The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  What else happened?

  A mirror cracked from top to bottom in the hatter’s shop of young William Hart, just starting to make his way in Mere Street; some copies of Lyly’s Grammar were spilt from a shelf in the King’s New School; six bricks fell down the chimney and into the men’s dormitory at the poorhouse.

  A small earthquake, but sufficient.

  Sufficient, that is, to make William Shakespeare shake the familiar dust of Stratford from his shoes once the earth stopped shaking under them.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Pickleherring’s peep-hole

  I’ve this hole in the floor of my room. I’m not complaining. I cover it with my Ovid, so no one knows. That’s not the Ovid that Mr Shakespeare gave me, with his signature on the flyleaf. Just Golding’s English translation, you understand.

  The hole’s not big, but it’s big enough to see through. I have a perfect view of the bedroom below.

  I like watching the whores through my peep-hole.

  My greatest interest is not to watch them being fucked, but to watch them dressing. I like to see their tricks before the mirror. It’s all their little secrets I want to know – the faces they turn on themselves, not the faces they make up for others. Their primping, their pricking, their painting, that’s what I enjoy.

  I snuff out my candle and I settle down to watch them. The hole’s half-hidden by a rafter. They don’t suspect a thing.

  There’s one girl in particular I like watching. She’s the one who fetched me up the speckled egg. She has long, dark hair and a little snub nose like a button. She’s not beautiful at all, though her figure’s good and slender. Small white bubbies, nicely rounded, very firm, like those eggs hard-boiled and warm with the shells just peeled off and a sort of dew upon them.

  This dark one’s my favourite. I think that she’s new to the game. She’s very young, and sweet. If I press my nose into the hole I can almost smell her perfume. But I don’t do that much. I prefer to look.

  Why I think she’s new to the game is not just because she’s so young. Some of these girls start very early – before they’re fifteen. I’d not be surprised if this little tart is about the same age that I was when I jumped down off that wall to meet Mr Shakespeare. But, as I say, it’s not only youth that makes her seem innocent. There’s this awkwardness about the way she moves. She’s much more shy and tentative than the others.

  When I watch her at work on her face in the glass, my favourite, you can see her trying to imagine what she does to men. She turns her head this way and that, and pulls and twists her hair across her cheeks. She throws her head back, and gives little gasps. She’s showing herself what she looks like when they fuck her. Sometimes, her mouth made up, she kisses her own image in the mirror, leaving a carmine smear and a cloud of breath. She likes to flirt with the girl in the glass, hiding her eyes with a fan or with her fingers and then peeping. It’s all very provocative, I can tell you; not least because she’s like a little girl trying on her mother’s things.

  There’s something that maddens my senses about this one girl. I don’t know what it is, but she seems shy and gentle. She has little blue veins just over each temple. Her nostrils are like those of an animal that finds its way by scent. I’d love to press my thumbs to her eyes when they’re shut tight, just to feel her heart beating and the secret thoughts that leap there. But I don’t want to hurt her. I would never hurt my beauty. There’s something exquisitely virginal about her, although she is a whore. Like Marina in the brothel in Pericles.

  Last night I saw her strip off her clothes to look at herself in the mirror. She was all alone, so she thought, but old Pickleherring was watching. She looked at herself in the mirror, my little egg girl. It was plain she is in love with what she sees.

  Why not? Who could blame her?

  She played with her own nipples. I watched them harden. They pricked out from her bubbies like tiny pink thorns. You’d think a whore would be weary of hands on her breasts, but not this girl. She smiled at herself in the glass, and she sighed with self-enchantment.

  Some whores will wear their night-rails in the street. Not my little favourite. Last night she tried gown after gown just to see what best suited her mood.

  I knelt in a trance of delight, my eye pressed to the peep-hole. I saw her dress herself in silks and damasks, thin tiffanies, newfangled cobweb lawns. I watched her take each garment off again. I could hear the crisp crackle of some of them, as she put them on, as she took them off, and the soft swish of others.

  Nothing satisfied her, quite, when she consulted the effect of it in her pier glass.

  My favourite’s final choice was a boisterous foamy farthingale. It made her look for all the world like a little mermaid coming up from the depths of the sea. She rose up and down on the balls of her feet, though, once she’d got it on, and trotted about to listen to it rustle on the floor-boards.

  She looked perfectly adorable in that.

  Her dress on, my girl goes and changes her stockings. She’s always a goose-brain, doing silly things like this, back-to-front things, all draggle-tail arsy-versy. But, of course, I adore her the more for such ways. And it was delicious seeing her legs with that dress rucked up.

  She sat down on the side of the bed to adjust her black garters. Then, with a squeal of vexation, the vixen tore them off. I was pleased to see her go and select a white pair from her drawer. And my pleasure was complete when she stretched out each leg in turn to draw them on up her plump little thighs, smoothing her sheer silk stockings as she did so, patting and pampering the garters in place, with a thrilling little wriggle of her haunches.

  Madam, you’re wrong if you think I want to fuck this sweet, delightful creature. Just to watch her, myself unseen, that is enough. In fact she’s far too exquisite to be fucked. There is something infinitely gentle about her, and what I feel for her is the kind of tenderness and wonder one might feel for a spiderweb all sparkling with morning dew, an intricate simplicity not to be touched without destroying it.

  Only, of course, this favourite young whore of mine is also infinitely more appealing to the senses than any spiderweb!

  I love watching her when she doesn’t know I’m there. I love watching her when she doesn’t know anyone’s there. When she thinks she’s quite alone, and so perfectly natural.

  All I want is to be as close to her as possible.

  I would like to be her comb.

  I wish I was her dress.

  Best of all, how I’d love to be my child-whore’s silk stockings!

  Well, reader, there you have it – the secret erotic life of Robert Tiresias Pickleherring Reynolds.

  Old Mr Pickerel: his wholesome whoreson pleasures.

  I never meant to put that in my book but now I have I shall not cross it out.

  And having put it in, it occurs to me to observe that my watching the young whore through this peep-hole is perhaps a perfect emblem of this art of biography in which I am involved for the rest of the time. What is the biographical act but a species of spying? You participate in a life you cannot share. You take part offstage in a play that is none of your making.

  Besides, it is only fair that if a biographer tells you the unpalatable and the disagreeable things about the life of his subject (as, in the name of truth, he must), then he ought to be prepared to tell you about his own unpalatables and his own disagreeables. I make it a rule for all who follow me in this new art. Procopius and Suetonius should have done no less. When a man wants to spit at life, he should spit in his own face, first.

  Watching my perfect little whore at her toilet is like writing about Mr Shakespeare. It’s her private face I want to know, not the tricks that she turns for others.

  I have never yet watched her being fucked, though sometimes I have listened. It sounded as if she was laughing. I stopped up my ears.

  If I ever do watch while she’s fucked, I’ll tell you about it.

  There has been, at all events, a moral outcome. Feeling good aft
er last night’s rapt observance of my darling, I stumped up this morning and paid Pompey Bum the rest of his rent. I used a guinea that was in today’s box, a guinea given to Mr Shakespeare by a whore. It was Lucy Negro who gave Mr Shakespeare that guinea. Why she gave it to him I do not know. So I have no story to tell you about that guinea. I cannot tell you a tale I do not know. (Other biographers, please copy.)

  Having been moral, and paid the money I owed, I had my reward not in heaven but here on earth immediately. That whore must be my good angel. A good angel in dainty white garters! Whatever she is, Pickleherring’s day was made when Pompey Bum called out to the girl, addressing her by name as he passed her on the stair.

  She is called Anne.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  About silk stockings

  So you think it strange that Pickleherring wants to be a young whore’s stockings as she’s putting them on?

  There have been stranger desires at the Court of Queen Venus.

  King James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland) used to come off paddling naked in the entrails of just-slaughtered stags.

  Veronica Juliana, a nun, beatified by Pope Pius II, always slept with a lamb, kissing it and letting it suckle on her breasts.

  The philosopher Aristotle liked to be ridden by a courtesan of Athens with nothing on his person but a saddle and bridle.

  Philip Massinger, the playwright, once told me that the only interesting part of a woman was her shoe. Laced boots with high black heels especially charmed him.

  Guy Fawkes collected girls’ handkerchiefs.

  Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, perished in the act of intercourse with a hen. He had stuffed its little love-hole full of snow.

  Some of these people had excuses.

  The nun, for instance, claimed that she took the lamb to bed in memory of Jesus. And Bacon’s genitals were very small.

  Pickleherring’s excuse would be that this is the price he has to pay for all the women’s parts he’s had to play. He fell in love with the clothes he wore to do it.

  His real name as he has told you is Nicholas Nemo. Nobody can say what Nobody is capable of.

  But perhaps there was always much of a woman in my own innermost nature. And Mr Shakespeare saw that right from the start.

  So he re-named me, and my name has been:

  Portia Juliet Ophelia

  Hermione Silvia Cordelia

  Cleopatra Jessica Desdemona

  Rosalind Beatrice Cressida

  My many parts. So many a time I ended with an A. Why I don’t know. You’d have to ask him, and I doubt if he could answer. Perhaps because A stands for Anne. And now I’ve an Anne of my own.

  But I need no excuses. Silk stockings are very nice and sweet and voluptuous, and no justification should be required for their worship.

  It was the Virgin Queen herself who set the fashion. In the second year of her reign, her silk woman, Mrs Montague, presented Elizabeth with a pair of black silk stockings for a new-year’s gift. They say that wearing those silk stockings pleased the Queen so much that she sent for Mrs Montague, and asked her where she had these silk stockings from, and if she could help her to any more of the lovely things.

  ‘I made them very carefully for your Majesty,’ said the silk woman, ‘and of purpose only for your Majesty. But seeing these silk stockings please you so well, I will presently set more in hand.’

  ‘Do so,’ quoth the Queen, ‘for indeed I like silk stockings so well, because they are pleasant, fine, and delicate, that henceforth I will wear no other stockings.’

  And from that time to her death Queen Elizabeth wore only silk stockings. No doubt she was wearing them at the time of her revels at Kenilworth. And perhaps at her earlier revels in the Forest of Arden.

  (I don’t always cite my sources, any more than a good cook will give you his recipes, since the craft is in the cooking not the ingredients. But in this case – just to prevent you from discrediting yourself with the suspicion that I might be making it all up to justify or aggrandise my own passion – I advise you to consult John Stow’s Chronicle, the 1631 edition being the one I have open before me, and look at page 887.)

  I confess I like silk stockings linking Queen Elizabeth and my little tart Anne. Confess it, now, all you lechers: Any woman wearing a pair of silk stockings is much more desirable than one with nothing on. I think even your most hardened modern rake – that young Earl of Rochester, say – would agree with Pickleherring in this matter.

  As for me, when I was in female costume for my parts, crossing my legs or walking in silk stockings was always the sweetest of pleasures, what with the little intimate sounds your legs make, rubbing and rasping, kissing each other through the webs of silk.

  And no, madam, I did not mock at women thus. On the contrary, I worshipped Woman.

  With my silk stockings on, the very word WOMAN would bring my young man to attention.

  Thereby hangs, as the bishop used to say, another tale. But it’s not time for that yet. It’s time to ponder the ‘lost years’ of William Shakespeare.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  How Shakespeare went to teach in Lancashire

  In this box I have kept two extracts from a will. It is the will of a Papist gentleman of Lancashire. His name was Alexander Hoghton, Esq., of Lea, near Preston. Lea Hall was not his principal residence. That was Hoghton Tower. Mr Hoghton, who seems to have been the same age as his century, died in 1581. He was by all accounts a wealthy fellow.

  He was in fact something of a provincial Maecenas, this Hoghton of Hoghton Tower, a patron of the arts, for here in his will (dated 3rd August 1581, and proved one month later) we find him bequeathing his stock of play-costumes and all his musical instruments to his brother Thomas, or, if brother Thomas does not choose to keep players, to his neighbour Sir Thomas Hesketh.

  There follows this sentence: ‘And I most heartily require the said Sir Thomas to be friendly unto Fulke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwelling with me and either to take them into his service or else to help them to some good master, as my trust is he will.’ (Pickleherring’s italics.)

  Later, Hoghton names William Shakeshafte twice as among his ‘servants’, and bequeaths him forty shillings (Fulke Gyllome gets the same).

  After that earthquake in southern England, did Shakespeare go to work in Lancashire? It is not impossible. I have heard Mr Aubrey saying that our author worked when young as a schoolmaster in the country. If Shakespeare and Shakeshafte are the same, then he went to work for Hoghton at Hoghton Tower, first perhaps as a Latin tutor to the grandchildren or great-grandchildren in that rich man’s large household, then perhaps as a player in Hoghton’s private company of actors.

  I don’t know if this is what happened, but I do know that it is arresting to see a William Shakeshafte being mentioned in a play-acting connection as early as 1581.

  I know too that John Cotton, the boy William’s last teacher at the Grammar School, the one who superseded Taffy Jenkins, came originally from Tarnacre, in Lancashire, and that Tarnacre is only about ten miles away from Lea. John Cotton is also remembered in Hoghton’s will.

  Might this Lancastrian school-teacher have recommended his brightest ex-pupil to his old friend the master of Hoghton Tower? And might Shakespeare then have found playing rather more to his taste than tutoring?

  The answer to the second question is yes.

  To the other one, maybe.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  How Shakespeare went to sea with Francis Drake

  In this box I have one remainder biscuit. It’s there to provide me with tangible and tasteful evidence of another theory to account for those undocumented ‘lost years’ in the life of William Shakespeare.

  Could he have gone to sea as a sailor with Francis Drake?

  Was our Shakespeare a cabin-boy in the crew of the Golden Hind when she circumnavigated the globe?

  Pickleherring brings to your notice, friends, the high incidence of shipwrecks in the plays collected in the
Folio. There’s one in The Tempest, there are two in Pericles. Twelfth Night starts off with Sebastian and Viola having been shipwrecked, and The Comedy of Errors starts off with a shipwreck too. Even Antonio’s ships in The Merchant of Venice get wrecked one after another. Shakespeare, in short, was obsessed with shipwrecks, perhaps in the way that only a man who has nearly perished in one at an impressionable age might be. He also exhibits in his works a considerable knowledge of seas and storms, as well as deploying several familiar terms that sailors use when they’re speaking of seas and storms or of their ships.

  Above all, there’s this fear in him of drowning. Remember poor Clarence’s dream in Richard III:

  O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown!

  What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!

  You don’t write like that without first-hand experience of the matter. (I should know. I once fell off a jetty at Yarmouth.) Notice there is no nonsense in Clarence about seeing your whole past life in a flash, or of drowning being an easy way to die. Mr Shakespeare, I say, had either once nearly been drowned himself or he had listened carefully to somebody else who suffered and survived the same fate – which somebody was not me, because I kept my mouth shut.

  Now then, let us consider Milford Haven.

  Why does Shakespeare drag Milford Haven into Cymbeline? It was never a famous or mighty sea-port, Milford Haven. Yet Posthumus sails from Milford Haven on his way to Italy – rather than from Bristol or from Plymouth, either of which would be more likely. And he writes to Imogen to meet him at Milford Haven on his return.

  If you look at the map, sir, you will see that Milford Haven is in fact the nearest port to Stratford. That is not to say much, I grant you, since the bard’s birthplace is about bang in the heart of England, and the farthest you could get inland from the sea. But if you marched due west from Stratford, looking neither to left nor to right, with the idea of running away to sea in your young head, then Milford Haven is the port you’d reach.