The Late Mr Shakespeare (45 page)

This morning I can see from my window the way the flames leap after a prodigious manner from house to house and street to street, at great distances one from the other. The clouds of smoke are dismal – they must stretch from here to the Essex coast. All the Inner Temple is assuredly destroyed, all Fleet Street, the Old Bailey, Ludgate Hill, Warwick Lane,
Newgate, Paul’s Chain, Whitehall, Exchange, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, out to Moorefields, the Cornhill, and Watling Street, all, all reduced to ashes.

Oh miserable and calamitous spectacle! The world has not seen the like of it since its foundation, nor will this terrible fire be outdone till the universal conflagration.

Pompey Bum has gone, and all the whores. This building is deserted now, apart from Pickleherring. Pompey Bum belaboured me to leave. He roared that it is only a matter of time before the flames destroy the whole of London, and his last word to me was that packs of rats on fire have been seen running from north to south across London Bridge.

I have no more Life of William Shakespeare left to write – and only one word more about his death. I will sit here and wait for the fire to come. If the conflagration takes my book, that is the will of God. It will not take Pickleherring. Wait and see.

I pray only for Polly to be delivered from the flames, wherever she is. Polly, Polly, you whom everything identifies with dayspring and whom, for that very reason, I shall not see again – O Polly dear, I’m glad you are not here.

The last poem written by William Shakespeare is inscribed upon his gravestone! It looks like this:

That is from a rubbing of the stone which I made myself. Here is the verse written out in a modern spelling and punctuation, just for your ease of reading:

Who is the
GOOD FRIEND
thus addressed? I think it is the sexton, both now and to come. The sextons of Trinity Church have been known to dig up old graves to make room for the newly deceased. The bones they uncover are then thrown upon others in the charnel-house, which stands adjoining the north wall, no more than a dozen strides from Shakespeare's grave. As I have told you, the poet had a horror of that charnel-house. But there is more to it than that.

William Shakespeare lies full seventeen foot deep in Trinity Church, deep enough to secure him, and he placed that curse upon his grave to make sure not just that he was not taken out of it but that no one else got into it. He liked in his later years to sleep alone. He did not want his grave raped, nor broken up to entertain some second guest. So he placed that curse there to make sure, I think, that he was not disturbed by
anyone
in his final slumbers. If for
ANYONE
you read Anne Shakespeare or Susanna Hall then I shall not deny you. For when Anne died seven years after her husband I heard that she left instruction that she was to be buried in Shakespeare's grave, and that so did Susanna when she died in 1649, but no sexton could be found who was willing to lift that nameless flagstone and incur the poet's curse.

Reader, I have heard it said that William Shakespeare did not write this verse himself, and that it is doggerel. I tell you he did write it, and that it is not. The test of any poem is this:
Does it work?
I say these four lines work very well indeed. They have done what the poet intended them to do, and they will go on doing it. No one will ever knave William Shakespeare out of his last bed. No one will ever dig up William Shakespeare while that curse is on his grave. His dust will lie there undisturbed till the day of judgement.

Besides which, just ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, would any of WS's relatives or friends have chosen or dared to have written a rhymed inscription of such an unusual kind to place on his grave? The idea that Shakespeare did not write it is absurd. And that four-beat measure, far from being doggerel, is in fact his favourite metre outside the iambic pentameter which comes so naturally to the speaking voice of a man or a woman in good health.

In any case, listen closely to the words. These phrases have his ring right to the echo.
GOOD FRIEND
as a direct form of address, occurs at key points in his works – for example, Miranda thus addresses Ferdinand in
The Tempest,
and Hamlet says it to Horatio just arrived from Wittenberg.
JESU
for Jesus is the poet's preferred formulation – he invokes the holy name like that all over the plays. As to
FORBEAR
– that is a favoured verb, and often as an imprecation forbidding
touching
, as in the second
King Henry VI: Lay not thy hands on me; forbear, I say
. Then there is the fact that when Mr Shakespeare thought of death it was often to link the word
ENCLOSED
with the word
DUST
(or some similar word meaning mortal remains), as for example in
Henry V,
Act IV, Scene 8, line 129, where you will find
The dead with charity enclosed in clay
. One of the final plays,
Cymbeline
, employs that
BLEST BE
formula half a dozen times. While
CURST BE
comes in
The Tempest
, as well as in the first
Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus
, and
Pericles
.
CURSED
and
BONES
come together in
The Rape of Lucrece
, line 209.

In short, that poem is Shakespeare's in phrase and pulse as surely as if he had written it in his own blood on parchment made from his own skin.

The grave, I think, was William Shakespeare's best bed. Have you ever noticed how much sweet, dreamless, and untroubled sleep is longed-for throughout his life's work? Sleep was for him God's greatest benison. May he sleep now in blessings! May he rest in peace and his faults lie gently on him!

And so, good reader, pray for me, your Pickleherring. I have done what I promised I would do. I have told you all that I know about the late Mr Shakespeare. And now that it is done, now that I have finished, this whole book I dedicate to my friend's memory in the same words that he used to dedicate his
Lucrece
to the Earl of Southampton: ‘What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have, devoted yours.' Unknown friends, this has been a lover's book.

What I have to do … What I have to do is make my exit. I just looked down this minute through my peep-hole. The room where Polly was is now all flames. The wind in the night must have blown from the north, and the fire come. But that may not be necessary. I am telling you something new about hell-fire.

Bear with me. My old brain is troubled. Brightness falls from the air. Pickleherring's mad again! I can see nothing. I can hear nothing. I can taste nothing. I do not know what comfrey fritters smell like.

Sir, did you expect me to lie down in my Juliet dress and wait for Romeo to come in a cloak of fire? Madam, would you have me robe and crown myself as Cleopatra and clasp the flames to suck on my wrinkled dugs? Shall my last act be to encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in my arms?

I tell you, none of these is Pickleherring's exit. Nor have
I caught an everlasting cold. Nor is old Pickerel, who was once your little Pickle, in the way to study a long silence.

In the beginning, when I was a boy, the late Mr Shakespeare made me jump down from the red brick wall to meet him. In the middle, the late Mr Shakespeare made me a woman before I was ever a man. But at the end, friends, at the end the late Mr Shakespeare kindly made me Ariel. This is Pickleherring's great secret. I am a spirit. I can fly away!

I will take my harp in my hand and rise above the city where it burns. I will go not just to the harp's defunctive music but my own. I will fly high above the flames, O Polly dear.

I think that is enough about what I have to do. I think that I have done enough already. I think that is enough about the late Mr Shakespeare.

This book contains quotations from (and variations on) the lives and works of: John Aubrey, W. H. Auden, William Barnes, John Berryman, William Blake, William Bliss, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Robert Burton, John Bunyan, Sir Edmund Chambers, the Comtesse de Chambrun, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, John Dryden, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Florio, Edgar I. Fripp, Robert Graves, Lady Charlotte Guest, Ivor Gurney, John Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, G. B. Harrison, William Hazlitt, Warren Hope, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, John Keats, Malcolm Lowry, Edmond Malone, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, John Masefield, Marianne Moore, Thomas Nashe, Lady Anne Newdigate-Newdegate, Robert Nye, Eric Partridge, Georges Perec, Robert Pinget, Edgar Allan Poe, John Cowper Powys, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, Sir Walter Ralegh, James Reeves, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Nicholas Rowe, S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, Dame Edith Sitwell, Caroline Spurgeon, Laurence Sterne, Lytton Strachey, Arthur Symons, Dylan Thomas, Anthony à Wood, Charles Williams, John Dover Wilson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

R
OBERT
N
YE
was born in London in 1939. His novels include
Merlin, The Memoirs of Lord Byron, Mrs Shakespeare
, and the award-winning
Falstaff
. A poet, journalist, and critic, he lives near Cork, in Ireland.

Falstaff

The Late Mr Shakespeare

ALSO BY ROBERT NYE

Expansive, sprawling, unruly and oversized, these are the memoirs of the most beloved comic figure in the history of literature. Larger-than-life, irascible and still lecherous at the advanced age of eighty-one, Falstaff recounts his outrageously bawdy tales as an antidote to popular legend – they’re guaranteed to tell you some things you never thought you needed to know about his life and times. Who killed Hotspur? What really went on at the battle of Agincourt? And what was it that made the wives of Windsor so merry? 

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