Voices from the Past Part 122

Shakespeare, Stratford sleepwalker, walks about his bedroom,

stumbles, tries door handle, raises window:

Ann, in clumsy breasty gown, wakes him angrily:

"What on earth were you trying to do?"

"I was listening to Burbage and Alleyn

recite lines from my plays."

November 15, 1615

A

gain I sleepwalk, from room to room, standing in doorways, waiting before windows: I wake and there I am, unseeing, window, door or wall in front of me, the crime of myself, the a.s.sa.s.sination of my past confronting me.

All the perfumes...all the words...all the concern defeat their purpose and I ask myself when will I get up next time and walk the floor, to disturb and be disturbed-for what reasons? Reasons for the unreasonable, reasons for the sickness of a mind-how can they be called reasons?

I wake to remember a dream, or wake to find the moment as bare as slate, or I feel that I am somewhere in the past, with my father, bending over people stricken by the plague, the plague bell tolling, the rain streaming over my face, someone weeping.

"Where is my new cap...where's my new cap?" The dying boy pleads, huddled against the church wall.

Alleyn-on the stage at the Globe-informs me of the plague and warns me in his stentorian voice to leave off helping people, let them die; then, he carries away Puck.

Alleyn stalks across the stage, his voice cutting the dark, my sleep, my sleepwalker's darkness. Dressed for Tambourlaine, forked beard over red cloak, he swings through lines, a torch gleaming, smoking behind his shoulder.

Henley Street

November 18, 1615

When to the session of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past...

It is not love-making I call to mind but an August afternoon, the paths that led us on and on, underneath giant oaks and elms, the ground wet with sun, our happiness as sure as the trees. We walked through groves and across fields, the pathway winding past cattle and horses at pasture, men at work scything grain. Sitting on a rock fence, we listened to the swish of their scythes, their friendly calls to one another. Wandering, we ate at a farm, the people happy to have us. b.u.t.terflies and children were part of that farm: it was as simple as that, and since it was so simple I would like to have that afternoon back again, a small favor to ask of time, just an afternoon and a lunch at someone's farm, dogs lolling on the ground, a cat on Ellen's lap.

Like as the waves make toward the pebbled sh.o.r.e,

So do our minutes hasten to their end...

I have not found a way to cheat the end: my gla.s.s is broken and the sand has sifted through. I am too much i'

the shadow, it seems.

Confidence diminished as my memory failed: this began in a certain way: during one of my plays I could not speak: power of speech gone, I forgot my lines: this double confusion occurred while I acted in a play by Jonson, given in Bewick, when we were on a summer's tour.

How vividly I remember that smoky inn-the crowd, the torches. In Chester, my lines once more escaped me: utterly perturbed, I gaped at the audience standing and sitting in the August sun: I wiped away sweat: how they stamped and jeered. Confidence might have returned, after later successful performances, except for another lapse: memorizing lines for Oth.e.l.lo, I began to speak them, alone in my London apartment: again there was nothing, no sound, no memory: I had been emptied, as a rapier can take care of a wine sack: only the sound of rainfall, as I stood in my apartment: in my writing, too, lapses sweated me: there was no one to help: I told no one: soon, I thought, I'll suckle fools and chronicle small beer.

How easily I memorized, as a youngster, swallowing the lines of a play in a night or two. Now I know that impotence can a.s.sume many forms, between the legs and between the eyes.

Henley Street

December 4, 1615

So the plays evolved, week by week, line by line, the crabbed scrawl, poem and song, comedy and tragedy; so the characters came into being: Agrippa, Iago, Ophelia, Troilus, Falstaff, King Henry, bearded and beardless, s.l.u.t and angel, lady and commoner: they gawked across my sheets of paper: I see them here, about me, crowding my candle's n.i.g.g.ard flame.

But look, they have become phantoms!

Never again, king or coward, never Romeo and Juliet, never a pair of lovers to kiss and die beside a tomb. It was the nightingale and not the lark that pierced the fearful hollow of my ear...

Phantoms.

Let me be taken, let me be put to death, and not wait here, await the hand of tyranny, the slow grasp of this town's sod. I am to lie inside the church. The bell will toll. They will carry me. On my grave they'll cut these words: I decree: