Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

This resident company, lounging in deplorable rags in a kind of classroom complete with blackboard, did not seem to like being instructed in the terminology of drama by a man in a decent, though old, clerical grey suit. Their director was not dressed like that. He was too old, though, for the coûture and coiffure he affected. Dirty grey sculpted sideburns. Silk shirt of black covered with sharpnosed Greek heroes in gold in postures of harmless aggression. Grey chest hairs and dangling medallions. Chinos stained at the crotch. Bare feet in fawn suede cowboy boots. Enderby felt he himself was there as for the reading of a will, which in a sense he was.

The people not there were the people who should have been there. But Shakespeare was to be played by a film actor who was the husband of Ms Grace Hope, and he was making a film. The dark lady who was to play the Dark Lady was completing a nightclub engagement. Hamlet without the prince, Enderby had quipped. Gus Toplady had morosely replied that he had tried it in Minneapolis at the Tyrone Guthrie but it had not really worked. Hamlet off stage all the time, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern eavesdropping on inaudible soliloquy. What's he say now? He say he not know whether he live or die but he use too many big words. Toplady had done a nude Macbeth somewhere. He appeared to have little confidence in Enderby. Enderby reciprocated with all his heartburn.

"Shakespeare," Enderby said, "is dying. His ageing wife and two daughters sit by his bed, the wife audibly jingling two pennies. These are to put on his eyes when he shall finally close them."

"Why?" asked a girl whom Enderby knew to be Toplady's mistress.

"The custom in those days. These are not what ah you would call pennies. Not cents I mean. Big pennies. English ones."

"Okay," Toplady said without compassion. "He's dying. Forget the pennies."

"You can't," Enderby said. "Shakespeare says: 'Ah, I hear you jingling your pennies to put on my eyes. Do not fret, wife. I shall not keep you waiting long.' Then, though it's still April, he hears the song of boys and girls bringing in the May. They sing the ah following:

'Bringing the maypole home,

Bringing the maypole home,

Bringing the maypole home,

Bringing the maypole home.' "

"A deathless lyric," Toplady said.

"There's more to it than that," Enderby said, red. "It goes on:

'Custom has blessed this strange festivity,

Licensing every gross proclivity,

Here's the year's nativity,

Here is life, let's live it.

To sin it is no sin

When spring is coming in.' "

He looked round for a positive response, but there was none, except of vague incredulity. He pushed on sturdily:

"In his dying delirium he sees the mayers prancing about the deathchamber, his younger self and Anne Hathaway among them. He says: "Thus it began. She overbore me in a wood. Needed a husband, even though one ten years younger. Susannah there born but six months after the marriage." Himself dying and his surrounding family fade into blackness, and the younger Shakespeare, whom we will call Will for brevity, is sitting in a chair nursing his son Hamnet."

"What happens to the singing and dancing?" asked somebody.

"That is ah sung and danced off. But this is another May and Will hears the song in the distance. He hugs his little son and sings to him as follows:

'Little son,

When I look at thee

I am filled with won-

Der such wonder should be.

Part of me yet no part of me,

Wholly good yet the wood of my tree.

If I could

I would live to see

Fulfilled in me

The man that I can never be,

Born to property,

Richly clad retainers about thee.

Hawk on hand,

You survey your land,

Your acres shining in the summer's gold

And I behold

The glory of a name

Restored to fame

It had of old.

Little son,

If these things should be

And I die before they are granted to thee,

Think of me as he who carved them

From the wood

For the wood of my tree.' "

There was a silence. Toplady said to Silversmith, who lay on the floor: "Mike?" Silversmith pronounced:

"I say what I said already." Toplady said with cold eyes to Enderby:

"Go on. But cut out the lyrics."

"But the whole of this ah induction is done practically entirely in song."

"Go on."

"Well," Enderby said, "Will goes to the window and looks up at the clear night sky. He sees, but we do not see, Cassiopeia's Chair, a constellation in the shape of an inverted W, the initial of his name. He sings to it."

"Ah Jesus," said Silversmith from the floor.

"He sings to it as follows:

'My name in the sky

Burning for ever,

Fame fixed by face

Never to die.

At least

I feast on that dream,

The gleam of gold, my fortunes mounting high.

To render my deed

More than pure fancy,

On lonely roads I must proceed,

My one companion a dream,

A seemly vision only I espy!

My name in the sky.'

"But then his wife Anne appears and sings a contrary song which combines in counterpoint with Will's:

'Will o' the wisp,

A foolish fire,

Leads fools to fall

In mud and mire.

Better by far

The fire at home,

Smoke in the rafter,

Lamb's wool and laughter -' "

"What," Toplady's mistress asked, "does lamb's wool have to do with it?"

"Lamb's wool," Enderby authoritatively defined, "was an Elizabethan drink for cold weather, consisting of heated ale mixed with the pounded pulp of roasted crab apples, which fragments floated in the ale like the wool of lambs in a high wind. Seasoned with nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Highly fortifying."

"You'd have to have a programme note," said a bearded youth, "or some guy standing there to stop the song and explain it."

"Push on," Toplady said in the tone of one who leads a toiling party through a high wind.

"Anne finishes the song:

'Will o' the wisp,

Do not desire

To follow fame,

That foolish fire.

Better by far

The fire at home,

Fresh dawn on waking

And fresh bread baking.

A will o' the wisp

Should not aspire

To be a star.' "

"Mike?"

"Like I said already."

"But," pleaded Enderby, "they both hear approaching song. It is the company of players known as the Queen's Men. They have been playing in Stratford and are now leaving it, with their property carts and clopping horses. The troupe sings:

'The Queen's Men,

The Queen's Men,

Not beer-and-bread-and-beans men

But fine men,

Wine men,

Music-while-we-dine men.

The Queen's Men,

The Queen's Men,

Of-more-than-ample-means men,

Are off now,

Doff, bow,

We will come again,

The Queeeeeeen's Men.' "

Enderby prolonged the long vowel in a gesture of song: "Hearing it, Will says: 'By God, I will go with them. I will become a player and eke write plays -' "

"Why does he go eek?" a fat frizzy girl in crimson asked.

"Eke means also," learned Enderby said. "Cognate with German auch. But he can say also if that is what is, ah, desired."

"That is, ah, desired," the girl said.

"He says to his little son: "I will be back with fine gifts for Hamnet. And eke Susannah and Judith. And eke their mother." Or, if that is still desired, also. Anne sings her Will o' the Wisp song and Will his Cassiopeia song again, and both are in counterpoint to the song of the Queen's Men. The scene ends. The curtain goes up almost at once on Elizabethan London in the full flush of victory over the Spaniards. A song is sung which begins with a kind of ah fart -"

"Your first job," Toplady said, "was to find out about the stage. This stage has no curtains. Go and look at it sometime. No curtains."