The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  I have this feeling, do you see, that there is more to say about Jenkins – that Jenkins is peculiarly important to Mr Shakespeare’s story. Where else might the poet have picked up certain tricks of his diction than from the verbal habits of a Welshman? I mean such characteristic locutions as his way of balancing two contrasting adjectives on the sea-saw of an ‘and’, and having both of them qualify a third word, always a noun. For example:

  A beauty-waning and distressed widow.

  That’s from Richard III. And then, from The Tempest, some twenty years later:

  To act her earthy and abhorred commands.

  I contend that what we hear on these sea-saws of sense is a development of what Shakespeare heard from the lips of Thomas Jenkins in his Stratford schoolroom. He makes fun of Jenkins and his mispronunciations in The Merry Wives of Windsor. ‘What is the focative case, William?’ But if Jenkins, like Evans in that play, made fritters of English, still Shakespeare fed on those fritters, for a purpose all his own.

  Pickleherring suspects that Jenkins brought a touch of Welsh wizardry to Stratford too, perhaps telling his pupils tales drawn out of a book called The Mabinogion which collects such myths and legends. How else explain the way that notion of the cauldron of inspiration and science survives in local gossip as representing something that bubbled in the corner of Mary Shakespeare’s kitchen? Such a cauldron figures in Welsh stories about the poet Taliesin, so I have heard. Other elements from those tales seem remembered in The Tempest.

  Alas, having promised you ‘more about Jenkins’, I have to confess that the ‘more’ which we really require – if my thesis has truth in it – is to hear how he spoke, and what young Will heard. That’s where Emma Careless comes in. For some reason (probably for amusement), the vicar’s wife drew up an inventory of the goods and chattels of the Welsh schoolmaster, writing it down in a manner which makes a burlesque of the sound of Jenkins’ voice. It is the nearest we’ll ever get to hearing what Shakespeare heard. You may judge for yourself if the poet learnt anything from it.

  Han Infentory of the Couds

  of Thomas Jenkins ap Hughes

  (B.A. 1566), Schoolmaster

  Imprimis, in the Wardrope – One Irish rugg, 1 buff frize shirkin, 1 sheepskin tublet, 2 Irish stocking, 2 shooe, 6 leather point (two proken).

  Item, in the Tary – One toasting shees, 3 oaten-cake, 3 pints of cow-milk, 1 pound of cow-putter, eggs.

  Item, in the Kitchen – One cridiron, 1 fripan, 2 white pot, 3 red herring, 9 sprat (for hur own eating).

  Item, in the Cellar – One firkin of wiggan, 2 gallon sweet sower sider, one pint of perry, 1 little pottle of Carmarden sack, alias Metheglin, wort, and malmsey.

  Item, in the Study (hur was almost forgot hur!) – One Welch Pible, 2 almanac, 1 Seven Champions, for St Taffy sake, 12 pallat, one pedigree, one most capricious Ovid.

  Item, in the Closet – 2 sorrow-struck and mortal hat, one pouse, 4 napkin (one for hursulf, one for hur wife Shone, two for cusen ap Powell when was cum to hur house).

  Item, in the Yard, under the wall – One fickle wheel, two pucket, 1 ladder, 2 frantic and forsaken rope, one mouse-trap.

  Item, in the Carden – One ped of carlike (for to mend hur kissing), 9 honourable onion (hur eyes smell hem), 12 leek (for heating upon St Davy’s Day), 12 viperous and surprising worm, 6 frog.

  NB: A Note of some Legacy of a creat deal of Coods bequeathed to hur Wife and hur two Shild, and all hur Cusens, and Friends, and Kindred, in manner as followeth:

  Imprimis – Was to give to hur teer wife, Shone Jenkins, all the coods in the ped-room.

  Item – Was to give hur eldest and digressing sun, Plack Shack, 40 and 12 card to play at Whipper-shinny, to sheat hur cusen.

  Item – Was to give to hur second sun, little Jenkins ap

  Jenkins, hur short ladder under the wall in the yard, and 2 rope.

  Item – Was to give to hur Cusen Lewellin Morgan ap William, whom was made hur executor, full power and puissance to pay awl hur tets, when hur can get sum money now at usance.

  This Infentory taken Note (ferbatim) in the Presence of Emma Careless of Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1579, upon the Ten and Thirtieth of Shun. The above-named Thomas Jenkins then quit the parish.

  I say that Jenkins served William Shakespeare in the same capacity as Holofernes served the young Gargantua. He taught him his ABC backwards.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  John Shakespeare when sober

  When sober, John Shakespeare taught his son the spartan vices.

  When a gentleman has had his arms and legs broken, he used to say, and two slow sword-thrusts through his belly, then, and not till then, he may say, ‘Really, I don’t feel well.’

  Once when William was thirteen he fell and broke his arm when walking in the Forest of Arden. His father told him not to tell his mother because she had been looking peakish and the news might put her off her food.

  Yet there was the occasional unexpected paternal gentleness in William Shakespeare’s upbringing also. His father did not approve of children being wakened too abruptly, for instance, and he would wake his son by singing to him, softly at first, then getting louder and louder until he had called the boy back to the waking world.

  Perhaps it was when he was sober that John Shakespeare took William to witness the Coventry plays. These mysteries were presented each Corpus Christi Day at Coventry by the trade guilds on waggons moving in procession through the streets from station to station. Father and son stood there in the street, watching one waggon after another as it rolled up, delivered its story, and then rolled away.

  I think that the Coventry play which made the deepest impression upon our Shakespeare was the one acted by the Guild of Shearmen and Tailors, in which Herod of Jewry takes the leading role. Why so, sir? I will tell you why. Because in that play there is a stage direction which says that Herod is to leap off the pageant-waggon and into the crowd of spectators: ‘Here Herod rages in the pageant, and in the street also.’ We may well suppose that the vainglorious braggart was costumed in red cloak and red gloves and that to punctuate his anger he carried a big club stuffed with wool (don’t forget that these were shearmen). Further, we might well suppose that he employed this club to belabour all who came within his range (don’t forget that these were rude mechanicals). Is it beyond supposition, then, to imagine an enthusiastic actor bearing down with all the terror of this club upon the future dramatist?

  Shakespeare never forgot the scene. Among the references to it in his plays I have noted the following:

  What a Herod of Jewry is this! (Merry Wives, II, 1, 20.)

  It out-herods Herod! (Hamlet, III, 2, 16.)

  To whom Herod of Jewry may do homage (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 2, 28.)

  Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you / But when you are well pleased (Ibid., Ill, 3, 3.)

  Another scene in the same play that must have deeply affected the boy William is the slaughter of the children by Herod’s soldiers, when the women fight with pot-ladles to repulse them. He refers to it in Henry V: As did the wives of Jewry at Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen (III, 3, 41.)

  Was John Shakespeare sober when he summoned real actors to Stratford? Perhaps, madam. But we may doubt if he was sober when they left. Performances took place in the yard of one of the inns – either the Bear, or the Swan, or the Falcon. I have seen from the corporation records that it was during John Shakespeare’s time as high bailiff that companies of London actors came to town for the first time – the Queen’s Players, the best in the kingdom, and the Earl of Worcester’s Players, not quite so good. (The first got nine shillings from Stratford by way of reward, the second only one shilling.)

  Then, in 1577, the Earl of Leicester’s Players came, under the direction of Mr James Burbage, complete with anchor on his thigh and other accoutrements. Don’t get me wrong, gentle reader. Old Burbage was a perfectly sufficient actor in his day, though not a patch on his son Richard. The plays were all piss and wind in tho
se early times, of course, compared with what was to come in the Nineties, and a lot of the early players won their reputations merely from an ability to strut and shout and point their codpieces in the general direction of the audience.

  Still, no doubt little Willy was impressed. He may even have thought that his dreams were coming to town. Dressed in satin and lace, the players would enter Stratford by Clopton Bridge, advancing up Bridge Street. You can be sure there was a trumpeter. (In those days there were always trumpeters.) Picture that trumpeter, then, as the boy Shakespeare must have seen him: all in scarlet embroidered with gold, wheeling his horse about where Wood Street and Mere Street converge, whilst the drummer beside him beat his drum at the run.

  The play was an anti-climax after that.

  Sober or drunk, or somewhere in between, we can be sure that John Shakespeare showed the actors such courtesies as he could. And that both he and his son found their performances preferable to what otherwise passed for public entertainment in Stratford-upon-Avon – namely, the royal proclamations read and the sermons sometimes preached at the High Cross which stands at the north end of Bridge Street. (Stocks, pillory, and whipping-post are set near by so that the ears of those undergoing punishment might also be edified.)

  I say that the play was an anti-climax after the drama of the procession, but that leaves out of account the fact that the least and crudest play has words in it, that plays indeed are made of words all through, and that language must already have been food and drink to the boy Shakespeare. Turn up the prologue to The Taming of the Shrew and you will see instantly how excited he would have been at the arrival of a troupe of travelling players. To read it is to be transported back to Stratford at the point where Leicester’s servants must have turned his mind towards the theatre in its infancy. (Madam, I mean his infancy and the theatre’s, for they shared a common period of nurture.) That prologue, by the by, brings us straight into the very neighbourhood where Shakespeare’s mother was brought up. The characters are local men and women he knew well, and who are still remembered in Warwickshire: Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, her servant Cicely, and the famous village drunkard, Christopher Sly. Sly describes himself as ‘Old Sly’s son of Burton Heath’. In fact, Burton Heath is Barton-on-the-Heath, the home of William’s aunt Joan (one of those Lamberts I want to keep out of the story). For all I know, Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell were real people too. They sound as if they might have been. John Naps certainly was. You’ll meet him in my next chapter.

  I wonder what age William Shakespeare was when bored by bombast he conceived the great idea of one day there being a play that has a man in it who simply wanders on stage with his dog, and sits down on the ground, and takes off his shoes, and scratches his feet, and starts to tell us stories about the dog and his shoes and his troubles? ‘This shoe is my father,’ he says. ‘No, this left shoe is my father,’ he says. ‘No, no, this left shoe is my mother,’ he says. And it’s all about as far away from out-herodding Herod as anyone could imagine.

  Friends, no one before the late Mr Shakespeare put real true things like Launce and his dog on the stage. Forgive an old man his whimsey. Pickleherring likes to think that WS first entertained such dreams of the waking world with his father warm beside him in the press, perhaps at Coventry, perhaps at Stratford, but in whichever place with John Shakespeare sober.

  Chapter Forty

  Jack Naps of Greece: his story

  It was in the early summer of 1578 that Martin Frobisher, that great mariner, set sail on his third quest for the North-West Passage. Life must have seemed fair and full of promise for Shakespeare then, too. He was fourteen years old, and the star of the grammar school. He might well have expected to benefit by being awarded one of the scholarships which bridge-building Clopton had established for the students of his town. The gates of the University of Oxford would then have been open to Will. But now something happened which dashed such hopes on the rocks. John Shakespeare fell.

  The fall of Mr John Shakespeare is no laughing matter. All the same, here are two stories his daughter told me, with a wild laugh. (She was an odd woman, Mrs Haft, but yet there is no reason to disbelieve her testimony, and there was as I’ve said a wild streak in all the Shakespeares.) These stories demonstrate more vividly than the fines I could otherwise cite from the municipal accounts just how addiction to strong drink brought about the father’s downfall.

  John Shakespeare falls asleep outside the ale-house. He’s drunk and his little mate is hanging out. Two of Heicroft’s choirboys come by and tie a red ribbon on it. When John Shakespeare wakes up and sees the ribbon he says to his prick: ‘God knows where you’ve been or what you’ve been up to, but I’m glad you won first prize!’

  Second story. John Shakespeare’s drunk, as usual, and passing by Holy Trinity Church, when who should he meet but Emma Careless. Quick as a flash, he’s got his John Thomas out, and he’s showing it to her. ‘Half-a-crown,’ he says, ‘if you rub this for me.’ ‘Rub it yourself,’ says the vicar’s wife, ‘for nothing.’ John Shakespeare thinks this over, and concludes that it sounds reasonable. So he performs the bargain while she watches.

  After these, and other misadventures, it is no wonder the butcher’s business collapsed. He no longer paid his tax for the poor of the parish. ‘I am one of the poor of the parish,’ he said, and withdrew his son from school. Will would have been asked to leave anyway, when Mrs Heicroft told her husband.

  All hopes of university gone, William Shakespeare had now to complete his education in the rough school of life. Some say he ran away from home, ashamed of his father, and worked for a man in Warwick who made fireworks and squibs. William Shakespeare’s part was the selling of these fireworks. He was a good salesman too, quick in phrase, apt in gesture, not averse to disputation but stinkingly polite. We may imagine that he made his customers feel better than themselves with a little Ovid; doubtless that’s the trick of it.

  One day Will was hawking his fireworks as usual, in the market-place, on a flat stone under the town clock, which probably stood at five to eleven, it usually did, in those days, the sun spilling on the cobbles, white as salt, and quite a crowd gathered to watch him, from the bull ring, when the constable approaches. ‘Are you selling?’ says the constable. ‘I am selling,’ says William Shakespeare. ‘Do you have a licence?’ says the constable. William Shakespeare shows it to him. The constable barely looks at it. He flicks it back at our poet as though he’s frightened it might scratch his eyes if he holds it too close. ‘Those fireworks,’ he declares, ‘are wicked things, calculated to assist thieves in the night.’ ‘Fiddle de dee,’ says young master William Shakespeare, pedlar.

  Fiddle de dee is not the right thing to say to any officer. ‘I pronounce them an abomination,’ the constable shouts, putting his face down next to Shakespeare’s. ‘Sixpence,’ says Will, ‘to you, comrade.’ The constable seizes him by the scruff of the neck, kicks his squibs into the gutter, and hauls him off before the magistrate.

  This magistrate, whose name was Sir Thomas Lucy, will figure again in our story, so I’d better describe him. He was a silly, short man who always powdered his cheeks. He’s not pleased to see Shakespeare, having seen more than enough of his father (though not in the sense that Emma Careless had, of course). The beak’s temper does not improve when he hears what the boy has been up to. ‘Those fireworks,’ he opines, ‘ought not to have been invented. You are a scoundrel, sir, to be endangering life and limb by selling them in a public place. How would you feel,’ he adds, ‘if a child took it into his head to play with one of them, and caught fire, and burnt to death?’

  Shakespeare thinks carefully. He likes riddles. He is not good at them, but he still likes them. He stands on his head to warm his wits in the corner. He hums and he haws a while, playing on his lips with his forefinger.

  ‘Come, sir,’ Lucy the magistrate thunders (or, more probably, squeaks). ‘My question is clear enough, is it not? How would you feel if a child burnt to death
because of one of your wicked fireworks?’

  ‘Regretful,’ says Shakespeare.

  ‘How dare you!’ cries the beak.

  Shakespeare supposes that he has made (and not for the first time) an incorrect response. ‘Mortified,’ he suggests, while the beak’s face grows longer and blanker, and flakes of powder peel off with his sweat. ‘My heart would cool with mortifying groans,’ adds Shakespeare, placatingly, or so he trusts.

  ‘The lad’s a monster,’ says the constable. ‘He ought to be in jail, the dirty incinerate, and that’s the long and short of it.’

  ‘Hold hard,’ protests Shakespeare. ‘All I have done is sell a few squibs and dragons at a bob a nob.’

  ‘Trmph,’ troats Sir Thomas, ‘then you plead guilty, do you? A month!’

  Shakespeare goes green. ‘Are you sending me to prison?’ he enquires.

  ‘That I am, sir,’ the magistrate confirms. ‘A month’s worth. To mend your ways. I hope you see, by the grace of God, their error.’

  ‘It’s you that’s full of error,’ Will says. ‘I am sound.’

  ‘Two months!’ says Thomas Lucy.

  Will shuts his mouth.

  In Warwick Jail young William Shakespeare associated with the rest. If he had been inclined to turn thief, he once told me, he had plenty of opportunities and offers of instruction. The separate or silent system was not then in vogue. Will worked on the tread-wheel. Most of the men who worked with him had nothing to say, the labour being arduous. But one day a new man worked with him, and this one proved different.

  ‘Good morning,’ says this stranger. ‘Sir, here is my prescription for a long and happy life: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.’

  Will Shakespeare intimates by a grunt and a shake of his beardless chin that he does not understand this. The stranger marches beside him on the tread-wheel. As he marches he talks. He tells from the side of his lopsided mouth the following story: