by Robert Nye
John Shakespeare wears his bailiff’s butcher’s best. His flat velvet cap, plum-coloured, is plumed with a great cockfeather, more bailiff than butcher. But his slashed butcher boots are made of the finest whitleather. Will, rising twelve, runs the road in his father’s fat shadow. It goes like that. It goes along. He wears a laced and embroidered shirt just like his father’s. His mother Mary sewed it when she was not sewing shrouds. He runs, he’s elated, he runs, he’s cock-a-hoop. Your merry heart goes all the day. (Your sad tires in a mile-a.) As for John Shakespeare, bold butcher Jack, on this hottest day in living memory he’s sweating like a pig. Father and son in peaked doublets with scarlet silk trunk hose reaching down to their bald knees.
It’s John Shakespeare who is singing as he rides. John Shakespeare has a song for each occasion. A great voice among the basses, and he always sings in tune, even when drunk. John Shakespeare’s singing now as he rides the Queen’s highway. Who’s going to the revels at Kenilworth? We’re going to the revels at Kenilworth. Who’s going to the revels at Kenilworth? Shakespeare and son.
That is his song.
As for young Willy, he runs.
Riding, a man can sing, but running no.
Will does not sing but his father’s song runs in his head. We’re going to the revels at Kenilworth. In Will’s head, though, the song is differently sung. His feet ring on the road. Shakespeare and father.
It’s far too hot for all their finery. Running, Will’s nose runs, and he has to wipe it with his arm, and the snot runs down his sleeve. Riding, John Shakespeare, plump Jack, already has a firkin of best canary refining his blood.
The sun is up and the larks sing on Stinchcombe Hill.
The world is for fathers to lead and their sons to follow.
So John Shakespeare sings. Who’s going? We’re going! Who’s going? He sings as he rides the way the gentlemen ride and he sings. At Kenilworth, to Kenilworth, in Kenilworth. This is the way, a-gallop, a-gallop, a-gallop.
And this is the way, lark, that gentlemen wait for their sons. So he has another swig and he sings in the sun as he waits. Who’s going to the revels at Kenilworth? I’m going to the revels at Kenilworth! He’s (hurry up) going to the revels at Kenilworth! Shakespeare and son.
Will found it best to maintain an even gait. Too fast and you stumbled, too slow and you wanted to stop. Will wanted anyway to stop but he did not for he wanted more to see the revels. The revels at Kenilworth he wanted to see more than all in the world. He wanted above all else to see the Queen’s pageant at Kenilworth Castle. Will found it best to think of anything except his running feet.
He did things together with his father but they did not sing songs together. Will had his own song. He did not sing a song for each occasion. Will had one song. This is what he sang:
My name is Will and Will is my name.
I will be Will whatever my fame.
I will be Willy always the same.
That was his song.
You could sing it without full-stops or even commas. You could make a catch of it, or a round, or a ballad. You could change the spelling and punctuation and change the meaning. For instance:
My name is? Will! An Will is my name,
I will be Will. Whatever my fame,
I will be, will I, always the same?
That was amusing. But best of all he liked just to add one beat to each line to turn song into speech:
My name is Will and Will is my true name.
I will be Will whatever my false fame.
I will be always Willy, and the same.
That last line, though, was perhaps a bit bathetic. Meaning what you said was sometimes not quite enough in poetry. You had to sound as though you meant it, which was harder. You had to get words and meaning to make the one tune.
Will’s side hurt but his heart would keep him running. He always stopped singing his song if he thought that anyone could hear him singing it. Everything excited him. Anything made him blush.
My name is Will …
It was a large claim, when you came to think about it. Once, before he ever came to think about it, when he was singing his song by the river, a girl had overheard him. Her name was Rose Bradley. She lived three doors away, in Henley Street. Rose stopped rolling her hoop and she said, ‘That’s a silly song.’
‘So it is,’ he said. ‘That’s why I sing it.’
Rose Bradley did not understand this, but from then on she called him Silly Willy. So now he waited until it was dark and sang his song only to himself under the covers at home in his bed.
Rose Bradley’s father was a glover. He had a wart between his eyes.
They said Rose had a wart as well but no one had seen where.
Will kept on running.
His father moved off as soon as he caught up, setting spurs to his nag. Who’s going to the revels at Kenilworth then?
Will did not care for the stars, but he liked the moon.
It is ten long miles from Stratford to Kenilworth Castle. (As the upstart crow flies.) No doubt it seems further to a running boy whose father is riding the horse. They had started out with the sunrise, and Mary clucking and fussing that the run would prove too much for her dear darling boy. To which John invoked stuff and bloody nonsense. Nothing to it, in a father’s honest opinion. He’d run further than that for his father when he was half the age. Such trials are what start to make a man out of a mother’s boy. On the way home, besides, Shakespeare senior promised that he would let young Will ride too. But on the way there, to Kenilworth, it was only right and proper that a bailiff should take precedence. A bailiff rides solo, with his son running after him like a squire.
So they’re coming to the revels at Kenilworth. Who else is coming to the revels at Kenilworth? Everyone who’s anyone, that’s who. Everywhere there are fathers and sons and more fathers out here on the roads. (There are bachelors, even.) Not all the sons run, but not all of the fathers are bailiffs. Not all the sons read, but not all of the fathers are butchers. Some journey on horse-back, on mule-back, on donkey-back, but most come in carts or on foot. Everywhere on the Queen’s roads coming to Kenilworth there are runners and riders and walkers and jokers on stilts. Everywhere at the revels there are merchants and soldiers and tinkers and minstrels and girls. There are lords and there are ladies. There are priests and there are publicans. Up hill and down dale they have come. They have all come to Kenilworth.
Who does John Shakespeare recognise? Whose face does he see that he knows in that great crowd?
John Addenbrooke, Richard Barton, Gilbert Bradley, Frank Collins, John Combe, Richard Hathaway, John Horder, Richard Lane, Anthony Nash, Adrian Quiney, John Richardson, John Robinson, Hamnet Sadler, Fulke Sandells, Derek Stanford, Abraham Sturley (servant of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote), Ralph Tyler, William Underhill, Thomas Whatcott, Tom Whittington the shepherd, and Victor Young.
No doubt that John Shakespeare thinks it will be good for his business to be here. In addition to the revels, it will be good to be seen in such good company. Quite apart from the Queen and the Earl of Leicester, when they should come, it is good to see customers and friends, at Kenilworth.
As for Will, he thinks nothing. He has stitch.
Never such splendour before this. Never such feasting in Warwickshire. They say that it’s costing Lord Leicester one thousand pounds a day. They say this great castle has a dozen kitchens. Besides which, what you can see with your eyes, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself, and take a look. Here, eat this crackling off the hog-roast, and consider it: towers, courts, battlements, fountains, gardens. A man might go a whole lifetime and never see the like. They say this castle encloses full seven acres within its walls, and that some of those walls there are twenty feet thick, so that a column of soldiers can march seven abreast a-top of them. And the Queen gave all this to her Lord Leicester. They say that the rooms inside are of ivory and gold. And they say that those rooms of great state are carried upon pillars, of freestone, carved and wrought. As fo
r that lake as wide as the eye can see, it wasn’t there last week, and when the revels are done it will be gone. The Earl dammed up a river to make that lake. He’s made that lake for the revels before the Queen.
All day they’re watching the great revels at Kenilworth. They’re at the royal revels at Kenilworth. It’s the Queen’s pageant they have come to see. Shakespeare and son. To see magnificence.
But where is the Queen? Will the Queen come to Kenilworth? When will the Queen be here so we can see her? How can the Queen’s pageant be without the Queen?
She will be here anon. My son, have patience. She will be here in her good time, and Lord Leicester besides.
Over the party, pagan deities preside. Bacchus pours out full silver cups everywhere, every hour, here at the revels at Kenilworth, of all kinds of wine, and of ale and beer as well. They must have a lake of wine beneath the castle. Jack Shakespeare likes that. He likes to drink the wine and think the lake.
More to young William’s taste, the thought of fish. Not to eat them, just to see them, just to smell them. That here, at the revels at Kenilworth, inland, and far from the sea, a man dressed gigantically as Neptune, with trident and horn, offers fresh sea-fish of every sort in the ocean – mullet, salmon, conger-eels, and oysters. Fresh herring too, and none of your pickled variety! Will was always a boy for the thought of the fish in the sea.
All day until darkfall they’re watching the revels at Kenilworth. Bears dance. Bands play. Clowns tumble. Men said to be from Egypt swallow swords and snakes. But when will the Queen be corning?
Now then, when darkness falls, at least comes Jove. If great Jove comes, can the Queen be far behind? Here’s the great father of the gods, a-shooting of his thunderbolts. See how each one is handed up to him for firing by his lame son Vulcan. So, Vulcan is the firemaster. But does Vulcan have to run?
People could see those fireworks some twenty miles away. The night sky was filled up with flowers of fire. At half that distance, his mother Mary stood in her garden and watched them, wondering, blessing herself and her stars, at home in Stratford. And mildly damned the pealing cannon which woke up Joan.
But those cannon and then these trumpets were for the Queen.
She came riding on a horse as white as snow. She came riding out of the woods and the night, and down to her lake. And more trumpets sounded as the crowds parted and cheered, and Queen Elizabeth rode to her revels here at Kenilworth.
Suddenly there were fairies all round the lakeside, green and golden. Suddenly, also, witches, magicians in black. A mermaid riding on a dolphin appeared in the torchlit lake. Then another, and another, another, another, until a quire of mermaids riding on dolphins was greeting the Queen’s arrival, all singing of Cynthia.
And the Queen came on through the crowds, riding down towards where he stood. Lord Leicester rode there at her side, as the fanfares sounded. But she came towards Will as she came to her revels at Kenilworth.
And now the poet Arion appeared upon a dolphin. Not all the crowd would understand this part. To Will, though, it was his own image out there in the lake. He knew about Arion, son of Cycleus, of Methymna in Lesbos. This poet, connected with the birth of tragedy through the invention of a choral kind of dithyramb, spent most of his life at the Court of Periander, but was once thrown overboard by sailors and rescued from the sea by being carried to land on the back of a dolphin who was enchanted by his music.
The thought of a poet on the back of a dolphin had pleased Will from the moment he first heard of it, he did not know why. So here, at a high point in the revels at Kenilworth, was Arion on a dolphin, harp in hand, and ready to make court to the Queen herself.
But as the Queen approached him, it all went wrong. The man on the dolphin, who had been busy among the wine-pots most of the afternoon, got his lines wrong. He stuttered his speech of welcome. He stammered. He forgot. At last, flinging his harp in the lake, he leapt to dry land. He ran to Queen Elizabeth, and tore off his mask, and he cried:
‘I am none of your Arion, madam, no, no, not I, but your plain and honest servant Harry Goldingham!’
Sweet bully Bottom was conceived that minute.
It was a midsummer’s night. But it was not a dream.
The Queen, on her high horse, coming nearer and nearer.
Will standing then, eyes agog, fists clenched, holding his breath, now almost a living part of the revels at Kenilworth, watching the pageant as the Wild One, the woodwose, hair matted like Pope John the whichever’s, fang-toothed, unaccommodated man and no mistake, face caked with filth, Tom o’ Bedlam, all overgrown with moss and ivy, like a walking tree, meaning to abase himself before Her Majesty, comes striding from the woods, Caliban, in one hand another tree, a young oak sapling, plucked up by the roots, which he waves overhead as he comes.
‘Beauty and the Beast,’ mutters John Shakespeare. But he’s sprawled out where he watches, and Willy’s pretending to himself that he is not with him, not Shakespeare and father; I know thee not, old man.
The Wild Man breaks his tree as the Queen rides by. He breaks his tree in two and he casts it towards her. It is meant as a gesture of abasement, but again it comes out wrong. A half of the tree, looping through the torchlit midsummer dusk, just misses hitting the Queen’s white mare across the head. Footmen rush to the horse and its rider.
‘No hurt, no hurt!’ quoth the Fairy Queen, an affable, laughing guest on this first night of her visit to her favourite, this night of her own revels here at Kenilworth, and then – so near to Will she could almost have touched him – she leans across the neck of her horse and she touches Lord Leicester. Like one of the gypsy girls who’ll go with you behind the stalls in Rother Market for a penny, the Queen of all England leans across to tickle the Earl of Leicester’s chin and his cheek, and then to fondle the great pommel of his saddle, a leer on her lips.
A high point of the revels here at Kenilworth, for which he ran half the morning, and waited in the sun all afternoon. Hard to surpass a thing like that.
Even the Kenilworth doorkeeper, got up as Hercules, mercifully with no speech to say so nothing to go wrong with that, leading a bear in chains, and the bear behaving civilly, offering the keys of the castle to this Elizabeth. Even Merlin the wizard leaving his island in the lake and breaking his wand in two and on bended knee renouncing his magic art in favour of Her Highness. Even Proteus, the mutable god, already our Will’s guardian, casting himself into many forms and fashions to crawl on the ground to please his sovereign lady.
Impossible to surpass that unprecedented moment in the revels here at Kenilworth when the Queen pulled off her gauntlet, embroidered with seed pearls, and with her naked fingers kittled her favourite’s neck.
Impossible to surpass the way she stroked him. She played him like a fiddler playing a fiddle.
‘Pretty Robin!’ she said. ‘Ah, my pretty Robin!’
And she laughed to herself, and moved her fingers on his pommel, up and down.
Queen Elizabeth’s face was hard, as though cut out from white wood or tallow wax. If such a thing had been imaginable, Will would have sworn that the great cloud of soft red hair about her head had never grown there. He remembered the tales he had been told of how in certain prisons the jailers cut their captives’ locks and sell them to be fashioned into curls to suit court ladies, and how some even said that fresh graves have been robbed when girls with long golden hair are buried. Could it be that the Queen of all England was wearing a wig?
Of course he said nothing about the matter to his father when they were riding home, John Shakespeare slumped in the saddle, relying on the nag to know the way, and Will half-asleep himself, worn out with enchantments and disenchantments, with a surfeit of delight, too warmly pleased. And he said nothing about it either to his mother when they got home, and his father fell down in a puddle, and he burst into tears. He told her, instead, the next morning, at their breakfast, of a boy he had seen riding on a dolphin, whose poem seemed to please Her Majesty.
They had been to the great revels at Kenilworth. They had seen the royal revels at Kenilworth. Their revels now, our revels now, are ended. That is the way it was. Never before had England witnessed such splendour.
But what Will remembered was the Queen doing that rude thing to Robert Dudley.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
More about Jenkins
Pompey Bum was just at the door, demanding his rent. Being dunned makes me feel quite the author. I told him I would pay him some, and, as most debtors do, promise him infinitely. But I fear the man is no playgoer, and this reference to the Epilogue to the second part of King Henry IV was misspent on him.
It is true that I am a shiftless little person, roving and maggoty-headed, and sometimes not much better than crazed. But it is not true what Mr Anthony Wood told Mr Aubrey – that I was ever exceedingly credulous, stuffed with fooleries and misinformations. That insufferable recluse of Postmaster’s Hall does not comprehend my method. He is no amateur of country history. He does not understand me.
I pride myself somewhat on not wasting time over things which everyone knows – which you know, sir, and you know also, madam – but that I prefer rather to select the small, the forgotten, detail.
Singularities: that’s what I’m after.
And I work through metaphorics, not metaphysics.
Of course, no one knows what Shakespeare’s life was, even one who knew him as well as I did. It occurs to me today, with just half the rent paid, that every attempt to find out the truth of another man’s life, and to write his Life, throws light on the person who makes the attempt, as much as on the man biographied. There, I have even invented a new verb. In the main, though, I protest I am not an inventor.
Inventories, however, are quite a different matter, and much to my liking, and here in this box I have one such which I trust will interest the reader. It was compiled by Emma Careless, wife of that Reverend Henry Heicroft already mentioned, vicar of Stratford from 1569 to 1584.
