The Late Mr Shakespeare (12 page)

In this box there is a top and a ball. The top is many-coloured. The ball won’t bounce. But once the ball bounced – when the boy William tossed it against the wall of his father’s house on Henley Street, catching it on the tricky spin as it came back.

I have made a list of all the games the poet played when he was young. The ball he gave me himself, not long after we first met. Joan Hart, his sister, made me a gift of the top, when I was in Stratford much later pursuing my researches. The other games I infer from the plays and the poems. Perhaps we should more truly say that our man had knowledge of them all, rather than claim that he played them. But with Mr Shakespeare knowing was nearly always doing.

Many times in his writings there is mention of
marbles
and
bowls
. As well as the
top-spinning
already mentioned, he tells also of
hoop-rolling
, of
hide-and-seek
, and of
blind-man’s-buff
.

That he knew how to
fence
and all the language of
fencing
and
sword-play
could be proved from a score of his plays. And he was a
toxophilite
– well able, like old Double as recalled by Justice Shallow, to draw a bow and clap you an arrow in the clout at twelve score, even if he couldn’t on horse-back hit a sparrow flying, any more than could that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas, according to scornful Prince Hal.

Of course, he played
tennis
– real tennis, I mean – for besides the Dauphin’s tennis-balls there are a dozen allusions to and terms drawn from that game. But this was not a pastime of his childhood. There was no tennis-court in Stratford. Mr Shakespeare learnt the game later, in London, on the Earl of Southampton’s private tennis-court.

And he played
football
– that’s in
Lear
. And at
push-pin
, like Nestor in
Love’s Labour’s
Lost. And at
more-sacks-to-the-mill
(see Berowne’s reference to this ‘old infant play’ in the same piece).

Swimming
, of course. He did that in the Avon. And
skating
on the ponds when they froze in winter.
Jumping
and
wrestling, hand-to-hand fighting, wielding the lance
and
greyhound-racing
were all things the boy Shakespeare saw done at Mr Robert Dover’s Olimpick Games upon the Cotswold Hills. Nobility and commoners came from many miles around to this annual event. ‘How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say he was outrun on Cotsall,’ says Abraham Slender, in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

But the real sport in the Forest of Arden was
hunting
. Mr Shakespeare certainly hunted, but I think on foot. What sort of hounds were those of Duke Theseus in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Basset hounds? Spaniels? The poet had in mind a memory of the Stratford beagles, I suspect. I have no
doubt that he
coursed hares
, running afoot with them when he was a boy or a young man.

Add to the list that he was a
fowler
, and went out with a gun and shot wild geese and choughs.
Cards
he played too; with me, sometimes, for kisses. There are not many allusions to card-playing in the plays, when you come to look for them, though there’s a game going on in Act V Scene 1 of
King Henry VIII. Primero
was the late Mr Shakespeare’s favourite card-game, though like Falstaff he was inclined to get too excited and foreswear himself when he saw good cards in his hand. In all honesty, Mr Shakespeare’s face was always too much the index of his heart and mind for him to be any good at bluffing card-games. Yet he loved to play them –
gleek, brag,
and
post and pair
were others that he liked.

Let me tell you why I think William Shakespeare knew little about
chess
. It is not just that I never saw him play a game of it in the Mermaid tavern, where Mr Beaumont and Mr Fletcher were always locked in combat of wits, blond head against black, above the chequered board. Nor is it that to the best of my knowledge he employed no chess-terms in the course of his imagery. No, sir, I think Mr Shakespeare knew little or nothing about chess because in
The Tempest
he has Miranda say that Ferdinand is cheating – and it isn’t easy at all to cheat at chess.

It was at the Mermaid that I first met Dr Warner. He was one of those poor fellows who do good and original work, only to find reward and credit for it go to other men. A thin little person, almost fleshless, with a withered left hand which he always kept hidden in his sleeve, the first time I saw him he was taking a frog from his pocket to demonstrate on the table among the tankards that heart-beats could only be
explained by the circulation of the blood. The honour for this discovery went some twenty years later to Dr William Harvey, who had also been present when Warner produced that frog from out of his pocket.

So the world wags, and fame is a foul strumpet.

As for the doctrine which made Harvey famous, Mr Shakespeare accepted it long before it was made public in that great anatomist’s
Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus
(1628). Witness Biron in Act IV, Scene 3 of
Love’s Labour’s Lost,
where he speaks of
the nimble spirits in the arteries
. Witness King John in Act III, Scene 3 of the play of that name, where he talks of
blood thickened by melancholy
, and then goes on:

All of which tells you that Mr Shakespeare was also paying attention to Dr Warner and his frog that night at the Mermaid.

But Pickleherring has wandered somewhat (as is his wont and manner) from the subject of this chapter – which was the boy Shakespeare’s games. O dear O simple long-lost days of childhood.

And how I wish I had left to drink some of that Scorbutick Ale which Mr Shakespeare’s son-in-law, Dr John Hall, once prescribed for me. It was a truly excellent stomach drink, and John Hall was another wise doctor of the kind unsung by history, even though all his ministrations failed to save Mr Shakespeare when it came down to it.

That Scorbutick Ale helped digestion, expelled wind, and dissolved congealed phlegm upon the lungs. It was therefore sovereign against colds and coughs, as well as scurvy. Being drunk in the evening, it moderately fortified Nature, causing good rest, and hugely corroborating both the brain and the memory.

Yes, I could do with a deep draught of Scorbutick Ale to help me to write my Life of William Shakespeare. In the absence of the reality, I will drink the remembrance. And boil and eat this egg which a whore just fetched me.

The midwife Gertrude was a great teller of stories.

Every Wednesday evening – Gertrude's Wednesdays, they used to call them – would find her seated in her rocking chair in the marketplace at Snitterfield, the breeze blowing sweet in summer from the groves of the Forest of Arden, her bottles and her boxes spread at her feet. (Yes, madam, in winter she would do her stuff indoors.)

First she would eat a spoonful of this. Then she would drink a mouthful of that. Then she would blow her nose, clean out her ears with a knitting-needle, rub her eyes on a dockleaf, gargle, spit, clear her throat, take William Shakespeare on her knee, and begin a story.

The boy William's favourite was the tale of the monk and the nightingale. It went like this.

There was once a monk who was a good man but not a good monk. He did not like praying in church with the other monks. He liked walking in the green wood in the cool of
the evening, and listening to the voices of the wind, and the streams, and the birds.

One night when he should have been at prayer the little monk wandered out into the dark and sat down under a willow tree. He chose the willow because its trailing branches made a screen around him, and he wanted to be alone to think.

He was thinking that he was not a good man because he was not a good monk when all at once a bird began singing in the tree above him.

It was a nightingale. Its song was so beautiful the monk wept for joy. Yet the song was not only a flow of joy. There was sadness in it too. It was sweet and sad, laughing and crying, merry and melancholy, all in one. The bird poured out its heart and the monk listened in a trance of delight, caught up in the music, pressed close to the heart of it.

On and on the nightingale sang, as if in rapture. In fact its breast was pressed against a thorn, which was why it sang. Its music told no story, least of all the story of the thorn, but it cast such a spell of melody everywhere in the dark around, the thronging notes echoing among the other trees, that the stream seemed to stop to listen, and the night breeze hold its breath.

‘Tiouou, tiouou, tiouou, tiouou,'
sang the nightingale,
‘lu, lu, lu, ly, ly, ly, li, li, li, li.''

When the bird stopped the monk was so exhausted with delight and gratefulness that he sat quite still in the dark for a little while, calming his heart. Then he hurried back to the church.

He saw the Abbot and went up to him. ‘Father,' he said simply, ‘I have heard the nightingale—'

‘Who are you?' broke in the Abbot crossly.

The monk looked closely at the Abbot in the gloom. He did not recognise him. It was a new Abbot. But how could that be?

‘I do not understand,' he said. ‘I went out into the night and I sat a moment under a willow and listened to the nightingale. Oh, Father, it was so beautiful I have no words for it. I wished that moment could have lasted for ever.'

The Abbot seized his arm and stared into his eyes. ‘Are you telling the truth?' he demanded.

‘Of course I am telling the truth,' said the monk. ‘The nightingale sang—'

‘I know nothing of the nightingale,' said the Abbot, ‘but a hundred years ago a monk went out from this church into the night – it is written in the records of the monastery – and he never came back again. The Abbot of the time searched and searched, and the monks searched, but the man was never found. It was thought that he had fled away because he was a bad man.'

‘I am not a good monk,' said the monk, ‘and I would not claim to be a good man, but if I was a bad man I do not think I would have heard the nightingale.'

And then there was only dust in the Abbot's hands. For in listening so attentively to the song of the nightingale the little monk had heard a moment in eternity – which may take a hundred years of time.

This, as I say, was William Shakespeare's favourite from among the many stories told by the midwife Gertrude.

She was a woman too much given to allicholly and musing. Tiny, rather plump, voluble, and obliging, with grey hair and a narrow mouth, she wore eyeglasses and a black
hat pulled square across her forehead. She used to sing to herself a lot.
‘Oh tennis,'
she sang,
‘oh tennis is the finest game and boy and girl believe / The game they love is just the same that Adam played with Eve.'
This woman spoke often to William Shakespeare also of crickets – with results that you may see in
Romeo and Juliet,
Act I, Scene 4, line 63, and in
Cymbeline
, Act II, Scene 2, line 11, and in
Pericles
where at the start of the third Act Mr Shakespeare announces that he has taken over the writing from Mr Wilkins by having Gower speak of how
crickets sing at the oven's mouth
. There is also a good bit about being
as merry as crickets
in the first part of
King Henry IV,
and in
The Winter's Tale
where Mamillius promises Hermione and the ladies a tale of sprites and goblins and goes on thus:

But the best line of all with crickets in it was given to me, of course, in my role as Lady Macbeth. Which fateful play, should you be interested, was actually written in Scotland and then first performed there – but I'll be coming to that when it's time for it.

I cannot believe that the midwife Gertrude knew as much about crickets as Dr Walter Warner. From him I learnt that the wings of crickets when folded form long, thin filaments, giving the appearance of a bifid tail, while in the male they are provided with a stridulating apparatus by which the well-known chirping sound is produced. The abdomen of the female ends in a long thin ovipositor. House crickets are
greyish yellow marked with brown. Field crickets are bigger and darker. It burrows in the ground, the cricket, and in the evening the male cricket is to be seen sitting at the mouth of its hole noisily stridulating until a female approaches, when the louder notes are succeeded by a more subdued tone, whilst the successful musician caresses with his antennae the mate he has won. The cricket's musical apparatus consists of upwards of 130 transverse ridges on the under side of one of the nervures of the wing cover, which are rapidly scraped over a smooth projecting nervure on the opposite wing. The mole cricket is different. Its front legs are like hands.

The midwife Gertrude had a soft, animal nature. She loved to be happy like a sheep in the sun. And to do her justice, she liked also to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun.

Some say that in the corner of Mary Shakespeare’s kitchen there stood a cauldron of inspiration and science. It was a giant cauldron and the brew it contained was dark and thick. Those who believe this say that as soon as the boy William was strong enough his mother set him the task of stirring the contents of her cauldron for a year and a day.

Bretchgirdle died, and Brownsword went back to Macclesfield. But Mary had learnt from the fat vicar before he died most of the magical virtues and vices of the flowers and ferns that grew in the fields about Stratford and in that green forest which bore her maiden name.

For instance, she knew of the heart-shaped wood-sorrel which warms the blood, and of moonwort which waxes and wanes with the moon and turns mercury into silver and will unshoe any horse that treads upon it. And she knew of the yellow juice of the celandine which will cure jaundice, and of liver-wort which is good for the liver. Also, you can take it
that Shakespeare’s mother was familiar with polypody which grows on old oaks and stops the whooping cough rather more effectively than the slug-slimed brown sugar Bretchgirdle had favoured. Certainly she would have known that the simple marigold is sovereign against melancholy, and that herb-dragon (speckled like a dragon) is the perfect antidote to adder bites.

Some of these plants, and many others that were stranger, went into the giant cauldron. Those who believe that Mary Shakespeare was a witch report that often she would be away from the house on Henley Street for weeks on end, searching in far and desolate places for rare herbs – for cassia out of Egypt, to the Transylvanian mountains for the purple-flowered hellebore, or getting aloes from Zocotora.

Was
Mary Shakespeare a witch, then?

I do not know. I do not care to think so. Yet Mr John Shakespeare – in his cups, in London, that only time I met him – spoke darkly of a woman he knew well who had only to whistle for the wind to rise, and only to sigh for it to fall again. However, he did not say this woman was his wife. He implied that she was young, so he might have meant Mrs Anne Shakespeare, his daughter-in-law. Assuredly there was something witchy about
her
. But then so there was about all the women I ever met who were in any way close to the late Mr Shakespeare. Lucy Negro once claimed she could keep lightning in a bottle. Mr Shakespeare’s sister Joan was invariably surrounded by black cats. And I admit that on that delicious occasion when Mr Shakespeare’s widow drove me (dressed in her petticoats) from New Place, she clapped her hands thrice and a star fell out of the sky.

I prefer not to dwell on such things.

And stars fall down anyway.

Back to the cauldron, then. Those who believe in it say that
Mary Shakespeare knew that when the brew in it had boiled for a year and a day then three precious drops of Inspiration from it would be sufficient to make her daughter Joan a poet. Joan was ugly and stupid and Mary had resolved, therefore, to confer poetry upon the new-born child, so that her wit and wisdom would gain her honour, and make up for her lack of grace.

As for the boy William, it is said that he never
meant
to taste the magic brew himself. It was an accident that he did. This is how it happened.

On the very last day, the day of the year and a day that the cauldron had to be kept boiling in the Henley Street kitchen, he was at work early, as usual, stirring with the huge wooden ladle. Perhaps he was excited by the thought that the moment had nearly come when the brew would be ready, according to his mother, perfected, for whatever reason, and his long labours ended. Perhaps he was just worn out by his mother’s attentions.

Whatever the cause, the boy William Shakespeare was not stirring his mother’s cauldron as steadily as he should have been. He splashed the gummy surface of the brew in dragging the ladle through it and three drops flew out of the cauldron and fell on his finger. They were so hot that – without thinking – the boy popped his finger in his mouth to suck it cool.

In that instant, as the three precious drops of Inspiration melted on his tongue, William Shakespeare was made a poet. It was as if a window had opened in his head. He looked out of the window and he saw a star so bright and clear that the light of all the other stars was swallowed up by it, and then there was only one star, giving so much light that the light seemed alive.

Then the night was gone and William Shakespeare saw a new country, just like the country around Stratford he had
always known but everything in it looking fresh and strange and early, as though the world had just begun that minute. The grass in this new country was greener than any grass he had ever seen, and buttercups grew there in the green grass so gold that they hurt his eyes, bringing tears to them.
Gold-belted
bees made merry from flower to flower; butterflies with green-veined and gold-spotted wings dabbled in the sunlight; the trees stood like delicate green steeples; the lakes were peopled by silver swans; the rivers ran over snowy pebbles with a sound that made WS smile; the breeze smelt deliciously of new-mown hay. It was all good enough to eat. And the strange thing was that WS felt he
could
eat it. He had only to open his mouth and he would bite the new day to the core, taste its sunlight on his tongue, feast on the green and the gold, drink the perfect country.

But even more strangely,
William Shakespeare did not want to eat it
. He knew it would be wrong to. He felt good, and he was content to look at the good things around him, without feeling any greed to have them.

Then it began to rain in the perfect country. The rain fell as rain, but when it had fallen it was little sapphire men and women who ran about hand-in-hand, singing.

As he listened to their song, trying to make out the words of it, William Shakespeare’s head began to spin.

He saw wars and warriors and fires that flashed through the air.

He saw ships ploughing the sea without sails or oars.

He saw other ships – like silver pencils – sail through the clouds and leave dewy snail-wakes down the blue.

He saw empires rise and fall, castles crumble and new castles rise in their places.

He saw a chicken pecking its way out of an egg – only the egg was the moon.

He saw a tree growing upside-down, its branches touching the ground, its roots in the sky.

And all the while words he could not understand burnt holes in the boy Shakespeare’s thinking. His mind could hardly contain all the crowd of things in it, and he clutched his head in his hands.

Then, clearer than anything else he had seen so far, WS had a sudden vision of his mother as she was at this moment, gathering the last plants for her cauldron in the land that lies at the back of the North Wind. Even as William watched her, in his head he saw her hand freeze as it stretched to pluck a mandrake out by the roots and her eyes turned, as it seemed, towards him and she screamed with anger and cursed him.

Shakespeare fell down in his fear. Then, pulling himself together, he realised that his best hope was to use his new-found powers to protect himself against his mother’s vengeance.

He fled from the house in Henley Street.

The cauldron seethed behind him in the kitchen. Purple bubbles burst from the magic brew. Hot ooze began to spill down its brazen sides.

Then the cauldron cracked in two, with a melodious
twang
.

This was because all the liquor it contained except the three drops of Inspiration was poisonous, and now the pure poison rose up and had its way. The cauldron split from side to side and the terrible brew flowed in a hissing snake-like stream over the floor, and out of the house, and down the streets and lanes till it came to the River Avon. Some swans on the river were poisoned instantly and fell dead in their own reflections.

Mary Arden went after her son like a fury.

When little William looked over his shoulder and saw his mother coming his heart swelled with fear so that he thought it would burst inside his chest.

Then he remembered the magic powers he had gained from the three drops of Inspiration and still running he changed himself into a hare.

But Mary had powers and wiles to equal his. Her blue eyes flashed when she saw what her son had done. She stamped her foot and changed herself into a greyhound, chasing after the hare and snapping at it with long, lean jaws.

Then WS came to the Avon and plunged into it, changing himself into a fish and diving down, down, down into the cool and deep and safety of the dark.

But Mary Arden followed quickly after him there in the shape of an otter-bitch, lank and sleek, with teeth like scissors, and she would have caught him if – in leaping down the weir at Alveston – he had not suddenly changed himself into a crow and flapped away into the air.

Seeing this, his mother flicked her otter’s tail and followed after as a long-winged hawk, harrying the crow and giving him no rest in the sky.

Then, just as she was about to fall on him and tear him to pieces with her beak and talons, WS saw a barn below, and a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of the barn, and he dropped down like a stone among the wheat, and changed himself into one of the tiny white grains.

Then Mary Arden beat her long black wings and turned herself into a high-crested black hen and scratched in the wheat until she found William, and swallowed him.

And no sooner had she swallowed him than she changed
back to a woman again and went home to the house on Henley Street.

Now, madam, no doubt this was a dream, or never happened. Yet Mr Shakespeare spoke more than once as if it had. I remember the tears in his eyes as he told me of the raindrop men and women.

The poet Jack Donne, later Dean of St Paul’s but in early days a great visitor of ladies and a great frequenter of plays, had a pet theory that every writer leaves somewhere in his work a portrait of his mother. I asked Mr S where his was. I have never forgotten his sly smile as he answered: ‘The witch Sycorax, in
The Tempest.’
(Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, does not, of course, appear in
The Tempest
. But as I hardly need to point out, her broomstick shadow lies darkly across all the action.)

As for the notion that Mr Shakespeare’s sister was the one who should really have been the poet, I recall that song at the end of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
with its refrain

My wife Jane told me that where she came from ‘keeling the pot’ is adding water or other cool liquor to it to save the brew from boiling over as you stir it. The reference to the cauldron is quite clear.

What happened to the swallowed wheat-grain Shakespeare?

Why, sir, returned home, his mother Mary shat little Willy out some nine hours later, and all went on as merrily as before.