5th January 1616. Night.

So 'tis the twelfth and the bean and pea in the plum cakes are
plucked, the lambs wool drunk and my guests, more than satisfied
with my simple ale mulled with sugar and nutmeg, now give wet lipped
wassailing to His and Her Majesties. Sheppard toasted our King as He
who has most excellently braved the slipperiest of Gods positions, a
man of all men, whether he be fully above them or fully below them.
Here! Here! shouted Toller, hes our finest Queen to boot. Margaret
warned not to test the ire of the true Queen, as a jewel with a pistol
she was, and with that Godfrey offered up a toast to Her Worships
dog-damned good aim. Connor too raised his glass to Our Queen, the
most fair of the fairest of blackamoors, he said, whose face hath
stained a thousand lips.
Yay, tis a night when we are free to disparage our uppers, mock
our own beliefs, worry not about noose or flog. 'Tis a staged night of
shallow trouble that opportunes unforetold events, unexpected guests.
A night of paint, of masks, and so too of revealing. Of twinned truths.

The final night of the season when a man is drunk enough he may
actually kiss his wife. And so of all the guests who came here tonight
there was indeed one who did not disappoint, one I did not expect, him
whose house this is, him whose name is known by me, him whose wife
I must be.
The young bishops broke their street procession to announce the
carriage approaching and it could have been any carriage coming at
any time, but I knew some way that this carriage carried a different
load, the deadened weight apparent in the sound of its springs, in the
desperate breathing of the poor jade that pulled it through the
thickened winter mud. No man with sound body rides carriage to
Stratford when a good horse will cover the harsh ground doubly quick.
Your corpse required this slower transport. Covered in your fever, I
gave you our marriage bed, not our second best where you sometimes
took your sleep, I giving not a second thought that your last days
would be spent here.
I cant fathom how I could without Gods trust know thee. Your
apple-john muttering nothings, your body so wormed by time its now a
state whereby you own shiverings threaten to rent what long held
strong, this broken monument simple proof that greatness is no shield
to time. And so you came back to us, to me. You came single coach.
And yet who guided you? Did the horses themselves know the route?

Why did you return here, Will?

Shall I indeed call you Will? As I said, it is not apparent who is this
anatomy that presents and not now not in such shabby state. Schooled
we are to trust appearances not, yet tis easier to ignore sights of great
beauty than squint at lesser deformity. True, the course of true love
never did run smooth and things this vile love can transpose to form
and dignity. So you say. But if this be lovers food I would surely waste.
I should be drawn in so many emotions, yet I feel naked, attired in
wonder, in nothing but a sheer bewilderment. Wouldnt I have thought
this would be a time I dressed in joy that my husband has come home
at last, while cloaked in the dark sorrow that he has come home for but
the last time. What woman does not joyfully mourn the conclusion to
her marriage thus? What wife does not grieve with laughter when her
husband finally retires his presumed occupation? What spouse does
not feel something new in old bones when the weight of marriage is
finally lifted? So we cover our faces in neckerchiefs to hide the tears
that good laughter brings.
Yet you wear your roasted crab with sinister effect; familiarity
has vacated this once common sight, it has been rendered foreign by
shadows, lines, dents, and hollows as if tattooed to deceive me, your
eyes have retreated conveniently into watery graves, your skin is not
the same youthful organ I touched so many years ago, your hands are

ravaged, your fingers crooked and no longer good for anything that
would offer pleasure or ever again advance your craft. What
something has disguised you Will, there is nothing I can see that tells
me this is my husbands real bearing. Nothing here but nothing may
be what tells me all I need know with certainty. I could unbutton the
truth and so see if the same nothing sleeps therein. I suppose. You had
a mark there, a vermillion blemish, a rare imperfection indeed. Years
ago you said it came from rubbing as a youth. You are still a youth, I
said. Then I still rub, you said. But let me rub, I said. Fine, you said,
and leave your own mark. I shall, I said. For I am yours, you said. And
with this new mark you are mine, I said.
Truth or no, I could not bear to see now and so will not bare to
know now. So Will, is this truly home at last? I dont see the life
remaining to get thee to another life. But this was your home, despite
your absence, for all these years and most certainly the last which
have seen you slower, duller and more attuned to rest than labor.
Perhaps here you had the solitude that must rarely be found in the
cities that acclaim and revel in you, so I have heard.
Now though, you, he, this but a lump of swarthy pestilence, but
an infestation of mans dreary ways and most seamy desires, of this,
him, you, I have to ask: Are you Will? Will you murmur your consent,
offer an acknowledgement right or wrong? Will you Will? Or will you

only offer the silence I have been generously proffered these so many
years? Or did you think I, like so many women, would remain but deaf
to your sly and unworldly utterances? What meaning is in your silence,
for nothing of yours is without a certain architecture, and so what
message is in thy mystery?
I can but guess. On this night many ago you did seek to
resurrect your twinned bairns separated by a tempest that offers no
reunion. On this Twelfth night you come to me. What game is this? To
what purpose, for whose mirth? And what of this number that infects
the mind but seems more rare in nature? By my fingers I cannot count
the days of Christmas, not the hours in a day, or in a night, not the
months, not the pence in a shilling, not the sons of Jacob, not the
disciples by my Lords side. Yet tis a cardinal that appears everywhere
yet without shape, color or substance, and so defines without defining.
You chose of it oft. Must not be of man, who would find more practical
ways to divide and sum. Gods design, and we can only ape.
And why my Lord, would you sanctify this day, this event, this
numeral in a play of hidden appearances, disguise and deceit? And
why would you appear on this day, with a mask that may be you
unmasked, your visage uncloaked after all these years, now cloaked
behind what may now be the strange and final truth? May I be the one
who surprises you my dear Lord, may I lift the visor you thought you

knew only to reveal a personage you knew not? May you discover that
I am the one twinned to a life you knew not, to a love you never knew,
to a future that can never be yours? The others carry on in drunken
forgetfulness of your entrance, of my absence. For me, no joy-sops
tonight, no wassail on this night of wassails, not of your return. With
this clay, I have been wedded into sober duty.

10th Feb. 1616. Sunday night.

And today Judith is wed. Though not without the drama or
comedy we Shakespeares seem to bring to any staged event. For the
most part, we who witnessed her and Thomas conjugation offered but
a dull audience, none of us any better than dear deaf Luanne who
clapped out of time to the merrily marrying, our hands smacking for
the love of warmth more than song. All was going well enough, and
briskly too for all our shivering sakes, when Judith appeared beautiful
and radiant in the church courtyard wearing a borrowed silver brocade
over the blue gown she had sewn. Happy she was to be given away
from the arm of Hamnet instead of her father who lay at home curled
and crippled in his own stew. Her shoes and gown were heavily caked
with mud despite the flowers and rosemary strewn before her and as
she strode cautiously down the slippery path we all feared for a fallen
and sullied bride. Yet it was Hamnet himself who slipped and muddied

his best pants, nearly toppling the bride oer him. Poor Hamnet, who
has had more misfortune than any man should bear, broke down later,
less embarrassed by his ungraceful touching of the earth and more
touched I believe by the letting free of his wifes namesake which
brought to mind the release twelve months past of his beloveds truest
spirit. At least I did not have to cook.
O Judith, so unlike me, so like me all the same. Of my two
daughters I see less of myself in the youngest, yet despite a multitude
of differences it is she and I who are most twinned. Unlike me, she
wears blue. Like me, she chose a winter marriage, to which I say: while
love is young and intentions dormant she will welcome her husbands
warmth against the cold; in later years the oldest blanket will probably
smell better, a dog comfort more. Unlike me, she has a perfect yet
homely face. Like me, she never learned what currency women gain
from looks, to which I add: good looks are but borrowed coins, you pay
back usuriously what you gain from beauty. Unlike me, she has no love
of brats or motherhood. Like me, she married a hopeless young man,
hers a tavern keep, a man who draws a good wine and strong ale but
never an interesting thought. Unlike me, she marries a man who does
not love her. Like me she married in haste, no publishing of the banns,
nothing prepared for the guests afterwards but some simple cakes and
sweetened sack. She is not quick though, I dont believe her belly
speeds her on, though some other germ may seed her journey.

Whatever it is I am left to wonder, and wonder too if my life is but a

glass to hers. Not stars or planets, the signs that guides her are of me.
I am the door she walks through to find tomorrow, I am the window to
what, who she will be. Look Judith, look closely before you hurry your
future so!
On the other hand, maybe for her this is just the prodding on of
lifes dull tale, just as winter comes from autumn and before spring,
whether written in stars, pomegranate seeds or animal dung, this is
the way things are to be and always will be, which is just as they are.
No simpler philosophy yet devised. Yet I cant help but fear that if this
was writ to be, I am the scribe, I created the script and forced it upon
her. And if I wrote it, then I must have read it to her as well. Illiterate
as a stone she has become, somewhere along her childhood path she
took ill to words. I believe all children are born with a passion to read,
in fact most will fight to read just as they struggle to stand on two feet
until they can walk; Doane tried to keep his children from books, a
distraction from work hed say, as he chewed a twig and set his eyes
with industry on vacant space. One of the Doanes a lawyer now and
the other a learned man of all that ails sheep and corn. Judith at one
time loved words but then willed herself to read not, she chose to let
words vanish into the background, become marks without content,
patterns without course. Yet stories are told more often than not
without the guide of script or cipher, and easily I could have told her

these stories that so shaped her destiny with the simple motions of my
body, gestures of hands that said to her: go marry a moneyless young
man, with a tilting of the head that spoke thus: marry not with a
thought about the future, and finally with an expression of eyes and
crooked mouth that said: seek out both love and marriage though
neither will make you happy. However, if you had chosen to keep words
as your constant counsel, my sweet daughter, then perhaps you would
have seen the folly of your mothers tale.
Ahh! Why do I pretend to write these words for unknown eyes?
As for words, and why words, and why I write these words to you Will,
for all I know, I know not why. You will never read them, nor shall any
other eyes be pained. I cannot bear to speak to you, although it was
you who said trust ears not eyes to love. Yet between us we had no
song to share, and so in my own eyes, you were the vision of love, my
only love. When you vanished, my eyes lost their most vital reference,
and as love can be blind, so can love be blinded. Now so blind, who do
I trust? Who do I see? If vision fades, does love so fade to paler hues?
If I love a specter of a man, did I love at all? So did I still love you, if I
could no longer see you? The answer is, despite doubt, despite
uncertainty is: without doubt most certainly. I saw and had seen, I lost
sight, I was blind and more blinded I am. Yet I loved you as it was my
duty to love you, as it was my fate to love you, as it was my chosen
calling to love you in sight or out of sight. I loved you indeed in

absence and even in moments of forgetfulness. I loved you young and

old, tall and short, thin and fat, curly haired and bald and so loved all
stages and all forms and all shapes of you. I loved you in as many
ways as there are kinds in Gods diverse universe, in ways changing
through everchanging time, in turn and in fear of Gods most gracious
will. Will I take thee Will? Yes, and I did take thee, Will.
But that is me, and my souls devotion. Others are not so
devoted. Your name was whispered not once today and even on the
chance it may have been uttered that chance seemed purposefully
snuffed from breath, the word Will may have filled many a mind, but on
tongue and chattering lip it was not in existence on this day. Without
any surprise I would have accepted the curates sly modification: Shalt
thou have this woman as to thy wedded wife? Shalt thou comfort her? I
w- w- shalt. The ones who might have uttered your name did not
attend, afraid perhaps that I would put you in a wheeled barrow like
some butchers offal and prop you up like one of your props so that
your daughter would at least have a father represented upon her
rather empty stage. The silence caused by their negation of Will
creates an uproar centered on a single unspoken query: Who were
you? Like me, how many Wills have we come to know? You have come
and gone wearing the face and body of someone new each time. As if
you had found a means to live by renting your name to others who in
turn overpaid me for this privilege to be their wife.

To me and the others in this town you began life as a boy of little
promise and even smaller means. You kept your word but that was
easy as you never offered it either. Then you left, and when you
returned you came fitted in silks and feathers. You came back a player,
yes, but one whom the queen had addressed at the edge of her skirts.
You were no rogue, no dandy, nothing that would have granted you
better entry to the profession you seemed to love. Despite your fancy
dress, you remained humble, never one to cause conflict or raise a
conflagration over any kind of event or even misdeed. Later, under
new visage, you would come back hoarding false merriment, wrapped
in the stench of tobacco, this rancid lady you cannot part with lest
screams peal from your broken lips. You came with plenty of coin to fill
every vintners till and could be counted on to piper on to Piping
Pebworth and mosey over to Merry Marston, to haul your junk to
Haunted Hillborough, grovel towards Grungy Grafton, drink with
Exhaling Exhall, wobble through Wicked Wicksford, bump into
Buggering Broom and piss your way to Piddling Bidford. You came
back fat as a sow, gurgling with rhyme, indifferent if your jowl kissed a
whores cheek or the pisswet dirt.
Is it no wonder the people here have abandoned you, that they
leave you alone, nary a one will even stop and ask of your condition?
Some of what I have heard said is that you are still nothing but a
doggish player, that plays cause men to play as soddomites play, while

others preen their logic thusly: the cause of plagues is sin, and the
cause of sin is plays, so the cause of plagues is plays. And you seem
to now embody their each and varied fears. I for one, can enjoy the
May pole or the Morris dance, but for many others here your stench
spreads an amnesia among them, has wilted their memories and
clenched their thoughts as one would an offended nose. For the rest,
they live with the simple wisdom that the unknown is best addressed
by silence.
Will, your daughter has now a ring upon her finger, not dissimilar
to this ring upon your furthest digit, and perhaps with time hers like
yours will bind her like a poorly measured leader around a fattened
sow, choking to death what it once dearly embraced, what it once
honored it now kills. Will, whose ring is thy fingers careless noose?

12th February 1616. Morn.

I sit here and watch, sit here and wait, as if expecting something
to happen, as if someone might suddenly tell me that all I have done
was right, that I am not to blame. How many times did I console
myself with the thought that I was in the right, that by doing right I had
done all I could do and so had nothing more to want? You stare back at

me, out of one eye dull and blank. Dust covers tears that have long
dried away. What should I do, what is my responsibility, should I lick
away your blindness? Is that what a wife should do? My knowledge of
such requirements is more spiritual than carnal, my idea of a cure
would be to pray not lick. Your body is a but a foreign being in my
presence, one I dare not touch, dare not move, dare not awaken.
In whispered desperation I begged advice of the reverend before
beginning this writ of communication. And in his whisper back to me I
was warned not to allow such thoughts, heaven forbid and God forgive
me should I set them to burn on paper. Such was not the prudence of
a woman to do so even though it be but a pin to a prick. Yet for some
reason I fear not, care not. Did you know I too could sin so well, huh
Will? Do you listen? If you cannot see, do you then hear?
Few of your friends have come to pay their visits, waiting
perhaps to pay their last respects when that can be done lastly once
and for all, nothing worse than to have to repeat ones eulogy, many
have still not come to terms with your mystery, many still doubt. Even
your son-in-law John comes here to offer his medications but stealthily,
his nose behind a pomander, afraid if his visitations be known his
physics practice to the gentle folk would suffer. I told him to not bother
any more, for each of what he has to proscribe I have twenty, more he
has taken from me that I have from him to give to you, and I do not

want the indignation of receiving a bill from my son-in-law for poor

treatments trumped up by his perceived indignations. He has come
home to you, Margaret said, that is all that matters for this is where he
chose to be home at last. Good Margaret, may God always love her,
for even as she suffers herself, she still glims sunshine in the places
pigs oft sit.
Now the fevers stir him from his sleep and seizes his mind. He
wrestles with strange identities, names I do now know, not characters
of his mind, but essences of something more real. He calls himself
Merlin, calls himself other names too. Where are my books he cries
out as if they were his gold. He screams for the dry pages to feed his
fiery fever. From his sunken shallows, this Kit comes forth, this spirit of
Kit, a man who slobbers as he thinks. One spirit exits as another
enters. A phantom named Skeleton now makes his appearance, formal,
rigid, his hands at his sides as if life were a coffin. And then a Sir
Vontes takes hold, and this same body cringes, curls in and into itself,
becomes a poor specter of a man, frail and boney with arms twisted
and a neck that gapes and turns like some injured fowl. He speaks
from the corner of his mouth, his face turned away as if ashamed of
what others would see if they looked upon him fully. Then they retreat,
these spirits, these ghosts of men from who knows not. They leave in
silence and I am left to ask: who is left when they so vanish?

13th February 1616. Morn.

Take an ounce of quicksilver and kill it with fasting spittle. Put it
into half a pound of boars grease. Mix well together. Take an ounce of
mastic, an ounce of wine, and ounce of camphor and beat these into a
powder, each by themselves and then sift. Take an ounce of saltpeter
and meld them with the boars grease and quicksilver and anoint the
affected party from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet,
sparing only the eyes and ears. Let the party keep in his bed with
moderate sweating two days and let him sit up for his ease the third
day till night. Then anoint him as before and let him lie two days more
and sit the third day. Take great heed for taking cold and use very
good diet and warm drink. If the party is to take cold it is unto death.
It will make the mouth to run very much.
For days in surrounding silence he sorely lies. Next to him in
blasphemy I poorly write. My words? Or are they his words? I dont
know. Dutifully yet unfaithfully I did learn these words from him, and
so mine must in some way be his, yet my body is not his and his body
touched not mine, not in touch nor in spirit much. So why do I hear the
echo of his voice when I scribble these words, my words? This body,
his body lies here in its sweat and in effluvia too vile to describe, a

body he needed for this, his time, a body which I certainly do not need
yet I will need to take care of and dispose of. Curled like a fetus upon
the gouty pangs that pinch his exterior parts, is this putrid appearance
of a man, lame in arm and leg, scarred, wounded, with contusions
suggesting an inner seepage, is this all that remains of him? Could this
be the man, even the mere shell of the man I married? Is this what
women inherit, not coinage for the future but pounds of sickly flesh
and warped bones to which a grave must be found? This body marked
and pocked and scarred with time, a physical etching of time passed,
time past, I ask again: is this the man I loved, love? No, not these
thoughts. I regret thee not, never regretted thee then, will never
regret thee for all time I have to come. Though I do regret being left
with this reeking mess of time, this human opportunity turned to scabs
and sores of times that have no time in coincidence with mine, these
swellings and issuances that bear no birth or creation that I want or
warrant. With responsibility alone I will take thee and so will clean thee
and dispose of thee and worry not if my job is inferior, for God will
ultimately cleanse and take of thee what thee left for Him to take.
I would take my loathsome task more joyously had you an
audience. I had thought the world would indeed regal in your death if
sorrowfully so, yet there is silence surrounding you, a deafening
absence that makes my heart ache. Where are your helpmates, where
is your boy Robinson, where are the others who loved you at least for

what you once were? For as I could not be all to you not in love or life, I
cannot now wife, cleanser, nailclipper, pallbearer and gravedigger
be.
Ah, I know life, it beats in a fingertip and cries when it is pricked,
life asks not of itself or asks others what it is, it is hard to define yet
simple to know, it is not created from fancy nor willed away by will
alone, yet what is love but the very opposite of life while at the same
time the very essence of life? The reverend has warned me against
such thoughts as well, love being but duty simple, a silence when we
most would want to shout, and so such questions as what is love?
Questions meant best for a poets amusement perhaps, not for a ladys
contemplation, for in a lady such thoughts cannot lead to anything
good or pure. But isnt it best to ask such questions not when dizzied
by the intoxicating fragrance of love but when bowed by the dank and
stench of this, loves ugly discharge? Isnt it best to challenge the mind
to remember when it is less inclined to offer memories for pleasures
sake and so pleasures gain? No, now is the time to ask and seek and
find. Amidst filth the truth sometimes lies, amidst filth loved ones
most uncover lies.
If you were my love, what form did you take? If the form for a
nose, I would sniff and then quickly expel thee. If for mine ears, I
heard both your word and song but nay, nothing said or sung for me.

So if anything love begins with a shape and through the eyes love first
enters, and through the eyes love takes hold, finds purchase and there
in sight it manifests. As we learn that the boy who becomes a man is
still the same being, we learn that the object of love endures even as it
moves from the particular to the abstract. Likewise as eyes grow old
and so see less and see less clearly, so love depends less on what is
seen. A shape once hung in picture frame now resides without hue or
shape. A face once loved for its comeliness is now bereft of beauty
clear and now loved for loves sake. So must my love be, as I see
nothing in you now that I can ascribe to what I saw before, no shadow
of youth, no vestige of what once cherished was, nothing on which to
imagine an earlier truth once so clearly seen, once so palpable I
trusted it more than my beating heart. Later when you disappeared, I
was faced with these sudden, these new realities about love, of loves
tenuous ties to lips and hands not seen or felt, of its strength in
weakening me, of its seeming permanence when its subject grew faint
and impermanent, finally of its dying and lessening qualities and how
time could reduce its swell, its murmur, and finally its faintest beat
despite memories that drummed on in moments both waking and
dreamt.
Then when you returned all those years later, it was with a
different sort of inquiry altogether that I approached love. How could
burning love for one young and fresh be equal to the pale and

uncertain love for the seemingly same now cooled and darkened with
time? And then as the years went on and you came to and fro, I had to
find new ways to understand it all again. And again. Now, here in
these final moments, I am faced with the tasks I never imagined I
would have to face: defining it all based on all I should have come to
know and understood. Of your life I have been but a forfeit, of our love
I have been its only keeper. If the love I had had nothing to do with
you, then why does it have everything to do with you? If love was
never a word uttered from your mouth to me, then why is all I
understand of love derived from the words you used when you wrote of
love. I have come to my own understandings of what is true, through
the ordinary oracles of mother and father, my children, through my
friends and others, even through my lovers, but my concept of love is
not from them, it is reinforced by them, it is not denied by them, it is
illustrated and made real by them, but it is not of them. No, my entire
ability to not just think but to feel love came first and comes last from
you, your words and your feelings that you write, words that define me
but were never designed for me.

1st March 1616. Evening.

Margaret comes to visit every day now, bringing with her a
basket of cakes, a few quarts of her winter warmers. I told her I drank

her ale when I gave birth to Susanna, and if not for her ale I would
never have given birth to the twins. We have drunk a lot of good ale,
she said. Since Robert died years ago, we have been steady gossips.
All he had to leave her was a small cottage, but she has done quite
well for herself, still manages to bake and brew and occasionally knits
her stylish stockings with crewel and clocks. I never thought of myself
as being in Margarets position, alone, without a man. Yet that is how it
has been.
I asked her if she remembered how years ago I cut my lip
breaking a piece of wood, lost these two teeth to the sawdust at my
feet, and she put in the stitch and applied the plaster. Of course, she
said, I see my needlework in your smile each day. (Not too good was I?
she whispers.) I wonder how many men saw me as disfigured, you
know ruined. Nonsense, Margaret said, men prey after the unusual,
you are now uncommon in lip as in heart. Besides this is not the
mouth theyre most interested in. She did not know of my deeper
malformations. And strangely, it had never occurred to me until now
to ask her if she missed her husband. Of course, she said, but you
never really miss your husband until he dies. For until he dies no
matter where he is or how far away or in what state of mind, he is
never really gone, and until hes gone you wont miss him.
And honestly, until theyre dead, you dont really like them

either, she said with her own toothless smile.

I became a mother before nature had time to fully fashion me
with motherly traits. I knew you as a child, before you knew me at all,
you were one of many chicks scattered about my skirts, and how many
times I touched you to pull free a thorn or clean a scrape, how many
times I cleared your cheek of tears, how many times I wiped clean your
nose so many years before I would come to know that nose, those lips,
those cheeks, that skin in a more knowing way?
And then came the day when you were a child no longer, but yet
a boy who wanted to be a man, your mothers milk scarce out of you,
a man whose desire was to woo me. But while I had further grown, you
were still too young, you were untrained, your family in disarray. I was
more fit to be your mother than your lover. I who had been this mother
who had motherhenned you, wiped you clean, to me now you would
attempt your ballads. As a comely teen, there was little of a poet in
you, other than your barren pecks at poetry, perhaps more womanly
you were than some, but they say a man can change as quickly as his
voice doth change. You were not old enough for a man, nor young
enough for a boy, a squash before it is a peapod, a coddling before it is
an apple, a hawthorn bud in mans apparel, a small show of man yet on
your chin. You stood beneath my window to sing your loyal cantons,
woo me with your babbling gossip, you kissed the cows dugs that had

chapped my hands, but it was not in kisses but in words Will that I lost
my sense of years, maiden tongued you were, your poor boyish verse
turned trees into my books, with your words the shadows of
motherhood gave way under less sensible light and less illuminating
passion until I forgot the years between us, closed my eyes to the child
before me and more blindly groped for the man you would one day be,
and in our darkness found our first home. My bawdy experience met
your boyful inexperience, like a fresh sprig to rosebud and with the
ease of life life blossomed and multiplied as love so desires it so. Was
this the lust Will that you called the liver vein that makes flesh a deity?
A green goose a goddess? When did these words come to mean
something for you? Then, later from the pen of regret? I do not
regret.
It seemed so easy when we were young. Simple and pure, as
unquestioned as instinct following desire, as unquestionable as the
most certain truths.
Still, how wonderful and sweet those first years of love,
especially as it was with you that I learned to read, with you as my
guide, following the ciphers to uncover their meanings, plumbing lips
for secrets deliciously divulged, treading young fingers on young hands
as guides to all that was delectable, all that was amazingly strange and
frightening familiar. All the wooing would not compare to sitting by

your side as words became Cupids barbs, and later words would
become the substance of my Lords love as Id read the devotions from
the Geneva I kept tucked in my petticoat, and later still words would
become what became of love as I read of your words and your worlds.
What pleasure lovers find in what is read together, and so what other
boys or girls were your later pleasures? Were they a sweet in
fragrance as ours once was, you seemed satisfied and in your rightful
place, yet a boys hidden fears can become a mans darker obsession?
It was words that created light and that light did vision make and so
then led to love, and maybe that is how it always is, and if not, that is
as it always should be, words should be the prelude to all joy, words
should announce the stirrings, should whisper the flow, should whistle
the ebb, should speak the coming moment, should sing the roles we
now need to play, scream and shriek that it is okay to scream and
shriek, good Lord, good God, Amen! My Dear God! Amen!
Without words we would have not, we would never have been,
we would not have found the right to passage, the key to inner bliss,
the seed to sow, the marvel, the sweet, sweet joy, of a sweet sweet
time, long long and far away.
Between the acres of the rye /with a hey and a ho and a hey
nonny no.
What do you remember, Will? What have you forgotten? That

your first child bragged in my belly before hearing Gods simple

sanction. You could have done as others have done. You could have left
town, you could have denied everything. Dunghill carrion, you could
have said, lay your litter where you list. I could have been flogged.
Made to be a strumpet. You did not leave me to have a child on my
own, perhaps you were too young to know what might have happened
to me had I been an unwed mother, made to stand in front of the
parish in but a sheet, whipped, forced to break my own child with no
help useless I screamed the name of the father. Perhaps you did not
know that the child would be then taken from me, that I would be told
to leave Shottery, that I would have been at the mercy of this world.
But you did not as that was not of your make or character. Remember?
it was but a troth-plight, a handfast, I take thee at thy word as you take
mine. Words again defined us and we exchanged vows before our
wedding day and so were married in the eyes of god from that day on.
Remember? we made a trip to the Consistory Court of Worcester before
I was too far along. We could have gone to Gretna Green or Isle of Man
to be married without banns, but you wanted to do it right. You became
a man Will, your father saw your resolve and sudden maturity and so
he did not hesitate in his consent. Remember? you allowed Fuke
Sandells and John Richardson to put up a bond for a special license.
Remember? even though you werent of age you stood by me through
the banns, and remember? you wrote the names of our child in the dirt

so that I could see what the names looked like when you said them.
That their names so beautiful in sounds were transcendent of sound
and were beautifully wrought in dumb marks and the meaning was
transferred by Gods grace to there and to there.
Bridesmaids awoke me with their song: The night is part and
joyful day appeareth/Most clear on every side/With pleasant music we
therefore salute you/God morrow Mistress Bride. My gown of sheeps
russet and a kirtle of fine worsted, my head in a biliment of gold, my
hair combed and pleated as I was led to church by my two nephews,
with bride laces and rosemary tied about their silken shirts. The
bridesmaids had their flaskets filled with flowers to overspread the
ground whereupon we would tread so as not to sully our slippers. You
in new from top to toe, with a pair of green garters tied to cross above
the knee and a dozen crewel points that set off your hose quite fair. We
were so wed to each other and to a life we were to make together. At
the simplest, I could sew and make wreaths and tutties, call by name
my cows, milk ewes and make whey, skilled enough to make it through
a hard winter, but you, what simple skill did you have to support me?
What trade would you honor to support me? Where did you get that
pearl that you gave me as a love token? Remember? twenty marks we
had to begin this life, ten from my fathers will and ten that you
somehow matched. Enough for our cottage, our castle. The biggest
expense was our bed. I was so happy, in my element, in my rightful

place. Remember?
What else do you remember? How later you placed a hand on my
belly to feel a kick or a heartbeat, how you gave a look to me that I
assumed was framed by a question, your eyes begging but afraid to
ask. That I but smiled my reply and so never knew if I answered your
silent query: and so began our own life without words. And so perhaps I
initiated the silence that has since defined our union. Yet even stripped
of words, you knew what to do.
Between the acres of the rye /with a hey and a ho and a hey
nonny no and so I cast myself to life with a boy who had nothing. Yet
you were with me when I gave birth to Susanna. You held my skirt
above the water, you gave me strong beer upon the groaning stool,
you yourself administered the midwifes potions, remember? the juice
of dittany, a dram with the water of fenugreek. Then came the twins in
the dead of that dreadful winter, we cut the umbilical cord of Judith too
short and Hamnets too long. Our sons disfigurement mirrored in
mine. Yet you stood by me all that winter to help with the children. Our
first born singly, our second came as twins. Would I now give birth to
three? you asked, not knowing I was a tattered flower, a shapeless
mouth incapable of song. And I remember that so soon after it began it
seemed our life as man and wife had come to some end. With no need
for an excuse, you left because you could not find suitable work, crops

had failed, life had dimmed. You were but another mouth to feed. And
for how long did I not see you? Seven, eight? How many years?
But you did return. Or did you? The country boy left and the Will
who came back, came back a gentleman. Preened in silks and such.
Pink and green and lavender were colors that trapped his sweat and
clung to his now hairless chest. Peacock feather in his hat. Talking this
way and that, boys following him, as if the city had changed him, the
stage had altered him in dress, prop and countenance, he was a player
and yet he wanted to play the role of a gentleman. I was embarrassed
for him, embarrassed for me. You came back honey lipped, wooing me
again, it seems. One moment you are jealous, the next moment
uncaring. You came back with money and this is when I knew this
man was different than the one I married that you had gained from
your new found style it seemed. What changed you? Had you indeed
been replaced? What could have happened?
We imagine life as a single cloth woven of days and years, but is
life really a garment patched, rent and tattered rather than whole, one
we struggle to sew into some mottled unity? In other words, is life
really dealt in stages, one so different than another that the continuity
of this thing called time is but an illusion we create?

15 March 1616. Night.

Thomas was to appear in Consistory court today after Walter
Nixon informed against him and our Judith for marrying without the
correct license. They had been granted a license from the Vicar of the
Holy Trinity Church who claimed the right to issue such license as part
of the privilege of the Stratford peculiar. Thomas had said he would
not attend and so was true to his word. The Court ruled
excommunication for both he and Judith in his absence. I fear that
there is much worse to come from all this as today we also went to see
Margaret Wheeler and her child buried at Holy Trinity. Someone told
me that she had heard a relation say that a Hart was the child of the
infant and there is much grief and bitterness brewing.
Cursed are the unmerciful, the fornicators, and adulterers, and
the covetous persons, the worshippers of images, slanderers,
drunkards, and extortioners.
If I am not by Gods rule to record my own words, then I am
doubly damned making ciphers of his. Such blasphemous things from
his mouth, the devil himself is a flame inside the man, his face seared,
his lips bled, spit formed like cotton at the corners of him mouth, his
legs scarred and dappled with traces of things terrible and his arms
were weak, lame, his belly swelled as if rising to give birth to
something terrible, indicating that for all the horribleness his body

displays what courses beneath could be many times worse.

For what purpose do I bother to write this down? How many
letters I have sent you that went unanswered by you, except for the
briefest message from time to time and a few pounds to buy some
grain or invest in a shoulder of land. If you, my husband, sought not to
listen to me, why would any other? Or could I bravely imagine that if
you were to write some final tome, an ultimate poem, that it would be
drawn from the very same words I seek to capture now? If we were
one in spirit Will would we be one in word? Could I speak for you,
however clumsy my approach? These words of his:
'Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly night,
Swift subtle post, carrier of grisly care,
Eater of youth, false slave to false delight,
Base watch of woes, sin's pack-horse, virtue's snare;
Thou nursest all and murtherest all that are:
O hear me then, injurious, shifting Time!
Be guilty of my death, since of my crime.

would he never have revealed unto me! His lips were but the
pages of a closed book with me. Never his wit, nor his beauty, nor his

humor did I hear. I have seen it only in the blackest upon white. And
yet here, now, I seek to understand what I was never offered to
understand.
He seems to suffer under the March sun, it heats his ague but it
not heat plenty enough to cure it. In demented tones, he snarls: Her
lips suck forth my soul see where it flies. My dear God, please tell me!
Should I even write this down, these words I am somehow compelled to
write, should I dare set these evil ciphers to paper? Whose guidance
guides me, am I not Satans accomplice for allowing these blasphemies
to live longer than the echo of my sick husbands rants and putrid
screams? I dont know, yes, I am, of course I am, I wont but I must, I
cannot do otherwise, I am somehow wed to this man and to his fury, to
his lame sickness, to his disease and filth, I am somehow wed and
married, conjoined to this, not a party but a part, I cannot weep let
alone drown my doubts, I cannot moan let alone clutch and scream
myself and shake away the terrible resolve to be here to hear him, to
understand this, the other half of me.
Yet if you have come here so as to seek my employ, I cannot
write quickly nor well enough to capture all you have to say; you have
chosen a terrible and inefficient scribe if these be your last thoughts
and testaments; I do not have your imagination, I do not have your
catalogue of thoughts, your library of images, nor your field of ideas

ready to erupt; but am I simply a witness to the throes of life beyond

life, the bird that thrashes about lifting wing and head despite its chest
being cracked in two, the sow that kicks and gapes for air despite the
bloody gash from ear to ear, these are not signs of life, they are the
vanishing signs of life now past, of death now come, there is no
stillness when death comes, we walk into death with a movement of
some kind, but it is not a movement that is pulsed by life, it is a final
movement to another being, the kick, the scream, the moan, the sigh,
the smile I saw on my fathers face, despite the pain, for the pain was
then gone as life was gone and so as moments near to nothing then
the trade is made.
If he would listen, I would tell him that I have read his poems,
that I have learned his poems and can even recite his plays. Despite
their terrible nature they are of terrible beauty and to live with them I
made them mine. Because of his poems I too can write, I too can sing
the songs that he carried in his heart, that he never meant for me to
hear, never thought for me to know. I took them, his pile of infidelities,
I grabbed them and ate them for my own. Word by word and line by
line I digested it all, ate back what I vomited, re-ate what I shate. I talk
like a whore now, even worse a shrew of the theater.
What is greatness if the dust of greatness is no greater than the
dust of the mediocre? What is greatness if it will be reduced to the dirt

and stench of the ordinary? What dear God is beauty if it eventually

wears a face one can no longer bear to look upon, a hand too cold to
hold, lies in a bed amidst its piss and shit? What is genius if it is
reduced to the babbling of a child and the wit of an ape? What is
greatness if it does not see its own greatness? If it does not honor its
own genius, does not marry its soul to its sacrifice? Your Lucrece found
greatness not in king or husband, not in man but in mans work, a
painting she sought to rip from the wall. Yet you do not care enough
about your own work to bind it tight and press it into future service. I
have saved for you what greatness you will have, and I could shred it
but I have no grief to back me in such a terrible act. Man thinks he is
wed only to his prodigality, no other responsibility has he.

25th March 1616. Midnight.

He loved me more than all women, and so how I wanted to tell
him how much I knew that women were his staff of life, that women
were his rocks, his foundations. He told me so in many ways and then
many a time, I read this over and over and saw him struggle with the
temporality of love that men offer versus the permanence of love that
women offered and gave unconditionally. Yet I know how mothers let
you down, and wives were but apparitions, but daughters like scars like
years of age like doubt were real and forever. I know I cannot offer you

anything but the transparency you felt a wife could give you, but I am
the only link between you and the one you truly love, the daughters
who you sought and held on to for salvation.
Yet I must speak with your daughters. Your father was not just a
stage player, I need to say to them, he was a writer, he was of words
that would last longer than life, of words that need no poet, of stories
that need no author, he speaks such things which I am sure are
blasphemous and heretical, but yet I cannot believe that completely
with my own heart, as stained as my heart may be at this time of such
sorrow and grief and pain, how this tests me I dont tell her, how this
confuses and disturbs me, how am I to ever live now that such words,
thoughts and deeds have been put firmly into my mind, my soul like
poisoned soil will never know again comfort, my spirit will be forever
tortured with these terrible spewings as if I had taken thistles to my
inner being, I did not tell her, he will be a man who will be larger than
his life ever was to any of us, I told her, he will be a man whose words
are on the lips of every other man, whose thoughts and sentences will
be rote by which others grow and learn, I told her, he will be great then
God, I did not tell her, he will surpass even the greatest of all beings
as the greater of all beings, he will be the man by which gods are
measured, he will be the soul by which all souls seek to attain
perfection, I did not tell her, and so how terrible a man this is that can
achieve such things, how terrible a man who knows not what he

aspires to be and how much terribleness he will wreck upon our simple
and simplified world, I did not tell her, for he was a man who rutted in
dunghole and whorehole, he was a man who drank his self to such
bloated nature that he seeps his sins as if they were spouts of ale, he is
a man marked and pocked and chancred to a degree that I am sure the
quicksilver I administered is but a red hot fire to him than a cure of any
kind. He then is the most terrible of men, the most filthy and foul of
men, from his maw to his torn and blacked feet. He is a terrible sight
to behold and worse to breathe in, and yet I want no other light or no
other air upon me.
Here is the man who I have known like no other who I know in no
way other than to say he is a man, that he has flesh like a man, that he
has the face of a man, that he has hands, feet and limbs of a man, that
he has the parts of a man once adored and now abhorred. He is man,
he is flesh, a being that moves and mutters, exhales and of excrement
excretes. He is a point of life giving up to the nonpoint of death, he is
the vestige of soul, of which is energy that suffers the moments before
all three are free and all three may continue on in their journeys.
Clearly, no work of conscience urges you at the last hour to remember
your life, that eternal life many follow your repentance.
And today he takes my hand O! I can barely bear it - and he
looks at me with loathsome eyes dully coated by the dust through

which he stares too long and hard at nothing, and why in his grip do I
feel that he grips a mans hand, in his eyes I sense that he sees
nothing womanly, but a mans love.
Who am I to him? If he knew I was woman he would worship my
breasts, he would honor my soft and subtle scent, just as he would
abhor my darker areas, this I know. He nearly trembles in disgust when
he hears the rustling of my skirt. The harder I clomp the floor the more
peacefully calm he becomes. He sweats when he can smell of my
lavender, he falls to sleep when I press close with the reeks of cow and
seat. What did I steal from you Will? Did I take from you your chance
to marry beauty? Did I rob you of the opportunity to create a life out to
the elements you found as you grew older? Did I leave you to function
with no more grace than an infidel, to steal what you sought from
others unable to give back, to seek what you did not have in others
who would not give? Did I give you a life of on which your genius had
to sleep with a homely future? Did I force you to place ideals outside
the realm of the possible?
The man who writes is not the man I see before me, not this man
for sure, this man of boils and sorrow consumed in his own
consumption, rotting inside a dead fruit while he burns to ash outside
over sins a lifetime brought to pyre.
He speaks to me in languages I cannot understand, speaks to

someone but me but to me all the same I should say. He talks even
the language of the church, reciting is verse and rituals but winds them
with a pist and cur upon his face. He wrings the words in his hands as
if collecting the ancient words into a bill and crushing them with his
little strength. I am sure he is beyond damnation, that he has been
damned and damned again beyond recompense and certainly beyond
salvation, beyond mercy of any kind, nothing more terrible has been
wrought on any storied character that will not be wrought upon him.
If only he would come to and see me, if only I could show him for
a moment what I have become, of what I have learned in his absence,
what I have gained in his leavings, if only I could show him the gold
him money has created from the fine farm we have, the goodly ale, the
knittings we have done. If only he could see how I talk, how I write,
how I hold my head up high, how I walk and walk among the others, he
would not recognize me he wouldnt, I would be as strange to him as
he to me.
And if he could hear me and he could ask me what for how dear
woman has this transformation so transformed you? I would smile in a
way he had never seen before showing him a look in my eyes he had
never before witnessed and with words he never thought he would
hear from me I would tell him how it had all come from him, that he
had transformed me, that he had evoked and wrought this change,

that he had nourished me and gave me strength that he had informed

me and taught me and showed me how life was in its fullest sense, I
would tell him that I learnt all this through him even if he was absent
from this entire life together, I would tell him that I took his words that I
was not to read, I embraced his writings that I was never to see, I
gathered them and learned them and embraced them and their
meaning for me or not for me, but embraced them as anyone would
and as many people will and as all people should. You taught me how
to think, how to feel, how to love, how to hate, how to fear. You are
master of my intellect, you are king of my soul, you are the deity that
holds my being. I speak in such damnable terms because as I told your
daughter, I told her, he is in great pain, but he has always been in pain,
he is not aware, but he has never been fully aware, I told her, he is not
of this world and yet he has never been of this world, I told her, and so
from his vantage point he can tell us of this world, this soreness that
we believe we have, of this pain that affects us all, this pain be it love
be it disease be it loss of flesh be it the birth of flesh.

31st March 1616. Easter.

For I will pass through the land this night, and will smite all the
firstborn in the land, both man and beast; and against all the gods I will

execute judgment: I am the LORD. And the blood shall be to you for a
token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will
pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you.
Bartholomew and I have nearly finished the inventory:
Clothes 1 pound 1s 4d
Wedding ring 1 pound
Jewelry 1 pound 4s 2d
Linen and bedding 30s

Nine coifs of black and tawny 3s

Six handkerchiefs 2s
Eleven drawn work coifs3s
Nine coifs2s 3d
Six crest coifs12d
Six plain coifs2s
Thirteen bands3s
Six pairs of garrets3s
Six pairs of gloves10d

Coarse gartering20d
Five other garters12d
Seven dozen laces2s 4d
Seven dozen points1s
Two dozen while inkles1s
Six yards of loom work12 d
One ounce of thread8d
Two dozen bandstrings18 d
Nin silk points12 d
Pins 2d
One box of brooches6d
Eight boxes2d
Thimbles and two bound grasiers4d
Forty two yards of bone lace4s
Four and one half dozen yard of loom lace 4s

Five flitches of bacon, four quarters of rye, six quarters of barley

and five of household, a quarter of muncorn. Two live pigs, two geese
and a gander, twelve hens and a cock, a cow and a year old heifer, ten
sheep. 11 pound 6s 8d
One malt mill, two little grates, three wheels, one strike, three
malt sieves, one peck, one try, one haircloth, one winnow sheet, three
looms, two kivers and twenty four quarters of malt in tow garners.
Four quarters of malt, seven hogsheads of strong beer, three of
ordinary beer, six half hogsheads of beer and four barrels of smaller.
22 pounds
Sums lent out 60 pounds
Stock remaining:
Milan caps, glasses, daggers, girdles, bands, bracelets,
mousetraps, bird cages, show horns, landers and Jews trumps, bells,
necklaces, beads of glass, collars hammers hatchets, coifs, pins,
purses, needles, thread, ouncers, and mariners breeches. Three
prayer books. Divers ballad chaps.
Calvins Institutes, 1st British ed.; Timothy Bright, Treatise of
Melancholy; Haringtons Orland Furioso; Robert Greens Pandosto;
Spensers Fairie Queene; Sidneys Arcadia; Richard Cromptons
Mansion of Magnanimity; Ovids Fasti; Puttenhams Art of English
Poesies; Plutarchs Lives; Holinsheds Chronicles; Thomas Lodges

Scillas Metamorphosis. Divers pamphlets incl. Hero and Leander, V&D:

two of my luscious marrow bone pies.
Pills of amber, resins, powdered pearls and crushed coral, gold
leaf, shavings of ivory, sassafras, camphor, mechochan, an array of
guns, powdered mummy, benzoin, grains of paradise, galingale, bezoar
stone, Armenian bole.
For he that is dead is freed from sin.

12th April 1616. Eve.

He lies infinitely more quiet now. The spirits of his mind at
ease.
Once you pass on, like the air in this room, the memory of you
will purify. That my aim will be. As you lay here now, in this living
state that only the coldest dead would call living, only I have been
witness. Your daughters will not know your shame. Though they are
often told of their father the player, they will not see your present
disgrace, they will not smell your stink, they will not see you covered in
asss milk, stained by mercury, reeking of tobacco, they will not be
allowed to have this as final memory of the man who gave them
name . They will have to wait for their own men to waste away to see
what becomes of men. Secretly you sought your redemption through

your girls, too weak it seems to ask for what they probably would have
given willingly and eagerly had you but asked, although now they
seem ill positioned to redeem that which they may never know.
Susanna offers some hope, while Judith spurns the very words that
make you and will never make sense of what your hands have
wrought.
Despite all you claim to know of life, you missed so much of what
I would call life. You missed all their first steps, their very first words,
the twins first birthday, your daughters first ewes, Mallory and
Wavery. You missed them running about the pea fields in their
scarecrow clothes chasing birds from furrow to furrow, as graceful and
nimble and light as birds, flapping their wings of cloth, cawing their
crow cries, screeching, falling onto a heap of tired laughter. The lark
that tirra-lirra chants! With hey! With hey! The thrush and the jay!
When you came back, and saw your son at a young boys age, you had
filled your mind with so many new ideas and foreign elements that I
could scarcely determine what looked less like you, your face or your
speech. To others you engaged in lively debates and spoke between
languages and seemed to have a gift that others longed to hear upon
their own ears. Wherefore these changes that wracked you, twisted
you, reshaped your face, your voice and the very spirit that gave
fountain to your speech? What world lay out there, where forces like
winds and rains bend trees and scatter ships, these forces disfigure

faces and blow new complex thoughts into once simple minds.
There was the time we were told you would be coming home for
Susannas birthday. So excited she was. Dressed as a farmers
daughter she wanted to be and a bonny lass she was all ready for you,
well tucked up in a russet petticoat with a bare hem no fringe, over
that she had a red lace and a stomacher of tuft mockado and a pattlet
cast over with a pretty whip, her girdle was green and on that hung a
large leather purse with fair threaded tassels, and a of course new pair
of yellow gloves, tufted with red raw silk very richly. And all day she
waited, a young girl in waiting, sitting inside on the guest chair so as to
make sure she did not dirty or mess her dress. But you never arrived.
That was the last time she ever believed you that you would return,
from then on, your return was an event
The love you had of your daughters was a love you knew not how
to handle, yet you knew you were responsible for whatever befell them
good or bad. You knew that if there was an accident you were the
cause even if you were cities away. If one of them was hurt by another
man, you were the perpetrator. If one was to be terribly hurt or killed
you would be dammed. And so you demand your wlee so as not to
suffer solely on their account. Each year the strangeness of you was
driven further from my mind by the love that seemed to grow in you
for them.

You sought their protection in your will, Will. I do not know and
cannot say if you are of a mind to make these final decisions, but I am
clear and happy with them nonetheless. You gave them what you may
not have given to an eldest son had you had one. Did you forget that
you had a son, Will? You wrote of a son in your plays but it was not
your son you wrote of, perhaps you wrote o yourself, perhaps you
wrote of your father, perhaps you wrote of another person you loved,
but you did not write of your son, your son came and went without a
wrinkle forming on your brow. The former gains strength each day
raising his baby calf as it grows, you gained no dram of strength in all
the year you had to lift him.
You loved your daughters, but you could not have known just
how strong, how special they were. Though many a supper was at best
of necks and points, midriffs and gathers, we were never really hungry.
Curds with dark bread was our feast through some nights. We never
had to pick oakum or clean chapel floors. Daughters were spared of
the hardest graft, but still worked hard to grow up strong. So they
grew up with little, but wanting less, yet still they had a terrible fear of
loss that extended towards the animals, to the seasons and even to
the light of day, a sense of loss that they felt about themselves far
ahead of what any child should feel. And I always wondered where did
this come from, from what well, from what emptiness did it flow and
reach for other, more tangible things? Was it you they sought, was it

you they worried for? But not knowing you or really of you did they
look to the light of sky and the breath of a bird? You were here for stray
moments over time, moments that stitched together the periods of
your absence but could never have given you a picture of their life.
There were moments such as when I came to Susannas room and
heard her sobbing one winter night. I sat on the side of her bed and
asked her what the matter was, are you cold? I asked, can I get you
more blankets? She shook her sweaty head no. Are you feeling ill, I
asked her, can I get you some tea? Again she shook her head no.
Something is the matter I said, cant you tell me. She just shrugged. I
felt her forehead for fever, there was none. I felt her arms and hands,
they were warm. So you wont tell me? I asked again. Im hungry,
Mother, she whispered. I was devastated. For a number of weeks we
had had very little to eat. Storms had flooded the stores of wheat and
we had little money to purchase anything but necessities. Dinner had
become quiet and solemn occasion, meals of black bread soaked in
salty broth, water with a bit of sugar for the imagination more than
anything else, and but I did not know that my daughters were in fact
starving. Why didnt you ask for something, I asked her. Because I
know that Judith is hungry and so is Hamnet. And I am sure you are
hungry too. I saw then, in the darkness that surrounded her anguished
face that she could starve here in her silence, she could perish here in
this bed during this night for all I knew, with nothing more than a

whimper, such was her reserve to remain silent to her suffering, she
could be gone one morning because she share life and the fate of life,
she shared the pain and the pain of death with us all, and this she
knew at the age of but nine.
Susanna was you clear favorite, it was she who had the wit of a
poet, the strength of a queen, the fleshy form of a nymph, the
constitution of Diana, you loved her best, you gave her our house, you
gave her everything some say in hopes that she will give you the heir I
could not. She was a woman I sometimes wondered if you wished I
was. Do all men feel disappointed by their wives? Do all men seek
redemption in daughters, just as they seek immortality in sons?
Daughters offer only a secondhand immortality, a lesser promise, a
faulty warranty.
You missed Susanna in her races against the boys, how she flew
across the field her long legs beating a winning stride beneath her
skirt, she had no notion of the humiliation she caused, all she knew to
do was to run and to win, she had a true fire in her. For her, to be
covered in sweat was to be triumphant, she was the wind, she was the
spirit that could prance with ease and could not be matched with any
other boy or girl even years older and hands taller. You missed the
years during which your daughter galloped and streaked, cantered and
raced like a wild thing of flaming intelligence, you missed that spark,

that flame, before it began to fade, then vanished, as she became a

woman and eased perhaps awkwardly into that more permanent role.
Judith was not as swift of mind or foot, not as tall and not nearly
as petty as her sister, nor did she receive your easy graces with the
same ease. Yet for me she is all the more dear, all the more gifted for
her ability to be here and negotiate this earth without these gifts, and
so I place here in perhaps higher esteem if that were possible and
while I could I never love one more than the other I do admire her
more, I sense a different presence that I honor more, I recognize a
station on this earth that I know will be harder, will bring her more
sorrow, more pain, I see her facing a darker heavier future and yet she
is not bowed by that weight, I see her moving forward without fear, she
will see all the world is and she will be forced to see all the more,
nothing will be hidden, nothing will she be able to take for granted.
And so the pittance you left her is yet another mark, another visibility
of the lifelong hardships she will bear, the little you gave her will be an
equally greater weight for her to bear, the lesser fortunes will be equal
to more than all the riches you could have garnered, the pittance a
weight upon her, the lesser the greater so only love can create
The younger one was steadfast from the earliest age to grow her
own love, I cried at times to think that she did this because no one
could give her what she needed and so she set to deliver her own, and

so she found it not in the hasty embraces of men and boys but in the
solid that would fill her belly, although the first time her act of creation
was lost, and yet this did not deter her and so she tried again until she
succeeded.
So rare and so bright seem the days when the girls would copy
the epigrams you taught them at the kitchen table, and how they
would dress the window panes with these cherished stories. But for
those few moments, you missed them both when they were of life at is
ascent, when all was possible, when neither had any idea that they
were girls and so for a fleeting time they were the finest and best that
a human being could be in stature, stride and speech, fearless, forceful
and strong. But with time, these qualities took a new role time, settled
from their waters and is now but sediment of memories which I can
barely stir back into flight. Judith seems to reject the very words that
gave her soul light on that day long ago.
With or without words, they gave you the same message but as
different messengers, both gave you a perspective on love that you
would come back to find unchanged from the love they gave you
before. From them you found love hat you could not swat away, you
could not destroy, most of all you could not ignore, you could not
starve this love, you could not wish it away, you could not even
mistreat it and hope it would disappear like even the animal that was

fondest of you. One love gave you love that you wanted, that you
desired most, it was easy for you to get and so it was the love you
appreciated the least. The other love you cared not much for, yet it
came to you anyway, it came not forcibly, not desperately, it came to
you with constant patience and with the cautious subtlety of a fearful
desire. With the one you learned one thing and with the other you
learned another thing. Without the one you would not have learned
the other, and without the other you would not have been able to learn
the other. And so they came to you, two wings of one being, two
elements of one substance and only as such were you able to see an
recognize it, accept it and endear it to your own heart, as hardened as
that may have been.
Nor did you write of your daughter in Leir. Such daughters you
had to concoct with the upmost strength from prejudices I would never
had believed you had. But poor blind Gloucester now he lost what you
must have feared most you would lose, you ability to see in the final
moments of life when all other senses falter and memories hang onto
light and shadow.
Your daughters Will, how will you leave them now, now that you
have left them? One daughter who loved you more than any other
man. You have left her in a darkness that I once thought I had created,
a darkness in which to hide, now a darkness that hides her and shows

her to be defective. What happened Will? Another daughter who

hated you as much as the other loved you. The asymmetry of
symmetry, the balance of opposites, the way nature grows and rivers
run, the way clouds form and the edge of the earth. The way a tree
grows and gains advantage from being both straight and crooked so,
the way a bird flies dancing off what could be a path direct and
efficient, the way life stages it moments one sad another happy. She
would hiss when she saw you coming, when she was younger that is,
later she learned to feel hatred towards other men, a hated she wanted
close to her, so close she cleaved unto them, as if punishing a sin
almost forgotten. What sin Will? Will you ever remark upon the marks
that changed us forever, the marks that one leaves and can never
erase, the marks that divide life onto one of two roads, that forever
cast the crooked future against the straightest past. One small event,
insignificant as a falling leaf, weightless as a touch, soft as a kiss that
one small event forges a future from a different stock, life like a child
grows from its stock of laughter, its stock of pain, draws from that soil,
drinks its own water, will ravish its own nourishment. You gave life to
life, and the stock you gave to life has rooted, has grown, has formed.
Along the way did you once display your rod, in a moment to forget
give them your staff? Did you seek to relieve yourself of your pain?
Did you seek in them too much, for they cannot give you all you need.
The daughters in your imagination were on one hand a destructive

force and yet you looked to them to redeem as well. They betrayed
their fathers as they saved their fathers.
1st April 1616. Morn.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing
mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And
there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat
upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and
began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
From Easter Lessons, yesterday.
Hot winds have rushed into his trembling body. In his fevers,
more severe than ever now, he talks of such strange things, of cities
and places I have no idea exist, maybe in his mind, of women who he
does no love, of men he does love, or fights, of terrible things, he
speaks with complete abandon, should I write them down, should I
save these thoughts that spill from him like blood from a wound. I
have written them down, how long on so many nights have I sat by
candle and sketched what I could of his words that broke over cracked
and frantic lips.
Will, what hisses you to your grave? What grotesque world did
you inhabit, what world filled with deception, self deception, self
induced imaginations or terrible mistruths that now wracks your body
and permanently scars your appearance. I cannot tell from your

exterior what sins you suffered, but I fear that you are not the man that
I find in memory or in word.
The spirits of the other men return. He stirs, groans and then
says as he rocks his head back and forth: Dont call me that. We are
not that familiar. I have a great name, I bear him on my back, who or
what he was, I did bear him, and back again. Another time, he sits up,
or tries to, and says through eyes blindly forward: If she could kill
Merlin and kill Kyd and kill Greene, she can certainly eat her own, what
a fest she has had of her most blessed ones. And so do not blink too
hopeful: that light falling from the air could be either Lucifer or Icarus.
Such sins I hear from him. As if challenged by me or some inner
spirit he suddenly says: Are we beasts? Animals care not for music, or
for beauty, so what is natural is by nature crass and ugly. Man is an
angel only if he raises himself above eating and dunging and
breeding. A nurse says to induce vomiting by giving him walnut and
celandine juice with powdered radish. But it seems that the poor man
could not afford to lose any more fluid than what poured from his
orifices and pores. Another person brought some spiced ale and salty
tarts of mince. Otherwise you would think the town knew of nothing,
there is hardly a word or whisper, not even the sounds of people
passing, as if they stayed away as if this were the house of the
epidemia suddenly.

I brought the twins through the fevers one year. Nothing more
terrible than a foe you cannot see. Every animal was a suspect, every
bird that flew into the yard, every rabbit I shooed away with broom,
every dog suffered by rage. Even the insects could vectors be, my
faith in God had to be bolstered by my own ability to keep the house
and yard clean. How terrible Will, to hear the screams of someone in
some house, screams that were indistinguishable from the agony of
the dying or the agony of someone watching the wretched dying die.
And then from outside the shots of guns and the yelps of poor dogs as
the men took to killing every beast that roamed. All of this you may
have witnessed in your own way, but you did not sit vigilant through it
all keeping two babes at your breasts, hoping that this mothers milk
was the one aspect of their life that would not infect them, as that was
all they had, and hoping it would last as days turned to weeks and all I
had was what was left of my flesh to feed them both.
I hear you talk of dusty trips across Moorish plains, of cathedrals
on whose walls the chains of slaves hung like gouges drawn by finger
nails, like scabs blackened, hardened he hissed , of a painting of the
Madonna where she held a pomegranate in one hand as if it were the
heart removed from the cavity of some recent kill. Of how men were
burnt and dragged, split open in front of children for games, had their
privates cut off and blood spilled where seed should have.

You did not come here alone this time, but you seemed to have
carried within you the spirits of several men, who have come now to
speak their turns. First this man Kit, then a Merlin, a Tom Skeleton and
a Sir Vontes. Who are these men Will, will they be the men who show
up to carry your casket? Or are these the men who have paraded to
me over time, the one and then the other now wanting their time with
me?
All the thoughts that plague you, should I be surprised that none
are of me. You never wrote me a letter, despite all the ones I sent.
Were you afraid of the very words you fearlessly wrote for the world to
hear? The world all but me? Were words directed to the heart of one
person of a different caliber than words spoken to the masses, through
the mouths of others, without meaning to anyone but your
imagination? Could you see the world only through the anonymity of
your characters? Were you afraid that the truth you sought would be
too hard to find if applied to one you loved? Did you fear that if you
had to write to one person in flesh and in spirit you would find not
applause but failure to move, to convince, to sway, to be
understood?

2nd April 1616. Morn.

Take scurvy grass, watercress, and brooklime, 2 handfuls each,

wormwood, fumitory and germander, roots of fennel, borage, succor,

one ounce each, root of elecampane, licorice, flowers of borage,
bugloss, rosemary, two pinches each. Boil them all in five gallons of
beer till one be wasted. After having he following ingredients in a bag,
viz., sarsaparilla, Calamus aromaticus, cinnamon, mace, seeds of anise
and fennel, each half an ounce, juniper berries eight. Let them be
infused in the hot liquor, well covered till cold, after put it up, hanging
the bag in it. After fifteen days have him drink of it, using no other.

3rd April 1616. Morn.

We met several times in that summer, I an older woman to his
fresh boyhood just begging to find the speech that would deliver from
adolescence to unsure manhood. He had soft hands with a cut on one
thumb that I treated with salve and plaster but not before I gazed
inside this small inner part of him. He had dark eyes that were bright
with the wonder life gives to those who do not know, but he was not a
boy who wondered about the world. He accepted it as a dog accepts
the sunlight or a horse accepts feed. He had no inclination it did not
seem to probe any deeper than was necessary to spend a moment
without failure. You could mimic fair but not your own create. Such
love to a young boy from an older woman happens but once, such is

time, such is innocence, neither one ever again.

Over one arm the lusty courser's rein, Under her other was the
tender boy was I the lusty courser Will, was that I back when we were
both still young, both in love with the spring, both tender and perhaps
a bit afraid were you younger than I would have believed, did I lie to
myself and create an image in my own eye of a man instead of a boy,
was I the only one who felt the pleasing rage? Who blush'd and pouted
in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy were you led
astray my dear Will, we only have one chance to make some mistakes,
we have not the chance to take back what we have done were you a
child that I took from his mother too soon? That I led into ruby caverns
and gave sight to things red morn you were too fresh to see She hot
as coals of glowing fire, He red for shame, but frosty in desire. But oh
Will, still I was the goddess and still you were a beautiful boy and so
my desire was a gift and treasure that you took. What could have been
to have made you regret this gift? Was this a warning to all young
boys? Or was it a warning to all women that a boy is nothing but his
flesh that to rain tears over the lost love of a boy was a wanton waste
of heavenly dew that would leave other fields dry?
Even as an empty eagle were you my prey, was I a beast which
devouring all in haste, could not get my fill of a young boys mouth
Till either gorge be stuff'd or prey be gone; Even so she kiss'd his brow,

his cheek, his chin, could I have been so ravenous, either in those
innocent times or more importantly in the memories of those times,
either in the times of love or more devastatingly in the old tales of that
love, tales you felt were as large as a myth as important as a tale from
eternity And where she ends she doth anew begin. Is this what you
thought of our love: Before I know myself, seek not to know me; and so
what am I to know now? Do you know yourself Will? You seem to know
the world in all its hues and desires and sins and multitudes. You
demonstrate that you know not only the old man who has lost his life,
but the old man who has lost his eyes, the man who has lost his mind,
his father. What of the people who have gained, what do you know of
them? You know of the man who has lost his only love, of the woman
who has lost her husband, the being who is lost because he lost his
pride, his self. But what of the ones who became one with what they
were by capturing what others could only lose? What of the man who
gained and did not lose all chances? What of the woman who earned
her love and did not lose it to fate? What of the man who found peace?
Of the woman who found self? Why are these so hard for you to know
when you seem to know all else that is dark and pitted with loss.
I remember the blue veined violets on which we laid. You were a
boy of the slow country who knew nothing of the world, who had seen
glimpses of royalty, who had seen men cry for mercy against a fine,
who had seen animals piked and children burned, but who had never

seen a man with dark skin or who worshipped a different god. How did
you learn so much of a barristers speech, of the speech of kings and
queens, of the jealousies that inflame the regal, of the terror that fills
the soldier? How did my man grow up into such a man and such a man
of all men? How did you cut inside the hearts of Jews, of Moors, of
Danes or Venetians? Did you divide the city and its deceiving sirens,
whose eyes are adamants, whose words are witchcrafts, whose doors
led you down to death, to face female serpents, hyena like their
wandering eyes? You knew the casts to cog at cards, cozen at dice,
you had learned the legerdemains of nips, foists, coney-catchers,
cross-biters, lifts, high lawyers, and all the rabble of that unclean pit of
vipers, and pithily you could paint their craft.
And where did you learn of a womans wants, her dreams, her
fears, her desires? Not from me. No. It is not jealousy I feel Will, no,
for that would be pure selfishness on my part. Yet I was cheated by
you. For everything thing you knew that I could not, I was left poorer in
some aspect. For every sight you saw without me, I was left blind in
some memory. For every insight you gained on this human condition, I
was let dumb and vulnerable.
Where did you learn to compare love to war, to render affection
as blows that bring about a swelling beyond hiding? What worlds did
you see, Will? Where far and strange did you go that brought to mind

such thoughts? Does not your Cressida swear that all lovers swear
more performance than they are able, yet reserve an ability they never
perform. And so your Troius spouts sometimes we are devils to
ourselves when we tempt the frailty of our powers.
And you not only learned of these races and species of men, you
came back with them embodied within your body. I learned of the
world through you, your body, as you had little to tell me yourself, I
had to read them from the physical knowledge your physicality
retained. You came back darker, with the Jews shadows about your
eyes, the Spanish Moors sundarkened hue, you also came back with
the Italians brittle nervousness, the Germans paranoia, and the
Frenchmans little self and his fondness for yesterdays odors. But
what would I know I only know what you tell me. And as God so
made the world from his Word, you have so made the world, my world
from yours.
Yet, I regret nothing, am envious not in the least. We are both
the poorer Will, for every bit of knowledge you gained you lost
something else. For every beauty you worshipped, you left another
beauty unseen. For every experience you passed on another. And
what you lost was the life that was us. And there is nothing better, than
that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for
who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?

I might have once wished to be a Mistress and to have lived the

life of the others in this town, the one shoes time sis pent walking and
riding, in playing at cards and otherwise, in visiting their friends and
keeping their company, conversing with their gossips, making merry
with them at childbirths, christenings, churchings and funerals, as is
the custom for them who they are. My hands are coarse, Will,
roughened by the toil of day and the toil of night, red and aged beyond
heritage, more fit to work than to soothe. Did you take a rose not
mine? One Titian-haired and dark?
Will, did you ever read: Let they fountain be blessed and rejoice
with the wife of they youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant
roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all time and be though ravist always
with her love. And why wilt thou, my so be ravish with a strange
woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger.

14th April. 1616. Eve.

What did I learn from you? You, a teacher with a desire to be
heard but no desire to teach? Nevertheless, I learned that the world in
indeed imperfect, that from imperfection great deeds and great
sorrows arise, that revenge comes bloody and rarely with satisfaction,

that love is a cousin to jealousy, that purity will be despoiled, but

goodness can rein, that hopes come true only upon great sacrifice and
patience, that chance is as good a guide as any heavenly star. I
learned that words can contain ones mind just as they can open wide
the world. I learned that of orifices eyes are better for sound and
textures as well as sights, that hands can say more than the most
practiced lips, that words are what the soul would wear should the soul
seek a way to be seen. I learned from you of me. I learned that much
truth spoils from the false interpretation of appearances. I learned that
as woman I am not dumb and oxen. I learned that I can mimic man
and even upstage him as it is only in folly that he believes his
superiority. I have learned that I can lust, I can desire, I can betray, I
can shame, I can rescue and I can make whole. I can bring the
damned back from the dead, just as I can condemn the good who are
too weak to serve my goodliness. Yet mostly, I learned from you they
that are rich in words must needs discover, that they are poor in what
makes a lover. And here, now, I alone witness your final performance.
Can I hope to find you in these pages? Dare I look that deeply?
Did you love the boy in your poems? Did you wish for a Juliet? Did you
terrorize the whorehouses as Pericles? Those are questions that do not
concern or interest me. But I do wonder about other characters that
seem in my wretched imagination that were you or were created from
you. So tell, me, please let your fever cool and so open your mind to

just a few truths, were you my dear or what part of you was the poor
Moor? Did some aspect of the Jew have to be torn from you with such
force that that is what left you lame? Could you have been Falstaff?
No. Could you have been Titus, Macbeth, Richard? Heavens no. Could
you have wished to be Prospero? Maybe. But I believe you were the
darker you.
You have asked me to leave this house, to leave what I have built
and the sorrow with which I receive that feels most like a punishment,
and while I do not understand you, I understand that you do not
understand me, I understand that you do not know that I have made
you just as you have made me, I understand that I have given you life
when you care not for life, that I will give you life when life is neither a
concern or a thing of recognition to either of us. I will be the
embodiment of all you never were, I will be the one persons of
substance that people will see and feel when they reach out to you. All
other aspects of you will be as ghostly as the Danes father. Unlike the
others, your never appended your thoughts or opinions to your plays,
you never let down your mask, you never revealed the man who wrote
these works, not his prejudices, not his sentiments. When they look
for you, you will vanish again and again, you will be one name but a
name confuses with many names, you will be one man but a man
thought of as many men, you will be both character and author, both
player and conniver, you will be both lover and spoiler of love, you will

be father and husband and cuckold and infidel. You will be the queens
favorite, you will be a man no one comes to see during your dying
days. Who will come to your funeral Will? Where are all the dignitaries,
where are all the people who love d you, who you loved? Where are all
the people who somehow stand behind the people in your work? What
of them, where are they? Would we have to pay pence to strangers to
carry your casket? Has a war ravaged parts so the world I will never
see? Is there truly violence and chaos on a scale that destroys all life
the moment it gains enough credibility to breathe and think? Are there
such floods and winds and monsters that they wreck and ravage all
that is human and so that is how you come to me so broken and
disparate, so alone and so weak, nothing but a tired sprit that calls out
to its many past selves, that shouts and wails at arguments past, that
weeps and moans over loves long lost, that reaches and coos and
whispers and calls to some unknown hope you hope will be there?
This ailment is not the fever, although the glands are swollen and
your body properly aflame, this is not that but something just as
horrible, what is it Will, the French disease? A product of your travels,
the Spanish scum, the German glanders, the Tuscan tetany, the Polish
pox, the Flemish flux, the Irish typhus? Or are these simply the marks
left by the transactions of your life, the trades you made along the
way, these pustules bursting open from deep like so many hungry
mouths, each one erupting in order to be fed, to be repaid, demanding

what, what compensation, what will satisfy them but your death, are
they but your souls screaming to be put out of its misery? How can
such a terrible fate come to one man? And you were a good man,
werent you Will? Of what you wrote, of what I have read had to come
from a man good, a man who had been witness to the malfeasance of
mankind but a man who above all that was good. I have seen the
executions of Catholics and they were at least spared the weeks of
torture you now endure.
People brought me your poems and plays, strangers who said
they were your friends, and although I sometimes questioned their
intentions, handing me these papers from horseback as if passing on a
secret, or standing at my door with oil slicked hair as if wishing to gain
a return favor, I suppose you did not know I had them, that I read
them, all that came to me. I have them all, until now I thought they
belonged to me and felt right as my hoard, but I see now that I would
not only be selfish, I would be hoarding against your desire as you
never did write them for me, never probably dreamed your daughters
would be able to read them, nor did that come from a who was mine
and mine alone. I hold them and feel not so charmed. I do not sense a
great voice, a raging soul, no lovers grief do I feel, no madness
pinches my fingers. No, will these are but chattel in my hands. A
mans efforts go to benefit his family, which is your daughters and their
families. And so with these writings I can see a way to support them,

to satisfy them , to show them what to expect of a mans body and

soul so that maybe they will nurture that same quality in husbands
and sons as well.
You created people I could talk to, who I thought must talk with
you. You gave me situations to fight against as I am sure you fought
them. You gave me indignation, you gave me pride, you gave me love,
you gave me rage. You created a place where I could bear indignation,
where I could suffer humility, where I could look upon cruelty and not
turn my eyes either in fear or to pretend it was not, for in your words
what was I doing but pretending, but in the pretend I found you, your
voice, your eyes, your fingers, your ideas, your touch, your soul, Will, a
soul I never knew I would find in any person let alone in any man.
My dear Will, there was a time for love for us, there was a time of
peace, when all we had was the moments of languish of heat of sweat,
a time we could cast away, a time to dance and embrace. For every
season, Will, and now we have a time to mourn, a time to cast that
stone away, that hate away, yes, for hate we do what we held forever
in our heart and failed to fully understand, a time to hate for what do
we do but hate when we resent what we have not power to control, a
time to hate when we fail to understand that there will indeed be a
time to love and with each season there is another season and until
that season back to the season before. This looks like the end, Will,

what comes when there is no more time, from here where to where do
we return Will? Perhaps that is why you evoke so many disparate
names and personalities, all that you have gathered under your
garments, some like old flowers, some like filth, some like brambles
that cannot be dislodged, others like things dear and near that you fear
will be loosened, lost.
What you have done, you have set down words and plays that
men will look to forever, some to admire and adulate you, some to
condemn and despise you, but who are they to judge, you created not
the world, you create a world with your labor and from you toils out of
the world, and so you cannot be so judged, no god will judge you not
for who you are here not for your diseased carcass that has been left
me, but for your work and what resideth in your work, what joy you
found in your work, other may try to judge you but only god will judge
supreme and ultimate.
Some say you lived like a dog, amongst dogs, and that your
plays were but scraps thrown to the gullets that slack with drink
opened for anything that might come their way, be it flies or beef or
the promise of something saucy. Some say you slept in the spoiled hay
of casual lovers, woke up damp with the seasalty damp of others and
could barely curse your own name. That you pricked yourself brown
and spat dead seed.

Who was I to believe?

Some say you were the favorite among earls and stood before
even the queen, and that your words were drunk like wine, tossed
about from lips to lips like roses, posies, lapped like nectar by a god,
men clutched their welling cods, women heaved their bosoms and
swooned, old maids felt fresh fluids flow, pregnant women gave birth
then and there if only to begin again, that you were dressed in silks
and asked to stand before her court and deliver your poems, that you
were asked to beautify marriages, that you spoke of a young boys love
and of an older womans desires as if you were the oracle of all that
touched the heart
What was I to believe?
And that which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath
already been. And so what of your disfigurement, what meaning doth
that have to me? None for your face hath no meaning that can
compare with the sense that comes from word and the thought that
you have offered me. Am I to think worse of you, am I to join with the
others a condemn you, avoid you, forget you even? And that which
devastates beasts devastates the sons of man; and as the one dies, so
the other; as each one breathes all one breath between them; and to
assume that man has preeminence over a beast: such is our vanity. All
go as they must and will, all unto one place; all are of the dust, and all

turn to dust again.

When we conceived perhaps it was a sign that I would see not
your eyes but the blue sky above us, I dont remember you eyes, your
mouth or your face, I remember seeing the clear blue as infinitely blue
as the sky could be. But a poet I did not see in either sky or eyes. As a
young man you were not gentle and introspective as I would imagine a
poet to be, yet you were not brash and outward as I would expect a
player to be. You had the continence of a farmer more than a poet, of
an artisan more than an artist, you were a glovers boy, you had no
real desire to see the world. Your hands did not have the fingers that I
could sense would hold a pen for hours upon the day, I never saw you
with a piece of paper, as dear as it was, never with a book, never with
a pamphlet or .. your lips were not framed in a face that I could see
living beneath the makeup and sweat of the stage. Your heart did not
desire for people to see you let alone applaud you, you had little desire
to understand the village beyond let alone foreign lands. And you had
no dreams that I could see, no lofty desires, no impossible struggles
that would be your vaunt from this boyhood to manhood.
What is a poet? Is it a man who paints color with black ink from
his fingers, who with those fingers plays music, plucks song from
barren sound, determines history and conjures thought? Who with
those same fingers scrapes the rock and hardest surfaces of the earth,

who with those fingers finds his own gullet, who with those same
fingers lifts ale to his blubbering lips, who with those fingers seeks
holes for a few pence worth, who with those fingers casts about blindly
and uselessly? For if you were a poet then you are as poets be and that
is as a animal is who if once human has lost it human essence, let it
slip through fingers now twisted and cursed no longer able to write a
word as a human would.
I fear that for fifty years or more, no man will write of you, will
speak of you, will think of you. And when they do they will have but
the words you wrote and the bones in your grave as testament.
Those lips that Loves own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said I hate

I hate from hate away she threw. And saved my life, saying not
you

15th April. 1616. Night.

Know you certainly, that if you truly repent you of your sins, and
bear your sickness patiently, trusting in Gods mercy for his dear son

Jesus Christs sake, and render unto him humble thanks for his fatherly
visitation, submitting yourself wholly to his will, it shall turned to your
profit, and help you forward in the right way that leadeth unto
everlasting life.
I am the she who applies the leaves of mercury, and administers
the juice of white henbane. Not one more important than I, now that
your sole vocation is to find relief from the most base of human
qualities, this pain, the one that awakens us at birth and carries us
awake unto our death.
In all other days, who was I to thee Will? I did not just take from
thee, I gave to thee. While you gave me an aspect mind I gave you
purchase on the earth. I gave you the forest in which you found
answers, I gave you summer meadows and gardens, fields and
pastures. From the smallest weed to the tallest tree, the willows and
yew, those were my branches, my leaves and my bark on which you
wrote. I gave you periwinkles, violets, primroses, daffodils, eglantine,
honeysuckle, gillyflowers, fennel, columbines, pansies and rye,
mandrake and ladysmocks, cuckoo-boos and poppies. I gave you the
flowers of love, the flowers of death, I gave you the very carpet of life
on which you spread wide your tales. Other than I who taught you the
life that swells in green and wood, of natures patterns and Gods
design. When a father failed you, I gave you a course with knives and

how to cut, limbs from a tree, to slice a pig. I gave you instruction in
wood, in holding a horse, in roasting the malt and cooling the ale. And
I gave you your one decent concept of love, I gave it to you not in song
but in mouth and belly, Will, I showed you the shape and form of love,
the changing course of love, the beauty and grace of perfect love, the
terrible truth and ugly reality of real love.
Do I hate thee Will? Of course I hate thee. You are nothing but a
mockery of what life is supposed to be. I have seen death Will and this
has not the barest of dignity, not a resemblance of even what the
poorest man or woman suffers. You have made a joke of life, just as
you have written of life in all its many wonderful phases, you left this
phase to be written upon yourself. Do I hate thee for what you have
done to me, yes and no. I hate thee for knowing love but not knowing
me. I hate thee for believing in women, but your belief in me was not
worth a mention anywhere. I hate thee for every minute that I have
lived without you, which a far greater hate makes than a thousand
times the love I might muster for the moments we were together. I
hate thee for never allowing me to reconcile the man I thought I knew
with the man the world knew. I hate thee for creating a spirit of man
and spirit of the world that I cannot find in your eyes, I cannot find in
any of your touches, would never find in any of my memories of you.
But no, I do not hate you Will for how can I hate someone who

had no choice but to spend your life in this manner? How can I hate
you for what could not have been a pleasurable journey for you, I look
at you and know that there was far more pain than pleasure in your life
Will. How can I hate someone who probably felt pain for me, for his
daughters, for you could not have felt anything Will, not you. I cannot
hate you because I know of the darkness that engulfed you, I know of
the dark undercurrent that buoyed your consciousness, I know of the
fear and hurt and sorrow and regret that drove you to seek beauty in
these crags and fissure we call life.
'Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel?
Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth:
Art thou a woman's son, and canst not feel
What 'tis to love? how want of love tormenteth?
O! had thy mother borne so hard a mind,
She had not brought forth thee, but died unkind
I hate you I suppose because you could not find the beauty in the
most simple that was me and in what was our life, our daughters, the
seasons, the events of day to day, the rituals, the surprises, the
proceedings that we accepted as blessed and the joy we felt for having
this life to live.

I hate you because I will never know how my daughters will

accept you, how they will be forever tormented by you, how they will
seek foolishly to understand you. Will they seek you in your writing as
did I? or would they seek it in other men? Or worse would they seek
you in their bodies, tear through their flesh for what they could find of
you, even worse, forget their flesh since their flesh is you and you have
nothing on which to remember. I have watched them for years grow
up without you, I have watched and yet cannot see inside them or
dissect their actions to know what is the cause of them, only God
knows, and yet I gain no comfort from that. I gain no peace and will
know no peace knowing a piece of them is forever missing and such is
the human spirit but to search and search and search even when it has
no hope of finding. And you were the creator of lies that you probably
unwillingly now destroy, and I have to hate you for your destruction so
selfish and so careless as it has been.
I watched death while you wrote about death. I watched your
father die. I held your mother as she died. I was alone with your son
as he died. Do you ever wonder if he asked about you? Do you ever
wonder what his words were? Would those words have been more
precious to you than any of the words you have written? Were you
awake when he died? Were you sober? Were you alone?
I suppose as you could not be here, Hamnet was my

responsibility and you were so absolved. And so I closed his eyes and
prepared his clean white linen shroud tucked with aromatic herbs.
Beside me, Judith Sadler, his godmother. While Hamnet Sadler carried
the littler Hamnet tied to the table to the grave. He was the second of
the twins and so came into this world with less air perhaps, or perhaps
he simply could not compete with Judith for the womb, in any case, he
came into this world through a torn and battered tunnel, he came not
with Judiths howl but with barely a whimper, and from that moment on
he was the weakling of the two, and that he made it to eleven years of
age was due to the grace of God as he had not the constitution or the
will, it seemed at times, to battle what life offers in way of challenge.
Perhaps you simply never believed poor Hamnet deserved to be here
in the first place, like the runt he would not survive, perhaps you could
not accept the eventually loss and so assumed the loss even before it
happened. Perhaps it was his small imperfections that were too large
in your estimation for you to bear. Yet you were not here, not of the
times when it seemed he would live, nor in the times when it seemed
like a miracle he was a love. You were not here when he was born and
you were not here when he was buried on a rainy day that made mud
of the earth, a mess such as the one into which he was delivered.
Perhaps it was your son of who you wrote, whose thoughts you
imagined, whose terrible life you delivered around him, you gave him
nothing but tragedy of women, a father who had deserted him, left him

in thoughts and doubt, left him to a life of carnage, the only aspect of
life he ever knew.
Was it Hamnet who threw himself from your Dover cliff? Was it
your grief that you asked of your audience? You wrote of twins who
upon their eleventh year as two suddenly became but one. Yet even
on paper could not express it as a boy leaving his wombmate, you
painted him not as son but as a daughter, a sister, as if you were
unable to bear the truer thoughts of your loss.
People assume I am glad that you have come back. It shows
what has been in your heart all along, they say. They say that as
friends, not as people who are worried about the truth. If they told me
the truth it would hurt me Will and what friends would hurt another in a
time like this.
You gave me money, and I suppose that should have been
enough, all that I could have expected, from our union, our
arrangement, more perhaps. You gave me money and with that I built
this business and I created a life that brought forth two strong women.
(I now regret that I made them so strong had they been weak they
would not have had the capacities to be harmed by you or the absence
of you. Only had I gave them strength thinking that would protect them
when in effect all I did was give away for you to enter into them, you,
your world, the doubts of you, the mystery of you, the fear of you, the

you that will haunt and bend and warp and lead astray) You gave me
money and that money helped me forget that I didnt know you, it
helped me look past the face that I honestly did not recognize, the
hands of bent and nail that I did not remember, a smell that did not
originate from this black soil in Stratford.
We were simple folk, Will, were we simple folk, you destroyed the
safety such simplicity affords.
Look, how the world's poor people are amaz'd at apparitions,
signs, and prodigies, whereon with fearful eyes they long have gaz'd,
infusing them with dreadful prophecies All you missed Will, all the
events, the happenings, the signs we had to interpret on our own, the
crossroads we had to take without you. When the well went dry and we
pried off the large wooden cover, from that ugly issuance flooded a
swarm of rats so thick, so dense that they formed a thick, brown fluid
that flowed from the wells maw, seeped into the grasses, shaking the
earth over the course of its indeterminate but determined spread.
Where did you shed your seed? How far and into how many
useless fissures? Does it disturb you that I can talk this way? Fool, you
are the fool to believe that you could see life in lifes way and not let
my eyes be so affected as well. And fool as you are the fool to think
that you could write in such melodies that I would not gain song like a
bird from its feathered tutors. And so I gain in crassness and sluttiness

what you seemed to feel belongs only to the sturdier sex. I was a slut
before you met me Will, remember, remember the words and anger.
You accepted the challenge as if it were a way to gain your manhood to
spear an older maid, not shake a sprite and cleaner maiden. What was
I to the men who could not have me? A whore was I not? And to you in
their eyes who did have me I was a whore time two. And yet you saw
your way into Mary Magdalenes heart didnt you. You took this whore
and made her yours. You wrapped this slut in white satin and upon
your young and never so mighty again spear we rode until the seventh
month.
Like Mary, I am not a credible witness.
Well just as I am the sex who carried the wheat, who ground the
barley, who plucked the birds, who held babies against the plague, who
bolted the door while alone against strangers, who collected debts,
who dressed the dead, who held the weeping shoulders of the shamed,
who taught your daughters the ciphers, who held force against
rodents, insects and fires well by Gods right I also gained the right to
speak of pricks and pudendum, to slap a buttock and pinch a breast, to
plunder the velvet slits and spit from a flute. No Will you have no
entitlement to the vagaries and crapologies of life, you have no
purchase by which to say you won a curse, an unholy act, in fact I will
spread my womanly legs while you can only ask boys to spread their,

perhaps to your pleasure, I can godfully fill my fill while you can only
waste what god wasted upon you. I can bounce and parade my
breasts whereas you can only shake dusty corsets tufted with cloth.
I can ride a man like you would ride a horse, yet you can only
ride a man as if following a horse.
When you first came back after those many early years you were
not the man I had married. No, it was not that you had grown older, it
was not that you had matured, it was not that life had roughened you,
marked you or changed you. No you had not changed. Because you
were not changed from who you had been as you were not someone
who was the same with who you had been. True, we are never the
same person as we once were, by nature and logic we are different
from moment to moment yet we are in some aspect known to God if
not to ourselves and our feebleminded sense of self, the same no
matter how much we change.
You were not my husband in visage, but what did I know of the
forces of the city and of life outside? What did I know of what changes
could be wracked in chin, eyes, and brow? I had heard of such sinister
things that would pock a clear face into a wart-mottled mess, I had
heard of how the air of the city could drain the fatty flesh from the very
bone of the nose and cheeks, I had heard of how water and fish and
drink from poisoned rivers could eat away the gum and plump out the

tongue and suck in the eyes so that even a comely young man could
quickly be reduced to the appearance of a frail and sickly elder. And if
so little change can change a face as when Dolly lost her ear or Mr.
McTigue his nose, neither one of them identifiable after their loss even
though so small a part of their whole had been taken, if such small
changes can evoke such great rearrangements in the human face why
would I trust my eyes to know waging your eyes? For what mattered
was that you knew me, you knew names, you knew dates and you
knew where scars were hidden, you knew the furniture, you knew the
birthdates of you children you knew the anniversary of our parents,
you knew the secrets we had shared, you knew the rooms in our
house, you knew the color of the blankets on our bed, you knew what I
liked in me tea, you knew I had one toenail black as pitch, you knew I
had a mole behind my neck, you knew I had a yellow dog when I was
young, you knew I had a cousin with a, of course you had forgotten
some things, but what you did forget only made me more sure of what
you remembered. I wasnt looking for a shred of doubt, I wanted the
whole of belief.
You told me that now you were impotent just as I was damaged.
We were both rendered celibate, ripe for only one hand now, the grip of
religion. My shaft points to God, he said, an awful blasphemy I
thought, if what I thought was true of what he said. That never would
he shake his staff at Hell, for hell had been ravaged and torn asunder,

a bloody mess, a terrible field lain waste, and so he was sterilized and I
was barren and so no two purer partners could there be.
Was I so pure, so faithful? No. I was your wife always, but I was
not your faithful wife. When you came back you had not only changed,
but you had been changed. I saw the sores on you manhood and knew
that your manhood had been taken by another. The one moment of
true kindness I remember was when you saw my face and you opened
your shirt and showed it all to me in it blistering, running and fiery
ugliness. This canker that eats up Love's tender spring, if I love thee,
death should I fearYou asked me if I was ashamed of you, you asked
me if I hated you, you asked me if I would ever forgive you. I had
never seen such disease before, I had never seen such a thing fouled
not even in the many years where accidents and disease ravage us all
in so many ways. I had never seen the wrath of infidelity kiss itself so
firmly on a member, I had never before seen how the teeth of
unfaithfulness can tear into the flesh and rip out what was once most
pretty and as beautiful as a young rose to hold. I also, sores, scabs or
not, had never seen that pizzle before.
Why should I imagine you thought of me when you write these
poems at our table. Why should I believe these songs had anything to
do with us when in fact you were not a boy in love who write them but
a man who live beneath a woman yet long past a womans love. But

still Will, we have but one youth and for us all there can be but one
disappointment at loss for once loss we have it not to lose again. And
so, was I the one that lent embracements unto every stranger. As with
you did I do it Will but for increase? Was that my excuse, my reason
but a bawd but lusts abuse?
Who was I, what was I to you Will? Was I mother, was I daughter,
was I wife, grandmother, was I friend, lover, savior, soulmeet? Was I
somehow the woman to whom you could never return, did I disappoint
you? Did I betray you? Did I let you down so often that you constantly
created another woman to whom you could unveil yourself? Did you
hope I would come to you? Did you on any day wonder if I would
appear suddenly, to be your redemption? Was I to be your Portia, to
have come and saved you from what court that bound you by rules
logical yet fatefully cruel, or your [Winters Tale], or your [Pericles], yet
you never called, never delivered a word to me, never unto anyone,
and if I had sought you, who would I have found? Despite my own selfearned qualities, I doubt you looked to me to spew the lines of Portia.
Who then, was it the woman Davenport? Whose child of eleven
reminds me of not just a child of ours but of you when you were but
eleven years formed, his face but for a nose a mirror to yours. Was it
the woman, dark and saddened, in your sonnets?
Was I anything, is there a memory of my there in your mind? Or

will you leave this earth without a trace of me? And if so, what then of
our meeting in Heaven? Can ones soul be purified but also
replenished with all it should know?
If I hate thee then how much more I hate the words you wrote,
their human elements, their godlike espousals! How I hate the poesy
and sonnets, the ballads and laments! How I despise the trees for their
part in giving you paper on which you first wrote such cruel beauty!
How I loathe the bullocks for offering their hides to protect these
tomes! How I hate the hemp for spinning off the threads that bind the
pages and keep them from scattering into the recesses of chaos! How
I abhor the eyes without which words would not be seen and would be
but black squiggles in the darkness! How I loathe the ears without
which words would not be heard and would be but part of the silence!
How I detest the very hole of the human mouth, the thick wallowing of
the tongue, the blustering lips for making the shapes of your words,
spitting forth their sounds! How I curse the blackness that spills from
ink to offer the contrast by which I have to now stare and read and
understand and render unto some form of myself the meaning of your
mind which for all these so many years you held from me like a selfish
and gluttonous creature never thinking at all how this skill you gave
me would now torture me and how this gift you gave me now tears at
me how you have torn life into what is and what can never be and
even worse ripped it into what was not and never will be again and

ripped it from what I had hoped and dreamed and prayed it would
someday be! How spiteful and evil of you Will to make my world so
plain next to your world, so feeble in its meager countenance
compared to yours that all I can see is my plainness and ugliness
compared to your universe of so many riches I will never ever know.
And how tortuous of you to leave me in the same silence that has
tortured me for this long tortured life, a life that I could bear had I been
able to bear it in my own silence, in my own silent way. How spiteful I
am of your words which without effort reproduce themselves in
volumes. Which by their very nature live on in written form yet can
carry as well on the wind, in a voice, even mouthed silently from the
lips. I curse the inability to destroy them, for the very act of burning a
copy is not to obviate the originals, and to destroy the original is not to
make any effort to diminish the copies. On and on your words
populate the word in ways that abhor nature, that transcend man, that
speak of the talents of our holiest spirit. How I hate thee for making
me think of you in such blasphemous ways! You the very bane of my
waking days, the burr in this life I have to wear, you the very union of
my heart and soul!
I hate you because I am nothing but a worthless cloth woven
from your words, a piece that has been carelessly tattered and long
discarded.

And now, as much I would like to make you disappear into this
earth, your final vanishment but preludes mine by these quickening
days, and into that same sauce I will be disposed, forever together,
seen from above as one and the same, while below the worms will
mingle between us and share food until mine is your muck and yours is
my dust. That I cannot escape, to be buried with you I might as well
get to know you now, not wait until senses are no more and then
knowing is at best unknown.
I start with your hair, of which there is none, a bald pate is all I
see of what I knew. All I remember of you is what you had not, and so
perhaps all I will know of thee is what you are not. For what is not, is
all I can be sure of knowing. But then your eyes, I see them and do not
remember them, not by shape which could change with pressure and
heat inside the skull, but their hue is what is strange to me without
rationale, how could color change, although I suppose as an infants
eyes change from blue to brown as they blink in open air, an old mans
eyes can perhaps change from brown to grey, yet your eyes I know
them not but as the eyes of a man who perhaps had seen too much
and so has taken his eyes back, looks inward now, if that were a view
infinitely more bearable, a sight set upon your own sights. Your cheeks
reveal bones that I do say I have traveled upon before, but the journey
was a short one, the climb barely significant. You ears are most
peculiar as they appear to belong to a man I once knew for but a

winter, a man who helped with the wood, who replaced a window pane
and cleared the doorways after a terrible storm, but they are not your
ears. I remember those ears because that was all I could see in the
darkness, I dared not look anywhere else, staring at those fleshy
ornaments that were as cold as winter that winter night. Your mouth
could have been a mouth I kissed hungrily, but your lips have loosened
from your jaws, your teeth are crooked now, darkened by the tobacco
you breath, bits of stone in a strange garden that comforts me not,
that never dare I say relieved my nourishment, that never cooed for
me, that never spoke my name except to beckon, except to bid me to
answer some other need than love. Your chin, that I find the most
displaced of your countenance, it belongs elsewhere, better on an
elbow or a knee than on your face. You legs frighten me, discolored
with the quick silver, cauterized and pestilent, I am not sure your
sickness draws from the ground through them or empties an effluvium
from them. You legs belong to Lucifer, he would lustily kick and dance
with such legs and believe he were grand. Finally your hands, I give
your hands more to mine own father than to yours, your fathers hands
were stained and torn from dye and wool, my fathers hands were
finely shaped by wooden instruments which slit the earth, like pen and
pencil, your hands have the shape and the desire to be my fathers
hands though yours are soft and lie most comfortable in the gloves
your father made for hands others than yours or his. Your hands are

instruments that render thought to those delicate patterns on which

thought can forever live. Your hands made a piece of paper a world
unto itself, an undeniable, unquestionable and unforgettable world.
You hands shaped worlds that were unerring in their errors. Worlds
that were immutable in their many shapes and configurations. Worlds
that spoke in one voice through many tongues and captured the face
of man in all hue, beauty in its very disfigurement, perfection in all its
imperfect parts. Your hands are cruel as they are wise, as heartless as
they are passionate. They can cause signs to whispers, and mere
marks to shout, they held on to and released both rage and soft,
tender love, they recorded the passage of history and foresaw what
many would never otherwise see. Worlds of words of which you had
not a care once they left your hands. If I knew you I would know your
hands.
And so. I could, I suppose, pull open your nightshirt and so
answer my question once and for all. And if I did perhaps I would gain
some measure of peace from knowing a truth finally, one truth I would
then know in this world. But is one truth enough? What then? Do I
seek to know a second? A third? And for what purpose? To quest after
a fourth? Or is it best to know none and embrace the unknowing cloud
and as woman, wife and mother, offer my simple existence in return
for simple silence, a simple peace. I wont unmask you but not for the
reasons I just gave, no, I will let thee lie as who you are supposed to

be, and as you are supposed to be, you are a man, a continuous piece
of flesh, well ripened and beginning to fray, but still together all the
same, still offering a shadow of a man when the light strikes you
correctly, still of head and shoulders, arms, legs and torso that I can at
least say lying here is the man who wrote these works. Are you the
man I married? Is this the flesh that was once unto my flesh, is this the
flesh from which I could not be twain? But tis not our bond onto one
flesh that I pledged, marriage is not a union of body, and so I can
despise and condemn what I see here. No, tis not a union of flesh but a
union of souls, that one, that simple, that lonely and unbreakable
bond.
This I believe, I say to myself as if bearing a pledge: this I believe
that the wife who redeems her husband does so by remaining faithful
to her bond, even in the absence of fellowship, comfort and intimacy.
The compact between spouses is a spiritual one, remaining faithful to
that compact does constitutes salvation. I am your helpmeet and
pledge to you salvation even if our communion will not happen here on
earth, this faith will characterize our meeting in heaven.
So tis not what lies here and stinks that concerns me. Your
muddy works have but one function now, that is to complete the cycle,
to be to dust again. Here is the very man who we will lower into the
earth, head first or feet first I do not know yet, but into the wormy

ground this man will go, and there forever will be the man whose name
will be printed across these books, for without that name, without the
meaning that one man gives to a name, these books will not live to see
the future days. And on that promise, I will live, your daughters will
live. And if God wills it, you Will will live.
Yet, the deep truth is Will, I dont know who you are, except that
you are a man about to die, a man so pathetic in his present state that
death is but a relief, a sheet to pull over your blistered face. For all
that I would like to believe I know I know nothing, yet for all I would like
to forget, I know more of you than anyone. I am filled with you just as I
would like to be emptied of you through spew or shit. But all that is
not animal in me is woven from you, all that is not gross and coarse
and damned to this earth, is wrought with the airiness of you. Upon
heavens gates I will finally come to know who you were. Only then, and
in days not many, will I meet the face I imagine, the Will I have longed
for. But for a long time Will I will be the one who remembers you. For
many longs years Kit, for another lifetime Master Tom and Sir Vontes, I
will be your repository, your reliquary. All go unto one place; all are of
the dust, and all turn to dust again. I wonder: will anyone asks me who
was Will? I doubt it Will, I doubt it. Kit. Tom. Sir. I doubt they ever
will.

23rd April 1616. Early morn.

The first nightingale sings.

27th April 1616. Evening.

Men now want stocklings not of cloth for that is thought too base,
but of jersey, worsted, crewel, silk, thread and such like, at least of the
finest thread and so curiously knitted with open seam down the leg
with quirks and clocks around the ankle and sometimes haply
interlaced with gold or silver threads, for this they will pay 20 shillings
or more and that is just the men. The woman are not ashamed to
wear hose of all kind of changeable colors, as green, red, white, russet,
tawny, and else what, which wonton colors any sober chaste Christian
can hardly without suspicion of lightness at any time ware. We knit
them as fast as our fingers can, seems hardly fair that money now is so
easy, as fresh as fashion as light as the air. Seems what hands make,
makes ones soul rise.