The play's the thing - Act 3

Shakespeare andBurns ...  Two gentlemen in a far off land ... continued




 CHAPTER THREE OR ACT THREE; whichever way you want it …




RB: It falleth as the gentle - but enough
I think …




WS: OK. The rain lessens, trickles
to a stop. Scents of wet grasses and foliage. Drip-drip-drip. Out of the trees
comes an upright shape on two legs carrying a light coloured bundle. The sky
clears of cloud, lightens slowly. Slow grows the music of the dawn, of organic happiness:
all the chirping, cheeping, trilling, all of it blending into the single song of
this, a far off land. From deep in the forest comes the growling, coughing
hiccup of a contented lion. Now the shape resolves itself into a large black
man carrying a small white woman. He is crying silent tears. She is dead.




Othello:   Addressing
his burden having discovered his awful mistake …

Now: how dost thou look now? O ill-starred
wench

Pale as thy smock, when we shall meet at
count,   (day of judgement)

This look of mine will hurl my soul from
heaven,

And fiends will snatch at it: cold, cold,
my girl,

Even like thy chastity; O cursed slave!

Whip me, you devils,

From the possession of this heavenly sight,

Blow me about in winds, roast me in
sulphur,

Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!

Oh Desdemona, Desdemona dead




RB: Sighs, shakes his head,
his hair untouched by rain. So much error, so much
love, pain and suffering. On your stage as always in your life, William. And
mine. And all.




WS: Nods, shrugs his
shoulders, lays back against the bank. Oh yes.




RB: And that is what you did better
than anyone else; held your mirror up, daring all to take a look. Plucks
and chews on a blade of sweetest raindropped grass.




WS: Chuckles. Perhaps. But it wasn’t any uniqueness. After I jumped ship
and reached London
and had got myself in with the so-called literati I realised that my new friend
Pip Marlowe had hit on a money making formula. He said it was all in just one
of his lines. Sits up, strikes theatrical pose:“Come live with me and be my love and we
shall all the pleasures prove,” That’s it. Prose as poetry. All human
emotion especially sex mixed in with all the other pleasures and all the many pains.
I expanded on that in my plays and some of my poor verse and lived a lot longer
than Pip in order to do so. I was quite handy with the old cold blade you know,
but not like him, Marlowe. So quick to offend, to take offence. He was never
going to live long. I looked for him here, Robert but … (sighs) nothing.

RB: Reborn to try again, perhaps? Anyway I reckon it a great shame that your
perfect union should have ended like that. Sits up, the better to regard the
tragic pair. This is how I would have had it, William …
For I confess I was as greatly concerned with love and the act of love as with
the equality of all, whether loved, lovely or those unloved. See here … Desdemona
stirs, raises herself in her husband’s arms, slips to the ground and sings …

Behold, my love, how green the groves,

The primrose banks how fair;

The balmy gales awake the flowers,

Curl more thy wavy hair.




She dances lightly around Othello, smiling, gossamer dress
flowing like that slow moving river of milk, stooping now and again to pluck a
flower from the forest floor … I have
wished only for us to be together, she murmurs, living the simple life away from the burden of State. You know, husband
mine, we are all the children of Nature, are we not? A black bird emerges
from the trees, swoops around her garlanded head. She sings on …



The blackbird shuns the palace gay,

And o'er the cottage sings:

For Nature smiles as sweet, I say,

To Shepherds as to Kings.



Let minstrels sweep their skilful string,

In lordly lighted hall:

I hear you play the simple reed,

Blythe where the cuckoos call.




Flotal music: King Harry’s Greensleeves. Othello reaches out, the
light of love in his eyes. He takes her hand. They step soft and lightly turn
as, shimmering, they fade away. The pair are a golden misted mirage, then are gone.





RB: You see, William? Her hair was like the curling mist, / That
climbs the mountain-side and sighs, / 
When flow'r-reviving rains are past; / And she had two sparkling roguish
eyes.




WS: Oh yes, you were so much more than
I the poet as well as the romantic. But my Othello was a tragedy, not a
romance. You said it; I tried to mirror life and life must always be a tragedy simply
because it always ends in death. Of course you and I know now that death is no
tragedy but we didn’t know that there and then, did we? Only the most
blameless, most at peace, most benevolent and most pious welcomed what our
friend Dylan called the dying of the
light - and failed to rage against it. Most of those - indeed the vast
majority of good health and sound mind dreaded their dying day. However
pain-filled their lives had been they wanted more of it. Very odd indeed. Chuckles. Most in my day were as convinced of this afterlife as they
were afraid of it - and afraid with good reason, most of them.




RB: Atheism was still a crime in my
age, tantamount almost to witchcraft. But then look. How soon did our so called
science demand its own atheism! By the twenty first century how few believed in
anything other than that which they could see, smell, hear, touch, or read about
in their so-called newspapers.




WS: The understanding that alone
lifted our kind above all others cast aside as of no importance, replaced by
mere mechanics.




RB: How soon all gone. Man no more,
no more machines




WS: Right. And mostly with good
reason. Where most of that ‘most’ are now we know not. Reborn to try again? Perhaps.
It is of no importance. But romance! I agree with you that romance was the
saving grace. That and our exposure on Earth to the uplift of the so-called
arts. His hands behind his head, he’s watching through slitted eyes the
play of sunlight through wispy cloud, listening idly to the drone of insect
life.




RB: Oh yes, romance … Tell me, who
was she anyway Will, the dark lady of your lovely sonnets? She whose identity has
driven so vast an academia to drink and argument over the succeeding centuries?





WS: The dark lady? I met her in Florence and later when she came to London. Her name was Bint Na’ir. She was the second
wife of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, ambassador for the King of Morocco to the
Court of Queen Elizabeth.  Messaoud was the
inspiration for my Othello, you know. Ah yes what a fine though very wanton
woman was our Bint. She certainly cut a wide swathe through the male ranks of
the Globe, as much as I detested having to share her favours, even with my friends,
even that Johnson. But we all needed to keep our liaisons very quiet.
Disclosure would likely have been fatal and not only to the lady herself.




RB: You had many such diversions in
your life on Earth?




WS: By no means as many as you, my
friend. Forget not that I was so much away from house and home. However I was never
tempted to try to expose my adventures in verse or in song as did you. I liked
to remain as invisible as possible behind my various creations. It is through
no fault of mine that generations of so-called thinkers often doubted my
authorship. Grins at his friend. You know, as if
we semi-educated country boys without that Cambridge label must be bereft of the finer
thoughts, the dancing words? Pauses to think back, his thoughts as
always apparent to his good companion, then gets to his feet. Shall we move on?




RB: Now also on his feet. But a man’s a man for all that. Yes, where shall we go,
what do we find there? Your choice this time.




WS: Anywhere and anything we wish …
if I am now to choose … oh, I think the sea that lies past yonder stand of oaks.
Come.




RB: The billows on the ocean, / The breezes idly roaming, / The cloud's
uncertain motion, / They are but
types of Woman. Laughs. They set off
as a black-maned lion stalks from the forest into the glade, coughs once, swinging
his great head side to side, padding along behind. Beside him trots a snow
white lamb, skipping sometimes, and a troupe of Thompson’s Gazelle springing in
slow motion stiff-legged high into the air, avoiding on their descent by narrow
margins a flock of waddling geese, an army of soldier ants, the Prince of
Denmark and a lady.




WS: Who’s the lady, Robert?



RB: I called her Clarinda. She was the Love that’s
like the red, red rose, as unrequited as it was, at least to all appearances. Touch of your Moorish lady,
right? The entourage proceeds through a grove of massive old oak trees
and out on to a scimitar stretch of achingly pale sand and an ocean turquoise, infinite.