Rotten at the Heart Read online

  “It’s the hairless ass he misses, Will,” called John Heminges, another of the company’s actors and shareholders, from across the stage. “With Burbage in his drink and Henderson in his dress and paint, I think they oft confused the bounds of life and art.”

  Burbage drained his cup and hurled it at Heminges.

  “Perhaps we should take a razor to Jenkins’s haunches and put our esteemed player in a better spirit,” I answered.

  Burbage guffawed a laugh, his original distemper largely pretended anyway. “You may shave what you like, Will, but you’ll still lack the steel to do it harm. Your name may say ‘Shakespeare’, but at the brothels they call your shaft more akin to the quill you wield than to any spear.” Burbage grabbed his own codpiece. “The ladies do, however, desire my Lancealot.”

  The company, those amused and those not, broke into laughter, knowing it the only way to tease Burbage back to work. For Burbage, the adulation of a crowd was like the sun unto a flower.

  Burbage strode to centre stage as though truly for an audience, grasped Jenkins by the shoulders, and kissed him firmly on the lips. “I shall learn to love thee, boy, even if my lance shall not.”

  The rehearsal concluded, I sat alone at the small desk in the theatre’s stores, and considered our accounts. Our troupe, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was the leading company in London, but leading that pack of late meant only that we would be the last to ruin. Only a few years hence, we – along with the other companies of players, the bear baiters, the brothels, and all other entertainments – had been forced from the city proper. For in the city, the power of the Puritans was ascendant, and their joyless philosophy saw no distinction between an actor and a whore, considering any activity that might grant a man a moment’s pleasure a festering infection that diverts his soul from the constant worship of their harsh god. The city, too, in concern of the recurring bouts of plague that still sprung to flame from the smouldering pestilence that underlay its burgeoning population, hoped our relocation outside its bounds would lessen the threat. And so we current kept our theatre in Shoreditch, while many of the other companies were across the river in Bankside.

  The company owed the lease, the shares, to the owners – of which, thankfully, I at least was one – and the wages to the other players. Given three new plays to be opened in the coming weeks, we would again need to buy the costumes and other accoutrement attendant to a successful staging. Our revenues had always scarce bested our expenses, but too often now that slim margin fell to the wrong side of the balance.

  Thankfully, I had a correspondence from Henry Carey, both the Baron Hunsdon and the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. He had been in poorly health, which was a grave concern, as his status as our troupe’s namesake and patron was in truth our greatest asset. If this note was evidence, he was some recovered, and requested a series of performances at court, as the Queen herself enjoyed all manner of amusements – her tastes much vexing those Puritan ministers who desired to drive from life every pleasure. A curious religion to me, so sure that we are most of us damned and yet still preaching such poverty of spirit that, on the day we wake in hell, we will find our sufferings not much increased from the dour life that they require.

  Word from Carey was most welcome, both as a sign that his health was recovered and so his patronage secure and because our investment in performances at court was minimal and the payment for them generous. With these, we might steal a march on the forces of penury, whose armies of late seemed always at our gates.

  Which left the conundrum of my personal accounts. I had the expenses of two households, my own in London and that of my wife and children in Stratford. And from Stratford, too, word of a new suit targeting my father. His barely disguised Catholicism left him vexed by the taint of recusancy, which eroded his station and left him prey to any who might press a claim, for he was forced to balance the benefit of a vigorous defence against the attention his opponents would surely bring to his religion. At least his closet Catholicism was better tolerated in the hinterlands than it would be in London. Here, for me, any stench of Papistry could mean ruin.

  Yet I am no Catholic. On matters of religion, I am convinced that any attempt to reduce to human custom and practice the will of a God infinitely exceeding the capacity of our understanding is folly. At best an innocent folly that encourages some charity and blunts the less holy impulses of our animal natures. In common practice, a banal folly buoying the hearts of men, who hear in the pause between each beat the empty echo of their own mortality, so that through all history they have hewn gods of every nature from dead stones and then prayed to their creations, imagining that a deity of their own making can somehow bridge that abyss which, at death, awaits us all. In its worst and most common practice, religion is an invented madness purposely infected into people to drive them to hate and to mould them to the ambitions of charlatans. It makes the world into a model of the hell they pray against in service of the trivial and transitory desires of the princes of the earth, whether those princes are adorned with crown or mitre.

  Also on the desk I had a long-awaited response from the College of Heralds. My father, years ago and at the time still the bailiff of Stratford, had sought the armorial bearings and coat of arms that would make him, officially, a gentleman, and me, therefore, a gentleman born. But the application had languished as my father’s fortunes reversed, until I, some months prior, and, at the time enjoying an uptick in fortune that I had foolishly presumed to be permanent, had renewed that claim. Now came word that, with only payment of the final licence, the arms would be granted.

  When teased by my fellows about my pretendings to stature, I would swear my aim only to be to secure for my father that standing that I did feel his by right. And, as should be with any good fiction, that lie was true – for to be finally named a gentleman would comfort my father greatly and provide some bulwark against the stream of claimants who now found him an easy meal. I did even admit my own desire for the practical advantages the status of gentleman would convey, as it would allow me to stand on even ground with the landlords and merchants with whom I had daily truck. It would allow me to adorn myself in honest in such finer clothes as oft I wore only on stage without risking the attention and fines of Her Majesty’s agents, as their Sumptory Laws forbade commoners from wearing certain fabrics and colours so that their betters could ready distinguish those deserving their courtesy.

  With the half-measure of these some-true lies I deflected inquiry into the hypocrisy of my appetites. But I cannot conceal from myself the venal ambitions of my own heart. I cannot forget that, as a boy, I did sometimes hate my own father for falling from his station at just such time as I might first taste its benefits, knowing full well I had done nothing to earn them by merit. Did hate my mother and the name Arden, which was the well-spring of the faith to which they did so stubborn cling, to all our ills, to no benefit that I could discern and with no blessing of philosophy to which, even now, I could lend credence. And I still remember the brickbats from the university playwrights, their amusement at my poorer Latin, at my occasional lapses in manners, and at my constant attention to matters of business – for I had not their wealth to pursue theatre as a diversion or a passion alone, but instead needed to make from it a livelihood.

  So, in those moments when, in conscience, I confront the truth of myself, I must confess that the coat of arms is not for my father, and not even for the mercantile advantages to be gained as a gentleman, but is instead a reflection of my own naked lust for standing. A lust I have so oft lampooned in the characters I write. But I had been a more optimistic man when I took up the cause of our family arms anew, and now understood that cost of the licence was likely beyond my means forever. I pretended to a status I had done nothing to earn and could never afford.

  We can know our own ills, but that does not mean that we can cure them. And if my own golden calf is a simple scroll adorned with a shield and a scribbling of Latin, then it is hubris at the least to imagine mysel
f the better of those who cling instead to a cross or a crucifix. We are each adrift on our own boundless ocean and must cling to any flotsam of hope on which we can gain purchase, for despair yawns in the deeps and would have our meat in its fearsome jaws should e’er we let go.

  The daylight was failing. A month past, I would have bolted to the borrowed rooms where I had found a kind of Eden in the arms of a young mistress. But of late what I had done to earn the fruit of that now despoiled apple, and the cost to us both of its conniving acquisition, had become too plain. The pleasures I gained from her favours were now so stained with shame that I could scarce keep my own company knowing first how I had made hers. And so, despite the girl’s entreaties, I had these past days foresworn her bed.

  Too dark now to read the ledger. I could start a candle, but candles are expensive. I resolved to retire to my quarters. I would burn a candle there in service to my writing, and since that service would provide saleable product for our company, at least the candle would earn its wage. The play was the thing. Though at current I was flailing for an idea on which to anchor one, wasting not only candles, but also ink and paper on failed and fitful starts.

  As I closed the ledger and returned the papers to their drawers, Burbage burst in, staggered with drink, his face pale. His mouth gaped, and he choked for a moment as he tried to speak.

  “Calm yourself, man,” I said. “What news has thee so?’

  “It’s Carey,” Burbage said. “The Lord Chamberlain is dead.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “How are you called, Shakespeare?”

  I was awakened early the morning next by a herald from Somerset House, home to the late Lord Chamberlain and his family. The herald bore a summons to meet that evening with George Carey, the eldest son and second Baron Hunsdon. I was glad that it was the Baron’s herald and not the Baron himself who witnessed my state, as I was askew after a long night with Burbage and the company’s other shareholders during which we tried to blunt this insult to our fortunes with what drink we had at hand and then, having exhausted that, sorely depleted the stores at the tavern closest.

  Now I stood at Somerset and in the Baron’s company, having borrowed from our troupe’s stores the attire to costume myself into a semblance of propriety and hoping that this prompt attention from the late Lord Chamberlain’s heir signalled good fortune.

  “My lord?” I said.

  “Your name, man. How are you called?”

  “Will most often, by those who know me well, but as you like it.”

  Carey grunted. “By which to say, should I prefer to call you a spotted ass, you would pretend no offence so as to retain my favour?”

  “By which to say, my lord, that my name is William, and whether Will or Willie or Bill, they all fall as easy on my ear, and that I am sure that the truth of your reputation – which is that of a fair and gentle man – would preclude you call me by any name to which I could not in honour answer.”

  Carey barked a gruff laugh, and poured from a silvered jug two measures of claret, holding one out to me.

  “Can you in honour drink?”

  I smiled and accepted the goblet. “In honour, yes, and even again when honour is out of earshot.”

  Carey sat in the chair nearest, but as he made no invitation that I do the same, I kept my feet.

  “And so you are clever,” he said.

  I gave a long nod, as if to bow. “As a shepherd has naught to sell but his mutton, I have naught but my wits. And as I am not yet starved, they do find some commerce, but in a more common market than your grace would frequent. I do fear that my wits might taste stale compared to the finer meats of your habit.”

  Carey gave me a long and inscrutable look, an appraising, then drew a swallow from his goblet. “I suspect you know well enough the quality of your mutton, sir, and I suspect also you have found few voices which please you as well as your own.”

  “I had, sir, until I made your company, but I am now better served to hear yours.”

  Carey rose from his chair and made a slow circuit of the room. A decade older than me, a half-head taller, he was a powerful man gone some heavy now. But still with muscled shoulders and arms that no doubt could cleave well with a blade. His clothes were of fine material and yet simple manufacture with little of the excess adornment common to his station. I feared to learn whether his plain dress was due to some Puritan sensibility or from mere simplicity of habit. But thought, too, this. My experience with men of his rank was either at court or at our theatre when they graced our performances, but in either case, public occasions for which they would dress to proclaim their station. Ours was a private meeting and in his quarters and it sudden seemed likely that his dress merely reflected what little effort my rude company required.

  His passage of the room complete, he stopped before me, just enough distant that I could not say his intent was to intimidate, but also could not say other.

  “You are concerned, I assume, for the future of your company?” he asked. “Having lost the weight of my father’s favour?”

  I cleared my throat. “As a shareholder of the company I am, of course, bound to consider its interests. But I would not so sully your father’s memory as to broach such matters so close in wake of his passing. There is time enough, always, for business, but this time should be reserved to the fond memory of your father.”

  Carey stood stock still a moment, considering me. Then he spoke, a harsher air to his voice. “Did you think I summoned you that we might embrace my father in fond reminisce? Do you imagine, sir, that, should I wish some company to celebrate my memories of him, I would reach first to you? A commoner, and not even of my personal acquaintance?” He looked darkly at me for a long moment with eyes that held both anger and hurting.

  As I could think of no safe answer, I answered not.

  “What business could I have with you, sir,” he said, “save business?”

  A misstep. A volatile man, Carey, and though he did at first act in good fellowship, he was quick to return our speaking to the bounds of our divergent standings. I bowed.

  “My lord, I fear my own love for your father did colour my judgment. I am here as your humble servant only, in such capacity as you may require and no other. I do beg pardon for my offence, asking that you know it stemmed only from an excess of affection.”

  Carey let out a soft snort. “I am told you are of the country, only marginally schooled, and yet your tongue can dance a jig about the truth as well as any of the over-read mandarins at court with whom daily congress is my unfortunate duty.”

  He paused a moment, a slight slackening in his expression that had me think I was to safe or at least safer ground.

  “There is always time for business,” he continued. “ As a man much of this world, I understand that that time is always now. It is the memories of men that must wait their moment until some respite grants us leave to consider them. My father will always be in my mind, but my hands now must be about his work.”

  “As you will, my lord.”

  And his expression changed again, but this time to the blank slate of a clerk tending a store. “I am prepared to continue patronage of your company in the custom that my father has established. The Queen will soon, I am told, name me to continue my father’s office as the Lord Chamberlain, and, as such, I will decide those players chosen to entertain at court and to otherwise distract her Majesty as she desires.”

  I bowed deeply. “I am most grateful, my lord.”

  “But in return I will require a service.”

  “My lord,” I interrupted, “you should know I already have begun work on a play to be performed in your father’s memory–”

  Carey held up his hand. “Such plans as you may have to honour my father should proceed as you deem his honour merits. The service I require is of another nature.” Carey paused for a moment, breathed deep, again sat in the chair, his face now masked with troubles.

  “How closely did you know my father, Will?”


  “Our company was well blessed by his favour, my lord, and on those occasions when we performed at court I had chance to speak with him. He was forthright in his opinion, kind in his manner, fair in our dealings, and I have always thought of him only well.”

  Carey nodded, facing away and looking out through the mullioned window into the evening, the edge of the distant sky turning the same red as the claret I had nearly finished.

  “He was a soldier first, as am I,” Carey said, “and not by temperament suited to court, some here finding his manner rough. He was better loved by those at arms than by the untried souls that stalk these halls to curry to the Queen’s favour. Save for the Queen herself, by whom he was loved best of all.”

  “I should trust a soldier’s opinion as to the measure of a man above all save the Queen’s, my lord.”

  “He loved me well and I him,” said Carey, “Does your father yet live?”

  “By the grace of God, he does.”

  “And do you hold him dear?”

  “I do, sir.”

  Carey nodded, his face turning back from the window to me.

  “Then we have a bond not so common as it might be in a better world be. Few men know their fathers scarce at all, and fewer still with any affection. And yet all I have learned of worth, I learned at his hand.”

  “Then his loss must afflict you greatly, my lord.”

  Carey sat back in his chair, drew in a long breath, and let it out slowly in a sigh. “He lived three score years and ten, was an able soldier, held well those offices to which he was appointed, raised to manhood two sons, and goes to God as unstained, I think, as any man of his years and experience can pray to be. I should greet his passing with only peace.” Carey raised his goblet and drank it dry. “Save for my dreams.”

  “Your dreams, my lord?”

  “My dreams. Which are my curse and the purpose of your visit.” Carey stood from his chair and resumed pacing the room, a troubled man who could find no peace when still and seemed intent to chase it. “You are aware, I am sure, that I did not until of late frequent your revels. It was my father who asked that I consider them, as he found them instructive. Such plays as you authored in particular. And I have noted that dreams figure in them often.”