"And wha micht ye be, laddie? Wait noo, I ken, I ken, ye are he that wrrrit the play of this nicht, are ye not?"
"Aye, William Shakespearrre, yourrr majesty," Will said, hearing with horror an effortless parody of the royal accent.
"Ye maun wrrrite it doon, yon saucy blasphemous irrreverrrent and impairrrtinent lump o' clairrrty doggerrrel, that all may see, laddie."
"I have forgot it already, your royal majesty," Will said, hearing in horror the faint traces of the sobbing Danish intonations of the Queen.
"Aye." It was clear that James did not know well what to do. Will had often met this situation when being unpremeditatedly pert to the great. He now willed the King out of his problem. Be sick, great greatness. "Aye, ye and yourrr saucy rrrhymes." He looked green and began to heave. It was, indeed, the usual end of a court soirée. Some writer of music for the virginals, Tomkins or somebody, had spoken of producing a tiny sequence consisting of the King's Rouse, the King's Vomiting, the King's Rest. "I maun gang," the King said, very green. "I mind ye, laddie, I'll mind yourrr sauciness." Then, on the arms of two simpering earls, he was led away to the Harington water closet, invention of the late Queen's godson, Britain 's contribution to the civilization of Europe.
"By Christ," Burbage said, "you get away with murder."
"What Ben Jonson says. Thank God our revels now are ended, aye."
When, much much time later, Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare's lodgings in Silver Street and said:
"Let us drink."
"Ben," Will cried. "Your ears are untrimmed and your nose whole. I'm glad to see you well."
"But thirsty."
"Drink water then. It seems to me that less and less of wine makes in you more and more of oppugnancy. If this drunken watch-beating continues it will be a matter of one day's holiday between longer and longer lingerings in the Clink."
"The Marshalsea. Listen. It was a strange time. I worked on the Bible."
"What?" They went down the stairs, past Mountjoy scolding his daughter Marie for loving the apprentice Belott, into the street, demoted to lead by the dull day. There were more drunk about than usual, belike because of the dull day. "The Bible, this I know, has already been worked on, nay worked out. They are at the great final stage of the galleys. And it is Harding and Lively and Andrewes, not you, that had the making of it. You are a man of some small reasonable talent, Ben, but you are no man of God. It is work for men of God that gratuitously or necessarily know Greek and Latin and Hebrew."
"I know all those tongues," Ben said. "I can Hebrew you as well as any clipped rabbi. It is, indeed, the work that comes before the final launching that has made lively my days in the stinking rathole of the Marshalsea. For, since I am a poet, they brought to me the poesy of the Bible. Meaning Job and the Psalms and the like. You are a poet, they said. Tickle our sober accuracy into poetic life. So I dip quill in horn and correct the galleys to a diviner beauty."
"Who brought the galleys and said all this to you?" Will said with some jealousy.
"Some man of the Westminster company – Bodkin or Pipkin or some such name. No whit abashed at the prospect of seeing God's work buffed and polished in a foul and pestilential prison. The apostles, he said, were in prison before being variously crucified."
"That will not be your fate. Whatever your fate is, it will not be that. That is the fate of the godly." And then, before they entered the Dog Tavern, "Is it you only of all our secular versifiers that are bidden trim the sails of the galleys?"
"Oh, there is Chapman, also Jack Donne – not properly secular, there is talk of his taking holy orders this year. Marston's name was mentioned but I was quick there. If, I said, you want a Bible that beginneth with In the ininalities of the mondial entities the Omnicompetent fabricated the celestial and terrene quiddities, then have Jack Marston by all means. There were others mentioned, smaller men."
"Was I," Will asked, "mentioned?"
They sat down not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both. When the jug of canary came Ben was able to have his laugh out.
"Why do you laugh? What is risible in me or others or elsewhere?"
"There were special orders that you should not be brought in. No Latin or Greek nor Hebrew – that was brushed aside as of small moment. But the King has a long memory and himself said that he would not hae that quick laddie that was perm with his imperrrtinencies."
"How do you know this?"
"There is some foolish rhyme fathered on you about the King sticking his lively harding andrew up the translators to make them come quicker and threatening to cut off their old and new testicles if they did not. It could not be you, it is too corky and bad even for you. But I will be kind. You shall not be out in the cold like the foolish virgins. I, Ben-oni, the Benjamin that Jacobus loveth, though he cannot keep me out of jail, I am ready to deliver sundry psalms into your palms."
"Is there money in it?"
"Honour, glory, perhaps an eternal crown."
"I am done with all writing," Will said, "even for money. I grow old, I grow old. I am forty-six this year. I will retire to Stratford and hunt hares and foxes."
"You would rather be hunted with them. And you have said this too often before of being done with writing. You will go and stay a week and then be back here thirsting to write some new nonsense. I know you."
"You poets," Will said, "may keep your Bible. You may stuff your old and new testes up your apocrypha."
"There speaketh sour envy. Well, we will keep it and be glad. For the day may come, some thousand years hence, when even the Works of Ben Jonson will be read little, but the bright eyes of Ben Jonson will flash out here and there in a breathtaking felicity of phrase from the green Eden of God's own book that may never die."
"You may stick your holofernes up your methuselah."
"Master Shakespeare," said Frank Beaumont timidly, "there is a matter we would talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here."
"She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three."
"I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedy called Out on You Mistress Minx which must be ready for rehearsing some two days from now and not yet started though the money taken. You are quick, sir, as is known. A night of work with Jack and me as amanuenses and it can be done. We can pay a shilling. It is safe here in a little bag in Kitty here her bosom."
"I have done with writing," Will said proudly. "I go to tend my country estates. All you poets may stick your zimris up your cozbis."
"Well bethought and à propos and a proposito. We were held up in our playwork by the need to work on the Song of Songs that is Solomon's for Dekker that hath an ague. Kitty here gave us a good phrase. Love, she said, is better than wine. Is not that a good phrase?"
"She carries two fair-sized flagons on her, I see. If by love she means comfort more than intoxication, then she is not right."
"Comfort me with flagons," Beaumont said to Fletcher. "Flagons is better than apples. Make a note."
"You may all," Will said, getting up, "comfort your deuteronomies with your right index leviticus. I go now."
"It is jealousy," Ben said when he had gone. "He has no part in the holy work."
Will rode to Stratford nevertheless with three or four psalms in galley proof in his saddlebag, a gift from Ben Jonson. He was to see what he could do with them; to Ben they seemed not to offer matter for further poeticization. But for Will there would be much non-writing work in Stratford, save for the engrossing of signatures. The hundred and twenty acres bought from the Coombes which Gilbert was managing ilclass="underline" these must be worked well. Gardeners needed for gardens and orchards. The tithes in Old Stratford and Welcombe and Bishopston. He, Will, was now a lay rector, a front-pew gentleman. Thomas Greene, the town clerk, together with his bitch of a wife and the two beefy squallers named Grayston and Hamnet, Gray and Ham, should be out of New Place by now, the lease up on Lady Day, 1610, this year. Forty-six years of age. Four and six make ten. One of the psalms in his saddlebag was number 46.