The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  My friend the player Weston loved this theory. He liked the notion of Shakespeare at sea as a cabin-boy with Drake, in buckle shoes, with a feather in his cap. He would quote in support of it the King’s sea-sickened invocation of Sleep in Part 2 of Henry IV:

  Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

  Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes and rock his brains

  In cradle of the rude imperious surge,

  And in the visitation of the winds,

  Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

  Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

  With deaf’ning clamour in the slippery shrouds …*

  My dears, you don’t write stuff like that if your only experience of seafaring is crossing the Thames from Westminster Stairs to Southwark in a wherry. Nor do you learn the ropes – witness all that language taut with sea-knowledge in the first scene of The Tempest – from punting about between weirs on the River Avon.

  But (and this was David Weston’s clinching argument, with which with portly sails he brought his argosies of speculation home) there is one thing in Shakespeare, one remarkable thing, which makes it almost certain that at some point in his life he had gone not just on a voyage, and not just on a long voyage, but that he had sailed the five oceans of the world on a very long voyage indeed, and that thing comes, of all places, in a completely land-locked scene, back at home, in England, in the Forest of Arden, when Jaques, in the seventh scene of the second Act of As You Like It, speaking of the fool he has met in the forest, remarks that the fool’s brain is ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage’.

  Search all the works of Marlowe and Chapman, madam. They are full of sea-imagery, awash with it, their pages salt-stained. They speak much and sing more of tall ships and high seas, of tides and masts and spars and sails and stars and storms and all the windy rest of it. But in neither of these writers, nor in the work of any other writer I can think of, no not even in great Homer, is there a single mention of REMAINDER BISCUIT.

  Only your true Elizabethan long-distance mariner would know of the existence of such biscuits. Drake’s crew was reduced to living on them at the end of their round-the-world voyage.

  How on earth (and I mean this literally), how on earth could William Shakespeare have conceived that extraordinary similitude unless he had himself been on the voyage and, yes, had himself cracked his teeth on just such a biscuit as this one, after shaking the wretched weevils out of the thing?

  * The Folio has clouds. But I remember it as shrouds. Bob Benfield had the part. He always played old kings. Benfield had six teeth missing by that time, so clouds could possibly have come out as shrouds. But I think shrouds the ship-shape word, in context, as well as making more exacting sense.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  How Shakespeare went to work in a lawyer’s office

  There is another story (there always is). This version has Shakespeare passing his lost years in a lawyer’s office.

  I never knew a soul that wanted to believe this story true, perhaps because lawyers are not poetical figures. But then the late Mr Shakespeare was not a poetical figure either – go and look at the bust his widow and daughters had erected to commemorate him in Trinity Church, if you should doubt me; that bust is a pretty good likeness of the man in his later years, yet fitting not at all the common notion of a poet. With pork-filled face and portly torso, and with quill in fist, it might be taken for the portrait of a lawyer. Did Shakespeare ever go to work as one?

  There is no evidence to support the theory. All that it rests on, when you get down to brass tacks, is the plethora of metaphors drawn from the legal profession to be found in his plays and in his sonnets. I turned up no decrepit litigants who remembered his service when I went looking for my items of country history in Stratford-upon-Avon. Nobody spoke of young Shakespeare as a clerk in the office of any of the town’s attorneys of the time – not that of Thomas Russell (his mother’s kinsman), not that of William Court, not that of the principal lawyer, Henry Rogers.

  Absence of anecdota does not quite disprove the case, though. Your finest lawyers are invisible men. Shakespeare might have slaved away, head-down at his parchments, dealing with dozens of those minor legalities which call no attention to themselves, do not disturb the world by their redress, and which then disappear from the minds of men leaving no more trace than the dust blown away from an ancient writ. He might have worked thus for some years, I say, without anyone remembering him. And, in favour of the theory, since we must suppose that no poet could enjoy such labours, there is the heart-felt cry he puts in the mouth of Dick the Butcher, rebel Cade’s right-hand man in Henry VI, Part 2: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!’

  But, pardon me, I did not mean to bring this up. Nor do I intend to summon as witness to the crime of Shakespeare’s lawyerhood each and every reference to ‘quillets’ and ‘fee simples’ and the like which we find in the plays. That Parolles, trembling and sweating under the examination of his captors, vomits up phrases from the deed-box, is not so very interesting. Nor is Hamlet’s disquisition to an imaginary jury on the possibility of one of his disinterred skulls being that of a corrupt solicitor.

  No, no, your worships, what I would prefer to draw to your attention is something that could never be anticipated – not a knowing reference to the law in a context where the action of a drama requires it, but a usage of legal terminology where it’s not required at all. That Portia is a legalist proves nothing. That Silvia and Mrs Page are is a very different matter.

  What I am driving at is the oddity of the way certain images drawn from the law keep cropping up in Shakespeare where we least expect them. I take it I do not need to quote sonnet 18? But if it is strange to find a poem in praise of a loved one’s beauty suddenly prattling like any lawyer’s clerk of ‘leases’ and ‘dates’, how much stranger to find Romeo (in the tomb with his heart breaking) pause above the body of Juliet to bid his lips:

  seal with a righteous kiss

  A dateless bargain to engrossing Death.

  The last six words are very legal-minded. Not as persuasive or conclusive, perhaps, as REMAINDER BISCUIT. But since there is not a shred of evidence that Romeo was a lawyer then circumstantially at least those six words point back to the man who wrote them as the only other suspect who could have committed such an offence.

  And there I would rest my case, were it not for NOVERINT.

  This useful word derives, your honour, from the Latin. In that language it is the Third Person Plural of the perfect subjunctive tense of the verb nescere, to know. In English it occurs as the opening phrase of writs. Thus, noverint universi, ‘let all men know’.

  Now then, by extension this English word NOVERINT has come to be applied not just to a writ but to the man who writes it – in short, to any member of the tribe of legal scriveners.

  And here I call to the stand the writer Thomas Nashe, dramatist and satirist, and author incidentally of the greatest work in English in praise of the red herring.* For in Nashe’s epistle to the Gentlemen Students of Two Universities, printed in 1589, he writes scornfully of ‘a sort of shifting companions’ who ‘leave the trade of Noverint’ in order to ‘busy themselves with the endeavours of art’. Such a one, he goes on, ‘will afford you whole Hamlets – I should say handfuls of tragical speeches’.

  Does Nashe mean Shakespeare? If he does, it means of course that a version of Hamlet existed some years before the one we first did at the Curtain. That is not impossible. For all that Mr Shakespeare (as Heminges and Cundell remarked) never blotted a line, he often reworked his own early plays, always improving them, and I have told you how he augmented the part of Juliet just for me. If you compare the versions of those plays published in Quarto form with the final texts of the same plays as they appear in the Folio you will see how Mr Shakespeare worked over the originals even after his retirement to Stratford. What Heminges and Cundell meant, I think, was that his fair copies for the theatre were always wri
tten out in a neat and legible hand – a noverint’s hand, indeed, with its straight or gothic letters. Not like Ben Jonson’s scrawl.

  Taken at face value, Thomas Nashe’s testimony does seem to intimate that he knows of a new writer coming up who has written something called Hamlet and that this writer formerly had employment in a lawyer’s office. In tone and temper, it’s worth pointing out, Nashe’s little attack has something in common with the rather more notorious libel which was to be perpetrated three years later by Robert Greene, a drunken, disappointed hack who as he lay dying accused his young rival Shakespeare of being a thief and a plagiarist, ‘an upstart crow’.

  Greene was killed by pickle herring.

  I’ll be coming to that.

  * Lenten Style (1599).

  Chapter Fifty

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

  OR – (and sometimes I think that OR should be this book’s sub-title, not that there is much should-ness* in my spirit) – or, some say, Shakespeare turned soldier and went to the wars in Holland, seeking reputation even in the cannon’s mouth. Well, perhaps not quite its mouth, but somewhere in the vicinity of a cannon. Since every able man in England between the ages of sixteen and sixty was liable for military service at that time, it is unlikely that our Willy eluded the net.

  Here is Corporal Shakespeare reporting for duty, sir. He served under the Earl of Leicester, in that brigade of poets led by Sir Philip Sidney, the hero of us all. Shakespeare was not a hero. Auctors aren’t. Shakespeare escaped being mentioned in dispatches. But perhaps he carried them, for Sidney does mention, as the messenger bearing home to his wife a letter from the Netherlands, a certain Will whom he calls ‘the jesting player’. Shakespeare the regimental jester? Will the wag of the mess-room? Who knows? There is an authentic whiff of gunpowder to the stuff about small sieges in the history plays. It makes you think that their author knows what it’s like to be under fire. Best of all, when Talbot speaks with scorn of ‘Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish’ you hear the voice of an English soldier in foreign parts, mocking the natives and making himself at home by pronouncing their words as English words. The men who went to Agincourt always put a T on the end of it, and called Ypres ‘Wipers’. So we can take it that Shakespeare knew his pack-drill. Unlike belligerent Ben Jonson, though, he never killed a man in single combat.

  After military service, WS went off again to sea. This time he sailed in a merchant vessel called The Tiger, bent on making his fortune, or some of it, only to be shipwrecked off the sea-coast of Bohemia. Shaking the brine from his hair, he made his way to Italy where he rescued the young Earl of Southampton, who had been set upon by thieves while travelling on vacation from St John’s College, Cambridge. The grateful boy arranged for his saviour’s passage back to London after a brief idyll in France where Shakespeare met the Countess of Rousillon and picked up the ingredients for the syllabub which is Love’s Labour’s Lost. (Remind me to give you Love’s Labour’s Won when it’s time for that.)

  OR perhaps he never went abroad at all? Perhaps he never crossed the Channel in his life? Perhaps WS just lost his ‘lost years’ by getting lost himself – at home, in England, going for a long walk in the Forest of Arden, picking flowers, stealing birds’ eggs, writing sonnets, climbing trees, spitting with the wind, pissing in the ditches, forgetting the way out of the woods. Lost in a green dream, he was turning into ‘Shakespeare’.

  He went for a long walk, if he did, like many another likely lad, under shady boughs, in dewy dells, where no doubt he came across maidens, and others who were no longer in that condition. He explored the Cotswolds, and the wilds of Gloucestershire, and the hinterland of his own heart. He hawked and he hunted. It was at this time in his life that he got to know Will Squele and Old Double the archer, drinking small beer with them in country taverns where they were served at their benches outdoors by maids in sprig muslin with holes in their stockings. Perhaps he drank with his father too, larger and more various potations, and slept all night under the crab tree with him at Bidford, intolerably intoxicated, both of them, too drunk to crawl home and face Mary Arden. The furthest he ventured from Stratford might well have been Daventry, where he perceived through the dregs of his dissipation the red nose of the innkeeper. Then he wandered on again, lost again, in the Forest of Arden again, until he met a fool, a fool in the forest, and the fool was him, and young Will found himself, a motley fool, and came sober out of the trees as WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

  Bit neat, that.

  Bit too neat for me, madam.

  The truth in it would be that if nobody knows where Shakespeare lost his ‘lost years’ then perhaps it is because Shakespeare did not know himself where they were spent.

  But Nobody does know.

  I’m Nobody, Nicholas Nemo, and I know.

  That’s why I put ‘lost years’ in inverted commas.

  I, nobody, Reynolds, Reynolds, good Reynaldo, your fool, your zany, your Jack Pudding, your clown, my own buffoon, I know and now I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen.

  Am I not your accredited, true and original Engelische Comedien und Tragedien sampt dem Pickelhering?

  So they say in Germany, which is I think germane.

  I am he, mein herr.

  Gnädige frau, it is Singing Simpkin at your service here. Take down your drawers and prepare for action.

  In France, of course, they call me Jean Pottage.

  In Italy, Maccaroni.

  I am that droll whom every nation calls by the name of the dish of meat which it loves best.

  So, in good round English, I am known honestly, which is without salt or mustard, as your simple Pickleherring.

  Did I not tell you this at the outset – before I ever fell like Humpty Dumpty off the wall, and met our Mr Shakespeare?

  I did.

  And have I not at all points been concerned to explain to you, gentle reader, that what you are holding in your hands is in no known sense a work of literature?

  It is, in fact, what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put together again.

  Herzchen, let there be no doubt about it.

  This book consists of what my German audience used to call (in my latter hey-day) a series of Pickelhärings-spiele.

  Me, madam?

  I call it plain pickery.

  So, little students of OR-atory, no need to rack your brains or stew your wits with wondering which is the true or more favoured as the probable account – land-locked Willy in Lancashire as private tutor to little Papists with a taste for amateur theatricals, of barnacle Bill the sailor all at sea and munching horrible biscuit with the (eventual) Member of Parliament for Bosinney, Cornwall.

  No call for a Corporal Shakespeare either, nor even a Lance-Corporal Shakespeare (ha! ha! not among the trumpets).

  Best of all, most devoutly to be wished, abolish and expunge from the tables of your memory, ladies and gentlemen, all trivial, fond records of the truly abominable thought of William Shakespeare at work as a provincial lawyer’s clerk.

  I, Pickleherring Pickle-Bottle, can tell you exactly where our man was and what he was doing in those ‘lost years’.

  I, Pick-Purse Pickleherring, will tell you precisely where William Shakespeare was and what he was doing in those years which were not lost at all.

  There is no mystery.

  Here are the facts of the matter.

  He went away.

  He went away to a far-away island.

  There Mr Shakespeare studied certain works on magic until abjuring the mystic art he proceeded to Naples, and thence to Milan. Here he fell into the hands of brigands who, pleased by his gentle address and ready wit, made him their chief. At the head of this band, Shakespeare captured the castle of Mondragon, which became then the base for his many expeditions of plunder and looting. In his lust for treasure (or, as he called it, finance) the outlaw WS dispatched his enemies with a ‘disembrain
ing spoon’. He would gather his loot into an enormous sack, which it was his pleasure to drag behind him. This sack he called his ‘bombard’, presumably because of its resemblance to a primitive type of cannon.

  Surrounded at last in his castle by a superior force of brigands which had crept up disguised as trees, Shakespeare made his escape in a large basket of soiled linen – leaving, alas, his bombard behind him.

  Then he came home to England.

  And the rest is history.

  * Like Claudius in Hamlet, I tend to think this should is like a spendthrift sigh, / That hurts by easing.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Pickleherring’s confession

  My father left me almost nothing but debts, and my mother likewise, and my whole inheritance came to a green shirt, a pair of lugged boots, three or four pieces of crockery, and a kidskin dictionary. The Misses Muchmore volunteered to adopt me. I grew up half their son, and half their mannikin. By the time I went to London with Mr Shakespeare I was accustomed to obedience. Possessing a clear voice, an unusually sturdy constitution, and a retentive memory, I made a good actor.

  So much for ‘childhood memories’.

  Truth to tell, I have no childhood memories. I made that up about the Misses Muchmore. They did not beat me. And I cannot even remember what the sisters looked like. The first thing I truly remember is jumping down off the wall and meeting Mr Shakespeare.

  The real story is my own story, which I can’t tell. It is not obviously innocent. I am like a child playing hide-and-seek, who doesn’t know what he fears and wants more – to stay hidden, or to be found. Besides, what if this book where I conceal myself should be like that bridal burial box in the old story? There was a princess who played hide-and-seek on the day of her wedding. She climbed into an ornate box and shut the lid above her. By the time her bridesmaids found her and prised the lid open she had suffocated. They buried her in that box in her white wedding-gown.