Will Read online

  PRAISE FOR WILL

  ‘This is a fleshy novel indeed, gorgeous, garrulous and gross…Rush stitches the story together with great colour… brilliant and evocative.’

  The Independent on Sunday

  ‘Masterful - a lifetime’s engagement with Shakespeare’s words informs every page.’

  James Shapiro, author of 1599

  ‘Courageous…a great book for lovers of Shakespeare.’

  The Mail on Sunday

  ‘A richly poetic novel…linguistically witty and imaginative, as any attempt to ventriloquize Shakespeare must be – Anthony Burgess is the only other novelist to pass this test.’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘[T]his spectacular novel…evokes the Bard and his landscape with mystery and utter confidence. The most amazing, literate and entertaining novel I’ve read in years.’

  Sir Ben Kingsley

  ‘An absolute gem of its kind…the author paints a spectacular portrait of London life…a must for A-Level students or undergraduates looking for that much-needed shortcut to higher grades [it] is undoubtedly a stunning achievement that puts most biographies in the shade and deserves to win awards.’

  British Theatre Guide

  ‘Described with intensity.’

  The Independent

  ‘Startlingly poetic… an excellent addition to the canon of Shakespeare novels.’

  The Spectator

  ‘There is a huge imaginative energy running through the whole book…it’s a triumph.’

  Professor Neil Rhodes, St Andrews University

  ‘[An] extraordinary book…Rush has achieved a wonderful ventriloquism…Will is a novel about who we are and where we came from: catholic, unwhiggish, a masterpiece.’

  The Sunday Herald

  ‘Such a raging poetry and fluency that it seems set to eclipse all other semi-fictional accounts…startling… frighteningly vivid…unforgettable…deep, wise, brilliant, courageous and beautiful.’

  Scottish Review of Books

  ‘We get to see the real Shakespeare – angry, emotional, honest, reflective, joyous and despairing.’

  Kingdom Magazine

  ‘Infinitely fascinating…Rush’s language conjoins the mundane and then miraculous, assuming a burnished Elizabethan accent in a torrent of metaphors…Rush uses his alchemy to make them eminently accessible, adding energy with anachronistic exclamations and unabashed innuendo. Sexual humour becomes the very core of comedy. What puns Rush finds in a name; what rampant imagery springs from Shakespeare’s genitals…this is illuminating stuff…Rush was born to be Shakespeare!’

  Glasgow Herald

  ‘A most remarkable work. He has made the Bard live!’

  John Bayley

  ‘One of the few masterpieces about Shakespeare the novel has produced.’

  Owen Dudley Edwards

  ‘Will can only be described as a spectacular feat, a prodigious enterprise, and a most remarkable production… Ingenious and original, diverting, amusing, poignant and moving, this book cannot be read without huge pleasure and immense wonderment at Rush’s great achievement.’

  Textualities

  ‘A brilliantly witty and imaginative piece of writing. It ought to be a front-runner for this year’s Booker Prize. Unfortunately it suffers from one huge disadvantage - it is far too enjoyable!’

  Classic FM

  ‘[Rush] has done an impossible job surprisingly well.’

  Alasdair Gray

  Will

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Peace Comes Dropping Slow

  A Resurrection of a Kind

  A Twelvemonth and a Day

  Two Christmas Stories

  Into the Ebb

  Venus Peter

  With Sharp Compassion (with John Shaw)

  Where the Clock Stands Still (with Cliff Wilson)

  Venus Peter Saves the Whale

  Last Lesson of the Afternoon

  To Travel Hopefully

  Hellfire and Herring

  This eBook edition published in 2014 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published 2007

  Beautiful Books Limited

  This edition first published 2014

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  Copyright © Christopher Rush, 2007

  The right of Christopher Rush to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored,

  or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic,

  mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

  the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-784-4

  ISBN: 978-1-84697-278-2

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  In loving memory of my little brother John, who gave so much.

  And in honour of Will’s brilliant shadow, Ian McKellen.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Epilogue

  A note on anachronism, accuracy and language

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Francis Collins came today. There’s something about March that spurs lawyers on and whips them up afresh, following the long winter glooms, all eyes and ears and anxiousness again. Francis is no exception. I could hear him rubbing his fat palms together as he came up the path. I heard a knocking at the south entry. I was lying in bed but I could see him wiping off the money-smile before Mistress Anne answered
the door. See him in my mind’s eye, that is, making his fatal entrance. Strange how death’s imminence sharpens the senses, enhances the fancy.

  ‘Up today, is he?’

  Bark bark, hack hack.

  ‘Jesus, Will, that sounds bad. A churchyard cough. Better get this draft done and dusted.’

  Before my own dust settles. I know. (Spoken aside).

  Very well, I said – (spoken aloud) – let’s draft all cares and business from our age.

  He gave me that owl’s look, going glassy and goggle-eyed as usual at the merest whiff of blank verse. Not strong on poetry, Francis Collins. Which makes him a good lawyer. And a dull human being. Who comes alive only when he eats and drinks.

  ‘Cares and business, Will? Leave these to me, old friend.’

  Gladly, Francis. And what else besides? That I unburdened may crawl towards death – and out of your whispering.

  He smiled and shook his head, and I closed my eyes and thought of what’s to come: a draft, a will, a death. And exit Will from the world’s stage, his last words uninspired, dictated to a quillman, and quite undistinguished from his clerk’s mentality. That made me protest a little, I must admit, roused up in me a moment of rebellious frenzy, unseemly to my years.

  Is this it then, Francis? I, William Shakespeare, do appoint… Is this what it’s really come to, in the end?

  He put on his pious professional look.

  ‘It’s what it always comes to, Will. It’s what it must come to.’

  Golden lads and girls all must…

  ‘There you are, you said it yourself.’

  As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

  ‘Exactly.’

  More than exactly, Francis. Do you know what golden lads are – exactly?

  ‘What do you mean?’

  It’s what we call dandelions in these parts, it’s what I used to call them when I was little. Hence the dust idea, seeds, you know?

  ‘I know. We used to call them pee-the-beds. It doesn’t change the situation. You were the golden lad of the London theatre for twenty years. And now you’re unwell, you’re a husband and a father, making a will. And I’m here to assist you. So none of your posturing, master dramatist, and let’s get down to it.’

  What can you say? What can you do, when you’re sick and tired, and your lawyer is pawing the floorboards like a little black bull? You get down to it, of course, just as he directs. Or rather you lie down to it and let him do the scribing – you’ve had enough of quillwork – and you grunt approval or denial every now and then. He knows your mind, you’re surprised by how readily he reads it, telling you what you were going to say in any case. And before the bat has flown his cloistered flight your affairs are settled, your house is in order. As for the frail house of flesh, your tenancy is up, and it will soon be over with you now and forever.

  But for you, my masters, my shadows, my audience, my charmed circle, for you it’s different. Desire, not business, is your theme. Huddle up then, come close, forget Francis Collins, and tell me what you’d really like to hear. A speech of quality, no doubt, before this humdrum legalese? I can do you anything, gentle friends, any exit piece you care to name – tomorrow and tomorrow, never never never, ripeness is all, the rest is silence. The simplest words worked best, put into the mouths of doomed and dying mortals, words that made even the groundlings stop scratching, stand still and wet their cheeks, like trees bedashed with rain.

  What do you say, then? Will you hear the will? – the words required by law, the skeleton text, the narrow facts, the miserly truth, the last anxious dictates of a spidery hand, the spindly paring down of language to one unquestionable unambiguous deed.

  Or shall it be a soliloquy spoken from the shroud? If so, then I’m your man, an old actor, after all. Well, not old exactly, at fiftyone, yet that’s not much, but frail and ailing in this mild March, gone suddenly cold, some forty plays and thirty years of theatre behind me, and nothing now between me and eternity but the elmwood coffin where my poor bones shall be thrown.

  ‘That’s enough of bones and shrouds from you, Master Shakespeare, it’s a will I’m about to write out, not a death warrant!’

  Francis brought the small table over to the bedside to save my voice and his ears, and started scratching out the opening formalities, ensuring my consent by saying each word out loud and clear, speaking slowly and emphatically as if to an old idiot.

  ‘In the name of God, Amen. I, William Shakespeare, of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick, gent., in perfect health and memory…’

  Jesu, I thought, what, will this line stretch out until the crack of doom? I’ll be dead before he finishes. But it’s no matter. Let him scribble and drawl – that’s what he’s for, and how he’s best contented. As for us, we have other talk on hand, and for that I’d be up and dressed, and out of this nightgown that really is beginning to feel like a shroud. How easy is it, then. Easy to close your eyes, rise like a wraith from your own carcass, don your best boots, your old outmoded apparel, snug enough weeds for Will, reach out across the desk, dip the quill for the last time into that pot of black gold, and with quivering wrist begin to write.

  About death: the undiscovered country, the after-dinner sleep, the everlasting cold, the dread of kings, the poor man’s friend. A subject on which I wrote with false authority. I became quietus’ witness, a theatre expert, an illusionist, an imposture of the end. I killed off scores with quick stabs of the quill, made the parchment weep, made stone mouths bleed roses and Yorick’s tongue take root. The words grew like flowers about the vanished lips, and a prince heard echoes of eternity in a silence that has no end. But the rest is never silence, sirs, it is loud with doubt, and eloquent with the unsaid. And as I sit here now and watch the slow dawns and sunsets set fire to Stratford, I ask myself for one last time, what is death? Somebody once said it has many mansions, and others say it’s nothing: rottenness, silence, sleep. I don’t know about the mansions. But I do know that death is not nothing. It is rather the sum of all it takes from us. By subtracting from us everything that we had, and reducing us to that much less than zero, to minus whatever we were, death turns out to be the opposite of nothing. It is, quite simply, everything. To know exactly what death is we must therefore know precisely what it is taking away. And so it is with me, in this my last performance. I must curl up once more and go to sleep in the womb. I must be born again. I have to go back to the beginning.

  1

  ‘Shall we make a start then, Will?’

  They never go away, do they, those conveyancers, those raspers in your ear? Francis Collins poured himself a generous measure of my best burgundy, slugged back a gulletful, topped up the glass, and set it on the little table, next to the quill and ink, the near pristine parchment. I noticed how the bleak March sunlight leaked through the inverted red cone of wine and winked at me from the walls of my room, my death-chamber. Something of the old life stirred in me, something slipping away. But I can’t get a grip on the quill. You see to it then, Francis, the penwork. Give me a cup of sack there.

  ‘I know thee not, old man. Behave yourself. You’ll have a small glass of what I’m having, and keep your head clear. Now where do you want to begin?’

  That was a strange one – want to begin. You don’t want to begin. The beginning is as out of your control as the end. Someone, something else decides. And where could it have begun but where it did?

  In the county of Warwick.

  ‘Yes, you’ve said that, Will. It’s written down. In the county of Warwick.’

  So come with me if you will. Follow the path of the rain. Jump on the back of an angel as it leaps like feathered Mercury from heaven’s floor and descends upon a second heaven, this sceptred isle – and tell me what you see. The emerald heart of England. And winding its way across that fertile green zone, a silvery track, winking at the moon, silent, glittering, as though left there by some night-foundered snail.

  Is that poetic enough, Francis? Does that outfox you? You’
ve heard nothing yet. Nor have you, my shadows. Descend then, crowd about now, closer still. Descend. Come closer. That lozenge wedge is Warwickshire. The wake of the midnight snail makes a bright noise now in the morning air.

  ‘The river Avon?’

  Divider of fields and forests. Fielden to the south, Arden to the north, the Forest of Arden, the beautiful wild Norman country of Beaudesert. And of all these bounds, even from this line to this, with shadowy forests and with champains riched, with plenteous streams and wide-skirted meads, we make thee lady.

  ‘That’s a generous bequest, Will, but not to the purpose.’

  That’s what I call poetry. And that’s what I said once to Anne Hathaway at the end of an afternoon’s intimacy: a highly charged act in which I played the player king and made large promises, including loving her forever and knowing no other woman.

  ‘Sounds familiar.’

  I’m sure it does. But I’ll come to all of that by and by.

  By and by is easily said.

  Like my name.

  ‘I, William Shakespeare…’

  Yes, thank you, Francis. I, William Shakespeare. It has a certain ring to it, you can’t deny, no matter which way you say or spell it – and they weren’t much fussy in Warwickshire in the good old sixties when I was busy learning to spell the names that God gave you. God had cloth ears. If the recording angel was anything like a Warwickshire scribe, your chances of being correctly identified in the Big Book on Judgement Day were less than one in ninety. This murdered sleep for a time. Supposing there were an orthographic error – and in the scribal confusion I ended up in hell? How have you spelt it, Francis? Let me see.

  ‘Now there’s really no need –’

  Shakspear, Shokspere, Sakspere, Saxpere, Schakosper, Choxper, Shexper, Chacsper, Sadsper, Shagspear –

  ‘Painful on the will.’

  Shaxbee, Shaksbye, Sackspree, Sashpierre, Shakespert, Shakeschafte, Shakestaff – I can’t make this out.

  ‘God knows who you are, Will, and so does your lawyer. Never afflict yourself. What’s in a name?’

  Whole volumes in folio. Stories galore. Take Saxpere the foreign chronicler, Sodspar the bosun, Sucksperm the whaler, Sharpspoor the hunter, and old Señor Saspedro, the soldier of the family, who dreamed of cutting foreign throats, of healths five fathom deep, of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades. I fetch my life and being from men of royal siege.