“What play is it?”
“The Winter’s Tale,” I said.
“What—a chilly play on top of this miserable weather! Why a month ago I was basking in the sun...you and your plays! Is this Denmark and another Hamlet? Tell me, Will, was Hamlet named for your son—are those lines in his honor?”
Jonson interrupted and answered for me:
“When my boy died I wrote something for him. I was in prison then and the jailer grabbed my manuscript and spat on it. Bah, that’s the kind of crassness that shakes you. I’ve forfeited goods in payment of my stupidities but I haven’t forfeited my hatred of injustice! It’s another kind of injustice when a boy, a stripling, dies. Will made Hamnet into Hamlet, an outcry against this world.”
He drank his ale and I saw him examine his thumb, where they had branded it when he was in prison; he nodded to himself; I suppose his thoughts were of his boy, a victim of the plague...
Jonson eats poorly. Prison treatment has hurt him. His hair is greying, particularly on one side, sweeping down, showing when he talks with gusto. Teeth are missing. Today he wears a suit of black wool, his cuffs clean, his collar clean. He hardly seems one of us.
Raleigh’s sword scrapes against the table as he leans forward, talking of his voyages. His is a perpetual struggle with storms and mutinies and his flashing eyes convey a courage one has to take into account. He has sent the idlers packing and smokes with his pipe in the bowl of his palm, its brown the color of his hands, the five or six rings on his fingers blazing: opals and rubies, I am told.
I am also told that if he sold the jewels he wears he could pay for the construction of a ship-of-the-line.
