The Medieval Murderers - King Arthur's Bones

I was interested to see William Shakespeare at work, I’ll admit that. Privileged too, maybe, for by this time WS was reckoned to be the finest playwright in London, and not just by us players at the Globe theatre. I’d heard that he wrote with great fluency, rarely pausing to blot his work or cross through a line, and from what I now saw it was true. His pen moved with the regularity of a tailor’s needle. Not wanting to pry or hang over his shoulder, I picked up a book from a pile on a table and flicked through the pages. It was a translation from the Latin of Plutarch’s Lives , and my eye fell on a description of Julius Caesar being murdered in the Senate. Some years before, WS had written his play of Caesar’s death at the hands of Brutus and the rest.

I became absorbed enough in what I was reading to be unaware that WS had laid down his pen and turned around to look at me. ‘What do you read?’ he said. ‘Plutarch, is it?’

‘The death of Caesar. How Julius falls at the foot of Pompey’s statue with his three-and-twenty stab wounds. Do you suppose they counted them?’

‘Someone might have done.’

‘Or the figure was plucked at random out of the air,’ I said.

‘Twenty-three knife wounds is a plausible number,’ said Shakespeare. ‘And it spreads the guilt of the killing, spreads it so thin that no one could say for sure who struck the fatal blow.’

‘What are you working on, William?’ I said. Since it was he who had asked me to visit him on this fine May morning, I reckoned I was entitled to a query or two, for all his secrecy. ‘You are writing more about the Romans?’

‘No, my subject now is the matter of Britain.’

I must have looked bemused, for WS said: ‘Arthur, King of Britain.’

‘Oh, him.’

‘Yes, him. As well as Merlin and Queen Guinevere and Mordred, and the Knights of the Round Table. The stories about them are known as the matter of Britain. You can read the account in Thomas Malory. It is a good subject because the king – our King James, I mean – has an interest in Arthur.’

This was true. On his accession, James had wanted himself styled King of Great Britain and to be seen, like Arthur perhaps, as a monarch embracing the whole circle of our island. So it was typically shrewd of WS to choose a subject which would appeal to our new ruler.

Now Shakespeare reached for an object on the far side of his desk, and I thought he was going to hand me another book. But when he gestured for me to take it, I was surprised, uneasy even, to see that it was a bone. A long bone, a human bone I presumed, part of a limb. I turned it over in my hands as if the owner’s identity might have been inscribed somewhere on it.

‘Do you know whose it is?’ I said, returning the object. A stupid question maybe, but it was for want of anything else to say. I noticed that WS handled the bone with more care than I had done, almost cradling it in his arms before returning it to its position on the desk.

‘I know whose it might be. But I am forgetting my manners, Nick. Make yourself easy in that chair and I will get us both some refreshment.’

He gave me a generous glass of sack before pouring one for himself and returning to the desk to sit down. His own chair looked less comfortable than the one I was on, but there was nowhere else to sit in the room. A silence followed. WS’s rented chamber was at the back of the house and so shut away from the noises of Silver Street. I wondered whether he’d asked his landlord for a quiet room for the sake of his work. I glanced around. Against the wall opposite the window was a canopied four-poster bed with the curtains drawn shut. A fireplace with ornate figures carved on the chimney-piece occupied the side of the room between bed and window. It was a better place than my own lodgings south of the river, but not so much better.

‘My brother discovered that bone,’ said Shakespeare suddenly. ‘Edmund gave it to me.’

‘You’ve never mentioned Edmund before,’ I said. In fact I don’t think WS had referred to any siblings in my hearing. I did not know much more than that he was married to a wife called Anne, who remained in Stratford-upon-Avon, and that he had fathered a few grown children, who might be anywhere. Shakespeare was a private man.

‘Edmund is my youngest brother. He is younger than you, Nick. He was a late bloom in my parents’ lives.’

WS looked away for a moment towards the open casement. I couldn’t tell what was running through his head but the ironic way in which he’d mentioned the ‘late bloom’ suggested he didn’t have any very high opinion of this brother. So it proved.

‘I do not know Edmund… not well. Soon after he was born, I married and then I… moved away from my birthplace and so came eventually to London,’ said WS. Unusually for him, he was picking a path through his words as if uncertain how much to reveal. ‘But I know that Edmund was a trial to my mother and my late father, God rest his soul, even if he was never a trouble to me. In Stratford he had the reputation of a scapegrace. Now he has followed my own course of more than twenty years ago and arrived in this town.’

‘To be a player?’

‘Yes.’

‘A player with us? With the King’s Men?’

‘I fear so.’

‘Is that so bad, William? Wanting to be a player with the King’s Men?’

‘It is bad for Edmund. He does not have the, ah, discipline to be a player anywhere.’

Considering the way in which most players behaved, at least during their younger days, I thought this was an odd comment. Yes, you needed discipline to learn your lines and, unless you were treated indulgently, you needed discipline not to overact or play the fool on stage (less because the audience wouldn’t like it and more because of the reaction from your fellows). But outside the playhouse one could go around drinking and swearing and whoring, within the customary limits.

‘I can see what you’re thinking, Nick,’ said WS. ‘What need has a young player of discipline except in the matter of his lines and so on?’

I nodded. He’d read my mind. Not very difficult perhaps.

‘You kicked a ball around when you were a boy, Nick? A ball that was made of a pig’s bladder, inflated?’

I nodded again.

‘They can endure plenty of knocks, those bladders; they are strong, yet they are hollow inside. Any man wishing to become a player should have something of the pig’s bladder in him. He should contain plenty of wind in order to mouth his lines but be tough enough on the exterior to withstand the kicks of fortune. I mean those kicks that are particular to our craft, a jeering audience, a playhouse closed on account of the plague, an ankle broken during a sword fight on stage.’

‘Players are hollow too,’ I said, falling in with the spirit of WS’s analogy, ‘because they can be filled with others’ words and natures.’

‘Yes, we are everyman – and no man too.’

And then William Shakespeare laughed, as if to rebuke himself for such a high-flown sentiment. ‘My brother Edmund doesn’t have that pig’s bladder quality. If he’s disappointed or frustrated, he will lash out with his fists or go and drown his sorrows in the nearest tavern. If one of the groundlings insulted him, he’d probably jump down and clout him. That’s bad for business. To say nothing of being bad for Edmund. He’ll end up in the Clink.’

None of this sounded sufficient to prevent Edmund from trying to make his name on the stage. There have been undisciplined, impulsive players before now. Some of them have even served a turn in gaol.

‘Can you discourage your brother from becoming a player?’

‘Whatever I say will only make him more determined.’

‘Then surely one of the other Globe shareholders could turn him down? You need have no part in it.’