The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  I am not writing this book to say that I have nothing to say. I am writing this book to tell you all I know about the late Mr Shakespeare. I knew him well, which is also to say that I knew him well enough to know that I know nothing. There’s little to know, but there is much to tell. He covered his traces as no other human being has ever done before. His best mask was his plays. By writing them he made himself many men and no one. The play’s the thing. Let the author alone.

  The plays, indeed, are perfect. They manifest omniscience, omnipotence, and the loftiest of mortal intentions. They must have been written by a god. And I trust that I have told you enough about the late Mr Shakespeare for you to be sure that he was not at all like any known kind of a god. Not that I come to bury him.

  My purpose is to postpone and even exorcise my own death by writing the Life of Mr Shakespeare, and by certain ‘magical operations’ with words to make him live again before your eyes. There is a pleasure of playing with vocabulary, also. It cannot delay the fatal issue by one minute, but one can act as if it could.

  Every man writes what he is, and I am a player. I see now that not just this Life of Shakespeare but all Lives of Shakespeare will be peculiar autobiographies. The sublimity of the subject ensures empathy and the impersonality of the life-record teases speculation.

  I am a player – which is to say, a man speaking words that are never his own, an actor of word-works, talking because he is on stage and it is demanded that he should talk, and because he is afraid of the dark and the silence that will fall with the final curtain. Suppose such a man eager to find an audience, even of one or two, fit though few, if only they will take him with the seriousness with which he takes his task, himself, and them. He will weave you a taut web of words whatever he is talking about, a web of authenticity, of truth, plain dealing. Such a man am I, reader, despite my player’s hide, your honest plain dealer.

  Imagine a writer who is unable to make one clear statement without yards of equivocation, rambling on and on in a thrasonical prose which is forever clearing its throat, making its points twice over, three times, four, only to deny their validity altogether a page or two after.

  Such a fellow could make an art of beating about the bush. Yet if you accused him thus, then might he not protest – hand on heart, but with his eyes averted so that you could never be sure that he was not lying when he told you he was telling a lie – that the reason he needed to beat about the bush was because there are no birds in it? This pretence of foregoing artifice would be itself an artifice, and one far more artful than the play-making art.

  I was a player once. I dealt plainly in artifice. What did I play? I played parts, sir. I was a man of parts. But what did I play as a whole? Madam, I played all and everything, as I do now: comedies and tragedies, histories, interludes, morals, pastorals, and farces. You name it, I played it. And others we cannot name. All for your recreation, friends, as for your solace and your pleasure. Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. I’m sure you know your Hamlet as well as I do.

  Is my writing then no more than what that prince said he was reading in his book? Words, words, words? A man is his words. But I am a player, and my words are not my own. How could they be, when I am writing the Life of the man who made me live? This book is the player’s revenge. So it is not all play.

  Yet I say of this writing of mine what Mr Shakespeare has his Holofernes say in criticism: ‘He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.’ Peregrinate Pickleherring, that’s the name for me. I draw out the thread of my verbosity finer than the staple of my argument. I have lived too long on the alms-basket of words. I am a poor old man.

  When I was a player I was a man of quality. I had favour even at the hands of the Queen herself. So did Mr Shakespeare.

  The distillation of Mr Shakespeare’s quality as a man is to be found now in the works which he left behind him. They are more really himself than anything that can be recorded about the person who produced them. Perhaps I have now got to the root of the matter. A writer should be judged not by his extravagances, meannesses, intoxications, sobrieties, quarrels, loves, vagaries, constancies, shames, honours, shortcomings as a husband, lapses from being a perfect gentleman, kindnesses towards his cat, and so forth, but solely by the extent of his achievement in what he has written.

  Does it matter in what position the poet sat when he began to write ‘To be or not to be’?

  Yet this world matters, madam. The mind of Shakespeare, when it ceased from Hamlet and The Tempest, did not forget to use reasonable means to recover his proper dues from his debtors at Stratford.

  Mr Shakespeare was a play-maker, and undoubtedly a man of many parts. He put on different masks for different people. I think sometimes that he felt he had no identity of his own and could only exist by adopting the identities of others. But despite the many faces of the man some continuities emerge. He was a man obsessed – obsessed by the pen, obsessed by private terrors. Perhaps it is only in its contradictions that the real meaning of his life is to be found. But no doubt that is true of any life.

  One thing is certain: This is not the end of the story.

  Of the late Mr Shakespeare what I remember is the innocence withal, the mirth, the sheer abundance. For (as Mr Jonson said) I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.

  He was always very gentle, delicate, and polite. ‘Sweet Mr Shakespeare’ – several said that. And they were right, all of them. He was a sweet little rogue.

  Yet sometimes he seemed a lost soul and his pintle was certainly in the back row. It was a little tiny thing that disgusted Lucy Negro to such a degree as to frustrate her into the most impolite abuse. I’ll be coming to that.

  He was always good company, though, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit. He was not like Mr Jonson. He did not live much before the public, and he did not love to take them into his confidence. He was a handsome, well-shaped man. He was no great company-keeper, and would not be debauched. If invited to, he would send down a note saying he was in pain.

  I remember a story my mother told me that I never heard anywhere else. It concerned a merchant who returned from the market and brought his youngest daughter a silver saucer and a transparent apple. All day long the girl spun the apple in the saucer, gazing upon it until she beheld the cities of the earth, the rivers and the seas, the flocks and the distant markets. As a child, then, I spun the world round in a silver saucer. And so do I now, with this Life of Mr Shakespeare. It spins and spins till I am frightened by the story. It is a world I cannot hope to understand. I remember at the end of the story my mother told me the girl’s sisters were jealous and killed her with an axe, and took away the transparent apple and the silver saucer. When she was dead they buried her under a birch tree and a single reed grew from her grave and a shepherd made a pipe from it and the pipe played with the voice of the merchant’s daughter. That’s all. That is all that I remember.

  I like stories to be in books, and I like books to be full of stories, but while I like the thought of a never-ending story I like books to have a middle, a beginning, and an end, though not necessarily in that order. This bit will be the middle. I daresay I should have begun with it, but it’s too late now.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  In which Anne Hathaway

  Here is Anne Hathaway walking down Henley Street. She goes down one side, she comes up the other. She is wearing a white gown with a crimson sash of velvet, a hat of plaited straw, long, fine silk gloves to her elbows, new sandals on her feet. It is when she is crossing the road outside the butcher’s shop that she has suddenly to stop and step aside to let a cart go by.

  When Anne tries to move again, it seems that she cannot. She stands stock-still in the middle of Henley Street. She is a handsome woman, twenty-six years old, well-versed in country mat
ters, with a decent little dowry, but so far none of her suitors has asked for her hand in marriage. This might be because of her tongue, which is known to be sharp and shrewd. Besides, it is said that her hand can be had without benefit of clergy. Like Perdita, a queen of curds and cream, she is willing to use it to milk her importunate swains when their needs grow too much. Unlike Perdita, Anne Hathaway now appears to be transfixed in Henley Street.

  Her flat wooden sandals seem stuck fast, in fact, in a deep heap of dung. It is summer, and the dung is thick and warm.

  Miss Hathaway’s father, a farmer, died last year. Her home is at Hewlands Farm, Shottery, about a mile away. There she lives, the eldest daughter, with a stepmother she detests, and her senior brother Bartholomew who is married and who brought in his wife to help him run the farm. Anne’s four younger brothers also live at Hewlands, all aged between four and thirteen, on purpose (she often surmises) to make her life less than the joy it might otherwise be.

  Miss H, in short, is in quest of a husband. At the moment, however, you might think she has a more pressing problem that requires to be solved.

  Anne Hathaway seeks to ease up her right foot within her sandal where it is embedded in the dung, keeping her instep pressed against the thong of whitleather.

  The sandal does not budge in its sticky bed.

  Anne Hathaway shifts her weight and tries to ease up her left foot, this time pressing with her ankle against the thong at the back of the sandal.

  Still no go, apparently.

  The maiden now stuck in the midden is fond of these sandals. They cost her two shillings and sixpence at Evesham Fair.

  Here she stands, in distress, as it seems, in the middle of the road. And the more that she struggles to pull her sandals free without removing her feet from them, the deeper those sandals are sinking in the soft, sticky dung. Flies start to buzz about her. The day is very hot.

  Quite a predicament, reader, I think you’ll agree.

  Presumably Anne Hathaway cannot just slip out of her sandals and walk barefoot in the street. Her feet would get dirty, or they might perhaps be cut. A farmer’s daughter in quest of a husband has in any case at all times to behave like a lady in public, and ladies do not go barefoot on the Queen’s highway.

  Should she then remove her gloves and remove her sandals and then replace her sandals on her feet?

  She could, sir, yes. But a lady does not remove her gloves out of doors, no, quite so, madam.

  Should she then retain her gloves and still remove her sandals and then replace her sandals on her feet?

  I think not, madam, no. For if she does that then her gloves will get covered with dung, yes, indubitably, sir, and they are fine gloves, silk gloves, also purchased at Evesham Fair.

  With gloves on or off, gloves retained or gloves sacrificed, we might also suppose that Anne Hathaway’s predicament is compounded by knowledge that whichever course of action she should decide upon, assuming she cannot simply lift feet complete with sandals out of the dung, then she will have to stoop and bend over in Henley Street in order to accomplish it. Again, here is something a lady would prefer not to do, if she can possibly avoid it.

  So, Anne Hathaway stands, Anne Hathaway is standing there, all of a dither. She flaps her hands about in the long silk gloves. She emits little mewing cries, as the flies go buzz about her, in what she trusts no doubt is a distressed manner. In fact she sounds more like a buzzard that hovers high above its prey.

  What is Anne Hathaway doing? She is looking for a husband. Why should she look in a dunghill? Because it is there.

  Do we know that she has not planned this? We do not. John Shakespeare’s sterquinarium, if not exactly a trysting-place, is something of a landmark in the district. And where the dung is there the flies are found. Anne knows all such proverbs.

  Besides, she has known William Shakespeare since both of them were children. But that eight-year difference in their ages has not enchanted her in his eyes, or so she suspects. She has seemed to him, perhaps, too much of a bossy-boots. So it could be with some cunning that she has devised the present accident.

  Here is Anne Hathaway, standing right outside the house where William Shakespeare lives, apparently vulnerable and undecided in the street, fixed in a nasty predicament which might be blamed in part upon his father, and in a posture that calls out for firm, over-riding male action on the part of the son.

  She is seeking to seem inadequate, frail, and clinging. She has placed herself in a position where he must sweep her off her feet.

  Now a small crowd has gathered to watch her. Children laugh, and the town idiot pelts her with cherry stones.

  Anne Hathaway’s big blue eyes fill up very fetchingly with tears.

  So along comes William Shakespeare on his white horse. It’s a shuffling nag, actually, spavined, old, and with a touch of stringhalt, but it serves well enough for a young man of eighteen with no fortune.

  William Shakespeare draws rein. He tries to spin his horse, but the creature’s not having that. Mr Shakespeare dismounts with a leap, after standing bolt-upright in his stirrups. He tethers his steed to a tree, though there’s probably no need since the creature falls asleep as soon as it stops.

  William Shakespeare approaches Anne Hathaway where she stands in distress.

  William Shakespeare plucks off his bonnet and bows as he comes to the lady.

  With a courteous ‘By your leave’, William Shakespeare gallantly lifts Anne Hathaway up and out of her stuck sandals.

  He carries her in his strong arms to the pavement just outside his father’s shop.

  Then he sets her down very gently in a patch of grassy shadow. Anne wriggles her pretty little toes in the grass as she stands there barefoot. Shakespeare’s eyes observe the gesture. Anne gives him a smile of thanks. He bows again, low.

  Then young Mr Shakespeare strides back to the middle of Henley Street, holding up his left hand modestly to acknowledge the applause of the spectators, and he tugs Miss Hathaway’s wooden sandals out of the dung.

  Even the town idiot cheers.

  In fact, he cheers loudest.

  Now this, as I have already intimated, was not of course the first meeting of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. But it was certainly the first time William lifted Anne up and carried her in his arms.

  By Christmas of that year the pair were married. The licence was applied for at the end of November. It was a special licence, since there was now some haste. Their first child, their daughter Susanna, was born the following May.

  I must have been conceived about the same time as Susanna Shakespeare. I doubt, however, if the circumstances were anything like the same. My father made love to my mother in a confession-box.

  We may suppose, I trust, that Mr Shakespeare gave his Miss Hathaway a green gown. That is to say, the lovers slipped out from a dance into the night, and by the time they returned to the dance the back of Anne’s dancing dress was stained with tell-tale green grass. I like these rural euphemisms. The world would be a more brutal and a less poetic place without them. You can find a use of this ‘green-gown’ phrase, in the explicit sense of ‘giving a girl a green-gown’, somewhere in the works of the poet and parson Robert Herrick, but I’m not able to recall the poem by name. Herrick, I think, is one of the few decent and authentic modern poets. Mr Shakespeare might have liked him, had he lived long enough to read him.

  I have in my possession one stanza of a very early poem which Mr Shakespeare wrote about Anne Hathaway. That poem was remembered for me, in conversation, by his sister, Mrs Joan Hart. The stanza runs like this:

  Thou knowest, my heart, Anne Hathaway!

  She hath a way,

  Anne Hathaway,

  To make thee smart, Anne Hathaway!

  Mr Shakespeare’s sister was in her older years when she recited this for me from memory, but we can assume that her powers of recollection were undiminished. If the tone of the poem is indicative of mixed feelings then the cause will be made clear enough i
n later chapters. While I have some reason to believe that Mr Shakespeare loved his wife, I also have every reason to suspect that he sometimes regretted his marriage, seeing it as not so much a love-match as a wedlock forced upon him because he had got Anne with child. Possibly there were moments when he felt that Anne had ‘caught’ him, and the story which he told me about her misadventure with her sandals in Henley Street was emblematic of his feeling this. Certainly there is nothing of the conventional love-song about the verses remembered by Mrs Hart, and plenty of suspicion concerning Anne’s charming ‘way’ evident in his punning on her surname.

  Mrs Hart told me that there were further stanzas in which her brother addressed his own mind and eyes and other parts accordingly. Alas, these (she said) were gone beyond recall. Judging from the manner in which the quoted stanza works by internal rhyme to make Shakespeare’s heart to smart, we can well suppose that Anne had a way to make his mind either blind or kind, and his eyes perhaps wise. The way she had to please his other parts might be readily inferred, but we cannot deduce by rhyme what that condition was in which she left them. The refrain would have been the same, in any case.

  Mrs Hart also said that her brother told her that Anne Hathaway had fleas in her drawers. I confess I do not know what this means. A country saying, perhaps, like that ‘green gowns’? There were no fleas present in the pair of Mrs Shakespeare’s drawers which I once had the pleasure of inspecting, as you will in due course hear.

  Shakespeare did not marry his Anne in Stratford. The ceremony took place in one of the neighbouring villages, but which one I don’t know. Despite strenuous searches, I have been unable to turn up the record. Mrs Shakespeare made clear to me more than once that she did not want to speak about the matter. His sister replied, in answer to a direct question of mine, that it was not Temple Grafton – the significance of which will be made apparent in my next chapter, where Anne Whateley will be considered as rival bride.