The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  To

  Giles Gordon

  and in memory of

  Glenn Gould

  Georges Perec

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I In which Pickleherring takes his pen to tell of his first meeting with Mr Shakespeare

  II In which Pickleherring makes strides in a pair of lugged boots

  III Pickleherring’s Acknowledgements

  IV About John Shakespeare and the miller’s daughter

  V How to spell Shakespeare and what a whittawer is

  VI About the begetting of William Shakespeare

  VII All the facts about Mr Shakespeare

  VIII Which is mostly about choughs but has no choughs in it

  IX About the birth of Mr WS

  X What if Bretchgirdle was Shakespeare’s father?

  XI About this book

  XII Of WS: his first word, & the otters

  XIII Was John Shakespeare John Falstaff?

  XIV How Shakespeare’s mother played with him

  XV What this book is doing

  XVI Shakespeare breeches

  XVII Pickleherring’s room (in which he is writing this book)

  XVIII The Man in the Moon, or Pickleherring in praise of country history

  XIX Positively the last word about whittawers

  XX What if Queen Elizabeth was Shakespeare’s mother?

  XXI The Shakespeare Arms

  XXII Pickleherring’s Song

  XXIII About the childhood ailments of William Shakespeare

  XXIV About the great plague that was late in London

  XXV Bretchgirdle’s cat

  XXVI Of the games of William Shakespeare when he was young

  XXVII The midwife Gertrude’s tale

  XXVIII Of little WS and the cauldron of inspiration & science

  XXIX Some tales that William Shakespeare told his mother

  XXX What Shakespeare learnt at Stratford Grammar School

  XXXI About Pompey Bum + Pickleherring’s Shakespeare Test

  XXXII Did Shakespeare go to school at Polesworth?

  XXXIII Why John Shakespeare liked to be called Jack

  XXXIV What Shakespeare saw when he looked under Clopton Bridge

  XXXV About water

  XXXVI Of weeds and the original Ophelia

  XXXVII The revels at Kenilworth 9th July, 1575

  XXXVIII More about Jenkins

  XXXIX John Shakespeare when sober

  XL Jack Naps of Greece: his story

  XLI Jack Naps of Greece: his story concluded

  XLII Flute

  XLIII The speech that Shakespeare made when he killed a calf

  XLIV In which there is a death, and a birth, and an earthquake

  XLV Pickleherring’s peep-hole

  XLVI About silk stockings

  XLVII How Shakespeare went to teach in Lancashire

  XLVIII How Shakespeare went to sea with Francis Drake

  XLIX How Shakespeare went to work in a lawyer’s office

  L How Shakespeare went to the wars & sailed the seas (again?) & took a long walk in the Forest of Arden & captured a castle

  LI Pickleherring’s confession

  LII In which Anne Hathaway

  LIII Shakespeare’s other Anne

  LIV Pickleherring’s nine muses

  LV In which John Shakespeare plays Shylock

  LVI In which Lucy is lousy

  LVII Shakespeare’s Canopy, or Pickleherring in dispraise of wine

  LVIII Pickleherring’s Poetics (some more about this book)

  LIX What Shakespeare did when first he came to London

  LX In which Pickleherring eats an egg in honour of Mr Shakespeare

  LXI In which Pickleherring speculates concerning the meaning of eggs

  LXII About Mr Richard Field: another ruminating gentleman

  LXIII About a great reckoning in a little room

  LXIV More

  LXV A look at William Shakespeare

  LXVI Pickleherring’s list of the world’s lost plays

  LXVII Love’s Labour’s Won

  LXVIII Was Shakespeare raped?

  LXLX All about Rizley

  LXX A Private Observation

  LXXI In which Pickleherring presents a lost sonnet by William Shakespeare

  LXXII Who was Shakespeare’s Friend?

  LXXIII The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 1

  LXXIV The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 2

  LXXV The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 3

  LXXVI The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 4

  LXXVII The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 5

  LXXVIII Of eggs and Richard Burbage

  LXXIX A few more facts and fictions about William Shakespeare

  LXXX In which boys will be girls

  LXXXI In which Mr Shakespeare is mocked by his fellows

  LXXXII Pickleherring’s poem

  LXXXIII In which Mr Shakespeare plays a game at tennis

  LXXXIV What Shakespeare got from Florio + a word about George Peele

  LXXXV Deaths, etc.

  LXXXVI ‘Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth’

  LXXXVII Shakespeare in Scotland & other witchcrafts

  LXXXVIII About Comfort Ballantine

  LXXXIX In which Pickleherring plays Cleopatra at the house in St John Street

  XC Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song

  XCI In which William Shakespeare returns to Stratford

  XCII Bottoms

  XCIII Some sayings of William Shakespeare

  XCIV A word about John Spencer Stockfish

  XCV Pickleherring’s list of things despaired of

  XCVI Shakespeare’s Will (with notes by Pickleherring)

  XCVII Fire

  XCVIII The day Shakespeare died (with his last words, etc.)

  XCIX About the funeral of William Shakespeare & certain events thereafter

  C In which Pickleherring lays down his pen after telling of the curse on Shakespeare’s grave

  Postscript

  About the Author

  By Robert Nye

  Copyright

  Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late

  Edmund Spenser

  The Tears of the Muses

  A never writer to an ever reader: News.

  Chapter One

  In which Pickleherring takes his pen to tell of his first meeting with Mr Shakespeare

  For instance, William Shakespeare. Tell you all about him. All there is that’s fit to know about Shakespeare. Mr William Shakespeare. All there is that’s not fit, too, for that matter. Who he was and why. Where he was and when. What he was and wherefore. And then, besides, to answer several difficult questions that might be bothering you. Such as, who was the Dark Lady of the sonnets? Such as, why did he leave his wife only his second-best bed? Such as, is it true he died a Papist, and lived a sodomite? Such as, how come he placed that curse on his own grave? All this, and more, you will find answered here. But better begin at the beginning, while we can.

  Who am I? Reader, I will tell you suddenly. My name is Robert Reynolds alias Pickleherring and my game is that of a comedian and believe me I was well-acquainted with our famous Mr Shakespeare when I was young. I acted in his plays. I knew his ways. I played Puck to his Oberon. To his Prosper, I was Ariel. I washed my hands sleep-walking too, as the Scottish queen. Why, once, at Blackfriars, the man was sick in my cap. I loved the lovely villain, ladies and gentlemen.

  By the time I have finished I think you will have to admit it. There is no man or woman alive in the world who knows more than old Pickleherring about the late Mr Shakespeare.

  I call to mind as if it was just yesterday, for instance, the first time I ever clapped eyes on the dear fellow. He was
wearing a copataine hat. You won’t know those hats now, if you’re under fifty. They were good hats. They wore good hats and they wrote good verse in those days. Your copataine hat was a high-crowned job in the shape of a sugar-loaf. Some say the word should be COPOTINK and that it comes from the Dutch. I call a copataine hat a copataine hat. So did Mr Shakespeare, let me tell you. I never heard him say that his hat came from Holland. And in his tragical history of Antony and Cleopatra he has the word COPATAINE. Which part, friends, he wrote first for your servant: Cleopatra. I never wore a copataine hat myself, but then I was only a boy at the time we are speaking of.

  I was living in those far-off but never to be forgotten days in a cottage made of clay and wattles just outside the north gate of the city of Cambridge. That cottage stood by a fen. Fatherless, motherless, I was being looked after by a pair of sisters, whiskered virgins, Meg and Merry Muchmore, two spinsters with long noses for the smelling out of knavery.

  It was the pleasure of each of these ladies in turn to spank me naked while the other watched. I think they liked to see my little pintle harden. Meg’s lap smelt of liquorice but there was no pleasing Merry. I had a well-whipped childhood, I can tell you.

  All their long lives these two weird sisters had dedicated themselves to piety and good works, and I, the bastard son of a priest’s bastard, conceived in a confessional, born in a graveyard, was one of the best of them. I mean, what better work than Pickleherring?

  I was a posthumous child. Of my father, I heard from my mother only that his mouth was so big and cavernous that he could thrust his clenched fist into it. How often he performed this trick for her amusement I know not. I know only that he could do it, and that also he had some interest in the occult. That is an interest which I do not share.

  Reader, don’t get me wrong. I believe in ghosts and visions. I pray only to be spared from seeing them.

  My mother died when I was seven years old. She smelt of milk and comfrey fritters. She used to tell me tales by the chimneyside. It was from her sweet lips that I first heard of Tattercoats and of Tom-Tit-Tot and of Jack and his beanstalk. She sang to me, too, my mother – all the old English songs.

  I remember her singing me to sleep with a ballad called O Polly Dear. But she died of a fever and then there was no more music. My bed was under thatching and the way to it was up a rope ladder.

  I had never before been spoken to by a man in a copataine hat. Mr Shakespeare was tall and thin, and he wore that hat with an air of great authority. He had also a quilted silken doublet, goose-turd green; grey velvet hose; and a scarlet cloak. Never believe those who tell you he was not a dandy.

  This first meeting of ours took place in the yard of a tavern called the Cock. A small rain fell like brightness from the air. Ah, what a dream it seems now, seventy years away.

  One thing I can tell you that you’ll perhaps not learn elsewhere. Mr William Shakespeare never minded a bit of rain. He sat under the springing mulberry tree that grew in the middle of the Cock’s back yard. He had a damask napkin over his knee and a little knife of silver in his hand. He was opening oysters.

  As for me, I had climbed up on the red-brick wall to keep him in my sight. My friends mocked me. One of them said the man was from Wales, and an alchemist. They said he could make gold, and fly in the air. They said he was in Cambridge for blood for his lamp. I pretended not to care. I did not want his art, but I had no father.

  ‘Pickleherring’s mad again!’ piped my playmates.

  Then they all ran away and left me on my own to face the necromancer.

  Mr Shakespeare must have seen me watching him. But I don’t believe that his eyes ever left the oysters.

  His voice was soft and gentle when he spoke. But it was the sort of softness that you stop and listen to, like the sound of the theorbo.

  ‘Boy,’ he said, suddenly.

  I nearly fell down off the wall. Instead I said, ‘Yes, sir?’

  I was shaking in my boots.

  ‘Say this, boy,’ he said. ‘I am afraid, and yet I’ll venture it.’

  What kind of spell was this?

  I looked at Mr Shakespeare.

  He looked up from his oysters and looked at me.

  Something in his look made me take him straight. So I forgot all about spells and I said the words he said. I said them simply. I do not think I can say that I said them well. But I said them more or less as he said them, which is to say that I spoke the speech trippingly on the tongue, not mouthing it, not sawing the air with my hand.

  It was, as I learnt later, the way he liked it. He never could abide the ranting sort. Truth to tell, I had never then acted in my life, so I knew no worse. Also, I was afraid, which helped me to say that I was as though I meant it.

  My performance seemed to please Mr Shakespeare.

  He took off his hat to me.

  ‘Good,’ he said. And then, ‘Good, boy,’ he said. And then again, after a little while, ‘Good boy,’ Mr Shakespeare said finally.

  He swallowed an oyster.

  ‘Say this,’ he said. ‘Say that.’

  I mean, I can’t remember now all Mr Shakespeare bade me say then. He sat there downing oysters while I recited. Sometimes he said ‘Good’ and sometimes he said ‘Good, boy’ and once he said ‘Good boy’ again and more than once he said nothing but just wiped his mouth with his napkin.

  I do recall that he asked me at last to sing.

  So I sat down on the wall and I sang for Mr Shakespeare.

  I had a good voice in those days.

  I sang for him the ballad of O Polly Dear.

  The sweet rain fell and the drops ran down my face and I sat there in the rain, legs dangling, singing O Polly Dear that my mother used to sing to me.

  Mr Shakespeare listened with his eyes as well as his ears.

  When I finished he nodded and he clapped his hands three times together.

  It was the first applause I ever had.

  Then at Mr Shakespeare’s instruction I jumped down off the wall.

  Chapter Two

  In which Pickleherring makes strides in a pair of lugged boots

  The first part I ever played for Mr Shakespeare on the London stage was that of young Prince Arthur in his play of The Life and Death of King John. That’s why he asked me to say I am afraid, and yet I’ll venture it. It is what that poor boy says before he kills himself by jumping from the battlements of the castle where he is confined.

  When I jumped down off the red-brick wall and into the back yard of the Cock Tavern, Cambridge, Mr Shakespeare stopped eating his oysters and he asked me my name and where I lived and who my father was. So I told him of the cot beneath the thatch and my fatherless fate.

  As I spoke to him of fathers, I saw tears run down his cheeks. I thought it was rain.

  ‘O my poor Hamlet,’ Mr Shakespeare said.

  Like a fool, I repeated the four words.

  Mr Shakespeare flushed. His face was all at once a crimson rose. He blinked at me in anger through his tears. I think he thought that I was mocking him. Then he must have realised that I’d mistaken what he said for another speech to try. He pinched his nose between the thumb and the first finger of his left hand, shaking his head a moment as he did so. When he looked at me again his eyes were clear.

  ‘Do you have perfect pitch?’ Mr Shakespeare asked me.

  I told him that I had. (It was a lie.)

  Then Mr Shakespeare took my hand, unsmiling, and he promised me that if I chose to come with him to London and join his company he could make me a player like himself.

  My heart thumped in my breast. I felt as if I had suddenly grown taller by an inch.

  Well now, my dears, it happens that this part of Prince Arthur might contain the key as to why Mr Shakespeare first noticed me and thought to give me employment as a player.

  I think perhaps that I put him in mind of his son.

  I was wearing, do you see, a pair of lugged boots. Those boots were all the rage that year of our first meeting. They
were boots of soft leather, hanging loose about the leg, turned down and fringed. I think they called them lugged because the fringes looked like ears.

  Be that as it may. I learnt later that young Hamlet Shakespeare begged for a pair of these boots to wear as he lay dying. He was eleven years old. It was Mrs Shakespeare herself who told me that she got them for Hamlet to wear as he tossed on his death-bed. He never so much as walked in them anywhere.

  So it might be that my lugged boots were what caught Mr Shakespeare’s eye.

  But then (you ask me), what has this to do with that other boy Arthur in King John?

  Permit me to tell you.

  Little Hamlet died not long before I first met Mr Shakespeare. I think that Mr Shakespeare was still writing King John in his head that day in Cambridge, and that in any case he was thinking of his own son when he has Queen Constance in Act III Scene 4 lament the fate of her son Arthur in these lines that follow:

  Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

  Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

  Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

  Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

  Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

  Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

  Of course, I could be wrong. My linking of the writing of this speech with what Mr Shakespeare may possibly have felt about the loss of his own (and only) son might deny the man’s imagination or at the least insult it. Or it could be that I mistake or misconstrue the way the mind of a poet works upon the things that happen in the poet’s life.

  I confess that I never dared to question Mr Shakespeare directly in the matter. But I remember a night at the Mermaid when having recited those tender lines which he gave to Queen Constance, I expounded my theory and quizzed his fellow playwrights as to what they thought.

  Mr Beaumont said I was right, and wiped away a tear.

  Mr Fletcher said I was wrong, and that my supposition accused Mr Shakespeare of a want of heart, or a want of imagination, or of both wants together, and only went to prove my mediocrity.

  Mr Ben Jonson said nothing, but belched and hurled a flagon at my head.