MY LORD SOUTHAMPTON, at the lake that day, removed his garments, wading in silence to deeper water. In hungry dawn his slender frame, already bearing scars and calluses of fearful games and hunts, seemed to pause and flicker. A heron stood on the neighbouring bank, observing the edge of the shallows. Against that human figure a bird’s shadow, hovering over water, preparing to strike at waiting fish, would not have seemed more ghostly or more pale. There my lord waited, hardly moving, suspended in the heron’s eye, as though lost in invisible thought.
I, standing on the shore, observed how light became flesh, seeming to pause and thicken. Water covered his thighs, his lower back. From the bank I considered him as he walked further into the lake, until it lapped his shoulder blades. I continued to observe him as he waded deeper into that periphrastic calm. The liquid line rose until, once level with shoulder and neck, he began to swim, both languidly and strongly.
Out there he seemed impalpable. Only his head appeared, floating on the surface. Under the dawn light he moved alongside his own reflection, touching ghost to liquid ghost, leaving a soft wake which formed and glimmered like an arrowhead.
Instead it was I – the watching man, the unquiet one – who took up my usual position, holding the reins of both our nervous horses. Part of that mind which lives in shadow now became alert. I remained constantly fretful – the silent waiter at the water’s edge.
Standing between the horses in that calm, with a warm and breathing beast on each side of me, I sensed the shudder of their animal spirits. Both seemed tense. My own gelding stood still, occasionally reaching down to feed. But beside me the stallion stamped and neighed softly, dancing on his hooves, restless as any child who wants to play. He was in perpetual motion, never still. I felt him strain, then call forth his challenge. His long whinny reached out across the tranquil earth and water. Holding their reins, I listened for that thread of silence which the horses could perceive. And then I heard, as though in answer, another horse’s call, as clear as a bugle note, from half a mile away; from some dark stretch of woodland, some invisible valley. Strange sound! It might as easily have come from a mythical, hidden underworld.
During those times when the London theatres were closed, curtailed by plague, I too was nervous, aware of my own vulnerability. My scribbling of plays had no market, and I could not even work upon the stage. It is true that poets often live at the edge of starvation – vulnerable as song birds to winter’s cold – but those days were the worst.
By some strange alchemy, my lord’s very confidence rendered me more sensitive. On his behalf sometimes I felt we were overlooked, or that another party spied on him. Sometimes I heard a horse neigh, far away, and once I saw three riders on a hill – distant, pricked out by light – observing us in what seemed like lucid concentration.
He began to swim now into the deeper part of the lake, so that the shadow of his body dissolved in the water. Only his head appeared, like a bust, floating on the milky surface. I stood a little back from the bank’s edge, ever-watchful.
Though he was my patron, I continued to chafe at his recklessness. For these were dangerous times, with many eddies of insurrection around our Protestant Queen. His family retained their allegiance to the Catholic Church. In their midst, he moved with peculiar ease, and feared nothing.
Out on the water, my lord turned, treading water, and looked back towards the silent land. Could he perceive me, soberly coloured against the darker earth? Even at that distance, I could see there was amusement in his expression. He called out, ‘Will you not swim, Master Shakespeare?’
I did not answer.
‘Come, gentle man,’ he sang out. ‘Swim with me.’
I, the nominative, smiled to myself and answered, ‘I prefer to keep a watch, my lord!’
‘Come,’ he repeated. ‘The animals will not run far. If they do, we’ll catch ’em.’
Alas, he thought my concern was with the horses. Around us lay an unsettled land. The woods had spies in them, and there were those whose loyalty was to the other great families – a number of whom did not wish him well. Yet he regarded himself as invulnerable. If I were not here, he would have let the horses wander and have happily chased them for a morning, naked and alone, without a thought for himself or for those who might see him in a state of nature.
Out on the lake my lord still swam. Now he turned and sang out to me in his clear, melodious voice, ‘Come, live with me, and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove.’
I observed him laugh at his own joke – knowing that he quoted Christopher Marlowe at me, and aware that it fretted at my profession of poet and incited my jealousy. He enjoyed reminding me that our great Marlowe also vied for his patronage. Perhaps, too, he relished the suggestion that Marlowe would be more responsive than I to his playful overtures. And since my patron, though young, was a man of subtlety and mischief, his remark reminded me that Master Marlowe was invited to dine at his house that night, during which time, no doubt, we two poets would be teased like rival and delicate young mistresses.
Perhaps my lord realised that I would not abandon my lookout. He shook his head at my caution, smiled to himself, turned, and swam out further into the lake.
STRANGE TO OBSERVE, yet stranger to recall, were those who called my lord ladylike, affected, languorous. Around him I observed his acolytes gather and whisper. Yet all who bore close witness to his pale beauty also observed, beneath the liquid surface, the stir of muscle and sinew. A condign will fleshed the hidden currents of the water. The searching eye, bent towards its surface, recognised fierce pride, and cold reflection. It was true that he was one of those who are unaware of how he scattered light. The effect was that all those admiring glances, falling on that surface, were reflected backwards to their source. In that way, he was like all heroes: you saw what you hoped for; he refracted your dreams.
Unaware of his own power, such grace seemed strange to him as much as to his companions. Yet to write of him as Narcissus, in truth, was also to address another. Rumours moved around him. He was there and not there, laughing at those vanities attributed to him by others. During the plague years, when the London theatres were closed, I saw my own fond hopes and circling ambitions reflected in that youthful, mirthful glass. He was both my plight and my aspiration.
As for effeminacy, in those surroundings what argument could one propose for such a creature? There were other realms, even in our own society, where effeminacy was much admired. In our theatre companies women were forbidden to act on the stage; beautiful boys and young men played the female roles, and were celebrated for their virtuosity. I myself loved their ambivalence; the flavour of the unknown and forbidden beneath the formal inhibition. Maleness might be enforced in the theatre, but not masculinity.
Our martial aristocracy, by contrast, lived by bloodlines. Twenty generations of great Pharaohs might create inbred leaders with perfect skin and lissom hips, but our turbulent kingdom, always on the edge of war, gave cruel tests to its warriors, often allowing less than a man’s brief span before disease or death, the axe-man, struck them down. Their deepest truths were brutal, simply this: all their lives hovered on the verge of annihilation. And these, our politic-ridden times, allowed no easy settlement into placidity or plain repose.
If we were sometimes witness to things of grace, it was by contrast rather than by inherence. Stare into fire, see how the greatest heat lies like a mellow ghost on wood or coal. So, in the harshness of our age, such a youth, whose fair exterior floated as a fervent dream before our eyes, was at the limit of benign possibility.
But grace itself is a form of power, carrying its own hidden and implicit threat. If I myself survived and even thrived in my lord’s companionship, it was precisely because, beneath that surface, I never forgot the harsh heat of his potency. I attempted to describe something of his character in a sonnet I was writing, addressing as its subject the nature of his attractions to