The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  In this box I have kept one other piece of verse which is something of a mystery. I shall insert it here although there is no reason for supposing that it really belongs here. Indeed, it may not belong at all in my Life of William Shakespeare.

  I include it because I feel it to be of some interest, all the same. I found the verses tucked between the pages of a prayer book in Trinity Church. (It was in the middle of the marriage service, perhaps that’s what struck me.) The scrap of thin white paper had been neatly folded and refolded into a tiny square. The handwriting is not Mr Shakespeare’s, but I do not know whose it is. Some say that there was a second butcher’s boy in Stratford, at the same time as Shakespeare, who also made poetical speeches over the slaughtered calves. Perhaps this little piece of versification is his work. That other butcher’s boy died young, so I heard tell, but they are fools who claim that if he had gone on, and run away to London, then he would have turned out to be another William Shakespeare, or even greater.

  Shakespeare’s sister, when I showed her these verses, insisted that she knew nothing about them. However, when I pressed gently, she did confirm that the subject of the lines would almost certainly have been that Emma Careless already noticed in this book as being the lively wife of John Heicroft, the vicar, the object of some unwelcome attention on the part of Shakespeare’s father, and the recorder of the speech-ways of the schoolmaster Jenkins.

  Here are the verses:

  Careless by name, and Careless by nature,

  Careless of fame, and Careless of feature;

  Careless of love, and Careless of hate,

  Careless if crooked, and Careless if straight;

  Careless at table, and Careless in bed,

  Careless if maiden, and Careless if wed –

  Were you Careful for once to return me my love

  I’d care not that Careless to others you’d prove;

  I then should be Careless how Careless you were,

  And the more Careless you, still the less I should care.

  I suppose it is just possible that the lines are by the first butcher’s boy, but I doubt it. Emma Careless, incidentally, was a native of Stratford, who married the Reverend Heicroft two years after his arrival in succession to Bretchgirdle. Five children were born to the Heicrofts while they were in Stratford, though three of them died in their cradles, whether due to Emma’s carelessness or to some other cause I know not. Heicroft is recorded as having preached special sermons for Lent in 1583 and it was on Trinity Sunday of that year – a red-letter day in the calendar of Trinity Church – that he baptised Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna. A year later he moved with Emma to the richer living of Rowington, some ten miles away as the upstart crow might fly.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Shakespeare’s other Anne

  But what of William Shakespeare’s other Anne?

  In the episcopal register of the Bishop of Worcester, John Whitgift, under the date of 27th November, 1582, is the following record of a grant of a licence for marriage:

  ‘Item eodem die similis emanavit licencia inter Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton.’

  Yet one day later the same source lists ‘William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford’ as being able, since sureties have been provided, to marry with only one reading of the banns instead of the usual three. Since these sureties amounted to the not inconsiderable sum of £40, it is quite obvious that the couple were in very great haste to marry. Since they were provided by two farmers, John Richardson and Fulke Sandells, who had been friends of the bride’s late father, it is equally obvious that the Hathaway clan was pressing for William to make an honest woman of the pregnant Anne.

  But are Anne Whateley and Anne Hathaway the same woman? And if they are, and the bishop’s clerk simply made a slip of the pen when he wrote down ‘Whateley’ for ‘Hathaway’, why did he say on one day that the bride resided at Temple Grafton, only to say on the next day that she came from Stratford like the groom?

  My friend the player Weston believed in Anne Whateley. He said she was the true love of Shakespeare’s life. She was a nun (said David), a sister of the Order of St Clare, beautiful, witty, and chaste. She lived at Temple Grafton, in seclusion, and young Will lost his heart to her when he came to do odd jobs in the convent garden. Sister Anne returned his love, but because of her vow of chastity had to deny him what Dr Donne (in his Jack Donne days) once called ‘the right true end of love’. Shakespeare was thinking of this woman when he wrote that line in his poem A Lover’s Complaint: My parts had pow’r to charm a sacred nun. He also celebrated their ‘married chastity’ in The Phoenix and the Turtle. But he was eighteen years old, in the full grip of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, and when Anne Hathaway offered him what Anne Whateley withheld, why, Will went for it. Miss Hathaway’s farmer friends then escorted him to the altar, at the double, as soon as the lass proved pregnant. But Will’s heart belonged to Whateley.

  This is romantic stuff. I cannot wear it.

  Apart from that name and address in the register, there is not a shred of evidence that any Anne Whateley ever existed, let alone in the unlikely guise of a beautiful nun.

  Yet nor can I believe in a mere slip of the pen on the part of an episcopal noverint.

  I suggest that ‘Anne Whateley’ came just for an instant into this world, like that, in inverted commas. In short, that she was an alternative Anne, a sweet fiction conjured up by the young Shakespeare’s imagination as he stood there, no doubt frantic with mixed feelings, giving details of his Intended to the clerk with the quill and the book. For a moment, in his fancy, it was not the Anne he had wronged that he would have to marry, but another Anne, an Idea or Ideal of Anne, the Anne of all Annes he would choose in a perfect world.

  There is an old English word WHATE, meaning fortune, fate, or destiny. I think that in a desperate moment of inspiration, confused before the clerk, Shakespeare reached into his heart and came out with the name of that Anne who would have been his choice, his fate, his destiny. She was no more than a sweet breath of hawthorn across the early hedges, but he had glimpsed her, and seen the way other flowers sprang up whitely where she went. And because this uncreated woman was so real to him, so he blurted out a name for her, and she entered the bishop’s records. The ghost Anne Whateley, Shakespeare’s other Anne.

  But why Temple Grafton? I confess I can find no reason – save that it’s a very pretty village, with an abundance of hawthorn in May, some seven miles west of Stratford, on the north bank of the Avon, and that there’s a green hill there where you can readily imagine the young Shakespeare standing, since it affords a magnificent prospect to the south out over the Cotswolds. On a clear day you can see as far as Cheltenham.

  The day I climbed it I heard a voice singing. It was someone in the distance, whether a man or a woman I could not tell, but the words by some freak of the landskip came clearly upon me:

  On yonder hill there stands a creature

  Who she is I do not know

  I’ll go court her for her beauty

  She must answer Yes or No

  O No John, No John, No John No.

  Last night I watched my whore-child sipping chocolate through a straw. This is the very latest beverage, which some call the Indian Nectar. It is made from the seeds of a tree that grows in Mexico. I know what was being consumed downstairs must have been this Mexican chocolatl. A man like Sir Walter Ralegh brought in my Anne a dish of it on a silver tray.

  I watched her drink that chocolate. Then she brushed her long hair. She brushed it hard, till it glowed black as jet in the candlelight.

  Then my little madam removed very carefully all the strands of her hair adhering to the comb, and held them out at arm’s length with fickle fingers, dropping them one by one to flare up and blaze in the candleflame. She laughed the while, and sat licking her lips flecked with chocolate.

  For some reason I cannot explain, this weird barber-work sent quicksilver running th
rough my ancient veins. I had not thought I could be so enraptured.

  I only put down my boot over the peep-hole when Sir Walter started removing his buckram breeches.

  Then I read a page of Ovid and soon fell fast asleep. I don’t think I have had a better night’s sleep since Jane was killed.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Pickleherring’s nine muses

  In these great decadent days that are upon us, they are allowing women to act upon the stage. The first was Mrs Margaret Hughes, Prince Rupert’s mistress. She took the part of Desdemona. If she was any good, I do not know. I did not go. I said I was in pain.

  In my day women’s parts were of course played always by boys. Some moderns affect to believe that this must have taken from the excellence of the performance. But permit me to assure you to the contrary that it added much to it. Even if it had not, this was the way it was, and Mr Shakespeare wrote those parts for boys to play. Would you hear a tune for the flute performed on the sackbut? It will sound different. The music will not be the same.

  The restriction (if you want to call it that) was one, in any case, that our playwright accepted, and he made the best of it in all kinds of ways. You might even say that the fact that Shakespeare knew that it would be a boy who would be playing the parts he wrote for a woman brought things out of his imagination that might otherwise never have seen the light of day. It was an inspiring constraint. It enabled him to enact the confusions in his own heart. Besides which, the prevalence of boy actors was in my view no drawback to the stage in general. Nearly all boys can act, and some boys can act extremely well. There are few men and women who can act at all.

  It pertains to quite a different order of seriousness to admit that the playing of women’s parts by boys may have limited not Mr Shakespeare’s art as a whole but the shape of the parts themselves. His women are kept within a range of thought and feeling likely to be understood by boys. This probably accounts for their pure animal spirits. There is no trace of the idle woman in her megrims in any Shakespeare play. But then both men and women alike in his work are alive. They never forget that they are animals. They never let anyone else forget that they are also divine.

  In Mr Shakespeare’s comedies, the women dominate. In his tragedies, they do not. Forget Ophelia and Desdemona – they are helpless victims. What catches and enflames our author’s imagination, usually, is a young woman of a different kind – one who by her wit and energy manages to control events in the world around her. A bright young woman. A woman with spunk in her. He had a model for such a woman at home in Anne Hathaway. He had another to hand in the person of picklesome me.

  ‘Acting a part’ – that’s the thing of it. At the heart of Mr Shakespeare’s comedies there is frequently a female character who is acting a part, whether disguising herself as a boy or pretending in some more subtle fashion to be something or someone she is not. (And here I am, sir, doing it all again.)

  Believe me, it is not difficult for a boy to play the part of a woman in comedy, especially when like Rosalind, Portia, Viola, and Imogen he takes the part of a girl pretending to be a boy. Nor does the unsexed Lady Macbeth present many more difficulties. But it gets a bit harder when it comes to the tragic parts of Juliet, and Desdemona, and above all Cleopatra.

  Mr Shakespeare helped me by not making the love passages get ridiculous. There is no passionate kissing in his plays. Better yet, have you ever noticed how his lovers use words to hold each other at arm’s length? Rosalind and Orlando are like a pair of fencers. The same could go for Beatrice and Benedick, and Kate and Petruchio. This device, which works well in comedy, he had to abandon when disposing his tragic lovers. He then found different solutions in different plays. Othello has wooed and married Desdemona before the play begins, and is most intimate with her when he kills her. Cleopatra and Antony are never left alone together, so that unlike the holy priests the audience never sees the queen when she is riggish. In the most passionate scene of Romeo and Juliet the lovers are kept apart by the height of Juliet’s balcony.

  When lovers come together on stage in Shakespeare it is always to die, and not just to make love. Thus he avoided a certain ludicrousness inherent in such situations, given that the woman on stage is really a boy. You might laugh at two same-sex lovers, but not if there’s death in their caress. All the same, when the boy playing the woman has to be the active partner there can be a little trouble, as in that moment when Cleopatra takes Antony in her arms and kisses him, perhaps the most difficult scene in all Shakespeare for a boy to play. (I always found it so.)

  Talking of Cleopatra, Mr Shakespeare even has her remind the audience of the fact that she is being played by a boy, when in Act V, Scene 2, imagining possible indignities, she says:

  I shall see

  Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

  I’ the posture of a whore.

  This was a daring remark, when you come to think about it, in that it was tempting the audience to laugh at me. And thereby hangs a tale. For although Cleopatra was perhaps in theory the greatest part that Mr Shakespeare wrote for me, by the time I came to play it my voice was going. The top of my performance had been Rosalind. I had now begun to croak like any raven. When I first read those lines he was making me say, I protested. Mr S would not have it. ‘If you say it then they will not,’ was all he said, meaning that my self-criticism would disarm our audience. He was right. All the same, I did squeak and croak a bit as Cleopatra, and the play was never the success he knew it should have been.

  I don’t know if it proved a success for Prince Rupert’s sackbut. Had she asked my advice I would have told her (or any woman) to begin her study of how to play a woman’s part in Shakespeare by first of all imagining herself a boy. It is a perverse paradox, no doubt, madam. And yet I do assure you that it holds a truth.

  There are nine Muses, but don’t ask me to name them. I forgot all things like that long, long ago. But there are also nine great woman’s parts in Shakespeare, female roles which correspond in some degree to the nine Muses, only because they are women not immortals they are more interesting. Those parts are these: Cleopatra, Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Portia, Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind. (I leave out Cressida because that’s actually a smaller part than everyone seems to remember, and I never cared for that scene in which she has to kiss the Greek generals in turn.) I played all those parts for Mr Shakespeare. O yes, I, Pickleherring, was his nine muses.

  Let me try now to recall for you a few of the details I put into them – in common with my method throughout this book, the sort of things you will never learn anywhere else. I wore, of course, different wigs for the different women. Ophelia had hair like barley; Desdemona was gold; Beatrice was auburn; Viola was dark; Rosalind had red hair – but then I used the same wig for Lady Macbeth, with the late Mr Shakespeare’s approval, he liked little tricks like that.

  As Rosalind, I used not just to strut, but to jump about. I played her as not so much a character as the characterisation of a mood, an exquisite poetic ‘essence’. Impetuous starts and headlong darts, provocative pouts and charming – well, I almost said ‘shouts’ for the sake of the rhyme, but I don’t think I ever shouted in the part of Rosalind, nor in any other part save Ariel. (By the time of The Tempest I was too antique and venerable for women’s roles, being twenty-eight years old when we did it first at court.) So let us say that I spoke the part of Rosalind in much the same voice that Lear approves in his dead Cordelia when he remarks: Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low – an excellent thing in woman. It made a good contradiction: soft voice and boyish gestures. That proved much to our author’s liking.

  I think that’s what he liked in me from the start, my voice. For the voice I employed for Rosalind was really my own voice. Once I asked Mr Shakespeare what it was he liked in me that day when I first met him. ‘Your boots,’ he said. But when I frowned and pouted (as I daresay I did) he said that my thought that day had been sweet-voiced and quick as a singing bird�
��s. That pleased me very much. That he thought that I thought.

  Anyway, I remember that I could always enchant him, on stage or off, with that simple phrase of Rosalind’s to Celia, after she has got rid of Orlando: ‘O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz.’ I could make that sound soft and intimate and sleepy, like the murmur of a ring-dove.

  What did Mr Shakespeare teach me as an actor? He taught me principles of grace and sweetness. He taught me to say my lines and to listen with my eyes as well as my ears when I was on stage while others were saying their lines. He instructed me not to knock over the furniture or trip in my gowns. (I had in those far-off days a waist that suited a stomacher, and I had sufficient agility to manage the Elizabethan farthingale, more cumbrous than girls’ skirts you see today.) He encouraged me to be myself, whoever and whatever that might be. He gave me lessons in expressing the infancy of knowledge, in which he said I had to learn to read with the eye of a bird, and to speak with the tongue of a bee, and to understand with the heart of a child. These were not easy lessons, but I was a willing pupil. Give me leave to wonder if Mrs Hughes went to school like this.

  Mr Shakespeare, my master, did not care for mannish women. Boyish ones, yes, they were a different matter. Bold ones, sharp-tongued ones, disarming ones: they were to his liking. Slim ones, and fashionable. I cut a fashionable figure, let me tell you, when I was playing any of those girl-into-boy-into-girl transformations of which he was so fond. He liked to get me out of my dress and into doublet, cloak, and trunk-hose – and then back again, once I’d strutted my stuff for a bit. All this cross-dressing suited some secret theatre he kept in his head, where all his plays came from.