A passage from Christopher Rush's biographical fiction on Shakespeare, Will (2007). It
is a novel much possessed by death, as it is structured around a
conversation with his lawyer concerning Will's final will and
testament, and his life now all past and no future. But there are many
other deaths to go through before the final one. Here (ch. 47)
Shakespeare reminisces on the death of his son Hamnet—and on the traces
it left in his work. Such traces are not in the least explicit: there
is no elegy "On the Death of My Only Son", something which has
bothered a number of scholars. Here, Rush's Shakespeare resumes work
after the child's burial.
When I finally came back to my lodgings in St Helen's, I clumped heavily upstairs to find the script of King John
scattered on the table just as I'd left it. I leafed through the pages
till I came back to Act Three Scene Four, where Constance, bereft of
her boy, takes comfort from the Cardinal that we shall see and know our
friends in heaven. 'If that be true,' she says, 'then I shall see my
boy again.'
The ink in the pot had dried up
in the sweltering August heat. The room smelt foul and was like an
oven. I opened the shutters to let London in again, re-filled the
inkpot, and with three strokes of the pen scored out the scene. Then I
sat down and re-wrote it on the spot. This time the distraught mother
found no confort in the golden words of the church. As I wrote, I
recalled those four empty walls in Henley Street that used to echo with
his laughter and prattle.
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
Stuffs out his garments. I was remembering that little pile of
clothes. And how I'd sat for hours in Stratford, turning them over and
over, holding them up, crushing them to my lips. My own garments were
stuffed out now with a stranger. I caught a sudden sight of myself in
the glass.
A
ghost had come back to Bishopsgate to carry on the life of work and
worry. There was nothing left for him to do. I knew he would throw
himself into it, reap the rewards, bask in the glory, the honour, the
fame. All of which he did. But he carried a long sorrow for his son and
these were not the last lines he wrote for him. He spoke to him in his
verses many a time to come. That's what the death of your nearest and
dearest does to you, Francis — estranges you from yourself, from life.
After the funeral you look at the world like the moon, with that vacant
stare, and no one sees or knows what's on the other side. Ben Jonson's son died too, of the plague, seven years later (the child
was seven at the time). I poured drink into Ben that night.
'His life may have been cut short, Ben — but in short measure life may perfect be.'
He looked at me with red eyes. And later stole the line when he lost a
daughter and penned her an elegy. Never missed a trick, old Ben. But
for his son he wrote a touching little lament of his own: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy — my sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
My own sin had been the opposite. I hadn't thought of him
enough. Not after that day I'd left him on Clopton Bridge. At least Ben
Jonson didn't have that guilt to live with. But I buried my guilt
between many lines. Ben's grieving love deserves to stand out clear.
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetrie,
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
It was nicely turned,
don't you think, that verse of Ben's? But I don't believe Ben turned
back to it after that. He moved on. Maybe I moved on too, or seemed to.
But it didn't stop me, couldn't stop me turning back. Grief in its
fullness doesn't always erupt at the time of death. It may take years
to blossom, to burst into those blackest blooms of the heart. The black
bile was always threatening me anyway, but Hamnet always kept it at
bay, even when I only thought of him. And when I saw him, all too
seldom, he cured in me thoughts that would thick my blood, with his
child's matter made a summer's day short as a winter solstice. After he
died came bleak December everywhere, every day; and every day after
that, somewhere in every single day that followed, I felt the chill of
that one awful day that would never go away. Every chill was that same
chill, every day was that same day, the day we buried him.
What ceremony else? That's what I
really wanted to shout at them that day, remembering my sister all over
again, and those maimed rites. What ceremony else? The old rites were
gone that could have comforted. We therefore commit his body to the
ground. Therefore.
It follows. Because we can no longer sing him to the saints with sage
requiem and ministers of grace. Because we have taken away your old
rituals, and therefore something of your beliefs too — for even beliefs
are made of words.
Which leaves you with what? With
a private knot of pain. Goodnight, sweet prince, I wanted to whisper —
and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. But no more of that, if
you please. Forasmuch
as it hath pleased almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our
dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground,
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope
of the resurrection to eternal life thorugh Jesus Christ our
Lord. Sure and
certain? Nothing was sure and certain any more. They didn't even call
him by his name, didn't even use a personal pronoun. Not a 'thou' was
spoken. Dear brother? What brother? What impersonal being was that?
Dear God, he was my son,
my only son. They were throwing on the earth, closing up the grave,
shutting off communion, sundering me from my dead child with their
Puritan words, hammered like cold nails into his coffin. Must there no
more be done? Can't we help them on, our lost lovely dead? Can't they
be allowed to call out to us, to help us too, the ones that mourn?
Can't we communicate? Must the bond be broke so entirely by death, and
the starkness of that cold ground, those inflexible words? No, the dead
boy is not in heaven, he is in the earth, he's dead, dead and rotten.
That's what you're left with on that terrible day, worse than the wrath of God. Dies irae? God's
anger would be acceptable, divine ire heaped on your head, better than
that emptiness, that coldness in the soul, and that rebellious anguish
that makes you cry out in the bitterness of your heart. No, no, no
life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou not breath
at all? Thou'lt come no more. That's the closest words can come to
expressing the pain of child loss. And ten years later, in Lear, the pain was still going on.
It went on in play after play. Sebastian was plucked from the waves and restored to his twin sister,
Viola, the sea of troubles turning to salt waves fresh in love, in my
troubled mind. And Leontes sees the dead brought back to life, a
miracle before his eyes, and all pain subdued. But not the son, not
Mamillius. The son never comes home again. Good night, sweet prince.
It's the father's fault, always the father's fault. John Shakespere's
time was unjointed and I'd to set it right, an absent father, and I
must be from thence, and Hamnet's life the price, aye, Will, lay thee
down and roar.
So he died over and over as I
lived on and wrote on and on, died in every play that filled up the
space he'd left. He couldn't stop dying, even in the days of my best
success. He had to keep on dying because I had to keep on burying him,
laying him to rest — not in shattered Catholic rites but in the only
rituals left to me, the theatre, the ones that plays provided. They
could never take that away from me. What ceremony else? The play, of
course, the play's the thing, once more, over and over again. It was a
public burial, never ending, pulling in mourners from the globe, from
the ends of the earth, but it was also deeply private too, it was that
paradox of the self that only the player knows.
—oOo—
