The Late Mr Shakespeare (37 page)

William Shakespeare and John Florio enjoyed a game at tennis. They played in a walled and roofed court belonging to the Earl of Southampton. This court was 110 feet long by 38 feet and 8 inches wide, though the floor measured but 96 feet long by 31 feet and 8 inches wide, the difference being the width of a roofed corridor, the ‘penthouse’ which runs along the two end walls and one of the side walls of all such arenas.

Across the middle of the court a tasselled rope is stretched, and I will tell you that the first object of the game is to strike the ball over this with a bat called a racquet. The rope is five feet high at the ends, and three feet six inches high in the middle, and divides the floor into two equal parts, the ‘service’ side and the ‘hazard’ side.

Sometimes I stood in the ‘dedans’ to watch them play. The dedans is an opening in the end wall on the service side, under the penthouse, where provision is made for spectators, who are protected by a net.

The game is very fierce. It goes like this.

The players decide who shall serve by spinning a racquet on its head. Mr Shakespeare would spin and Mr Florio would call ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’, the ‘rough’ side of the head of the racquet showing the knots of some of the lower strings. The winner takes the service side, service being an advantage.

The server may serve from any part of the court, and in any way that he thinks best to serve. (Mr Shakespeare would spin the ball high with his fingers and then hit it hard with his racquet as it came down.) The ball must then fly over the rope, and strike the side penthouse, and fall into the service-court. The opponent (or ‘striker-out’) tries to return the ball over the rope before it has touched the ground a second time. He may volley it if he can, or he may half-volley it. For a stroke to be ‘good’ it must be made before the second bound of the ball, and the ball must go over the rope (even if it brushes it), and the ball must not strike the wall above the play-line, nor touch the roof or rafters. The first point to be attained is thus to be sure of getting the ball over the rope, and the next to do so in such a way as to defeat your opponent’s attempt to make a ‘good’ stroke in return.

It often happens that a player, either intentionally or from inability, does not take or touch a ball returned to him over the rope. In this event, a ‘chase’ is made, the goodness or the badness of which depends upon the spot on the floor which the ball touches next after its first bound. The nearer this spot is to the end wall the better the chase. Strokes into the galleries and doors count as chases. The making (or as they call it, the ‘laying down’) of a chase does not immediately affect the score: it has to be won first,
i.e.
the other player tries to make a better chase; if he fails, the original maker
wins. The winner of the chase scores a point. A point is scored by that player whose opponent fails to make a good return stroke, or who strikes the ball into a winning opening, or wins a chase, or to whom two faults are served in succession. A player loses a stroke who strikes the ball twice, or allows it to touch himself or his clothes.

The game is marked, 15, 30, 40 (or advantage), equality of numbers, and then victory. The players wear felt shoes for play on the smooth, tiled pavement, with caps held on by a band which goes under the chin. The balls are small and hard, being made of whitleather and stuffed with dog’s hair and other such stubble.
*
The racquets are woven from strings such as might otherwise be found on a six-stringed lyre.

Mr Florio was an excellent player at tennis, with a subtle understanding of all the game’s finer points. Even if you had never seen him in action on Rizley’s court, you might deduce as much from his
Second Fruits
(1591), where the value of chases is discussed at length.

Mr Shakespeare was an altogether wilder sort of performer. He struck the ball well and he was agile in his volleying and his bandying, but when it came to the chases you could tell his mind was somewhere else. This did not bother me as his spectator. In fact, what I liked best was the stream of invective which would flow from his lips when he was
losing
. I never heard anything to match it, not even among the tinkers and mountebanks busy at Bartholomew Fair.

One morning when the game went all Florio’s way, I took paper and jotted down some of the choice names which my master called his opponent as each point was lost. Here is that riot of insults:

There were other choice phrases of abuse also, more in the nature of complete sentences, which Mr Shakespeare uttered when he had his breath back. Amongst these I noted:

And so on, and so forth. Mr Shakespeare was a master of this craft or sullen art. He could go on for minutes on end, insulting Mr Florio without ever repeating himself once.

I remember one game where Mr Shakespeare kept on serving what they call double faults. Of course, he blamed his opponent for this small deficiency. John Florio, he said, was a
KNAVE
. Then, standing at the tasselled rope, racquet in hand, which he waved above his head to punctuate each verbal thrust, he gave it as his opinion that John Florio was not just a
KNAVE
, but a foul-mouthed and caluminous
KNAVE
, and not just a foul-mouthed and caluminous
KNAVE
, but a wrangling
KNAVE
, a poor, decayed, ingenious, foolish, rascally
KNAVE
, a
KNAVE
that smelt of sweat, a shrewd
KNAVE
and unhappy, a sly and constant
KNAVE
, a lousy
KNAVE
, a bacon-fed
KNAVE
, a counterfeit cowardly
KNAVE
, a crafty
KNAVE
, a subtle
KNAVE
, the lying’st
KNAVE
in Christendom, a beastly
KNAVE
, a stubborn ancient
KNAVE
,
a muddy
KNAVE
, a whoreson beetle-headed, flap-ear’d
KNAVE
, a base notorious
KNAVE
, a
KNAVE
very voluble, a pestilent complete
KNAVE
, a
KNAVE
fit only to be beat into a twiggen-bottle, an arrant, malmsy-nose
KNAVE
, a
KNAVE
most untoward, a muddy
KNAVE
, a ruddy
KNAVE
, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking
KNAVE
. In short, a
villain
.

And not just a villain, of course, but a bloody, bawdy villain, a remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, landless villain. A honeysuckle villain. A villain fit to lie unburied. Even a chaffy lord not worth the name of villain.

Mr Shakespeare had a very good line in expletives, also. Here are just a few which I recall from the tennis court – William Shakespeare’s tennis court oaths:

And so on. But his favourites, in the expletive art, were
‘A pox on this gout! or a gout on this pox!’
(which line he gave to Falstaff), and (if he noticed me, note-taking in the dedans)
A plague o’ these pickle-herring!’

As this will indicate, some of these terms of abuse were borrowed from his own plays, but there were as many or more which he had not used in his work at the time when he uttered them extempore.

All of which makes me think that William Shakespeare employed his games at tennis to put some critical part of his mind to sleep in action, and to see what words and phrases would bubble up from the depths if he lost his temper as a result. Not that he ever did lose his temper; not exactly. He would let himself go just far enough to have access to his great store of original invective. Then he would turn his fury into words. Then he would stop playing tennis. Often I thought he was playing some other game all the time.

I am apt to believe that Mr Shakespeare’s skill in the French and Italian tongues exceeded his knowledge in the Roman. For we find him not only beholding to Cinthio, Giraldi, and Bandello for his plots, but also able to write such a scene as that in
Henry V
where the princess Katharine and her governante converse in their native language quite believably. More cogent, though, to my memories of the playwright’s performance on the tennis court is the very great number of Italian proverbs scattered up and down in his writings. Where did these come from if not from John Florio?

Southampton’s tutor had been born in London, the son of an Italian refugee of Jewish ancestry. He was educated under the direction of the scholar Vergerio at Tubingen. He travelled through Italy and returned to England in the middle 1570s. Here he made a living from private lessons, taught at Oxford, and was authorised to wear the gown of Magdalen College. Patronised by Walsingham, he was
recommended to Lord Burghley, who appointed him as tutor to his ward. This would have been at the start of the Nineties, about the time when Shakespeare was beginning that monumental work more durable than bronze or stone, the immortal sonnets, which as we have seen began as advice to the pupil Rizley.

So we have this interesting little triangle if not trinity – rich patron, learnéd teacher, eager poet. I think it was Rizley’s wish to see some of the furnishings of Italian romance transported to England, and Shakespeare’s wish both to please him and to have a certain edge over his rival playwrights by substituting for their classical scenes the much more colourful Italy of the Renaissance. As for the pedagogue, he was happy enough no doubt to have found both a powerful nobleman and a poet of genius to act as propagandists for the culture he personified.

Florio’s library was magnificent. It contained more than three hundred volumes. It was this precious collection, to which Shakespeare soon had access, which provided the plot source of nearly every one of the early plays. Here he found the
Novelle
of Cinthio, and Luigi da Porto, and Boccaccio, and Bandello. Here he found the works of Machiavelli, and Ariosto, and Ser Giovanni, and Florio Fiorentino, and Petrarch, and Aretino, and Dante. Many of these texts were not yet translated into English, but with Florio to guide him to the treasures in the magic cavern the man from Stratford was soon rubbing lamps and releasing genii for himself. Everything he found got thoroughly turned into English in the process of his imagination, but Florio should be acknowledged as the one who gave him access to the cave.

All Mr Shakespeare ever needed to set his mind a-racing
was a few words, the merest outline of a plot. Often, hearing of some such, I saw him stop his ears, covering them suddenly with his hands, rather than listen to the actual conclusion of the story. He always preferred to hear half a promising tale, and then let his own wild fancy do the rest. In this way several of his plays had their beginnings.

John Florio was a curious gentleman. The feature of him which I remember best was his little wax-like hands. When he had completed a game at tennis the smell that his body exhaled was of sweet earth-flesh, the odour of mushrooms. He had long, bristling moustaches which he would twist between his fingers and thumbs as he talked to you. As his several books show, he was a man of incontestable erudition and culture, even if he did like torturing rats.

To give you some idea of Mr Shakespeare’s debt to Mr Florio, I think I will quote first from the latter’s
First Fruits
:

That saying, of course, gave Mr Shakespeare the title of one of his first plays,
Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Among the three hundred proverbs which Florio boasted of having introduced into England from Italy, Shakespeare uses (to my count) more than thirty, and there are a few of them which the poet quotes more than ten times. It is interesting and revealing, your author suggests, to see the manner in which Shakespeare incorporates Florio’s ‘golden sentences’ in his dialogue or fits them into his verse:

In each and every case, of course, Shakespeare has improved on Florio. For instance, how much more fleeting his water-by-the-mill because it
glideth
, a word which has both the movement of the river and the sunlight on it, and so is more ephemeral than the Italian lexicographer’s
flows
. For instance, how much more immediate the poet’s
one touch of nature makes the whole world kin
, where
TOUCH
and
KIN
bring home the mere abstraction of the original.

You may say, madam, that proverbs are much the same in any language, but surely you will concede that there are so many striking verbal similarities between Florio and Shakespeare as to make it likely that here we are not just up against coincidence. Besides, in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
(whose very title is borrowed, as I have shown, from the Italian-English manual), Shakespeare goes so far as to quote Florio
in the Italian original
, when he makes Holofernes say:

‘Ah! good old Mantuan. I may speak of thee as the
traveller doth of Venice:
Venetia, Venetia, Chi non te vede, non te pretia.’

Florio had written:
‘Venetia qui non ti vedi non ti pretia; ma chi ti vede ben gli costa!’
You will find this also in his
First Fruits
, published in London in the summer of ’78.

These two volumes of English and Italian dialogues, Florio’s
First Fruits
and his
Second Fruits
published some thirteen years later, seem to me to have provided Mr Shakespeare with a most unusual source of material. That the influence extended both ways might be surmised from the fact that while the subject of Love was omitted from the
First Fruits
, in the
Second Fruits
Mr Florio devotes no less than sixty pages to the tender passion, quoting Ovid constantly. I smell my master’s hand in this, not least in Florio’s conclusion that Love is as indispensable to mankind as eating or telling lies.

Incidentally, in the course of the
Second Fruits
John Florio not only gives us his opinion of the state of the English stage, but sets this in the context of a tennis game exactly like the ones he played with William Shakespeare. This is how the game is led up to:

I suggest that Mr Shakespeare’s eye certainly passed over these dialogues, which are spoken prose set out with some of the appearance of verse. Whether he thought that Florio was having a hit at
King John
and his
Henry VI
trilogy with that remark about ‘representations of histories without any decorum’, I could not tell you. The criticism bears some truth within it. Though it might be just revenge for a lost game at tennis.

Florio’s major work came out in 1603 – his Englishing of the
Essais
of Montaigne. There can be no doubt that Mr Shakespeare read this carefully. He makes use of Montaigne’s essays on cannibals and on cruelty in passages of
The Tempest
, and I think there are traces of the Frenchman to be found in
King Lear
also, and the last revision of
Hamlet
. Montaigne’s thoughts on Death were much to Shakespeare’s taste in his later life. I have his copy of the
Essays
in Florio’s translation, with his signature in it, which is followed by the words
MORS INCERTA
in his neatest hand.

John Florio’s star rose highest after his years with Southampton, when he was appointed to be one of the tutors of the greatly gifted but ill-fated Prince Henry. When that boy died young, this gentleman’s fortunes waned. He died of the plague at Fulham in 1625, having spent his last years in vain bickerings with his daughter Aurelia and his son-in-law, Dr Mollins. His wife Rose Spicer had been a sister of the poet Samuel Daniel, of whom I once heard Mr Shakespeare remark that he could never trust a poet whose name rhymed with itself.

This was, for him, an uncommonly harsh criticism. He was nearly always generous in his appraisal of other writers – saying nothing if he could not say something good.
Even of Henry Chettle, that fat fool who was responsible for publishing Greene’s upstart crow libel, he managed to find lines to like. Not that Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly (heigh-ho) nonsense, but
Aeliana’s Ditty
.

The late Mr Shakespeare’s usual practice, if you happened to mention a poet’s name, was to remember at least one good line that the man had written. For that matter, if he heard good told of anyone, he would rub his hands together instinctively.

Most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves. Not so, of course, with William Shakespeare. But it
was
so in the case of a now obscure writer whose work (if you will forgive the pun) certainly much appealed to WS. I mean George Peele.

Poor Peele. He died young, and of the pox, and after his death for some reason he passed swiftly into legend as the very emblem of the witty poet, the so-called
Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele
, published in 1605, consisting for the most part of jokes and stories fathered on him. The author of
Polyhymnia
deserved a better fate. I often heard Mr Shakespeare refer with affection to him, and more than once I heard him quote the song that concludes that long poem, the lyric that begins
His golden locks time hath to silver turned
.

His favourite amongst Peele’s poems, though, was not that, nor the famous
Bethsabe’s Song
which begins
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, / Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair
, although for sure I know that he loved the latter. Mr Shakespeare esteemed his friend George Peele most highly on account of nine lines in his
The Old Wife’s Tale
, a song sung by a voice that speaks from a well. That song goes like this: