The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman Read Online Free PDF Page B

actors once sat outside, their faces like their lives shrunk to rotten apples, for what is an actor once teeth and face are gone, if they have not saved coin for their old age? No man can act if he loses teeth and cannot playa hero as well as an old crone, nor his mumbles be heard above the crack of walnut shells. For charity’s sake we who still sunned ourselves in warm success did not hound them off our cobbles.
    One night I saw a new beggar, old and with no teeth. Dimly I saw in the crumbled face that first Caesar of my childhood. I dropped threepence into his bowl.
    As he muttered, ‘Bless you, sir,’ I said, ‘I saw you play Caesar at Stratford when I was just a boy. A fine performance.’
    He straightened a little, even in his rags. ‘Thank you, Master Shakespeare.’
    All men in London knew me in those days. I warrant many know me yet.
    â€˜You took a young lad as apprentice. Ned Forrest was his name.’
    â€˜Ah, Ned,’ he mumbled. His breath could have stopped a charging bull. ‘He wasn’t with us long.’
    â€˜He found another job?’
    â€˜Ay, you could say that.’ The beggared Caesar giggled, and I knew my threepence would go on gin. ‘A job at the bottom of the river. Being a corpse, that was Ned’s job, eh.’
    I asked quietly, ‘How did he die?’
    â€˜Why, he drowned himself. The poor puppy started damp with tears, and died a wet one. Two months, maybe three he drowned, after we took him. Some takes to the life and some doesn’t, and he was one of those.’
    â€˜A sad, cold end,’ I whispered.
    The beggar squinted at me. ‘If you give me another penny, sir, I can see your play tomorrow. They say Apollo guides your tongue, that every line you write strikes like a spear.’
    I did not want his flattery. I put another penny in his dish, and went to dine with Ben Jonson and laughed and drank. But the next day I lit a candle for young Ned, and have done every Sunday since.
    And never, in any company I have been part of, has a boy been asked to whore.
    Eight invitations to dine, but I preferred not to venture out into the mud.
    Dinner this midday: a quarter of roast boar, delivered as a gift from the squire, who, if he has not a son with enough sense for conversation, does have the gift of hunting; a dish of mutton, stewed; eels with worts and gravy; an elderberry tart. Second course: a chicken pie; pigeons, roasted, our dovecot giving us good harvest all year now; a mess of parsnips and leeks, the first from our garden this season; pears baked in cider; May butter; a raspberry tart; a cheese; medlars, soft fruit my wife likes much; and good October beer, of which we now have enough barrels in our brewhouse to last well into summer.
    Bowels: steady. Waters clear and strong.

Wednesday, 14th October 1615
    My wife has just come in rain-wet and chilly-fingered from our dairy after checking that the cheeses be turned. The maids are pickling pears and making apple jelly and quince paste, and Judith is visiting her sister, I suspect to escape straining jelly and cutting the quince cores. The house smells sweet, but sticky. And I to this room, with a good fire and spiced ale to ward off autumn’s breath, to live awhile in memory.
    Ned’s father sold his son at ten years old. I was eighteen before my father sold me, but that evening at the guildhall play was the last I spent as a schoolboy.
    The four winters since Ned had left had been hard too. Another year of blight, then a winter so cold and long the snow did not melt till June. The wheat ripened on short stems, enough to fill our bellies, but not long enough to make straw for thatchers. Roofs leaked like kitchen sieves, and tempers grew short as beds grew damp, and such a crop of mould as if to mock the fields that harvested so little.
    Plague’s bony fingers shut the London theatres twice more. Corpses lay rotting, no one daring to bring them out. Dogs’