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 Alleynrecite lines from my plays.”
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, 1615Again 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 forTambourlaine, forked beard over red cloak, he swings through lines, a torch gleaming, smoking behind his shoulder.Henley StreetNovember 18, 1615When to the session of sweet silent thoughtI 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 forOthello,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 StreetDecember 4, 1615So 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.Butlook, 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 forbearTo dig the dust enclosed here:Blessed be the man that spares these stonesAnd 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.StratfordGossip 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 StreetDecember 7, 1615Not 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.
November 15, 1615
A
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 forTambourlaine, 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 forOthello,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.
Butlook, 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...”
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 StreetStratfordLinnus, 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 StreetStratfordDecember 11, ’15Linnus 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 StreetStratfordDecember 12, 1615One 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.MidnightWhat 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 StreetStratfordDecember 20, 1615 Evening – lateMost 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 StreetShylock 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 StreetDecember 24, 1615Scene: SeashoreLord ThomasWas it yesterday?PhiloNo—it was the day before—at night.ThomasWhen...when was it?PhiloSpeak lower...they’ll overhear us! Sssh!ThomasI 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!
Henley Street
Stratford
L
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.
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 StreetJanuary third, 1616It 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 theSpanishTragedyseemed 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.)But I prolonged Ben’s New Year visit: we sat on chairs in the oriel, and talked and talked, and the talking of him brought out the talking in me, and there was no bothersome time: I suppose we ate by candlelight; I suppose we went to bed, but our talking was not bedded, and I hear it now in the sound of his retreating horses: I hear hope retreating, hoof on cobble, hoof on brain: for he will not come again. Or should I ask him, being thought-sick?Twelfth DayIn the fall I went across the fields to the poplar trees under which Ann and I used to make love; I sat in the sun and let it drench me. The trees were nobler though limbs had fallen off; one tree was rotted at the top; another...but no matter.I sat and remembered how it was before our twins were born, sat with elbows on my knees, gaping. I tried to see that pair of lovers loving on the grass. That love had never happened. No. The thing that was real was my gaping loneliness...I walked home and took up a packet of her letters; this one was lying on top:Dear Red,I am glad that people like your play, thatRomeo and Julietplay. That was the one we saw at the Globe, I think. The Capulets frightened me much. What is the name of your new play that you are writing at? I can’t remember. Is it theMerchantplay?You should write a play about your papa and his glove-making. The twins are sick again. Hamnet is the worst, sick at night, and all that. Judith has a flushed face and she coughs and coughs, and I keep her in bed.Write soon.Love,AnnI try to forget the casualness and say it belongs to a buried past and then I say to myself, if this is dead then all life is equally dead, including myself.I opened another letter and a dried flower fell out of the yellowed paper. I had to hold the sheet to the window before I could read it, meantime trying to harden myself, half remembering. My wits are diseased, I thought.Dear Red,So you have made twenty-two pounds at the theatre from all the good attendance. That will help take care of the clothes we need, and winter right against us. What is this play they are playing at the Globe, the Othella thing? I have heard Mama talk about a woman like that—some foreign woman. Is Othella your leading person? Is she pretty? Is it true you fought a duel? That will not help you get ahead in London. You said that people talk.You should see Hamnet. How well he does with his school work, better than anyone at school, I hear. He takes after you, his master tells me.Our bedroom window was broken in the storm last week, but Tom has put in new glass, and leaded and puttied it nicely. It was the window by the good chair.Love,AnnLike roses, red roses on a stalk, or was it, coral is far more red than her lips’ red...love is my sin...my love is longing still!I put away her letters and closed the shutters and lit the candles and the rush lamp, and, settling in my chair, I read of another past, to palliate myself, Virgil’s.StratfordI have been thinking of Merlin and his magic ways, the thrall of his immense dabbling: this island should have been named Clas Myrddin: Merlin’s Enclosure. Perhaps Gawain and Lancelot would have enclosed us and the grail might not have become the great illusion among illusions.I am reading Spenser’sAmorettinow: now I read what Raleigh read in prison; the coincidence is appropriate enough. There are not too many coincidences in life but there are many kinds of prisons. Perhaps the worst is the prison imprisoning the prisoner against his will; the other prison, self-germinated, self-maintained, can be as ascetic, as impassioned in its tortures, and yet it has its rush lamp for the outcast state:Pour soul, the center of my sinful earth,Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array.Why dost thou pine...such a mistaken canisterOf words that I would not put them down once more.January 15, 1616Stratford—Henley StreetViola bows rasped and recorders piped and rain hit the door and windows at Hall’s, the quartet playing before his fireplace, the men sitting with their backs to the blaze, instruments fired.“More ale?”“How about canary?”“Cake, eh, Will?”Cakes and rain perpetually, the strings for a throat, garroting the night...the rain, it raineth every night. Admit no impediments, listen:Never say that I was false of heart...the poison left her stunned, as if beneath an avalanche of men. Mad slanderers, no, Ann deserved the slander but what could slander accomplish? Like incessant rain, or that repeated low note on the fiddle, what good? A flooding melancholy, and Ann unchanged.Love was my sin but now my sin is breathing. And tonight it is a multiple sin for I am listening, hoping these instruments and players have a message for my soul. The shattered rain on windows is everyman’s storm, the gutter thief, the pimp, the king—all of us hunkered under pain.The good Dr. Hall bends over me:“Feeling better tonight, Will? I hope so.”I chuckle and say I am.Put on your cloak and hurry, Hall. There’s someone sicker than I who needs you. Eat a crocodile. I’ll be going home soon. I should be there now, going over my accounts.Music has unstopped my ears but no grapple of sound holds tonight, not with the scrofula of rain, the wink of time on cavernous faces beefed by the fire.See that wizened face, that’s Hall, tall and thin, and next to him my frump, belly puddinged, hair screwed at angles, lines and then more lines lining the half-open mouth, the missing teeth... Ann, dear Ann, was it to you I wrote the sonnet beginning? Ah, no, the errors snare us, bare us to the quick of lime. The arithmetic of memory multiplies fantasy.Poetry, succor me in this hour of need, help me as you have: I have given you my life; now, you must lend argument to my folly. Dry the rain on my skull! Be youth: be Ellen, outcast, incast, what is your substance, whereof you are made, that millions of strange shadows on you tend? Is thismymemory? Or do the lines remember me?The notes of the quartet confuse the shadows, the fire’s instrument, the tankards on the table, one for you, Marlowe...I am to wait, though waiting be as hell—And we walked home together through the rain, she who has never met Touchstone or Polonius or Othello...And so to a cold bed.–S–On some of Dr. Hall’s visits, he urged me to discontinue my journal, wanting me to rest. I told him that the language I used was hardly playwriting, requiring the barest effort on my part. I explained that I need something. He huffed and rumbled, with professional sincerity, like the good neighbor he is, and I understand now that my resurrected fears may, like a Greek chorus, pervade and annul. But what do they pervade and annul, this corner, precharnel, prepaid house in Hell? Am I to talk with trees? Am I to forget manhood? Am I to cheer old age? Infirmity? Hall is such a knotted creature I wonder my Susanna married him: such a sultry woman for such a cadaver! His contorted body, pinched here, pinched there, sewed here, unsewed there, his starvation face, with zealot eyes in bald skull, leaves me lacking in confidence; yet, I listen and he prescribes and we talk and play chess. I am his medical pawn, gulping doses for him, bleeding for him: is the final move his or mine?HomeJanuary 18, 1616Dr. Hall, when you found your woman in my Susanna, you found bed-woman, kitchen wench and apothecary girl. Your shop, shelved, bottled, ointmented, reeks of balm and poison. Long before you married my Susanna, I got to know that smell when I came to you to help me battle pain. You were never too ill or busy to help me check pain’s unkindness.But underneath your skin you are another Timon, another hater of mankind, concocting health to make more health to make more pain to make money. Pestel in hand, you measure alleviants, the richer your patient, the cleverer your compound. How you worry on behalf of the young countess. How you thumb your books for the Lord Chamberlain’s gout.Drum bottles—Beat shelves—Smash glass—See, his shingle in the wind, JOHN HALL – PHYSICIAN, weeps rain, and I sit waiting, with vapors, losses, pangs, venoms in my blood, anticipating prescriptions—or epitaph.His face grimaces his thanks, his hand extended, his pox is to “rob one another. There’s more gold! Cut throats...all that you meet are thieves!” All this is patiently and subtly withheld by the good doctor since frightening the patient frightens money. Only dear friends discover the true Timon...Oh, God, how pain strangles me today! It paves my skull! I am on fire! Such useless misery! Pain is the greatest cheat. Pain, your friendship is much too covetous! Pain—you old prostitute—swallow your own hemlock for a change!Henley Street, StratfordJanuary 20I am too hard on friend Hall!I’ve spent hours there, puttering, talking, laughing, entertained by his curious, Indian cow’s tail, stones cut from men’s bladders, uterine balls of hair, paw of a bear, and skeleton of a pigmy.This year, he is publishing a treatise on theWounds of the Abdomen. He’s as clever with his scalpel as his concoctions of wormwood, rosarum and menthol. Around Stratford, he is best known for his treatment of dropsy.StratfordJanuary 23, 1616Logs burn in my fireplace and I have a book on my lap: I have a kingdom: a crown: crackling of wood becomes voices, stuff of dreams, friends, stages, plays, quarrels, hopes, changes, beginnings, endings, the pen scratching paper, pigeons chuckling, laughter, death, Hamnet’s face, father’s, the cloak, the whisper, the plague, the rain, fog, losses, waves against rocks: a log totters and the upended section spurts into a pennant...shake-scene!I have no picture—no drawing—to help me remember Hamnet. Inago Jones could have done one. I should tear apart pieces of paper and fold them until they become his face, or, with scissors, cut out his silhouette. Damn the weak mind that makes such simple wishes impossible!There was no artist in Stratford. Stratford had no skills to offer except death’s skill...death for all of us along with that triumvirate, love, marriage, children; with fornication for pallbearer, adultery for sexton, rape for choirmaster...How weary and stale and flat are the uses of this world. Bring hebenon for O...Youth’s falcon on his glove, Hamnet stands with his friends around him, most of them young, their well-groomed horses held by pages.On the distant shore of a lake, a castle breaks through a grove of beech.Hamnet is laughing at his unhooded bird.“Have you unseeled him?” someone asks.“He can fly,” Hamnet says. “Now.”“See...he’s looking for game!”“Hamnet, is it true your father writes plays for our Queen? London plays?”“You should see hisMacbeth! That’s a play for you! Duel and all! We’ll go to London and see one of his plays. There’s one at the Palace soon.”How I would like to rearrange life, bring happiness, bestow wealth, fix love, make well, foil crime, reverse ill luck. But only the stage can accomplish miracles and there custom stales the plot and disharmonies garble intention.But, as evening galls, and candles go on, I hear Hamnet’s footsteps...he wants new gloves, new hood, new leash...What’s past is prologue:At Blackfriars, the chandeliers of candles are hugely lit and light streams upon Alleyn, who is speaking on stage; the boards are clean and shine; all actors are in their places; the seats are almost filled; I see a woman, in dark green velvet; accompanied by her maid, she takes a seat; rows of faces beseech the stage: oh kingdom, place of tempest and calm, engulf us again!Henley StreetStratfordFebruary 1Suum—nun—nonny, the wind said, as my father and I worked in his glover’s shop, quiet hours, among the many kinds of leather, sheepskin, goat, kid, lamb, pigskin, coltskin, doeskin, buckskin. In his tiers of drawers were the pontifical gloves, liturgical gloves, gloves for dignitaries, ladies’ gloves, wedding gloves...A bird sang in its cage by the door.Between the opening and closing of the shop we talked pleasantly or waited on customers with consideration:We talked of Rocco Bonetti, the great London fencing master, and his fencing school; we talked of the snail and how it shrinks in its house when hit, or sits in the shade of its shell; we chatted about spears and helmets and mottos likeNonSanzDroict,his favorite; we talked of great castles, like Kenilworth, and their ghosts; we talked of kings and how to catch larks with a mirror and scraps of red cloth...the buzz of our talk was a good buzz.So, another memory!CandlemasI wroteTheTempestat Stratford, the only play I wrote at home. For the first time I had leisure to write, in my garden, the summer warm: this was an island for an island: time faded: I rememberedscenariI had seen at thecommediadell’arte:I remembered the wreck of theSea Adventurein Bermuda: a drunk sailor stopped me and described that grievous storm, described the bewitched island, and I began:On ship at sea:Captain:Boatswain!Boatswain:Here, Master, what cheer?Captain:Good fellow, talk to the sailors, warn them, fall to it quickly or we’ll run aground!Entersailors:Boatswain:Quickly, my fellows! Take in the topsail speedily! That’s the captain’s warning whistle!Then the shipwreck followed.It was pleasant to invent without pressure: I wanted a lively yet serene play, with a mixture of philosophy, humor and fantasy: I wanted a play to fit the new mode, free of symbolism.I walked about my garden and my peace trees, and there, over there was Caliban, a savage slave; I took another turn, and there was Ariel; I heard the wind blow hollowly across an uninhabited island...“Safely in harbor is the king’s ship; in the deep nook where once you called me at midnight... Go, make yourself a nymph of the sea... Where should this music be? In the air, or the earth? Delicate Ariel, sea nymphs ring the knell...in the dark backward and abysm of time...”
Henley Street
January third, 1616
I
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 theSpanishTragedyseemed 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.)
But I prolonged Ben’s New Year visit: we sat on chairs in the oriel, and talked and talked, and the talking of him brought out the talking in me, and there was no bothersome time: I suppose we ate by candlelight; I suppose we went to bed, but our talking was not bedded, and I hear it now in the sound of his retreating horses: I hear hope retreating, hoof on cobble, hoof on brain: for he will not come again. Or should I ask him, being thought-sick?
Twelfth Day
In the fall I went across the fields to the poplar trees under which Ann and I used to make love; I sat in the sun and let it drench me. The trees were nobler though limbs had fallen off; one tree was rotted at the top; another...but no matter.
I sat and remembered how it was before our twins were born, sat with elbows on my knees, gaping. I tried to see that pair of lovers loving on the grass. That love had never happened. No. The thing that was real was my gaping loneliness...
I walked home and took up a packet of her letters; this one was lying on top:
Dear Red,
I am glad that people like your play, thatRomeo and Julietplay. That was the one we saw at the Globe, I think. The Capulets frightened me much. What is the name of your new play that you are writing at? I can’t remember. Is it theMerchantplay?
You should write a play about your papa and his glove-making. The twins are sick again. Hamnet is the worst, sick at night, and all that. Judith has a flushed face and she coughs and coughs, and I keep her in bed.
Write soon.
Love,
Ann
I try to forget the casualness and say it belongs to a buried past and then I say to myself, if this is dead then all life is equally dead, including myself.
I opened another letter and a dried flower fell out of the yellowed paper. I had to hold the sheet to the window before I could read it, meantime trying to harden myself, half remembering. My wits are diseased, I thought.
Dear Red,
So you have made twenty-two pounds at the theatre from all the good attendance. That will help take care of the clothes we need, and winter right against us. What is this play they are playing at the Globe, the Othella thing? I have heard Mama talk about a woman like that—some foreign woman. Is Othella your leading person? Is she pretty? Is it true you fought a duel? That will not help you get ahead in London. You said that people talk.
You should see Hamnet. How well he does with his school work, better than anyone at school, I hear. He takes after you, his master tells me.
Our bedroom window was broken in the storm last week, but Tom has put in new glass, and leaded and puttied it nicely. It was the window by the good chair.
Love,
Ann
Like roses, red roses on a stalk, or was it, coral is far more red than her lips’ red...love is my sin...my love is longing still!
I put away her letters and closed the shutters and lit the candles and the rush lamp, and, settling in my chair, I read of another past, to palliate myself, Virgil’s.
Stratford
I have been thinking of Merlin and his magic ways, the thrall of his immense dabbling: this island should have been named Clas Myrddin: Merlin’s Enclosure. Perhaps Gawain and Lancelot would have enclosed us and the grail might not have become the great illusion among illusions.
I am reading Spenser’sAmorettinow: now I read what Raleigh read in prison; the coincidence is appropriate enough. There are not too many coincidences in life but there are many kinds of prisons. Perhaps the worst is the prison imprisoning the prisoner against his will; the other prison, self-germinated, self-maintained, can be as ascetic, as impassioned in its tortures, and yet it has its rush lamp for the outcast state:
Pour soul, the center of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array.
Why dost thou pine...such a mistaken canister
Of words that I would not put them down once more.
January 15, 1616
Stratford—Henley Street
Viola bows rasped and recorders piped and rain hit the door and windows at Hall’s, the quartet playing before his fireplace, the men sitting with their backs to the blaze, instruments fired.
“More ale?”
“How about canary?”
“Cake, eh, Will?”
Cakes and rain perpetually, the strings for a throat, garroting the night...the rain, it raineth every night. Admit no impediments, listen:
Never say that I was false of heart...the poison left her stunned, as if beneath an avalanche of men. Mad slanderers, no, Ann deserved the slander but what could slander accomplish? Like incessant rain, or that repeated low note on the fiddle, what good? A flooding melancholy, and Ann unchanged.
Love was my sin but now my sin is breathing. And tonight it is a multiple sin for I am listening, hoping these instruments and players have a message for my soul. The shattered rain on windows is everyman’s storm, the gutter thief, the pimp, the king—all of us hunkered under pain.
The good Dr. Hall bends over me:
“Feeling better tonight, Will? I hope so.”
I chuckle and say I am.
Put on your cloak and hurry, Hall. There’s someone sicker than I who needs you. Eat a crocodile. I’ll be going home soon. I should be there now, going over my accounts.
Music has unstopped my ears but no grapple of sound holds tonight, not with the scrofula of rain, the wink of time on cavernous faces beefed by the fire.
See that wizened face, that’s Hall, tall and thin, and next to him my frump, belly puddinged, hair screwed at angles, lines and then more lines lining the half-open mouth, the missing teeth... Ann, dear Ann, was it to you I wrote the sonnet beginning? Ah, no, the errors snare us, bare us to the quick of lime. The arithmetic of memory multiplies fantasy.
Poetry, succor me in this hour of need, help me as you have: I have given you my life; now, you must lend argument to my folly. Dry the rain on my skull! Be youth: be Ellen, outcast, incast, what is your substance, whereof you are made, that millions of strange shadows on you tend? Is thismymemory? Or do the lines remember me?
The notes of the quartet confuse the shadows, the fire’s instrument, the tankards on the table, one for you, Marlowe...
I am to wait, though waiting be as hell—
And we walked home together through the rain, she who has never met Touchstone or Polonius or Othello...
And so to a cold bed.
–S–
On some of Dr. Hall’s visits, he urged me to discontinue my journal, wanting me to rest. I told him that the language I used was hardly playwriting, requiring the barest effort on my part. I explained that I need something. He huffed and rumbled, with professional sincerity, like the good neighbor he is, and I understand now that my resurrected fears may, like a Greek chorus, pervade and annul. But what do they pervade and annul, this corner, precharnel, prepaid house in Hell? Am I to talk with trees? Am I to forget manhood? Am I to cheer old age? Infirmity? Hall is such a knotted creature I wonder my Susanna married him: such a sultry woman for such a cadaver! His contorted body, pinched here, pinched there, sewed here, unsewed there, his starvation face, with zealot eyes in bald skull, leaves me lacking in confidence; yet, I listen and he prescribes and we talk and play chess. I am his medical pawn, gulping doses for him, bleeding for him: is the final move his or mine?
Home
January 18, 1616
Dr. Hall, when you found your woman in my Susanna, you found bed-woman, kitchen wench and apothecary girl. Your shop, shelved, bottled, ointmented, reeks of balm and poison. Long before you married my Susanna, I got to know that smell when I came to you to help me battle pain. You were never too ill or busy to help me check pain’s unkindness.
But underneath your skin you are another Timon, another hater of mankind, concocting health to make more health to make more pain to make money. Pestel in hand, you measure alleviants, the richer your patient, the cleverer your compound. How you worry on behalf of the young countess. How you thumb your books for the Lord Chamberlain’s gout.
Drum bottles—
Beat shelves—
Smash glass—
See, his shingle in the wind, JOHN HALL – PHYSICIAN, weeps rain, and I sit waiting, with vapors, losses, pangs, venoms in my blood, anticipating prescriptions—or epitaph.
His face grimaces his thanks, his hand extended, his pox is to “rob one another. There’s more gold! Cut throats...all that you meet are thieves!” All this is patiently and subtly withheld by the good doctor since frightening the patient frightens money. Only dear friends discover the true Timon...
Oh, God, how pain strangles me today! It paves my skull! I am on fire! Such useless misery! Pain is the greatest cheat. Pain, your friendship is much too covetous! Pain—you old prostitute—swallow your own hemlock for a change!
Henley Street, Stratford
January 20
I am too hard on friend Hall!
I’ve spent hours there, puttering, talking, laughing, entertained by his curious, Indian cow’s tail, stones cut from men’s bladders, uterine balls of hair, paw of a bear, and skeleton of a pigmy.
This year, he is publishing a treatise on theWounds of the Abdomen. He’s as clever with his scalpel as his concoctions of wormwood, rosarum and menthol. Around Stratford, he is best known for his treatment of dropsy.
Stratford
January 23, 1616
Logs burn in my fireplace and I have a book on my lap: I have a kingdom: a crown: crackling of wood becomes voices, stuff of dreams, friends, stages, plays, quarrels, hopes, changes, beginnings, endings, the pen scratching paper, pigeons chuckling, laughter, death, Hamnet’s face, father’s, the cloak, the whisper, the plague, the rain, fog, losses, waves against rocks: a log totters and the upended section spurts into a pennant...shake-scene!
I have no picture—no drawing—to help me remember Hamnet. Inago Jones could have done one. I should tear apart pieces of paper and fold them until they become his face, or, with scissors, cut out his silhouette. Damn the weak mind that makes such simple wishes impossible!
There was no artist in Stratford. Stratford had no skills to offer except death’s skill...death for all of us along with that triumvirate, love, marriage, children; with fornication for pallbearer, adultery for sexton, rape for choirmaster...
How weary and stale and flat are the uses of this world. Bring hebenon for O...
Youth’s falcon on his glove, Hamnet stands with his friends around him, most of them young, their well-groomed horses held by pages.
On the distant shore of a lake, a castle breaks through a grove of beech.
Hamnet is laughing at his unhooded bird.
“Have you unseeled him?” someone asks.
“He can fly,” Hamnet says. “Now.”
“See...he’s looking for game!”
“Hamnet, is it true your father writes plays for our Queen? London plays?”
“You should see hisMacbeth! That’s a play for you! Duel and all! We’ll go to London and see one of his plays. There’s one at the Palace soon.”
How I would like to rearrange life, bring happiness, bestow wealth, fix love, make well, foil crime, reverse ill luck. But only the stage can accomplish miracles and there custom stales the plot and disharmonies garble intention.
But, as evening galls, and candles go on, I hear Hamnet’s footsteps...he wants new gloves, new hood, new leash...
What’s past is prologue:
At Blackfriars, the chandeliers of candles are hugely lit and light streams upon Alleyn, who is speaking on stage; the boards are clean and shine; all actors are in their places; the seats are almost filled; I see a woman, in dark green velvet; accompanied by her maid, she takes a seat; rows of faces beseech the stage: oh kingdom, place of tempest and calm, engulf us again!
Henley Street
Stratford
February 1
Suum—nun—nonny, the wind said, as my father and I worked in his glover’s shop, quiet hours, among the many kinds of leather, sheepskin, goat, kid, lamb, pigskin, coltskin, doeskin, buckskin. In his tiers of drawers were the pontifical gloves, liturgical gloves, gloves for dignitaries, ladies’ gloves, wedding gloves...
A bird sang in its cage by the door.
Between the opening and closing of the shop we talked pleasantly or waited on customers with consideration:
We talked of Rocco Bonetti, the great London fencing master, and his fencing school; we talked of the snail and how it shrinks in its house when hit, or sits in the shade of its shell; we chatted about spears and helmets and mottos likeNonSanzDroict,his favorite; we talked of great castles, like Kenilworth, and their ghosts; we talked of kings and how to catch larks with a mirror and scraps of red cloth...the buzz of our talk was a good buzz.
So, another memory!
Candlemas
I wroteTheTempestat Stratford, the only play I wrote at home. For the first time I had leisure to write, in my garden, the summer warm: this was an island for an island: time faded: I rememberedscenariI had seen at thecommediadell’arte:I remembered the wreck of theSea Adventurein Bermuda: a drunk sailor stopped me and described that grievous storm, described the bewitched island, and I began:
On ship at sea:
Captain:
Boatswain!
Boatswain:
Here, Master, what cheer?
Captain:
Good fellow, talk to the sailors, warn them, fall to it quickly or we’ll run aground!
Entersailors:
Boatswain:
Quickly, my fellows! Take in the topsail speedily! That’s the captain’s warning whistle!
Then the shipwreck followed.
It was pleasant to invent without pressure: I wanted a lively yet serene play, with a mixture of philosophy, humor and fantasy: I wanted a play to fit the new mode, free of symbolism.
I walked about my garden and my peace trees, and there, over there was Caliban, a savage slave; I took another turn, and there was Ariel; I heard the wind blow hollowly across an uninhabited island...
“Safely in harbor is the king’s ship; in the deep nook where once you called me at midnight... Go, make yourself a nymph of the sea... Where should this music be? In the air, or the earth? Delicate Ariel, sea nymphs ring the knell...in the dark backward and abysm of time...”