foolish
there backstage and could not matter less as Ellen and I
drove to her apartment—in her red carriage, swaying
through the rain.
Her fireplace was stacked with flame. Her servants
withdrew and she leaned against her marble mantel, breast
leaning forward, her dress low, shoulders and neck bare,
such ivory.
Her cousin had accompanied us in the carriage; now we
could talk:
“I hadn’t expected you in London tonight,” I said.
“I came from Dover, yesterday, late yesterday” she
said.
“From your brother’s place at St. Cloud?”
“Yes. A hard trip across the channel and hard to be
away so long from you... My dear, this play’s better than
the last. How you make those Venetians live! They’re like
so many I’ve known... You must have known them too...”
“Darling, I like your hair this way. French? Your
hairdresser really knows...”
“Will, tell me that you love me. I love you.”
“Should I?”
“Your letters tell me but now, you tell me.”
“With hands and mouth...”
It was like that—her gown letting me—but it was also
fear, remembering that Ben had warned us that we had been
followed by another carriage as we left the
theatre...twice now.
Ellen and I hoped our purse of hope would lose all
counterfeit coins...foreign exchange no...no cheating, no
niggardly luck...could I foresee with gypsy insight?
Our goblets touched.)