The Late Mr Shakespeare (26 page)

Today was St George’s Day, which day I always keep. This particular St George’s Day I had especial cause to honour. It was fifty years ago today – 23rd April, 1616 – that the poet William Shakespeare breathed his last.

Anne brought me another egg, and she dressed my chamber! She fetched also a pitcher of cold fresh water, plus a little bowl of suckets. When I asked her if this was in honour of St George or Mr Shakespeare, she simply shook her head and stamped her foot. Our English patron saint, I fear, means nothing to this sweet witch. And I do not think she had heard of Mr Shakespeare.

For once, I nothing cared, to encounter such ignorance. I pinned a clean napkin before me, and I put on a pair of white Holland sleeves, which reached to my elbows. I ate my egg with relish, even the white part, and offered my guest a spoon of it, but she would not.

She had seated herself on a stack of my used boxes by the
window. She showed not the least curiousness concerning their contents, nor in anything else in this room, for all that I could see. Yet how strange it must all seem to my whore-child’s eyes! They are big and blue, by the by, with long dark lashes which she flutters prettily. Her ankles, when she sate herself, I perceived very neat and slender in her white silk stockings. (But your author knew that already, and so do you.)

She did not stay long, this dear, sweet Anne of mine, but she left a perfume of herself across my room. While she was here, there was an illumination about her. Barely a word did she speak, once she came in, until her going out again, yet my poor old, tired head sings with it.

‘Sir,’ – that’s what she said, when I opened my door to her gentle knocking – ‘I’ve brought another egg, sir. Would you like it?’

Ten words. Well, eleven, if I am allowed to draw out the contraction. And her voice is very beautiful, sweet and low. She called me
sir
. She made me a delightful little curtsey. I did not let her know that I know her name.

What did they see, that pair of deep, adorable blue eyes? What can their young owner have made of your ancient Pickleherring?

I keep no mirrors by me in this attic. I’ve allowed myself no looking-glass of any kind since my wife Jane departed this vain world. But of course I can remember what I look like. The memories are not all bad, sir, not all bad.

Pickleherring is of middle stature, with a fair complexion (remarkable I daresay for my extreme age), and of a pleasant countenance, open and cheerful even if somewhat cross-hatched with wrinkles.
(Beated and chopt with tann’d antiquity
, as Mr Shakespeare said of his own face, and still in his thirties
when he said it.) My hair (by reason no barber has come near me for the space of several years) is much overgrown. My habit is plain and without ornament, for the most part – which is to say, when I am not dressed up in any of the ruins of my costumes, but no one ever sees me garbed like that. I favour a sad-coloured cloth, of a texture that will defend me against any machinations of the cold. Since Jane was killed, I say, there has been nothing to be found in my apparel which could be thought to betoken or express the least imagination of pride or of vain-glory.

As she was leaving my chamber, as she stood there in my doorway, I made this darling Anne the gift of one of my precious pickled mulberries.

‘This is no common fruit,’ I told her. ‘It comes from the tree of the greatest poet and the dearest man who ever lived in England. And today is his day, little miss, as much as it is St George’s.’

Anne inspected it most respectfully, before wrapping it up in her handkerchief. Then she dropped me another dainty curtsey, and scampered away. Watching her rush down the stairs I remembered her childishness. Perched on my boxes, legs crossed, she had looked something else.

Thus passed the most remarkable St George’s Day I have ever known in my life, in which my only feast was on an egg. Blessed be the dear white hands that gave it to me. I ate that egg in Mr Shakespeare’s honour. As I say, it is fifty years from the day that the poet died. I will not tell you how he bade farewell to me until it’s time for that. Today, fifty years on, let me say only that William Shakespeare’s purgatory must be past. His heaven will never end, be sure of it.

Nothing in this box. And this nothing’s more than matter to my mood. It fits my spirits, this box that when I tap it with my fingers sounds with hollow poverty and emptiness. I am a poor fellow, sir. I speak with nobody, and I do not answer. I am, again, Cordelia, am I not? ‘What can you say?’ ‘Nothing, my lord.’ ‘Nothing!’ ‘Nothing.’ And nothing will come of nothing, as Lear replied.

That was one of Mr Shakespeare’s favourite words – that terrible
NOTHING
. He plays on it in every other play. It is no sort of a word for an old man like me.

Well, madam, there you have it, like as not. Pickleherring’s down in the dumps this morning, after the high delights of his yesterday. Like a bear with a sore head, madam, O yes, indeed.

I lay awake and thought about those eggs last night. What can it mean – that twice now my bewitching whore-child has brought me an egg?

Reader, forgive me, for then various silly sayings concerning the meaning and significance of eggs came floating into my head where it tossed there, unable to sleep.

Does this Anne mean (thought I) to
egg me on
? Not likely, I thought. Why should she? How could she? There would be nothing for her in it, and while ’tis pity she’s a whore yet a whore is what she is. (That strange image of
egg on
is a corruption of the Saxon
eggia
, to incite, according to my dictionary, consulted by candlelight in the dead vast and middle of the night. Madam, I
did
put my nightcap on.)

So then (thought I, safely back in my cot, and keeping that nightcap tugged down about my ears) does perhaps this dear, sweet little innocent mean to say without having to say it that we are
like as two eggs
, she and I? Hardly, I thought. We are in fact as different as chalk and cheese. And a broken white stick of dry-as-dust chalk is what I amount to, while a very tasty piece of parmesan looked that Anne, going down those stairs making cheeses with her petticoats.

But what if the cunning little vixen intends to laugh at me? How? Why, by
teaching her grandmother to suck eggs
? The naughty wicked scamp, if so, thought I, kicking off the bedclothes in my fury. For I should have to show the wench that Pickleherring is no grandmother but the veriest grand
father
under his red cotton nightshirt. And to achieve that office would I not need to take Anne across my knee, and have her drawers down, and attend to her posteriors …

These final images brought me terribly awake, and confronted by my own base desires with regard to the girl. Yet I knew at the same time, even in my excitement, that she did not deserve this, not after her kindnesses to me, which
might well have been performed for no motive but that they are the natural expression of a good and simple heart.

I determined then that I would myself have to
tread upon eggs
in regard to the creature – taking care not to frighten, not to startle, never to hurt her, but to go tenderly and gingerly in all, as if walking over eggs that are so easily broken.

Pickleherring calmed himself down from this unfortunate storm of passion by recalling the well-known anecdote of the silent man and the eggs. (This story, now I come to recite it for you, chimes with some of my procedures in this book – where there is often a delay between event and resolution, for no better reason than that being the way my comedian of a mind has always worked.)

The anecdote concerns as I say a man much given to long silences. One day, when riding over a bridge, this man turned about and asked his servant if he liked eggs, to which the servant briefly answered, ‘Yes, sir.’ Whereupon not a word more was spoken until a year later, when, riding over the same bridge, the man turned about to his servant once more, and said, ‘How?’ To which the instant answer came: ‘Poached, sir.’

This fine example of intermission of discourse served me last night to take my mind off the matter in hand. I must then have fallen asleep, for the next thing I know I was watching a wonderful silver egg being laid by the joint labour of several serpents in the street below, and then buoyed up into the air above London by their hissing. I stepped out of my window and I caught the egg, and I rode off through the night at full speed astride it. I knew that I had to ride fast away from the serpents, to avoid being stung to death. But I knew also that now I possessed the egg I was sure to prevail in my Life of
Mr Shakespeare, and indeed to defeat all my enemies in any contest or combat that might befall me, and to be courted by King Charles and others in power. In my dream I then heard Anne’s voice saying (as it seemed close by, and whispering, upon my pillow): ‘Pliny says he has seen an egg just like ours, but it was only about the same size as an apple.’

Then I dreamt I wept, and woke. But why I wept, I knew not; yet I know.

When William Shakespeare first came to London he lodged for some while at the sign of the White Greyhound in Paul’s Churchyard. This place was not a tavern but a building that housed a printing works. It was owned by a friend who had been his fellow at the Stratford Grammar School, a young man by the name of Richard Field.

Richard Field was an enterprising gentleman. Son of a Stratford tanner, he had got himself apprenticed to a London printer when he was eighteen years old. His second master was a Huguenot, Thomas Vautrollier, famous in his day for the beauty of his types and the excellence of his press-work. When Vautrollier died, young Dick married his widow, a Frenchwoman called Jacqueline. Thus, at an early age, he came into possession of one of the best printing establishments in England.

The house of Vautrollier had published some fine if heretical books. For example, the works of Calvin, and
Luther and Theodore de Bèze. For example, the works of Giordano Bruno. For example, new editions of Ovid and Plutarch. For example,
Campo di Fiore or Singing in four languages to aid those who wish to learn Latin, French and English, but especially Italian
. (I have this.) For example, that
Treatise on Melancholy
, by Dr Timothy Bright, which I have told you was of use to Mr Shakespeare when he was writing his
Hamlet
.

Under Field’s control, the printing house became if anything even more distinguished. Having published Puttenham’s important
The Art of English Poesie
, it went on to publish Mr Shakespeare’s
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, as well as Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
in the translation made by Sir John Harington at Queen Elizabeth’s request. But all this is to run ahead a bit too fast. I just want to show you that our hero had a knack of falling on his feet even when starting out in a strange city.

At the time when Mr Shakespeare came to London, as it turned out, his old school-friend had just married the merry Jacqueline. She was a sportive piece, a black-eyed beauty. It cannot have taken much pity on Mr Field’s part to bed her or to wed her, especially since it was only by inheritance or marriage that any newcomer could enter the close corporation of master-printers. The Fields’ house was at the south end of an acre known as Little Britain – the printers’ quarter. This meant that Mr Shakespeare had not far to go to do his first job of horse-holding at the theatres on the north side.

Later in life, Dick Field had an even better shop, the Splayed Eagle, in Wood Street, Cheapside, where his widow carried on the business after his death. It was in the back
room of that establishment, over a dish of strawberries, that I once asked this engimatic woman who
she
thought the Dark Lady of the sonnets might have been. She smiled into her fan.
‘C’est moi,’
she said.

Field’s printer’s device (inherited, like the dark Jacqueline, from old Vautrollier) was an anchor surrounded by laurels and accompanied by the motto
ANCHORA
SPEI
.

His other claim to fame, apart from his friendship with Shakespeare, is that like the Reverend Bretchgirdle, Mr Richard Field was a ruminating gentleman.

This human chewing of the cud is not so singular a thing as you might suppose, dear reader. Dr Walter Warner told me once that he had just had the satisfaction of dissecting a ruminant man, and proving the falseness of Bartholin’s theory that such people possess double stomachs. So neither are they freaks in their anatomy.

Richard Field the master printer used to commence ruminating about a quarter of an hour after a meal, and the process usually occupied him for an hour and a half, being attended with greater gratification than the first mastication, after which he claimed the food lay heavy in his lower throat. He was obliged to retire from the dining table at his house beside the printing works, and to go into a little room, star-ceilinged, which he called his ‘rumination chamber’, where he could ruminate away to his heart’s content. Often he declared in my hearing that this second process of mastication was ‘sweeter than honey’ and ‘accompanied with a delightful relish’. His son by Jacqueline inherited the same faculty, but with him it was under better control, he being able to defer its exercise until any convenient opportunity, and so needing no star chamber for the purpose.

Mr Field seldom made any breakfast in his later days. He generally dined about noon or one o’clock, eating heartily and quickly, and without much chewing. He never drank with his dinner, but afterwards he would sink a pint of such malt liquor as he could get. As I say, he usually went into his ‘rumination chamber’ and began his second chewing about fifteen minutes later, when he would claim that each and every morsel came up successively, sweeter and sweeter to the taste. Sometimes a gobbet might prove offensive and crude, in which case Richard Field would spit it out. The chewing continued usually about an hour or more. If he was interrupted in the act by a customer he found (alas) that he would be sick at stomach, and troubled with the heart burn, and foul breath. He could punctuate his second eating of the same meal by smoking a pipe of tobacco, and this was never to my knowledge attended by any ill consequences. It was not until a few weeks before his death, in 1624, that the faculty left him, and then poor Richard Field remained in tortures till the end.

I think it must have been one of the few sorrows of Mr Field’s life that he parted with the copyrights of Shakespeare’s narrative poems to a bookseller called Harrison. Both poems were extremely successful and went through many editions. Perhaps Field let them go because of his theological interests and because by then Mr S was getting big in the theatre. Field had no time at all for the world of the playhouse. He joined other residents of Blackfriars in signing a petition in 1596 – the year I came to London – against James Burbage’s attempt to open a theatre there. The petition succeeded. I think that setback broke old Burbage’s heart.