Page 88 of The Two Wills

Four months after Hamnet’s death, the Poet, at last, had made true progress on a new tragedy. The sharers had a private reading, before inviting the rest of the company. Burbage whispered that there was much darkness in the new play, but he predicted it would be a triumph. That the Poet had not invited me to participate in the reading, nor shown me any of the play at all, saddened me greatly. Nor were there any new sonnets to cheer my day—nor even any that might explain what had been going on in his mind. The silence between us grew longer and more profound. Our rare interactions grew even colder than before. I could not bear it any longer. And so, one night, I went to his rooms late, and seeing the candlelight peeping beneath his door, I knocked.

“Go away!” he called. “I’m not in the mood!”

Who he thought I was, I did not know, but I knocked again and spoke loudly. “Will! It’s me, Hughes! I need to talk with you! Please!”

He came to the door and greeted me without inviting me in. “Yes. What is it, Hughes?” There was a formality to his voice that chilled my heart.

“Will, can I come in?”

He must’ve heard the wound in my voice, for he spoke more gently next. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, lad. I have writing to do, and—”

“Will, please!” I begged in a harsh, teary whisper. “Please let us speak to each other. I know I’m being horribly selfish, but I need to know what’s going on … with your feelings for me. I know you’re passing through a most terrible agony. But I feel as if you left me out at sea, and I’m drowning. If you feel your silence is relieving me of some pain, you are most wrong.”

He opened the door further without looking at me and bade me in. His room was a shambles, with much discarded paper with scribbling out. His hair and beard were ungroomed, and he stank from drink.

“Say your piece.” The Poet’s eyes cast down onto his writing table.

“I understand you’re in a despair about your poor son, but you and I had been dear friends for years, and just months ago we were far more than that. Remember what you had written in the sonnet about us? We belong to each other. Thou mine, I thine. But now you barely look at me. If it is true that you no longer love me, please tell me.”

He started to speak but once more turned his eyes from me. I moved myself to where they looked.

“I know what those awful religious men screaming outside the playhouses are saying,” I continued. “But our love for each other and making plays together is as much godly as their preaching.”

Finally, the Poet looked at me; there were tears in his eyes. “And what if our love brought down God’s wrath?” he blurted cruelly.

My eyes filled with hot tears. “Please tell me you don’t believe that.”

“I … I don’t know,” he said with a bitter hopelessness in his voice. “I just know that I’ve been selfish in my behavior toward my children, toward Anne, toward you. Perhaps, if there is a God, I’ve offended him.”

He tore at his hair and turned away from me again.

“Has something changed about me?” I asked. “You’ve never worried about what the moralists said before. It has to be something else. What is it?” I walked to him and pressed my damp cheek against his shoulder. “Why would you remove yourself from me thusly? I’d never remove myself from you willingly—not for anything. I love you more than words.”

He was silent for a moment, then gently pushed me from him.

“More than words?” he repeated, wiping his own tears from his eyes with his sleeve. “And therein lies the rub, lad. It’s the words. What we’ve done together … it has taken away my words.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, my heart panicking from the chill filling in his voice.

“Us!” He spat. “You and I … this sin we’ve been committing. It’s ruined me!”

“What are you saying” I cried. “That’s not true!”

“But it is.” The Poet’s eyes flared in disdain, and there was pure bitterness in his voice. “I said it so long ago, but you convinced me to ignore it.”

My insides tangled themselves with a sickening confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Ever since you and I began … actualizing our affection for each other, I have felt my urge to write fading … even disappearing.”

“By Saint George, that’s a lie!” I cried. “I acted better when you invited me to your bed. And since we’ve been together you’ve written as well as ever … perhaps even more so!”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t. Not really. Or rather I did not become inspired with new ideas. This play I am finishing I was only able to devise after you and I had separated in Warwickshire. All the others I wrote over the last two years were based on ideas I had come up with before you and I allowed ourselves to …” He let his words disappear into the air of the room, but I knew the final word he would have uttered was “sin.”

“My point is,” he took up, “the job of a muse is to be forever an unfinished love, to lure the poet to the words with the promise of ambrosia, but then pull the cup back, so his other seed may spill upon the page. Having that which I wanted but should never have had, destroyed all the spirit, sucked all the magic from my pen.”

I rolled my eyes in contempt. “Fie on thee, coward! I know you, Will. You have listened to the Puritan zealots; you believe that somehow our love has caused Hamnet’s death—”

“And what if it did!” He then spoke softly. “What if our sin both caused my son’s death and ruined me as a poet. What if, in order for us to go on with our lives, without more devastating loss, we can no longer engage in this … this …”