Will and Testament
When Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare's lodgings in Silver Street and said: "Let us drink."
"Ben," Will cried. "Your ears are untrimmed and your nose whole. The shearers were held off, then. I'm glad to see you well."
"But thirsty. Let us go and drink."
"We can drink here and shall. Malmsey? Sherrisack? Or shall I send out for ale? Ben Ben Ben, have a care. Next time the shearer may be the ultimate trimmer, the sconce-chopper as they call him."
"I've a mind to drink in a tavern. Let us go."
"As you will, this being a sort of great day for you. How was it in jail? Are Marston and Chapman there yet?"
"There still and like to stay. After all, the offending line was of their making. As for the jail – stink, maggots, rats, lepers, pocky chancres. But there was a man I will tell you of while we drink."
"You swore to me the line was your line, the best line in the whole of Westward Ho as you would have it. How does it go now? 'The Scotch -' It begins with 'The Scotch -'."
"Eastward Ho is the title. You look as ever the wrong way. Back when the rest of us look forward. It is this: 'The Scotch are good friends to England, but only when they are out of it.' Well, indeed I wrote it, but it seemed politic to father it on the other two. Under oath, aye, but a poet could not live did he not perjure." They went down the stairs and past the workshop of the tiremaker Mountjoy, Will's landlord. Mountjoy was scolding, in Frenchified English, the apprentice Belott.
"Immortal," Will said. "He can never say that I did not make him immortal. But no gratitude there."
"How immortal?"
"I have him in Harry Five as the herald."
"He taught you the dirty French for the same?"
"He put right the grammar. I knew the dirt already." Out in Silver Street, which the sun had promoted to gold, they saw beggars, limbless soldiers, drunken sailors, whores, dead cats, ordinary decent citizens in stuff gowns, a kilted Highlander with a flask of usquebaugh in place of a sporran. A ballad singer with few teeth sang:
"For bonny sweet Robin was all my joy,
And Robin came oft to my bed.
But Robin did wrong, so to end his song
The headsman did chop off his head."
"An old one," Ben said. "And still I cannot hear it without a shudder."
"It seems older than it is. A great deal has happened in the interim. Poor Robin."
"That was your name for him? You called him Robin to his face?"
"He was Robin to my lord of Southampton, and my lord of Southampton was ever Harry to me. So it was always out-upon-titles. But, he was ever saying, when he was become King Robert the First of England there would be no familiarity then. Would it had been so, sometimes I think, though bloodless, bloodless."
"Treason, man, careful."
"What will you do, report me to Gobbo Cecil? 'An't please you, good my lord, there is this low playmaker that doth say how the Essex rebellion should have succeeded.' He'll say, 'Aye aye, and maybe he's in the right of it.' He's no love for slobbering Jamie with his bishops and buggery and drinking tobacco is an unco foul sin to the body, laddie, and doth inflame the lung, if thou lovest tobacco then lovest thou not thy king."
Ben sighed. "I know how it is. I say too many Scotchmen about and I am flung in jail. You could tell the king to his face that he's a – I say no more, you see that sour man in black there? Following us, is he? Nay, he turned off. You could skite in his majesty's mouth and he'd say, 'Aye, I do dearly love a guid witty jest, laddie, will ye be raised to a Knicht o' the Garrrterrr?' Some men are born jail meat. Others – Here, round here. At the bottom of this lane. Go tipatoe, 'tis all slime underfoot. Careful, careful."
"The Swan with Two Necks." Will read the warped sign with a fastidious nose-wrinkle. "This is not a tavern I mind ever to have visited before."
"It is quiet," Ben said, leading the way into noise, stench, striding over a vomit pool, between knots of swarthy men with daggers. "We can talk in peace and quiet." They sat on a settle before a rickety much-punished table whereon fat flies fed amply from greasy orts and a sauce-smear unwiped. A girl with warty bosom well on show showed black teeth and took an order for wine. "Red wine," Ben said. "Of your best. Blood-red, red as the blood of our blessed Saviour." Some villains turned to look with surly interest. A man with an eyepatch nodded as in friendly threat at Ben. "Buenos días, señor," Ben said.
"For God's sake, Ben, what manner of place is this?"
"A good place, though something filthy. Good fellows all, though but rogues to look on. Now let me speak. A great change is come into my life."
The wine arrived. Will poured. "Change? You have fallen in love with some pocked tib of the Clink and think her to be a disguised angel?"
"Ah, no. By heaven, this is good wine, red, aye, red as the blood that is decanted daily on the blessed holy altars of the one true faith."
"For Christ's sake, Ben."
"Aye, for Christ's sake, you say truly. What I do I do for Christ's dear sake. Let me tell you, my dear friend, what befell. In this noisome stinking rathole behold the word of the Lord came to me."
"Oh Jesus the word of the."
"Aye, a good old priest of the true faith, aye, though earning his bread as a dancing-master, thrown into jail for debt, spake to me loving words and told where the truth doth lie. It was by way of being in the manner somewhat of a revelation." Ben drank fiercely and then said: "Good wine. Enim calix sanguinis. Drink a salute to my holy happiness."
"Keep your voice well down, man," Will said, his voice well down. "See how they all listen."
"They may listen and be glad. I have friends, have I not? Have I not friends here?" he called to the drinkers. "Amigos? There was no response save for a man hawking, though all looked still.
"I am getting out of here," Will said.
"Aye, ever the prudent. Well, there is another word for prudent and you know it well. A plague on all cowards. Why should I not speak aloud my joy in being restored to the one true holy bosom? Is not the Queen's self of the blessed company? I tell you, the day is at hand when we may take the holy body in sunlight before the eyes of all men, not skulking in a dark hole. Hallelujah."
"You know the danger, fool," Will said, sweating. "There was an expectation of tolerance, but it is not fulfilled. The bishops will see it is not. Let us be out of here."
"With this blessed red wine unfinished? With this blood of the grape crimson as the blood of."
"I am going." Will drained the sour stuff and turned down his cup with a clank.
"Well, well, very well, I have told my story. Now, thanks be to God, my true story doth begin." Ben drank straight from the jug, beastlily, emerging spluttering. He wiped his mouth with the dirty back of his hand and nodded in a friendly manner at the company. "Give you good day, all. And God's blessing be ever on your comings and goings and eke your staying where you are."
"Come, idiot."
They left. Ben said, "Aye, aye, we will see how the spirit works. Is anyone following?"
"None. None yet. Do you wish someone to follow?"
"I say no more of it now, Ben Jonson his conversion. Except that you may speak of it to your friends and colleagues and all you will. I care not. I dare all for the lord Jesus. I owe him a death."
"That is mine. I wrote that."
"You did? It is all one. There is a tale they tell of you, do you know that?"
"What tale? Where?"
"Jack Marston told me. It is of Master Shakespeare dead and ascending to heaven's gate and demanding admittance. St Peter says: We have too many landlords here, we need poets to sweeten long eternity. Well, says Master Shakespeare, I am well known to be a poet. Prove it, says St Peter. I am of poor memory, says Master S, and can remember no line I wrote. Well then, says heaven's warder, extemporize somewhat. At that moment within the gates and all visible from the threshold little bow-legged Tom Kyd goes by, a poetic martyr, with his fingers cruelly broke by the late Queen's Commissioners. A bow-legged one, says the saint. Extemporize on him. Whereupon, firequick, Master S comes out with:
"How now, what manner of man is this
That beareth his balls in parenthesis?"
"Whereupon St Peter sighs and says: We have no room for landlords."
"Not funny," Will said. And then: "So they talk of me as dead already, do they?"
"Not dead. Shall we say retired. Your sun setteth. Westward Ho is your cry." Ben looked behind him to see two daggered ruffians following. He said in some small excitement: "Leave me here. Take your leave, aye. I think there are two coming who will show me where I may hear mass Sundays and saint-days. The blessing of Mother Church on you, Will."
"No, no, I want no such blessing."
It was some week or so later that Ben Jonson sat at dinner with new friends, the room being an upper one in Eastcheap. There was Bob Catesby at the head of the table, very fierce and sober, and a swarthy one that had been in that low tavern that time they called Guy though his true name was Guido, somewhat drunk on Spanish wine, and there were Rob Winter, little big-eyed Bates, Kit Wright, Tom Winter brother of Rob, and also Frank Tresham who kept wetting a dry lip and looking shifty. Catesby said to Ben:
"You are wide open, Master Jonson. Your days are numbered."
"By whom?" Ben said. "If you mean that I blab of the brotherhood, by God you are mistaken."
"You have not done that, no, you have been prudent enough there. If you had not been so, Guy here – a soldier, remember, who will cut off ten heads before his breakfast – Guy, I say, would have had you, by God. No, I mean imprudent in that you talk too much of the Godless King and the runagate Queen, who will show her bosom and legs to all and go to mass hiccuping with the drink. I mean treasonable talk. I believe you are destined for a martyr's crown."
"No," Ben said. "I want not that. I will not force apart the jaws of heaven for my precocious entering. Heaven may open in its own good time without my prompting. There is wine for the drinking yet and wenches for the fondling. Nay, no martyrdom."
"Speak out the scheme, Rob," Catesby said to Tom Winter's brother. "You are he that must hold it in his memory. You are our living parchment."
"Well, then," Rob Winter said, looking at Ben, "it is this. It is to do with the new session of the parliament. All will be there – King, Queen, Prince Henry, nobles, judges, knights, esquires and all, all for the forging of new acts and laws to put down the true faith. They will be blown up."
"They will be -?" Ben asked carefully.
"Blown up. We are to place twenty barrels of gunpowder in the cellar beneath with faggots on top. Set but flame to the faggots and there will be a greater blowing up than has ever before been seen in the long tale of tyranny and human suppression."
"Blown up," Catesby said after a pause, as to make sure Ben properly understood.
"The Queen," Ben said, "is of the true faith. Is it right she too should be blown up?"
"You are always ready to talk of her Godlessness," Catesby said. "Well, she will be punished. Alternatively, she will be a martyr. Destiny puts forth a choice."
"However you gloss it," Ben said, "she will be blown up."
"Everybody will be blown up," Tom Winter said, pausing in the picking of his teeth. They had eaten of a roast ham, each mouthful full of teeth-hugging fibres. "Everybody."
"And then there will be a new era of love for the true faith?" Ben asked.
"We will think of that after the blowing up," Catesby said. "Certainly there will be a many problems, but sufficient to the day as the Gospel saith. First the blowing up."
"And the choice of the one to whom shall be given the glory of setting flame to the faggots for the blowing up," Kit Wright said. They all now looked at Ben.
"He too will be blown up?" Ben asked.
"There is every likelihood that he will be blown up," Catesby said. "But he will at once be endued with a crown of martyrdom. You, Master Jonson, are wide open." They all continued to look at Ben. Ben said:
"How first are you to convey the barrels to the cellar?"
"It is a wine cellar," Rob Winter said. "The barrels will be brought on a vintner's dray. What have you there, the guards will ask. Wine, will come the answer. Wine, as hath been ordered. It is all very simple."
"And the faggots?"
"The faggots will be in another barrel, dry and ready for the laying on. And he that is to do the brave deed will go as a guard in a borrowed livery. Bearing a torch."
"In broad daylight?" Ben asked.
"He will say he has orders to search the cellar for possible treasonous men lurking. It is all very simple."
Francis Tresham now spoke. "I am against it," he said. "It is a plot of some cruelty. Also of some injustice. The Queen, true, is a foreigner and doth not matter. But there are enow good Catholic Englishmen in hiding among those of the parliament. We are blowing up our own."
"Martyrs' crowns," Ben said. "Think not of it."
"You will do the deed?" Catesby said, leaning closer to Ben and, indeed, discharging a blast of hammy garlic onto him.
"I will think on it," Ben said. "Your reasons are of a fairly persuadent order. I will go home now and start to think on it."
"Guy here will go home with you," Catesby said, "and help you think on it."
"No, he will not," Ben said. "I want none breathing on me while I think. I go into this in full libero arbitrio. I cannot be made to do it."
"That is true," Catesby said. "Except by the promptings of your own destiny, Master Jonson. I see the martyr's crown hovering above you." He looked somewhat fiercely at Tresham. "Frank," he said, "you waver. It is strange you waver when you were loudest once in saying perdition to the betrayer of the faith of his own royal mother. There are measures may be taken to discourage waverers." He looked at dark Guido and then back at pale Tresham.
"I am no waverer. I ask only that we right our souls on this matter of the killing of Catholics along with Protestants. It is a matter of theology I would ask that we concern ourselves withal."
"Theology," little Bates now said. "There is enow of theology at the Godless court, holy Jamie and his atheistical bishops. Out on theology. Let us have the true faith back and God's enemies blown up. I drink to you," he said, "Master Jonson," and drank.
"I too drink to me," Ben said, and drank likewise. He wiped his loose lips and wrung his beard and said, looking at the company severally, "Now I go home. To pray. For blessing and eke for guidance."
"Guido will go with you for guidance through the perilous streets," Catesby said.
"I go alone. I am in no peril."
"Guy will be your guide."
Ben, with Guido Fawkes at his flank, was some way advanced through the warren of stinks and drunkenness and stinking drunken bravoes that led to his lodgings when, to keep up his courage, he began to sing:
"Here will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."
At the song Fawkes clicked his fingers and said:
"Spy."
"I cry your mercy, what was that?"
"Spy, I said. I think you to be a manner of spy."
Ben ceased walking or rolling and looked at him fair and straight beneath the moon. "You are drunk, man. You know not what you say."
"Spy. I asked myself long who it was you put me in mind of, and he too was a poet and spy. He cried his sodomitical atheism to the streets, and none did him harm. I conclude he was under protection. His name was Kit Marlowe. That was a song of his you were singing but now. Spy."
"Marlowe," Ben said soberly. "He was all our fathers, though he was slain young, God help him. You flatter me more than you know. But I am no spy." They heard as it were antiphonal singing, though more drunk than sober, approach.
"Sit we amid the ewes and tegs
Where pastors custodise their gregs
And cantant avians do vie
With numinous sonority."
"O Jesus," Ben prayed. "Jack Marston."
It was Marston, true, drunk, true, but able to see, mainly from the bulk, who stood in his path. "Jonson, cheat, rogue, liar, ingrate, thief too. I am out now, see, and have learned all. Graaagh." The sound was of blood rising in the throat.
"You speak too plain to be true Marston. Where be your inkhorn nonsensicalities? Thief, you say. No man says thief to Jonson. Any more," he added to Fawkes, "than he says spy."
"Thief I say again. You said that you would pay me when Henslowe paid you, that Henslowe had not paid you, therefore you could not pay me. But Henslowe has paid you, has, thief. I was with him this night, I saw his account book. Draw, thief." He drew himself, though staggering.
"If it is but six shilling and threepence you want, let us have no talk of drawing. Come to my lodgings and you shall have a little on account. I will not have that thief, Jack. I am a man of probity and of religion."
"Of that we hear too," Marston cried. "The lactifluous nipples of the Christine genetrix and the viniform sanguinity of the eucharistic abomination. Draw."
"Very well." Ben sighed and unsheathed his short dagger. "I have killed, Jack," he said, "and my adversary was sober. I killed Gab Spencer, remember, and he too said thief." Ben now saw the reflection of flames in a bottle-paned window. Torches lurching round the corner of Cow Lane. Four men with swords and cudgels, the watch. With relief he lunged towards Marston. Lunging, he saw Fawkes flee. Wanted no trouble, right too, right for his filthy cause. Marston thrust, tottered, fell. Ben sheathed his dagger and leapt onto Marston's back, took his ears like ewer handles and began to crack his nose into the dirt of the cobbles. Then the watch was on him.
It was four of the morning when Will received the message to go at once to the Marshalsea. A boy hammered at the door below and Will went to his window, Mountjoy in his nightshirt also appearing, a minute later, at his.
"Mester Shakepaw?"
"Approximately. What, boy?"
"Mester Jonson in the jail do want ye naow vis minik."
"He wants money?"
"I fink not sao. E gyve me manny, a ole groat, see ere."
"Go away, garsoon," Mountjoy cried harshly, "discommoding the voisinage so. We desire no parlying of prisons in this quartier. It is a quartier respectable."
"I'll come," Will sighed. "I'll come now."
Few were sleeping in the Marshalsea. There was a kind of growling merriness, with drink, cursing, fumbling at plackets, gaming, a richer though darker version of the dayworld of the free. There was even a one-eyed man selling hot possets. Will listened, sipping, to Ben's story. "The names," Ben said, "take down the names."
"I can remember well enough of the names."
"You cannot. You are poor at remembering. You cannot remember even your own lines. Take your tablet, take down the names. And then to Cecil."
"Now?"
"Now, yes. Easy enough for you. You're a groom of the bedchamber, a sort of royal officer."
"This is no jape?"
"This is by no manner of means a jape, God help us. Go. I am, thank God, safe enough here. Cecil will understand all that, why I wish to be shut away. I am safe enough here till he has them."
"I will write them down, then."
"Do, quick. Then go."
"So," Will said. "Kit is truly your master. Though look where his spying got him. A reckoning in a little room. Keep off it, Ben. Playwork is duller and pays less well. But it is safer."
"Go now. He will be up. He does a day's work before breakfast."
Will sat, in groom's livery, too long in the anteroom. He had spoken of his business to secretaries of progressively ascending status, and none would come alive to the urgency of it. One had even said: "If you would speak of plots for new plays, then must you go to the Lord Chamberlain. Here be grave matters in hand."
"You will be at no graver work than the scotching of this that I tell you of." Weary, three hours gone by, Will took to sketching of a drinking song he had been asked for by Beaumont, something for a comedy to be called Have at You Now Pretty Rogue or some such nonsense:
Red wine it is the soldier's blood
And if it be both old and good
So take a rouse
And let's carouse
And
Strange, he had been infected by Ben's feigned unreformed eucharisticism. No, it was tother way around. Blood turned to wine, not wine to. His head was spinning with lack of sleep, he needed much sleep these days, past his best, looking westward. He began to calculate his fortune in real estate, but that led him to things needful to be done in Stratford. The load of stone still encumbering the grounds of New Place and neither paid for yet by the Council nor taken away. His brother Gilbert had written of some odd useful acres he might – He was shaken to here and now by the top secretary, who said:
"You are to come in. And quickly, rouse. My lord speaks of urgency."
"He was not very urgent in speaking of it."
"Come your ways."
Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, big-headed and dwarf-bodied, stood with his hunchback turned to the great seacoal fire. Papers, papers everywhere. He said:
"I am glad, albeit it be brief, to make acquaintance of the man. The plays I know. Your Amblet was fine comedy. What is this story?"
Will told him. "And Master Jonson fears for his life now. He deserves, if I may say this, my lord, very well of you."
Cecil picked up a letter from his desk. "This has but now come to me. You know of a certain Francis Tresham Esquire?"
"His name is, I think, on the list I gave."
"He has a brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle. Lord Monteagle has sent me a letter from this Tresham, and it saith nought but this: "They shall receive a terrible blow this parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them. The danger is past as soon as you have burnt this letter." As you see, it was not burnt, nor will it be. I am conveying it at once to His Majesty. So what you bring from Master Jonson conjoined with this does but confirm what the King will say he knew all along, that he hath enemies." Cecil smiled very thinly. "Moreover, it would seem that his dreams are often charged with what may be termed a memoria familiaris. Blowing up comes much into them. His father, the Lord Darnley, was, as you will know, blown skyhigh at Kirk-o-Fields in Scotland while his royal mother was dancing at some rout or other. So, I thank you for this your loyal work -"
"A tragedy, good my lord."
"It might well have been so."
"No, no, my play, which some call Hamlet."
"Was it so? I remember laughing. Now I will remember the intention was tragic. And remember too to have Master Jonson out of the jail where he languisheth as soon as the conspirators be apprehended." Cecil gave his hand, very crusty with rings, to Will. Will was not sure whether he was meant to kiss it. But he shook it sturdily and left.
When Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare's lodgings in Silver Street and said:
"Let us drink."
"Ben," Will said, "if you mean we are to go again to this low papist tavern full of vomit -"
"Nay, show sense, man, that was but show. That was part of the part I played and played well. I am as good a son of the English Church as any that was fried under Bloody Mary, and I will prove it Sunday by drinking the whole chalice off before all the world. I say let us drink. I say also let us eat, it being near noon. I have good King's gold here." He made jangle the little purse at his waist or no-waist. Clink clank. "We will eat roach pie and flawns at the Mermaid."
Ben told it all over the fishbones and pasty fragments. "Of course," he said, "the King will have it that he foreknew all. Let them, says he, get in theirrr Godless butts of gunpowderrr and I myself, laddies, will marrrch thither with guarrrd and witness to prrrove it was no tale. So he did, and so he says that he has singlehanded saved the rrrealm. Will you come to the hanging?"
"I will not."
"Squeamish as ever. Twelve men swinging aloft in the sun and enow guts and blood and hearts ripped out to feed the King's kennels a whole day. There is a little book to come," he coughed modestly.
"I thought you were waiting to print all your plays, such as they be, in one great book called Ben Jonson's Works, mad notion. Or is it epigrams and corky expatiations all in Greco-Latin?"
"I will let pass your pleasantries. This little book will have no name of author below the title, though all shall know from the mastery whose it is. The title is to be A Discourse of the Manner of the Discovery of the Late Intended Treason."
"That is too long."
"Have a care, man. It is the King's own. And it is to be spread abroad that the King's self had the writing of it but was too royally modest to set his name thereto. It is a terrible false world."
Will now quoted from something he was writing. "We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves."
"You sound as though you cite somewhat from some new kennel of misery you are hammering together unhandily."
"A tragedy, aye. About a king that insists on divine right and knee-killing deference and fulsome fawning and will not have the plain truth. He is cast out into the cold and goes mad and dies."
"A care, Will, a care."
"It is for the court."
"O Jesus, O blood of Christ not really present on the altar. You will be hanged and quartered like any Guy Fawkes."
"I care not. We have seen the best of our time."
When Christmas came to court, Lear, done by Dick Burbage, ranted and tore his beard, and Queen Anne slept or woke and pouted at what seemed most unseasonable for Yule, a time of drunken showing of one's legs in some pretty wanton masque, while James drank steadily and chewed kickshaws offered by a succession of lords on bended knee. After the play he ranted. The Grooms of the Royal Bedchamber were there, in livery after their acting, yawning, Will among them, hound-weary, half-listening.
"Therrre ye see, my lorrrds and ladies and guid laddies a', what befalleth a king that trusts too much in human naturrre. It is the trrragedy of ane that insisteth not enough on his divine rrricht. He lets gang the rrrule o's rrrealm tae ithers. Weel, thank God though I hae drrrunken sons I hae nae ambitious dochters of yon stamp. Aye aye aye." Then he suddenly shouted. "Kingship, kingship, kingship," so that many of the drowsy started full awake. "I was but rereading in the Geneva Bible this day, aye, and find therrre mickle to offend, aye. Much flouting I find of the divinity of kingship in the saucy marrrgins therrreof. Aye, I was in the rrricht of it, the divine rrricht I may say, to hae thrrrown oot of the rrrealm a bulk nae matterrr hoo holy that hath been defiled by the pens of Godless rrrepublicans, aye. It is verrry parrrtial in its notes and glosses, verrry untrrrue, seditious, and savourrring tae much of dangerrrous and traitorrrous conceits. When, my lorrrd arrrchbishop, shall we see our ither, our new, our Godly?"
"They are hard at work, your grace," said the Archbishop of Canterbury, huge archiepiscopal rings of weariness under his eyes. "All fifty-four translators, all six companies. Andrewes and Harding and Lively report well of the progress of the holy work and say but four years more will see it sail gloriously all pennants flying into port."
"So Harrrding looks lively and Lively labourrrs harrrd, eh, eh?" There was loud and immediate laughter that went on long while the King beamed around and said: "Aye aye aye."
Will could see that his majesty was looking in vain for a pun that should bring Lancelot Andrewes, head of the Westminster translating groups, into his fancy. Without premeditation Will came out, in a firm all too audible actor's voice, with:
"Each Bible scholar, so the ungodly say,
Works lively hard Englishing for no pay
The royal Bible, aye, and rewes the day
When such an unholy labour came his way."
There was a terrible silence into which the King waded rather than leapt. He said:
"And wha micht ye be, laddie? Wait noo, I ken, I ken, ye are he that wrrrit the play of this nicht, are ye not?"
"Aye, William Shakespearrre, yourrr majesty," Will said, hearing with horror an effortless parody of the royal accent.
"Ye maun wrrrite it doon, yon saucy blasphemous irrreverrrent and impairrrtinent lump o' clairrrty doggerrrel, that all may see, laddie."
"I have forgot it already, your royal majesty," Will said, hearing in horror the faint traces of the sobbing Danish intonations of the Queen.
"Aye." It was clear that James did not know well what to do. Will had often met this situation when being unpremeditatedly pert to the great. He now willed the King out of his problem. Be sick, great greatness. "Aye, ye and yourrr saucy rrrhymes." He looked green and began to heave. It was, indeed, the usual end of a court soirée. Some writer of music for the virginals, Tomkins or somebody, had spoken of producing a tiny sequence consisting of the King's Rouse, the King's Vomiting, the King's Rest. "I maun gang," the King said, very green. "I mind ye, laddie, I'll mind yourrr sauciness." Then, on the arms of two simpering earls, he was led away to the Harington water closet, invention of the late Queen's godson, Britain 's contribution to the civilization of Europe.
"By Christ," Burbage said, "you get away with murder."
"What Ben Jonson says. Thank God our revels now are ended, aye."
When, much much time later, Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare's lodgings in Silver Street and said:
"Let us drink."
"Ben," Will cried. "Your ears are untrimmed and your nose whole. I'm glad to see you well."
"But thirsty."
"Drink water then. It seems to me that less and less of wine makes in you more and more of oppugnancy. If this drunken watch-beating continues it will be a matter of one day's holiday between longer and longer lingerings in the Clink."
"The Marshalsea. Listen. It was a strange time. I worked on the Bible."
"What?" They went down the stairs, past Mountjoy scolding his daughter Marie for loving the apprentice Belott, into the street, demoted to lead by the dull day. There were more drunk about than usual, belike because of the dull day. "The Bible, this I know, has already been worked on, nay worked out. They are at the great final stage of the galleys. And it is Harding and Lively and Andrewes, not you, that had the making of it. You are a man of some small reasonable talent, Ben, but you are no man of God. It is work for men of God that gratuitously or necessarily know Greek and Latin and Hebrew."
"I know all those tongues," Ben said. "I can Hebrew you as well as any clipped rabbi. It is, indeed, the work that comes before the final launching that has made lively my days in the stinking rathole of the Marshalsea. For, since I am a poet, they brought to me the poesy of the Bible. Meaning Job and the Psalms and the like. You are a poet, they said. Tickle our sober accuracy into poetic life. So I dip quill in horn and correct the galleys to a diviner beauty."
"Who brought the galleys and said all this to you?" Will said with some jealousy.
"Some man of the Westminster company – Bodkin or Pipkin or some such name. No whit abashed at the prospect of seeing God's work buffed and polished in a foul and pestilential prison. The apostles, he said, were in prison before being variously crucified."
"That will not be your fate. Whatever your fate is, it will not be that. That is the fate of the godly." And then, before they entered the Dog Tavern, "Is it you only of all our secular versifiers that are bidden trim the sails of the galleys?"
"Oh, there is Chapman, also Jack Donne – not properly secular, there is talk of his taking holy orders this year. Marston's name was mentioned but I was quick there. If, I said, you want a Bible that beginneth with In the ininalities of the mondial entities the Omnicompetent fabricated the celestial and terrene quiddities, then have Jack Marston by all means. There were others mentioned, smaller men."
"Was I," Will asked, "mentioned?"
They sat down not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both. When the jug of canary came Ben was able to have his laugh out.
"Why do you laugh? What is risible in me or others or elsewhere?"
"There were special orders that you should not be brought in. No Latin or Greek nor Hebrew – that was brushed aside as of small moment. But the King has a long memory and himself said that he would not hae that quick laddie that was perm with his imperrrtinencies."
"How do you know this?"
"There is some foolish rhyme fathered on you about the King sticking his lively harding andrew up the translators to make them come quicker and threatening to cut off their old and new testicles if they did not. It could not be you, it is too corky and bad even for you. But I will be kind. You shall not be out in the cold like the foolish virgins. I, Ben-oni, the Benjamin that Jacobus loveth, though he cannot keep me out of jail, I am ready to deliver sundry psalms into your palms."
"Is there money in it?"
"Honour, glory, perhaps an eternal crown."
"I am done with all writing," Will said, "even for money. I grow old, I grow old. I am forty-six this year. I will retire to Stratford and hunt hares and foxes."
"You would rather be hunted with them. And you have said this too often before of being done with writing. You will go and stay a week and then be back here thirsting to write some new nonsense. I know you."
"You poets," Will said, "may keep your Bible. You may stuff your old and new testes up your apocrypha."
"There speaketh sour envy. Well, we will keep it and be glad. For the day may come, some thousand years hence, when even the Works of Ben Jonson will be read little, but the bright eyes of Ben Jonson will flash out here and there in a breathtaking felicity of phrase from the green Eden of God's own book that may never die."
"You may stick your holofernes up your methuselah."
"Master Shakespeare," said Frank Beaumont timidly, "there is a matter we would talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here."
"She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three."
"I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedy called Out on You Mistress Minx which must be ready for rehearsing some two days from now and not yet started though the money taken. You are quick, sir, as is known. A night of work with Jack and me as amanuenses and it can be done. We can pay a shilling. It is safe here in a little bag in Kitty here her bosom."
"I have done with writing," Will said proudly. "I go to tend my country estates. All you poets may stick your zimris up your cozbis."
"Well bethought and à propos and a proposito. We were held up in our playwork by the need to work on the Song of Songs that is Solomon's for Dekker that hath an ague. Kitty here gave us a good phrase. Love, she said, is better than wine. Is not that a good phrase?"
"She carries two fair-sized flagons on her, I see. If by love she means comfort more than intoxication, then she is not right."
"Comfort me with flagons," Beaumont said to Fletcher. "Flagons is better than apples. Make a note."
"You may all," Will said, getting up, "comfort your deuteronomies with your right index leviticus. I go now."
"It is jealousy," Ben said when he had gone. "He has no part in the holy work."
Will rode to Stratford nevertheless with three or four psalms in galley proof in his saddlebag, a gift from Ben Jonson. He was to see what he could do with them; to Ben they seemed not to offer matter for further poeticization. But for Will there would be much non-writing work in Stratford, save for the engrossing of signatures. The hundred and twenty acres bought from the Coombes which Gilbert was managing ill: these must be worked well. Gardeners needed for gardens and orchards. The tithes in Old Stratford and Welcombe and Bishopston. He, Will, was now a lay rector, a front-pew gentleman. Thomas Greene, the town clerk, together with his bitch of a wife and the two beefy squallers named Grayston and Hamnet, Gray and Ham, should be out of New Place by now, the lease up on Lady Day, 1610, this year. Forty-six years of age. Four and six make ten. One of the psalms in his saddlebag was number 46.
New Place, when he got there, was bright as a rubbed angel, Anne his wife and Judith his daughter yet unmarried having nought much to do save buff and sweep and pick up hairs from the floor. The mulberry tree was doing well. Anne was fifty-four now and looked it. Ben was right: his home was a place for dreaming of going back to; he would be back in London before the month was up, nothing more certain. On his second day home a murmuration of blacksuited Puritans infested his living room. Anne gave them ale and seedcake. They had a session of disnoding a knotty dull point of scripture, something to do with Elijah or some other hairy unwiped prophet. When they came out of the living room to find Will poking for woodworm at a timber in the hall, they sourly nodded at him as if to begrudge his being in his own house. The following day they came again for a prayer meeting. He spoke mildly to Anne about this black or Brownist intrusion.
"While I am here," he said, "I will not have it. Tell them that, tell them I will not have it."
"They are godly," she said, "and a blessing on the house."
"I can do without their blessing. Besides, their aliger faces show no warmth of blessing."
"They know what you are."
"I am a gentleman with an escutcheon. I am, moreover, one of the King's servants. I am, I do not deny, also a player and a playmaker, but that was the step to being a gentleman. Will they begrudge me my ambition?"
"Plays are ungodly, as is known. They will have no plays in this town. Nor will it avail you aught to flaunt your king's livery in their faces. They know that kings are mortal men and subject to the will of the Lord."
"Genevan saints, are they? Holy republicans? What do they say of Gunpowder Plot?"
"They said that it showed at least a king might be punished for his sins by an action of the people, though to put down the Scarlet Woman of Rome is no sin and the voice of a papist is no part of the voice of the people."
"God help us, Christ give us all patience."
"You blaspheme, you see, you are in need of the power of prayer."
"I am in need of nothing, woman, save a quiet life after a feverish one. I would have some seedcake with my ale."
"There is no crumb left and there has been no time for baking."
"If you must give up your hussif's duties in the name of dubious godliness, at least there is an idle daughter who could set to and bake."
"Judith hath a green melancholy on her. It is a sad life for the girl. None asks for her hand."
"Ah, they cannot stomach to have a player as a father-in-law. Well, at least Jack Hall takes me as I am. Jack is a poor physician but a good son-in-law and husband and father. Susannah, thank God, has done well."
Susannah came next afternoon, with her husband Dr Hall and little two-year-old Elizabeth. Will played happily with the child and sang, in a cracked baritone, "Where the Bee Sucks". Anne said with suspicion:
"Is that from a play?"
"Not yet. The play that it is to be in is not yet writ, but it will be, fear not." "
"I fear not anything," Anne said, "save the Lord's displeasure." She called to Judith to bring in ale and seedcake. Seeing married Susannah and the child now drowsy on her lap, Judith let out a howl of frustration and left. Anne said:
"It is the father's office to seek a husband for a daughter. Judith is ripe and over-ripe."
"So ripeness is not after all all," Will sighed. "I will go seek in the taverns and hedgerows, crying Who will wed a player's brat?" He turned to Jack Hall, whose lips were pursed, and said, "Will you come stroll a little in the garden?"
Jack said, after a strolling silence, "Your book has been read here, you may know that."
"What book?"
"The book that is called Sonnets."
"But God, man, that is old stuff, it came out all of a year ago, and I have disclaimed the book, I did not publish it, it is pirate work. What do they say that read it, not that I care, does it confirm them in their conviction of Black Will Shakebag's damnation?"
"It is a book of things that a man might do in London," Jack Hall said gloomily. "It is pity that Dick Field brought home a copy."
"Ah, poor corrupted Stratford. So you too join the headwaggers?"
"There is such a thing as propriety. Dick Field has been long a London man like yourself, father-in-law, but he has ever shown propriety. He hath printed foul stuff enow in his trade of printing, but he hath not the filthy ink of printed scandal sticking to him. You will, I trust, forgive the observation of one who is, besides your daughter's husband, a professional man and also your physical adviser."
"Dick Field is a man tied to a cold craft, not one like me who has had to make himself a motley to the view and unload his naked soul to the world." Then he said, "What has being my physical adviser to do with the book that is called Sonnets?"
"I have wondered at times about your cough and your premature baldness. Now I read records of licentiousness in that book."
"You mean," groaned Will, then gasped, then growled, then cried aloud, "I have the French pox, the disease of that pretty shepherd Syphilis of Fracastorius of Verona his poem? Oh, this drinks deep, this drinks the cup and all. And what thinks your sainted mother-in-law?"
"She knows nought of it. The book has been kept from her and from her friends the brethren. The bridge of the nose," he said, squinting, "seems soft in the cartilage. That is an infallible sign. Do keep your voice low. It will crack if you shout out so and not easily be mended."
Will howled like a hound and strode into the house to his study, passing his womenfolk on the way. He growled at them, even at gooing little Elizabeth. In his study he took from a drawer the galleys of the psalms that Ben had given him. He took them, waving in the draught of his passage, to shake like little banners at his family, crying, "These, you see these? The King's new Bible that is not to appear until next year, given to me in part, along with my brethren the other poets of London, that the language be strengthened and enriched. You think me godless and a libertine but it is to me, me, me, not the black crows of Puritans that daily infest this house and shall not infest it more that the task of improving the word of the Lord is given. You see," he said to Anne, "you see, see?"
"A new Bible," she said. "It is all too like what one may expect of unreligious London, where the holy Geneva Bible is not good enough for them. That it is the King's Bible renders it no whit more holy. Nay, less from what we hear. Even kings are subject to the law."
"The King," Will cried, "is my master and bathed in the chrism of the Lord God. Generous and good and holy." Then he stopped, seeing he had gone too far. "The King hath his faults," he now said. Yes, indeed: ingratitude to Ben and himself: pederasty; immoderate appetite; cowardice, but half the man the old Queen had been. "But still," he said, and then: "All men have their faults, myself included. But I deserve better of the world and of this little world, and, by God, I will have my eternal reward."
"That," said Anne, "is the foul sin of presumption." Jack Hall was now back with them, listening to his father-in-law rave, grow quiet, rave again: infallible symptoms.
"My name I mean, my name. My son, poor little Hamnet, dead. And the name Shakespeare dishonoured in its own town and soon to die out along with the poor parchments that put innocent words in the mouths of players." Jack Hall shook his head slightly: self-pity too perhaps a symptom. "Wait," Will cried. "Do not leave. I, your king, lord of this disaffected small commonweal, do order you to wait. Wait." And he sailed back to the study, galley pennants flying, and took the forty-sixth psalm out of the bundle. He sat to it, calling "Wait wait" as he dipped quill in ink and counted. Forty-six words from the beginning, then. It would do, the change improved not marred. He crossed out the word and put another large in the margin. He then, ignoring the cry or cadence Selah at the bottom, counted forty-six words from the end, felt awe at the miracle that this forty-sixth word too could be changed for the better, or certainly not for the worse, by the neat mark of deletion and the new word writ clear and large in the margin. "Wait," he cried. Then he was there to show them.
Anne's jaw dropped as in death. Susannah, whose sight was dim, squinnied at the thing he had done. Jack Hall said, "This is also a -," and then kept his peace.
"You see, you see? To do this I have the right. I am not without right, do you see? Now another thing. On Sunday I will read this out in the church, aye, in Trinity Church during matins will I, and eke at evensong if I am minded to do it. For I am a lay rector. Not without right. And I have a voice that will fill the church to the rafters, not the piping nose-song of your scrawny unlay rector, do you hear me? Non sanz droict, which is the Shakespeare motto, and the name too shall prevail as long as the word of the Lord. Now, mistress," he said to Anne, "I would have supper served, and quickly." Then he strode out to stand beneath his mulberry tree, granting her no time to rail.
On Sunday morning he stood, every inch a Christian gentleman in his neat London finery, on the altar steps of Trinity Church. Family, neighbours, the scowling brethren, shopkeepers, nosepicking children filled the pews. His voice, the voice of an actor, rose clear and strong:
"This Sunday you are to hear not the Lesson appointed for the day but the word of the Lord God in a form you do not know. Next year you will know it, for it is His Majesty King James's new Bible. But now you have this for the first time on any stage, I would say any altar. The word of the Lord. The forty-sixth psalm of King David." He read from the galley expressively, an actor, clear, loud, without strain, so that all attended as they were in a playhouse and not in the house of God:
"God is our refuge and strength: a very present helpe in
trouble. Therefore will not we feare, though the earth be
removed: and though the mountaines be carried into the
midst of the sea. Though the waters thereof roare and be
troubled, though the mountaines tremble SHAKE with the
swelling thereof. Selah.
There is a river, the streames whereof shall make glad the
citie of God: the holy place of the Tabernacles of the most
High. God is in the midst of her: she shal not be mooved;
God shall helpe her, and that right early.
The heathen raged, the kingdomes were mooved: he uttered
his voyce, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.
Come, behold the workes of the Lord, what desolations hee
hath made in the earth. He maketh warres to cease unto the
end of the earth: hee breaketh the bow, and cutteth the
sword SPEARE in sunder, he burneth the chariot in the fire.
Be stil, and know that I am God: I will bee exalted among the
heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is
with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah."
He ceased, looked fearlessly on them all, then stepped down, with an actor's grace, to return to his pew. One man at the back, forgetting where he was, began to applaud but was quickly hushed. Before Will arrived at his seat, Judith said to her mother:
"I wonder that God has not struck him down."
"Wait," Anne said grimly. "The Lord does things in his own good time. Fear not, the Lord will repay." Will sat down next to her. Then, having looked on her and Judith and Susannah and Jack Hall and Mrs Hart his sister with a peculiar lingering hardness, he knelt and prayed. He prayed long and with evident sincerity, so that his wife grew tight-mouthed with suspicion. Then he got up, looking much refreshed, sat down and waited till the dull long sermon was finished. Then he said very clearly to Anne and, indeed, to any on the pew that would hear:
"I am minded to turn papist."
"God forgive you. Keep your voice down. This is not place nor time for atheistical japes."
"I will turn papist." He tasted the term gently then gently spat it out: tpt. "I will not say that. It is a word of contempt. More, it puts overmuch emphasis on the Pope of Rome. It is the faith that matters."
"Be quiet," she said in quiet fury. The service was continuing, and eyes were on Will, ears striving to pick up his words.
"Catholic," he said. Then he said no more. She remained tight-lipped. He did not speak of the matter again in the two days more he remained in Stratford.
When Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare's lodgings in Silver Street. Before he could say aught of going out to drink, Will said:
"I have writ this new play. It is called November the Fifth, but Burbage will doubtless change the title as he always does. It is based on Gunpowder Plot."
Ben sat down carefully on a delicate French chair. "It is based on -"
"Gunpowder Plot. There is a king that is a fool and an ingrate. He believes that God exists but to confirm the holiness of his kingship. Conspirators led by a poet seek to destroy him for his blasphemy."
"A poet?
"I had you much in my mind there. Not a very good poet and most apt for meddling in state matters. His name is Vitellius. Here is one of his speeches. Listen."
"No," Ben said. "Let me read instead." He looked at the fair copy that was also the first draft and read to himself:
Conserve agst ye putrifyinge feende
The fathe yt fedde oure fathers, quite put doune
His incarnacioun in thes worst of tymes,
Casting hys hedde discoronate to ye dogges.
Then he said: "They will not let you. This will be construed as present treason."
"I am sick of it all," Will said. "The black bastards of Puritans in Stratford that will have nothing but grimness, and a church that is the lapdog of a slobbering king and no king. My father died quietly in the old faith, I will die more noisily in it."
"Have you spoke of this yet to any?"
"To my lord Cecil, aye, and he said he needed no more spies aping to be papists to dig out popish plots. I have said it to many, but none will take it that I mean what I say. It is part of the peril of being a player, that all one says is thought to be but acting."
Ben said, "The great work is now in page proof. They expect it to be out in the new year."
"What is all this to do with what I said?"
"The forty-sixth psalm has shake and speare in it."
"That is not possible. None would have it, this I knew. It would be seen as bombastic and overweening."
"Tillotson, one of those charged with the overseeing of our emendations, said that the two words came nearer to the original than what they formerly had."
"That is not possible."
"He had never, I could see," and Ben smiled sweetly, "heard of the name Shakespeare."
"Let us," said Will, "go and drink."