Will

Dramatis Personae:

Will Shakespeare…………Gentleman, poet & playwright, retired

Anne Hathaway…………..Wife to William Shakespeare

Francis Collins……..……….Lawyer and friend to Shakespeare 

Prologue

Francis: (rubs palms, knocks)

There’s something about March that whips things up afresh for lawyers, following the long winter glooms.

Anne: (opens door)

Will: (offstage, coughs violently)

Francis: 

Jesus, Will, that sounds bad.

(aside)

A churchyard cough.

Better get this done and dusted.

Is this it, then?

What is done and what is yet to come:

A draft, a will, . . . a death.

It’s what it always comes to.

What it must come to, in the end.

. . . How did it go?

Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers come to dust.

(reading from scroll)

‘I, William Shakespeare, do appoint…’

(aside)

I’m pretty good with a quill myself.

Not much for poetry though.

That’s what makes me a good lawyer.

What do you say then? Will you hear the will?

The words, required by law.

The skeleton text. The miserly truth.

The last anxious dictates of a spidery hand.

In the name of God, Amen.

I, William Shakespeare, of Stratford upon Avon

in the county of Warwick, gent., in perfect health and memory…

 — — — Act 1: History — — — — 

Will:

Jesu, what, will this line stretch out until the crack of doom?

I’ll be dead before he finishes. Is this what it comes to in the end?

Very well. Let’s draft all cares and business from our age.

Francis:

Cares and business, Will?

Leave these to me, old friend.

Will:

Gladly, Francis. And what else besides?

That I unburdened may crawl towards death.

Francis: (stares blankly)

Will:

Not strong on poetry, are you Francis?

That’s what makes you a good lawyer.

And a dull human being, who comes alive only when you eat and drink.

Francis: (pours a generous measure of wine, slugs back a mouthful, tops off the glass and sets it down on table, next to parchment, ink and quill.)

Tis my occupation to be plain.

Shall we make a start then, Will?

Will:

You see to it then, Francis, the penwork.

Francis: 

Where were we?

Will:

In the county of Warwick

Francis: 

Yes, it’s written down, In the county of Warwick.

Will:

On the river Avon, crawling like the midnight snail beneath the moon

The forest of Arden to the north.

Francis:

Where late the sweet birds sang.

Will:

You steal my lines Francis.

Stick to the numbers that become you!

Francis:

You’re wandering, master Shakespeare.

Will:

I can tell you more.

Francis:

I can tell you’re going to.

Will:

Where Aprils tolled like bells.

Francis:

Ah, the bells.

Will:

April’s a marble month, my mother would say.

The killing time for Shakespeares. The time of epitaphs.

The time for Shakespeares to carve their names in stone.

She had a turn of phrase, my mother.

I must have heard bells when I was born.

The bells tolling for the plague dead.

Francis:

Scary stuff

Will:

Bells in my blood, summoning me from infancy to eternity.

But I didn’t answer the call.

I didn’t become a plague-bill number.

Or cannon-fodder. My eyes,

Moist as they are, might have been pearls by now,

My bones to coral turned.

Like Uncle Henry and Aunt Margaret in their sleep.

John Shakespeare’s and Mary Arden’s folk.

How quickly and quietly they turned,

Though it seemed slow at the the time.

The slow sleep of their lives, every day

Turning back to the the earth they tilled.

I remember the fields, turning over like the sea,

Those fields of folk. Turning to dust.

And the folk themselves died without fuss,

Like beasts turning over in the fields.

Only sometimes they turned like beasts on the spit,

Spitting and snarling in their juices,

The red-faced fevered farmers of Stratford,

Roasting in their beds at nights,

Revolving over the snalring coals and hissing logs

Getting ready for hell.

Francis: (pouring more wine) 

This is going to be a long day.

Will:

The innocent animals at the slaughterhouse,

Down from our shop. That was my first experience of treachery.

You give an animal a name, as if it were

A sister, a brother, a Christian soul.

You scratch its back and tickle its chin.

You feed it from your hand. Its one of the family.

Then comes the day of the great betrayal.

As the butcher takes away the calf,

And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays,

Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house,

and as the dam runs lowing up and down,

Looking the way her harmless young one went,

And can do nought but wail her darling’s loss.

Francis:

Whoa! Whoa!

Will:

Woe’s the word.

And you see your father as you’ve never seen him before

Stained with the purple butchery of his business,

Your loving father, with his brandished steel,

Which smoked with bloody execution.

It never left me, that gesture, a farewell to infancy.

One figure standing brutally above another,

Murder most foul. The slaughter-house is where

My player’s days really began.

I’d entered the theatre of blood,

And the only defense was to whip on the visor,

Stop up the access and passage to remorse.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

Francis:

You’re wandering, master Shakespeare.

Will:

I can tell you more.

Francis:

I can tell you’re going to.

Will:

As to the fireside fears, they were different,

Ensnaring the mind, not the senses,

The stories told by the wind to the chimney

When the storms over Stratford made the flames burn blue.

Uncle Henry said it was just weather in the grate,

That cold blue firelight.

But Aunt Agnes said it was ghosts,

Come to populate your hearth and dreams.

Francis:

And give you a good night’s sleep?

Will:

Aye, revenants from a darkness almost unimaginable.

Almost. But she made me imagine it, all the same.

The spectres slipped like shadows from their graves,

Where the worm forked and fretted, and they swarmed across the sleeping town.

Darkness now unleashed upon Stratford, making straight for my bedchamber.

I saw the wraiths, made white by the moon,

Sliding like fog against the closed shutters and snug sleepers,

While they, the souls of the dead, had no beds to return to

But cold clay. And so they’d slither up the whispering eaves,

Over the prickling thatch. Just birds and rats in the roof, Henry said,

But Agnes knew better. And so down the chimney, still shivering,

To make the flames change colour,

The stones of the grate go violent blue,

And the lamps round the kitchen shrink and quiver like frightened hares.

I sat there too, twitching and trembling,

Listening to the oldest terrors of the earth, where ghosts

Break up their graves, moaning in the icy winds,

Scrabbling to be let in out of the streaming rain.

Francis:

Sounds like a good night.

Will:

There was always worse to follow.

Francis: 

Spare me the details. What of your will?

History’s full of ghosts, Will.

Will:

She told me about witchcraft too.

Will:

There’s only one entrance to the great stage of fools,

But there are a thousand early exits.

I avoided all of them. I escaped.

Opened hell’s trapdoor,

And stepped out onto the London stage.

Francis:

To become the foremost playwright of your time

Will:

Known to queen and king, and known in the country too.

A life well lived, you could say.

Francis:

You could. Let’s wrap it up then, shall we?

Will: 

And usher me into eternity? Pause there awhile,

Give me breathing space, some shriving time allowed.

Don’t be in such a hurry to close the gate.

Such was the plague. There fell the time of horrow, dreaded by those of all degree.

(…)

Francis:

I need to make a great pee.

Francis:

An April baby. Look at you now.

Will:

An April corpse.

Such was the plague. There fell the time of horrow, dreaded by those of all degree.

(…)

(on being born into death)

Death: the undiscovered country, the after-dinner sleep, the everlasting cold.

The dread of kings, the poor man’s friend.

Tis a subject on which I wrote with false authority.

I killed off scores with quick stabs of the quill, made the parchment weep.

Now I ask myself for one last time, what is death?

Though I do not know, I know it is not nothing.

It is the sum of all it takes from us.

It is the opposite of nothing. It is, quite simply, everything.

To know exactly what death is we must therefore know precisely what it is taking away.

And so it is with me, in this my last performance.

(

And of all these lands we make thee lady.

Francis:

That’s a generous bequest, Will, but not to the purpose.

Will:

That’s what I said once, to Anne.

• looking back; family; Stratford; England; (history plays);

• (historical segments from text of will)

• back to Stratford; love, lust, procreation

Act 2: Comedy

• love; longing; leaving Stratford for London

• 
  

Act 3: Tragedy

• plague; death

Epilogue

 — — — — —-

Death didn’t come easy at the slaughter-house.

F: You shouldn’t have looked. I’d have looked away.

Will:

It was my first experience of treachery.

You give an animal a name, as if it were a sister, a broberh, a Christian soul.

You scratch its back and tickle its chin, babble your baby-talk to its silly snout, stick daisies and dogroses behind its ears. You feed it from your hand — and it comes running to the sound of your voice. It’s one of the family. Then comes the day of the great betrayal.

And as the butcher takes away the calf, and binds the wretch and beats it when it strays, bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house; and … looking the way her harmless young one went, and can do nought but wail her darling’s loss…

Francis:

Whoa! Whoa!

Will: 

Woe’s the word.

And you see your father as you’ve never seen him before, stained with the purple butchery of his business, your loving father with his brandished steel, which smoked with bloody execution…

It never left me, that farewell to infancy.

And it’s emblem, one figure standing brutally above another, murder most foul. I see it in silhouette, and memory blurs the detail, but I know it’s my father, the two-footed one with arm raised high, with axe in hand, over the four-footed one, the victim. Down comes the blade — and now, not now, not ever, not even if he wanted to, can the executioner leave off his hacking and slicing, not till he unseams him from gullet to groin, releasing the terrible torrent. It hits the floor, steaming, the high-pitched screaming dies away and the silence that follows fills your ears like blood.

Francis: 

That’s horrible.