Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

"You wanna a drop of this?" the dresser asked, bringing from a cupboard a fluted bottle of Southern Comfort. He was an undistinguished man on whom rested impertinently the distinguished though raddled mask of the late John Barrymore. Enderby could reply only with a headshake. He had no saliva and the mechanism of speech had totally to be remastered. He looked down with difficulty at sturdy legs in gooseturd hose. From these the power of locomotion had entirely departed. The feet just about worked still, however, and on these he slid towards the door. The door opened and Jed Tilbury, dressed presumably for Aaron the Moor, nodded at him. Enderby nodded back and said:

"Aaargh."

Enderby was pushed by men in stagehand undress into total blackness. From his right an orchestra boomed and screeched to its final chord or what passed for one. Farther right there was meagre and dutiful applause. Enderby saw below the young bald Pip Wesel dimly lighted wagging a stick with a glowworm stuck to its end at dimly lighted music stands. There was a faint response to the stick and Enderby heard sung faintly from ubiquitous loudspeakers words he had himself composed:

"Bringing the maypole home

Bringing the maypole home

Bringing the maypole home

Bringing the maypole home"

He now saw a woman in a kind of nightgown rocking a kind of cradle. That would be Anne Shakespeare, NéE Hathaway. He saw her more clearly as dimmers undimmed. He presumed he had to have a colloquy with her. To his surprise he found he could walk. He walked towards her. She was downstage in a pool of pink light. He spoke words:

"Aye, they're bringing the maypole home. You remember?" He saw there was a kind of casement standing on little wheels, unsupported by a wall. He went to this object to pretend to look out of it. "A night spent in the woods, cider and cold meat and hot lechery. You overbore me as Venus overbore Adonis. I was cozened, caught, caged in a loveless marriage. I have a mind to go." These words, so far as he could remember, were not in the script. It seemed to him that he was probably improvising them. "Aye, a mind to leave you." He blinked at the cradle-rocking Anne, who was not being played by the mistress of Toplady. There were coughs and rustles from the audience. Enderby spoke out more boldly. "I have my destiny to fulfil, my star to follow." He peered through nonexistent glass and saw nothing. "More than my star – my constellation – she is bright this night. Cassiopeia is roaring lionlike in the heavens – an inverted W signifying my name. Will and Will in overplus. My name in the sky."

From nowhere and everywhere the voice of the fag Oldfellow began to bleat:

"My name in the sky

Burning for ever

Fame fixed by fate

Never to die

At least I feast on that dream

The gleam of gold, my fortunes mounting high"

At the third line Enderby realized that he was supposed to mouth those words, so he did. But it offended him that his voice should have become the voice of that now blacked out or just emerging from blackout fag. He strode quite sturdily downstage to the very edge of the apron and addressed the audience:

"A mask, a copy, a travesty. The poet turned into a motley to the view. You have heard of the A-Effekt? Alienation. I am not Shakespeare, he is not Shakespeare. We mock, we defy, we admit absurdities. You and you and you must all be punished." He had heard those lines before somewhere. Yes, Eliot, Murder in the. "Beware." He strode back upstage. The song ended, to no applause. Male voices off began to sing.

The Queen's Men

The Queen's Men

Not bread-and-beer-and-beans men

But fine men

Wine men

Music-while-we-dine men"

"By God," Enderby cried, "the players are leaving. I will leave with them. They return to London, I spoke to Dick Tarleton in the inn but today. By God, if they will have me I will be one of them." Anne ceased her cradlerocking and began to sing:

"Will o' the wisp, do not desire

To follow fame, that foolish fire"

Enderby again confided in the audience: "A lot of nonsense. This ginger-haired bednag, having nagged me to screaming, having scraped my loins dry, now tries the craft of quasi-melodic seduction. Listen to that voice. Would you be seduced by it?" And then, with great confidence, he strode off. There was applause which drowned the last lines of the song. He had, by God, got them.

In the wings he collapsed and was offered Southern Comfort and smelling salts, which they called smelling sauce. The thin girl who played Anne was on to him, ready to tear off his well-glued beard. "You bastard," she cried. "You fucked up my song." She was dragged away by ready shirtsleeved muscles. The wings were suddenly cluttered by mock-Elizabethans. Flats were wheeled in and off. Full stage lights screamed. The orchestra blared. And then there she was, divine farthingaled ass awag, down centre:

"The white man's knavery

Sold me in slavery

To an unsavoury"

Enderby was on his feet again looking down at a small boy dressed like a miniature Elizabethan adult. This boy proffered a sticky hand which Enderby vaguely shook. "No," the boy said in a profound if juvenile Midwestern accent, "you gotta hold on to it."

Of course, Hamnet his son. A property hand handed to Enderby a vague brown bundle. "That's your grip," he said.

Enderby and the lad toddled on and looked about them. London peopled mainly with prostitutes, some of them sitting sprawled, all bosom and legs anachronistically exposed, outside a door unupheld by a building. Enderby took the boy downstage and addressed the audience: "The title, incidentally, must not be misunderstood. Ass means a donkey. This child is meant to be Shakespeare's son Hamnet. His accent, you will notice, is unauthentic. Speak, child."

The boy said: "Is this London, dad?"

"Yes, my boy, this is a London apparently peopled by tibs, trulls and holy mutton. And do not call me dad. Dad is a term used only for an illegitimate father. In other words, only a bastard may use it. You, whatever you are, are not a bastard. Your mother and I were married in Trinity Church, Stratford. Ah, I wonder if that is Philip Henslowe." Some members of the audience seemed to consider all this funny. Enderby went up to an actor who was frowning over a daybook and addressed him. "You are Master Henslowe? In charge of the Rose Playhouse on the Bankside? I have a play for you."

"Ah, Jesus, will they never give up?"

It went rather well, Enderby thought, except that the small lad insisted on holding on to his hand while he was trying to gesture. He was forced to say: "Go in there, Hamnet my boy, and play with the pretty ladies." And he banged the boy's bottom thither. One way of getting him off. Unfortunately he collided with Ned Alleyn coming out, buttoning.

There was a kind of ballet with people carrying posters on sticks: TITUS ANDRONICUS; HENRY VI PART ONE; HENRY VI PART TWO – Finally there came RICHARD III. All Enderby had to do was to stand and watch and leave the work to others. But he had not to forget to note ostentatiously the passing of a message from April Elgar through her duenna to Dick Burbage. He was dragged off by a mass of exiters only to be pushed on later to find himself alone with the Dark Lady. He gulped. There was a frilled and tasselled day bed upstage. Downstage she sat combing her hair in an Elizabethan negligee. This was to be a love scene.

"Who are you, sir?"

"Madam, I noted at the play you did tender a message to Master Dick Burbage. You bade him come meet you here but be announced for discretion as Richard the Third. But, madam, I am the creator, with a little help from the historians, of that reprehensible humpback. I am William Shakespeare, madam." Enderby glanced timidly up at the flies, whose lord might launch flyshit, at the enskied bard's request, to punish the Marsyas temerity of that identification. Then he said: "Will you not like better a visit from a king maker than from a mere king?"