Love's Will (28 page)

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Authors: Meredith Whitford

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“Yes,
Ireland. I used to want all those things.”

“You’ve
written about them, you’ve made them real to other people.”

“I
suppose so.”

“Will
you,” Harry said, “ever write about me?”

“Oh
my dear, I have. Every golden youth I’ve ever written was you.”

“And
every woman was Anne?”

“No.
But some of them were her, at least in part. The loving, steadfast wives were all Anne. No doubt more will be, too. Or my daughters. The rest are, as usual, imagination. And one day soon people will lose interest in my plays and laugh at my poetry. I’ll be out of fashion and forgotten. And then I shall retire permanently to Stratford and marry off my daughters and sit by the fireside with my wife and fret about repairing my house and saving my money.”

“Or
go on to even greater fortune as the King’s pet playwright. Perhaps he’ll knight you. Give you a pension.”

“I’d
like it, but I doubt it.”

“It’s
possible. Anything is possible.”

“Trite
but true.”

They
were holding hands now and William could feel the pulse in Harry’s wrist racing. “Whatever happens,” he said awkwardly, “she won’t put you to death. Not now.”

“She
might.” Harry’s blue eyes had dilated with fear and tension so that they looked entirely black. Black as that woman’s. “She might give the order as the last thing she does, to show that traitors are not to be forgiven. Even as she dies, so might I, by her order. Or someone may try to seize the crown before James can do so. Think of Lady Jane Grey. There are always ambitious people, always people plotting. If I am to live, James must become king. Elizabeth killed his mother and he has never forgotten or forgiven that. Her enemies are his friends. His friends are her enemies, and she may be vengeful even after death.” Feverish colour burning in his face, he turned to William again. “If I die, write something for me. Something on my death. So that I shan’t be altogether forgotten. Promise me, Will.”

“I
promise.”

“And
that song of yours, the one that woman set to music, fear no more the heat o’ the sun, make that mine, say it at my funeral or over my grave. Make my grave renownéd.”

“I
promise. But there is no need, Harry, the Queen will die, you will live. And when we meet again, you as the new King’s Counsellor, perhaps, me as one of his tame players, we’ll bow and perhaps talk. You’ll tell me of your children and your wife, I’ll speak of mine, and then I will retire to Stratford and be forgotten, and sometimes I will hear news of the Earl of Southampton’s latest glories. I promise.”

Muffled
at first by the fog, a sound began to come clearly to this room. Outside, the passing bell was ringing, to say the Queen was dead.

End Note

Of
the people in this novel:

Elizabeth I died on 24 March 1603 and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland. In April 1603 the new king issued Letters Patent making the Shakespeare's company The King's Men. Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest plays after Queen Elizabeth's death, and retired, rich and famous, to Stratford not long before he died in April 1616.

Anne Shakespeare died in August 1623. Famously, or notoriously, Shakespeare left her only his 'second-best bed' in his will, which may mean anything or nothing. Probably her husband assumed she was automatically entitled to the widow's share of one third of his estate, although some biographers say there was no such entitlement in Warwickshire. If not, unless she had some private settlement of money, Anne was left to the tender mercies of her elder daughter and son-in-law.

Susanna Shakespeare married John Hall, a Puritan and quack physician without any medical training, on 5 June 1607. Although in his will Shakespeare was pathetically anxious to settle his estate on Susanna's male heirs, she and Hall had only one child, Elizabeth, born in February 1608. She married Thomas Nash, son of one of her grandfather's friends, in 1626, and after his death married John Barnard, who later received or bought a baronetcy. Lady Barnard died without issue, and the Shakespeare estate went to her Hart cousins. Susanna died in July 1649, her husband in 1625. The Halls received the bulk of Shakespeare's estate in his will. (In 1637 creditors chasing a debt against Hall's estate broke into New Place and stole "divers books…and other goods of greater value", probably including all of Shakespeare's books and other papers.)

Judith Shakespeare was thirty-one when she married Thomas Quiney, son of a prominent Stratford family, in February 1616. The following month her husband was found to have impregnated one Margaret Wheeler, who with her baby died in childbirth. It must have been a juicy Stratford scandal, and may have accounted for Shakespeare's reducing Judith's portion of his estate and making sure Quiney couldn't get his hands on her inheritance. None of Judith's children survived her. She died in 1662.

Shakespeare's father died in 1601, his mother in 1608. None of his brothers married. Gilbert died in February 1612, Richard in February 1613, and Edmund in December 1607, five months after the death of his illegitimate son. He is buried in Southwark Cathedral, and it can be assumed that William paid for his funeral with the expensive tolling of the passing bell.

Joan Shakespeare married William Hart, who died a few days before his famous brother-in-law and presumably of the same disease. Joan died in 1646, and it was the descendants of her several children who eventually inherited what was left of Shakespeare's estate.

The Earl of Southampton was released from prison by King James on 5 April 1603, and restored to his titles and properties. He had married Elizabeth Vernon in 1598, only just before the birth of their first child, Penelope. They had four other children, and their marriage seems to have been happy and affectionate. In 1624 Southampton, like Shakespeare, suffered the anguish of watching his son die, then himself died the next day, presumably of whatever killed his son. By his daughter Penelope's marriage to a Spencer of Althorp, Southampton was the ancestor on their mother's side of Their Royal Highnesses The Princes William and Harry of Wales.

Except for the Dark Lady, the boy Nol and Anne's old cousin, everyone in this novel actually existed. Although the author followed historical data, their characters, emotions and actions are her own invention and any resemblance to any real living person is entirely coincidental.

The only spelling of his name that Shakespeare never used was 'Shakespeare'. His extant signatures, and the way his name was spelt in official records (‘Shagsper’, ‘Shaxberd’) suggest that in his time his name was pronounced with a short 'a' in the first syllable, and an unstressed second syllable. His actual last will and testament, dated in 1660, was headed ‘Shackspeare’ and signed ‘Shakespere’. Only in print was he, for technical reasons, ‘Shakespeare’. In this novel I've used 'Shakspere' as a half-and-half measure.

'Wriothesley'
is pronounced 'Rizley'. 'Henry' was always pronounced 'Harry'.

Many
biographies of Shakespeare use a multiplier of 500 to convert money in his time to ours. Other sources use a multiplier of 100. A mark was worth two-thirds of a pound.

I have always read a lot of and about Shakespeare. In the 1990s, when I was stuck between a contemporary novel and what would become my first published novel,
Treason
, I became very irritated with so many (mostly male) authors’ insistence that the tortured genius fled a carping, illiterate farmer’s daughter who, thoroughly on the shelf at twenty-six (in fact exactly the average women for Tudor women to marry), trapped him into a shotgun marriage and saddled him with three children before he was twenty-one. We all have our own ‘vision’ of Shakespeare, and mine did not include the unhappy marriage or horrible wife that is so readily assumed. So I started writing a novel about a happily married but unfaithful, bisexual Shakespeare. And then the film
Shakespeare in Love
came along, and suddenly there was a new novel about Shakespeare almost every week. So this book went on being my ‘security blanket’ when I was stuck with other writing – until one day I realised I’d finished it and had nothing more to say.

Hard,
provable facts about William Shakespeare and his wife are scarce, although as research and scholarship march on, one would now need not the back of a stamp but perhaps a postcard to fill with what is known. We know the date of his baptism (26 April 1564) and the date of his death (23 April 1616) but not the date he was born. We know he married Anne Hathaway in November 1582 and that their first child, Susanna, was born six months later. We know the baptismal dates and names of his three children, the date of publication of his long narrative poems, and when, but not why, his son Hamnet died.

There
are records of his land and house purchases and of his endearing refusal to pay taxes, and of his (evidently reluctant) involvement in legal disputes. There is nothing provably in his handwriting. There are six extant signatures, all different, three of them (possibly forged or "assisted") on that curious document, his will, clearly made when he was too ill to know what he was doing, and in which he almost forgot to leave his wife anything.

There
is little agreement about when most of his plays were written except where there is an extant record of someone seeing one of the plays. The few other facts give us no real picture of Shakespeare.

No
one knows whether the Sonnets tell the story of two real and passionate love affairs (as they do in this novel) or if they were simply sophisticated literary exercises. Certainly it seems Shakespeare made no attempt to publish them, but nor did he attempt to publish his play scripts, yet he took great care with the publication of his two long poems. That the plays still exist at all is due to the dedicated work of two of his fellow actors.

So
most biographies are about five percent fact and (except for Bill Bryson’s recent book) the rest wishful thinking, imagination or some very strange assumptions. Really we know nothing about the private Shakespeare.

Might
as well write fiction, then, and have some fun.

Meredith Whitford. 2012

Select
Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter
Shakespeare: The Biography
. Chatto & Windus, London, 2005

Akrigg,
G P V
Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton
. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1968

Auden,
W H
The Dyer's Hand and other essays
. Vintage Books, 1968 edition

Bate,
Jonathon
The Genius of Shakespeare
. Picador, London, 1997

Bryson,
Bill
Shakespeare
. (For the Eminent Lives Series) Faber & Faber, 2007

Cook,
Judith
Shakespeare's Players
. Harrap, 1983

Duff
Cooper, Alfred
Sergeant Shakespeare
, Viking Press, New York, 1950

Duncan-Jones,
Katherine
Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his life
. The Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

Greenblatt,
Stephen Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Jonathon Cape, 2004.