Life with Will

by John Mortimer

three facsimile pages of the Observer Magazine 8 May 1977

JOHN MORTIMER has just finished six plays on Shakespeare's life which will be shown by ATV in the autumn. He was an apt choice to dramatise versatile creative genius, embodying as he does the roles of playwright, journalist, screen writer, critic and Queen's Counsel. Here he describes his search for Shakespeare.

My enthusiasm for Shakespeare is buried deep in my childhood. My father was always a passionate addict of the plays. Instead of 'The Three Bears' I got Macbeth at his knee, and I still remember screaming as his finger pointed out the blood‑boultered Banquo in a corner of the sitting‑room. Later we used to see every play at Stratford (at a time when Donald Wolfit was the star) and I remember being paralysed with fear at the sight of a hooded figure in the hotel bedroom which I took, at the age of seven, for old Hamlet up from the grave, until I realised it was my reflection in the wardrobe mirror, pulling my shirt over my head.

When he came to see me at school my father would greet me with inappropriate Shakespearean quotations. 'Is execution done on Cawdor?' I remember him booming for all to hear, on a rare visit to Harrow speechday. In the holidays I paid him back by performing 'Hamlet' and 'The Merchant of Venice' in the sitting‑room, and as I was an only child I had to duel with myself, cheat myself of my own pound of flesh, force myself to drink my own poisoned chalice and quarrel with myself as my own mother. For this reason I still have great chunks of the plays by heart and will recite them at bad moments in Law Court corridors.

So for almost 50 years my head had been full of the plays, but the life? When, in January 1976, I was asked by ATV if I would write six plays about Shakespeare, on a schedule that would give me about four weeks a play, the idea filled me with an equal mixture of enthusiasm and panic. How could I cope with his biography ? I asked Professor Terence Spencer of Birmingham whom I'd met at the National Theatre.

He assured me happily, 'You can write it all on a postcard.' This news came to me as a relief. The plays would have to be works of fiction: six stories of what it might have been like to be a dramatist in that hot summer of the English stage, with no very clear hope of surviving the plague for another year, or the closure of the theatres, let alone of struggling on to write 37 plays embalmed in print to enthral audiences and bore examinees for all eternity.

Fiction is what I would have to produce, but fiction founded on the facts about a character: and if Professor Spencer were right, and the date of the marriage, the leases for the transfer of property, the few lawsuits and the detailed will were all history had to say on the subject of Shakespeare surely the works would be more revealing. It's true that you can find almost any sort of Shakespeare you want in the plays. Would you care for a radical reformer? ('Handy Dandy, which is the justice. which is the thief?') Or do you prefer a Conservative? ('Take but degree away, untune that string and hark what discord follows.') But the Sonnets, however interpreted, must be a great and agonised autobiography, and I thought the plays, if no guide to their author's polities, at least show certain obsessions. Ingratitude is a subject that aches through Shakespeare like an old wound: and the Shakespearean hero has always one quality the author admires, a Stoic acceptance, when the last battle is lost, of his own character, flawed as it is, and his destiny. Jealousy is also a recurrent theme, as are pride and ambition. These great and alarming concerns might, I hoped, prove better material for six plays than the courtship of Anne Hathaway, or the doubtful legend of the young poet poaching the deer at Charlecote.

When I talked to Peter Wood, the director, he seemed doubtful. The character was still unclear, and the plays only vaguely intentioned. 'It's like trying to pick up a handful of water, he said. All the same we arranged to meet at breakfast the next morning (we found later we shared many tastes, not least that for getting up at around six and then playing records of Mozart piano concertos very loudly and thus making life hell for our nearest and dearest). 'The trouble has always been,' Peter Wood said, 'that Shakespeare comes out so patient and long suffering. Like bloody St Francis of Assisi.' So we began to evolve young, lying Shakespeare, who made terrible unfounded boasts about his life in the theatre. And we went on to talk about Elizabethan England as passionate and secretive and full of plots and pride and taboos as present‑day Sicily.

Our first invention was a steward for the Dark Lady, half Malvolio and half Pandarus, who would thread his way with a sort of voyeur's ecstasy through the web of jealousy and intrigue. By the time we had woken up the neighbourhood, and tired men were going to work down Warwick Avenue Tube Peter Wood gave my working on the plays his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

I was due to take a trip to Sri Lanka, and in that improbable location I made a start with the third play, the triangular relationship between Shakespeare, his Dark Lady and his young patron the Earl of Southampton. I sat by the hotel pool, listening to the delighted screams of Qantas air hostesses on a stop‑over, and re‑read 'Troilus and Cressida' and the Sonnets. The story of the obsession with a woman who had no idea of the havoc she caused, the loss of innocence and friendship, the deep sexual disgust, was clear. As the conflicting claims to being the Dark Lady still seem to me unproved I decided to invent her, and made her a judge's wife whose husband was always busy hanging people on circuit. Shakespeare, I hoped, was slowly becoming more than a list of facts on a postcard.

I had begun work. From then on I was to receive, at regular intervals, unsolicited propaganda from the Francis Bacon Society. It wasn't, of course, as easy as that. I began to discover that the known facts about Shakespeare's life would need a pretty big postcard. They take some 260 pages of the best and most down‑to‑earth of books on the subject, Professor Schoenbaum's 'Documentary Life', where you may find facsimiles of all the documents, eked out, it must be said, by some of the carefully distinguished rumours which began to be circulated about Shakespeare after his death. It's as much as might be known about a successful Elizabethan businessman, and there's no doubt that a perfectly clear and coherent character emerges. There was obviously a William Shakespeare, son of a Stratford glove maker and alderman, who got trapped into marriage with a woman a good deal older than he: Anne was 26 when he was about 18. He fathered three children, two girls and one boy, Hamnet, who died at the age of 11. The year after Hamnet's birth Shakespeare left Stratford and disappeared into those convenient 'dark years' during which he might have been a soldier, a lawyer's clerk, a schoolmaster, or gone to Italy, or picked pockets, or indeed have done whatever his admirers would most prefer. In about 1589 he's heard of at the theatre, and a story put about after his death has it that his first job was looking after the gentlemen's horses while they were at the play.

Soon, however, he got work as an actor, and then as a mender of old plays and writer of his own chronicle of Henry IV. He became steadily more successful and prosperous, but never wholly severed his ties with the country and his family, to whom he returned, rich and famous, to retire and die in 1616.

Professor Schoenbaum can show us with his facsimiles the externals of an actor‑writer's life, his property buying, his unexpected path to the coat of arms of gentility and financial success. What he cannot do is tell us what Shakespeare felt about these matters, or why such an apparently calm course was forever inwardly troubled with storms of bitterness, self‑hatred and rejection of the world. Such things can only be speculated on and written about, not with the assurance of history, but with the liberty of fiction. What remains certain, as someone said, is that if the plays were not written by Shakespeare, then they were written by a character who followed precisely the same career, and happened to have an identical name.

By early spring last year the Globe Theatre had been built on the lot at Elstree, a one‑third life‑size replica which must be one of the most beautiful and expertly made sets ever constructed for television. It was thrown open by Lord Grade (a ceremony the poet couldn't possibly have foreseen, even during his richest fantasies on the subject of immortality), who then left Peter Wood and me, with the constant support of Cecil Clarke, the producer, to pursue our invention unhindered.

I had now worked my way back to the first play, which deals with an entirely fictional friendship between the young Shakespeare and the established Marlowe. Marlowe said outrageous things in company, reporting an 'extraordinary love' between Jesus Christ and his 'Alexis' John the Baptist (Merlyn Rees would have had him deported for less) as a dinner party sally. The inquest on his violent death by dagger in a Deptford inn also provides an insight into his extraordinary character. Shakespeare the Survivor must have kept quieter in company, and his life was apparently guided by a general determination to die in bed. So there seemed room for an argument between the playwright's dedication to his craft and his ever‑present temptation to act out his dramas in the real world. The confusion was exaggerated in those days when the Elizabethan man of action frequently behaved like a character in one of Shakespeare's plays (Essex quoted Henry IV on the scaffold, Southampton wore a Hamlet suit of black when imprisoned in the Tower). Only Shakespeare himself forever resisted the temptation to behave like a Shakespearean hero.

Ian McShane, darkly handsome, came back from America to play Marlowe. By an inspired piece of casting the star of 'The Rocky Horror Show', Tim Curry, whose eyes might have come straight from the 'Flower' portrait, was Shakespeare. Shooting began in the heat‑wave, when Peter Wood arrived and electrified the studio. He sat in the control room with a silver Thermos of coffee, an assortment of pills and sweets, bottles of bay rum to rub on his head at moments of tension, and urged the actors to behave like real people. 'It all gets terribly slow once you've got your Elizabethan knickers on!' he warned them.

The actors responded manfully to Peter's tirades of flattery and rebuke; but the audience in the Globe Theatre were less involved. Although the director, wearing little but a pair of Y‑fronts and a gaucho hat, shouted stimulating directions through a bull horn, they began to melt away in the hot weather. It was noticed that the benches were thinning, and assistants were sent out into Elstree to round up sullen groundlings who were pushing wire wheelbarrows through Tescos or shopping in Boots, still wearing full costume.

In the autumn Peter Wood went off to direct an opera in the Arizona desert. Other directors came, and the plays, which of course took more than a month each to write, became easier as I got to know the actors. A wonderful company was selected as Shakespeare's fellow players, starting as rustic as the rude mechanicals in the 'Dream', keeping hens and tethering goats beneath the stage of the old Rose Theatre, and ending in scarlet liveries as the King's Men, with well‑fed Burbage almost too fat for Hamlet, rogues and vagabonds no longer. I was amazed at the perfectionism of Cecil Clarke: having worked for many years with Guthrie and taught at the Old Vic Theatre School he saw every shot, supervised every costume, and if a scene wasn't correct he went back and had it redone. I also had the luxury of writing new scenes for the earlier plays if they were not altogether clear or correct in performance.

At last it was over. The Globe became filled with mud, and then ice, as the actors shivered over 'Hamlet', the last play we show in an open theatre. There was a party at which three secretaries arrived dressed as Queen Elizabeth, talking the language I had tried to write, based on Shakespeare's prose and the Queen's own speeches. Nick Clay, who had rioted through London as the arrogant young Earl of Southampton, changed into his Palm Beach shirt, kept on his earring and drove off in his multi‑coloured car. Tim Curry locked on with large eyes, finished with the Observer, the Survivor, the Nurser of Bitter Memories, the Great Comedy Writer and the Post of the world's most terrible tragedies; the man whom everyone loved but no one really knew.

As they were to be plays and not documentaries we were guilty at times of forcing history into that most compressed of all dramatic shapes, the hour‑long telly play. We brought forward the death of one of the actors who left money to Shakespeare into the time of general questioning and terror after Shakespeare's company were suspected of giving a special performance of 'Richard II' to encourage the Essex revolt. The dates of some plays' composition have been telescoped; but really the invention is in areas where the historian can only guess and the dramatist must create. So the principal story of the plays is the changing relationship of two men, poet and patron, friend and lover, Shakespeare and Southampton in youth and early middle age.

The plays end when Southampton also lost sight of his friend, in the dark shadows of Jacobean England, when the drama came indoors from the daylight of the theatres, and Shakespeare began that final journey in which he seems isolated from his friends and family and all that happened to him took place behind that high, walled forehead where neither I nor Peter Wood nor Cecil Clarke, with all the sets that ATV built so expertly, could presume to follow him. However my television plays about him may be received, living with Shakespeare has given me one of the most undilutedly happy years of my life. 

from The Observer Magazine 8 May 1977, pp.32-37