The Late Mr Shakespeare (4 page)

It has been said that all the facts about Mr Shakespeare’s life could be written on a single page. Here they are then:

Known facts about WS

These twelve facts are all that there is to be known for sure about William Shakespeare from the public records.

But a man’s life does not just consist of facts.

Least of all, the life of our Shakespeare.

When in the last chapter but one I named some of the birds that helped save Mr Shakespeare’s mother from the hanging tree I must admit that I took a few of their names from his plays and his poems. Why not? How else could it be when you think about it? My mind is printed with his words and phrases. (Sometimes I think he dreamt me.) I was his page, sir. Now the page writes the book.

Remember, madam, I am an ancient actor. I strutted in my time on the ivory stages.

To be an actor, what is that to be? It is to be a man who turns himself into all shapes like a chameleon. But the whole damned craft is strange, and rooted in mystery. Why does one man’s yawning make another man yawn? How, when standing in the jakes, should one man’s pissing provoke a second? These are questions impossible to answer except in terms of some common nerve of human sympathy. But what if that sympathy be betrayed by art? What if your first
man is not tired or pissy? He is your actor. He pretends a yawn he does not have in his jaws. He peacocks a piss when there’s nothing in his bladder. In all this he’s as false as those witches and old women that can bewitch our children. The forcible imagination of the one party moves and alters the spirits of the other. And behind the phantom of the player stands the god of the playwright. I was myself created by Mr Shakespeare. My real name is Nicholas Nemo. I am no fowler or ornithologist, no catcher of birds or discourser upon their several kinds and conditions.

And yet not all is art. It is plain fact and verifiable that I have seen with my own eyes in the country around Stratford-upon-Avon certain among those birds I mentioned. For instance, finches. But others I know only from my trusty Folio – the chough, for instance, which I believe is not an inland bird at all, but more probably to be discovered at the sea-coast of Cornwall, where it builds its nest in the cliffs.

Reader, my procedure is to give you the warp and the weft of Mr Shakespeare’s world. His mind held choughs, and his verse found places in it for those birds to fly, therefore it seems to me right that they should be here in the tale of his begetting in the night of the great storm.

Instances are on record of choughs being taught to speak, but Mr Shakespeare appears to have entertained no great opinion of their talking powers. He speaks in
All’s Well that Ends Well
of ‘chough’s language, gabble enough, and good enough’, and then in
The Tempest
the usurping Duke of Milan, talking of ‘lords that can prate’, says:

Falstaff, in the scene with the Prince and Poins, when they are met to rob the travellers at Gadshill, speaks of the victims as ‘fat chuffs’ – no doubt from their strutting about with much noise.

By the by, Mr Shakespeare sometimes says choughs when I think he means jackdaws. For instance, in the second scene of the third Act of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, where in my part of Puck he had me speak of 

Russet here is the French
gris
, a fine grey, and the head of the jackdaw about the neck and ear-coverts is precisely that colour. The head of the chough, like the rest of its body, I believe to be perfectly black.

But if you ask me our poet certainly means the cliff-haunting chough, your chough
graculus
or
Pyrochorax
, when he has Edgar at Dover in
King Lear
pronounce

Sampire did you know is the herb of St Peter (San Pierre)? It was used in the old days for pickles. But I digress.

For instance, carp is a muddy fish.

For instance, old Mr Burbage had an anchor on his thigh.

For instance, I anchor my mind fast upon Mr Shakespeare.

(One must needs scratch where it itches.)

So if I tell you now of some of the things in the country-side about Stratford, my dears, you may take it as read that I speak of what I have seen with my own eyes.

No choughs in this chapter.

The country about Stratford is pretty, well-watered, and uninteresting. A few miles away rise the Cotswold hills. These have a bold beauty, very pleasant after the flatness of the plain. The wolds towards Stratford grow many oaks and beeches. Farther east, they are wilder and barer. Little brooks spring up among the hills. The nooks and the valleys are planted with orchards. There are grey farm-houses and little grey villages. There are sheep.

Michael Drayton called Warwickshire the heart of England. (And I heard Mr Shakespeare once call Michael Drayton seven sorts of an ass.) Other wise men remark that none of our counties is richer in truly English features, and that none has more verdant or more pleasing meadows than you can discover in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Certainly the Avon is an agreeable river. There are always the swans.

This famous Shakespeare country, then, is what? Let me spell it out in his own words, as I did with the birds. It is all lady-smocks and cuckoo-buds, and it is oaten straws and cowslips’ ears. Marigolds. Mary-buds. Undulating farm-lands broken with coppices, I say.

Soho! Soho! So how did Mary Arden’s garden grow?

How do you think? The same as any other for miles around.

She planted it when the frost broke in March. She set out thyme and hyssop, garlic, parsley for stuffing rabbits, saffron to colour her pale pies.

Rank fumiter grows in the hedgerows round about her village of Wincot, its flowers sometimes yellow, sometimes waxy red – as red that is to say as sealing-wax.

Idle weeds choked the corn in the bad days: hardokes, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers. (And quite what those hardokes were I have no idea. In the Quarto of
Lear
the word is printed hor-docks. But he always made me say it out as hardokes. Yes, madam, Pickleherring played Cordelia.)

Well, I think that’s quite enough pastoral for one night. The truth is I’ve got little to say about the country. The country doesn’t exist, so far as I’m concerned. It is Nothing turned inside-out and painted green in spring and golden in the autumn. It is all illusion. All the same, I like it. I also like the town. Pickleherring is not hard to please, you see.

As for Mr Shakespeare, I once heard him give his opinion of Stratford-upon-Avon in four words. Three of them were Stratford-upon-Avon. The other was a verb he never used in his plays.
*

But today I feel scurrile – idle, dull, and dry. Reader, you cannot think worse of me than I do of myself.

What am I? I am an antic actor now turned writer to be thought a polymath and get a paper-kingdom. This book is my common theatre. The subject of my discourse: William Shakespeare.

I remember a night not long after I first came to London in Mr Shakespeare’s company. We were eating carp quick cooked in butter. I spilt some of their shitty grease on the
front of my shirt. Instantly, seeing my embarrassment, Mr Shakespeare thrust the forefinger of his right hand into the hot dish and smeared the front of his shirt to look like mine. I never dreamt of such courtesy before. I have not seen it very often since.

Mr Shakespeare’s face was always full of the vivacity of his mind. His habitual look was that of an aloof but sunny spirit. He was a man alive to his fingertips.

I was a witness to some of Mr Shakespeare’s life. I was not much of an actor in any of it. Nor am I exactly his bard, though of course he is mine. He has been my guiding spirit all my days.

He was my master, and my genius. I am a dwarf. He was a giant. Yet a dwarf sitting or standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than the giant himself. So, telling you Shakespeare’s story, I tell you at least one story which Shakespeare could not tell.

O my tautologies. O my toys and fopperies.

All that’s too bold, though. (Not like the pancake country round about Stratford.)

This chapter has been a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills. The next one should be better. In it I’ll have the birth of our hero for my theme.

The Misses Muchmore always used to claim that April was the cruellest month. I don’t know why. Meg would speak of memory, and Merry of desire. ‘Pinch him!’ Meg squeaked. ‘And burn him!’ squealed Merry. Then they would strip and spank me in their parlour.

It was in April, cruel or not, that Mr WS was born and christened. Here’s how it happened.

The first nightingale sings each year in the Forest of Arden on the 23rd of April. It was in the late evening of that day in the year of Our Lord 1564, after a day when all day April had been unpicking the blossoms on the whitethorn, a day when expert April had been unlocking the earliest blossoms on the whitethorn, a day when April with shy smiles had been unclenching the first fists of whitethorn blossom, that William Shakespeare, our hero, son of John, was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the shire of Warwick.

It was a Sunday and St George’s Day.

At the coming forth of the babe the town clock stopped. The small hand pointed to heaven, the big hand to hell. It was half an hour before midnight when the bard was born.

The midwife, whose name was Gertrude, and who hailed from the neighbouring village of Snitterfield, cut the birth-cord with a sword she kept close for the purpose.

Then she kissed the caul that covered the baby’s head.

‘Here’s one who will be fortunate,’ she noted.

Then she kissed the black spot, no bigger than a sixpence, on the infant’s left shoulder.

‘And he’s of the devil’s party too,’ she said.

This Gertrude was a small woman, plain and eager, an intense little mouse living in hope that a big tom-cat would one day jump on her. Blissfully shy, tremulously silent except when telling stories, suffering from piles and a need to be loved, she quivered through what passed for life in Warwickshire wearing a gown with a pattern of faint-green moss on it, her hair drawn up and coiled at the back of her head in a shape which suggested a bun, mittens on her paws, the eyes behind her spectacles on sharp look-out for symptoms of insincerity, moral facetiousness, or otherwise offensive brilliance in those she met.

She was serious and fussy, this Gertrude, liking sunsets and waterfalls, the kind of person afflicted with aphorisms in the presence of either – and that is all your author intends to say about her for now.

That’s a good word that bun though. Have you noticed it’s the simple words, the words we take for granted, that are strangest when you stare at them? Nobody really knows where bun comes from.
Bugnets
is French for little round loaves – lumps made of fine meal, oil or butter, and
raisins. The Frogs eat them during Lent, but then France is a dog-hole. Still, there’s an old French word
bugne
, meaning swelling, and this might have led to a puffed loaf (a
bugnet
), and thence to our good plain English
BUN
.

But as I say it’s doubtful. One thing I do know for certain: In Scotland buns are sweeter. They put more sugar and spice in them there, the Scotch being sourer to start with.

It was Mr Shakespeare awakened me to language. But I think you won’t find a bun in his plays nor in his poems. I like a buttered specimen myself to my breakfast.

Mary Shakespeare’s labours had lasted seven days and seven nights. Her women were about her at the birth, but her husband busied himself outside in the shed where he sometimes cobbled slippers from his surplus whitleather. He was always on the make was Mr John Shakespeare. Now as he watched he saw the house catch fire and burn in flames that spired sky-high. He ran to the Avon with a bucket for water. But Gertrude came to the door of the house and cried: ‘Be still, the child is born.’ The house was not burnt, neither had a single flame harmed the inmates. John Shakespeare was dumbfounded, until he took thought and remembered his Bible, how Moses saw the burning bush – the flames that burnt yet consumed nothing. (
Exodus
iii. 2-4.)

Gertrude placed salt in the child’s cradle and sewed a speck of iron into the seams of his blouse. The child was sained then. Tallow candles were lighted and whirled about the bed in which mother and infant lay. This whirling was done three times, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and in the direction in which the sun moved round the house.

A word about cauls. The old wives used to think they
stopped you drowning. They used to sell them to sailors if they could. Haly how, sely how, a lucky cap, a holy hood, which midwives like Gertrude called a howdy or a howdy-wife.

According to some, and not all of them fools, the keeper of a caul would know the health of the person who was born in it. If firm and crisp the caul, then he (or she) alive and well. If wet or loose or slack, then dead or ill. The colour of the caul was important also. Black caul, bad luck. Red caul, all that is good. Diadumenus was born with a caul. He became emperor.

The poet William Shakespeare came veiled into this world, then, for his head, his face, and the foreparts of his body, all were covered with such a thin kell, or skin.

John Shakespeare, seeing this, and being as I have told you a man much given over to jealous fantasies, convinced himself that the local vicar, the Reverend John Bretchgirdle, must be the real father of Mary Shakespeare’s son. It was so like the clergyman’s cowl, that caul on baby William.

So on the Monday morning up jumps John Shakespeare bright and early hammering on the vicar’s door and threatening to kill him with his little cleaver.

‘Warlock!’ he shouts. ‘Fat villain! Whoreson upright rabbit! I’ll caul you! I’ll puncture your testicles!’

‘God’s mercy!’ protests the priest. ‘But I am an innocent man, Mr Shagspierre. Sit down upon this hassock, sir. I will pray for you while you wait.’

John Bretchgirdle, oh yes, the Reverend John Bretchgirdle, for the best grin through a horse collar, John Bretchgirdle always won first prize at the Stratford Fair. His eyes were the colour you see otherwise only in a mountain lake, an
intelligent, clear colour. His complexion was perfect gallows. He was given to winking, not blinking, strong on charity, hard on heresy. His hair was very dark brown, so dark as to appear almost black. In his youth this same Bretchgirdle had been anxious to distinguish himself by committing new sins. He had sat brooding at Christ Church, Oxford, trying to work out exactly what the sin against the Holy Ghost might be, so that he could commit it, never be forgiven, and become immortal in the memory of men as a saint-in-reverse. (Unless the sin against the Holy Ghost is writing blank verse and concealing it in prose, then your author doubts if even he has committed it.)

On the occasion of his first visit to the house in Henley Street this venial vicar did not address a single word to Mary Shakespeare, and when at John’s request he dined there two days later the only notice he took of the lady of the house was to command her to sit at the same table.

Bretchgirdle’s condescension in allowing her to share the dinner she had cooked for him did not go unremarked by Mary, although his habit of rejecting his meal from his stomach and chewing it over again, as a cow the cud, some twenty minutes after its original ingestion, caused her no little wonder.

It was Bretchgirdle’s pleasure to continue this second chewing for no more than an hour, after which he would always counsel against both Puritans and the tyranny of the Pope.

It fell to the Rev. John Bretchgirdle to christen William Shakespeare. This act he performed in his parish church at Stratford, with John Shakespeare watching his every move with a beady eye.

After the christening feast had come to an end, and the godfathers and godmothers of the child had eaten and drunken lustily (as was the country custom in those days), all set forth on their way homeward. But the night was wet, and they were weary, and they minded not all their steps to be careful of them. And so it came to pass that one of the godmothers carrying the child (it was the wife of WS’s uncle Harry) caught her foot upon a stone and fell into the ditch with little William in her arms. She and the baby came out all covered with mud. But as weeds cannot so easily come to harm, the child was not hurt, though he looked like a soot-black imp.

When they got home, Mary washed her child clean in good hot water.

Thus was William Shakespeare in one day three times christened. First, according to the prayer book. Then in the mud of the ditch. And at last in sweet warm water.

So it is always with poets, I have heard. Even in their infancy, strange and wonderful things foreshow their future greatness.