The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  I wish I could hear what he says as he walks in the garden. I wish I could hear what he says when it comes to that reckoning.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  More

  These were William Shakespeare’s earliest plays, all written and performed between 1587 and that terrible year of ’93 when Marlowe was murdered and the plague caused the shutting of the playhouses:

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona 1 King Henry VI

  The Comedy of Errors 2 King Henry VI

  Titus Andronicus 3 King Henry VI

  The Taming of the Shrew Richard II

  Romeo and Juliet Love’s Labour’s Lost

  It will be seen that his rate of production ran from the start at about two plays a year – which is something I know he counted professional, unlike on the one side the torrent of thin stuff that was pouring from such as the amiable Thomas Heywood, and on the other side the costiveness of Mr Ben Jonson who seemed able only to squeeze out his ‘humours’ at long intervals and after much grunting and straining.

  However, in these first years of Mr Shakespeare’s industry there was more. Pardon me, gentles, I pun unpardonably. I mean that to this period we should also ascribe his original workings on that Hamlet play which haunted him a good half of his working life, growing longer and longer in the process, until some of our Company considered it unplayable; and also that other white elephant, the play they called More.

  Before getting into that, though, a word about WHITE ELEPHANTS. Here is an image Mr Shakespeare would not have known, but which I find useful. I have it from a translation of Pinto’s Travels published three years ago. It seems that the King of Siam makes a present of a white elephant to such of his courtiers as he wishes to ruin on account of their obnoxiousness. Your white elephant, you see, being a huge and a delicate creature, costs so much to keep that none but a king can afford it. Thus, by extension, a man might beggar himself by wasting all his fortune on some pet article. For example, a person moving is determined to keep a rich and expensive carpet, so hires too grand a house just to fit the carpet. There are, as I say, such WHITE ELEPHANTS to be found among the works of William Shakespeare.

  The More play (since this morning I feel like mixing my metaphors to spice my gruel) could also be said to have been a WHITE ELEPHANT which turned into a POISONED CHALICE. Several playwrights had a hand in it. It was a waste of all their time.

  The idea was Anthony Munday’s. He sketched out the plot. Henry Chettle then took over, taking out some of the religious polemic which had disfigured Munday’s draft. The play was to be called More (more or less), and it was to chronicle the main events in the life of Sir Thomas More, King Henry VIII’s chancellor, from his rise to favour, through his friendship with Erasmus and opposition to the King, to his fall and his death on the scaffold.

  Frankly, I could have told them that this would not do. An historical drama in praise of her father’s martyred arch-enemy was hardly likely to give much pleasure to Queen Elizabeth. As it turned out, the play was refused a licence to be performed. Most of it disappeared into the strongbox of Sir Edmund Tilney, censor and Master of the Revels, and was never seen again.

  Here, in my own 64th little strongbox, I have William Shakespeare’s contribution to this More, the only example I know to survive of his work as a cobbler and patcher of other men’s plays. I am quite sure that the original idea could not have been his – religious and political controversy being a hurly (patience, madam!) which he always went out of his way to avoid. But at some point he was called in by old Mr Burbage to write the most difficult scene, in which More, as sheriff of London, uses his eloquence to quell the riot of the apprentices who wish to drive all foreigners out of the city.

  The passage is passionate Shakespeare, a paean in praise of the necessity of respect for order and degree. It was a concept he worked out most completely in the great speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida.* The scene as a whole has much in common with another he wrote later – that scene where Menenius Agrippa calms the plebs in Rome in Coriolanus. As there, you can see him shifting sympathy from the rioters to the man who masters them by dint of just and reasoned argument. Not only the style but some of the words of Coriolanus are prefigured. Without law, says More, ‘men, like ravenous fishes / Would feed on one another’. Coriolanus upholds the rule of the senate who ‘Under the gods, keep you in awe, which else / Would feed on one another’. The shouts of the rioters in More are identical with those later used in Julius Caesar, and Shakespeare begins More’s speech with what sounds to me like a clumsy throat-clearing rehearsal for Mark Antony’s Friends, Romans, countrymen! when he has the sheriff address the mob as Friends, masters, fellow-citizens!

  If you look closer at the vocabulary which Mr Shakespeare deploys in this lost scene of the suppressed play More then there is even (forgive me) more that rewards attention. Here are to be found such phrases as ‘in ruff of your opinion clothed’, and ‘stale custom’, and ‘unreverent knees’, as well as ‘self-right’ and ‘self-reason’ – all expressions dear to WS and which he alone employed. His use of the word SHARK as a verb (‘would shark on you’) is a peculiarity which I have encountered nowhere else save in his own Hamlet.

  Another idiosyncratic thing of interest here is that in the More manuscript fragment the word SILENCE is spelt as scilens. The late Mr Shakespeare always spelt that word that way. It is the old-fashioned way. (You will find it thus in Caxton.) Usually the printer corrected these ancient spellings when it came to setting the plays in type, but not invariably. In the Quarto of 2 King Henry IV, for example, you will find Justice Silence called Scilens not once or twice but eight times!

  Is this too bibliotic? I apologise. But the world is a book, sir.

  I am citing all this, besides, because otherwise such information might be lost for ever, along with the whole play of More. The other plays, early and late, you can read for yourself in the Folio. Pickleherring seeks always to give you what you cannot get from any other source.

  The lines being the draft of Mr Shakespeare’s contribution as it stood before the whole went to the copyist, they tell us even more about his methods. It is plain, for example, that he was a careless contributor to the work in hand – he shows no respect for the play as a whole, distributing his speeches among the rioters with such titles as Other, instead of the name of a character. In one passage, where his usual fluency dries up, he leaves two and a half lines so tangled and confused that the book-keeper (Mr Burbage?) has struck them out and substituted a half-line of his own.

  I mean that passage where Shakespeare first writes:

  to kneel to be forgiven

  Is safer war than ever you can make

  Whose discipline is riot; why even your war

  Cannot proceed but by obedience.

  Then (perhaps observing that he has used the word WAR in two successive lines) he strikes out the second ‘war’ and substitutes the word HURLY, a favourite synonym of his to cover all forms of contention, which he uses in at least three other plays.* The lines now read:

  to kneel to be forgiven

  Is safer war than ever you can make

  Whose discipline is riot; why even your hurly

  Cannot proceed but by obedience.

  That seems perfectly put to your author, but still it did not satisfy Mr Shakespeare, because he then inserts after the word RIOT, the phrase ‘In, in to your obedience’, perhaps wanting More to be more vigorous and direct. However, it is obvious that this pleases him no better, for he did not relate it to what followed, but instead gives up, leaving the passage a jumble as it stands. It is this that Mr Burbage, unable to solve the difficulty, has drawn his pen through, for there in quite another hand we see the tame and unShakespearean:

  Tell me but this.

  Now because these manuscript pages reveal much of Mr Shakespeare’s method of composing, and the better to preserve them in context for a possible posterity, I intend to paste one of them into my book. Thus, if the two in the box are lost t
hen this one may survive, and vice versa.

  I will offer two general observations about them.

  First, by their very carelessness (sometimes he even scribbles Oth and O to indicate successive speakers whose names he can’t be bothered with) they suggest that Shakespeare already at the time of their writing held such a high place among his fellows that they recognised his superior talent by indulging him. They may have been so grateful that he deigned to contribute to the More play that they did not even complain when he scrawled Moo as a cipher for Sir Thomas More.

  Second, with the one exception examined above, there are few alterations. You can see where he sometimes struck out a word, or the start of a word, almost as soon as he had written it, following on at once with his second thought. All this is evidence of Mr Shakespeare’s quick hand and quicker brain, his fertility and his facility. You will see that sometimes his hand stumbled, but less often his thought – as when he starts to write the word NUMBER with mu, and then writes in instead of NO. As to actual corrections, all of them involve the substitution of better words within the lines: watery is changed to sorry, help to advantage, god to he, only to solely.

  All this evidence of speed and ease in composition bears out, of course, what Mr Heminges and Mr Condell said in their address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ in the Folio – that Mr Shakespeare’s mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with such easiness that ‘we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’ Pickleherring can confirm this. When my master’s mind was white-hot it was a wonder that the page did not catch fire beneath his hand, so fast his pen ran. He wrote the first two acts of Macbeth in a single day. (All the same, he went on writing Hamlet all his life.) Here, then, is the page from the More for you to see these things, dear reader, with your own eyes:

  * Act I, Scene 3, lines 75-137.

  * Taming of the Shrew, King John – and I forget the other.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  A look at William Shakespeare

  Imagine William Shakespeare in his prime. It is the April of 1594, say, and he is thirty years old today. He might be at his lodgings in London, though if he is there will be little enough for him to do here, the theatres having been shut down for over a year on account of the worst outbreak of the plague in living memory. (Fifteen thousand persons died of it in the last twelve months.) More likely, then, that he is in the provinces with his Company; or perhaps staying at Titchfield, the country house of his patron the Earl of Southampton; or he might even be at home with his wife and their three children …

  The place is not important. Where he is does not matter.

  It is the face of William Shakespeare that I want you to look at.

  It is a frank face, though it keeps many secrets. Fair-skinned, fresh-cheeked, it is a face that blushes easily to reveal its owner’s heart. It is a good-looking face, with firm, delicate features, and a gaze both calm and observant under brows set low.

  It is a worldly face: sensual, sceptical, alert. The eyes are blue, and they dance with bright amusement most of the time. When they do not, the look they give you is straight and unwavering. He has a somewhat drooping lower lip.

  That foolish hanging of his nether lip – I think he said he got it from his mother. His forehead, though, is splendid. Like the dome of an observatory.

  The most singular feature, no doubt, is the poet’s nose. It is broader at the nostrils than down the straight, solid bridge. It is tip-tilted (slightly), and those nostrils arch quickly at the least unpleasant smell. All Mr Shakespeare’s senses are acute, but you can see his sense of smell at work, thanks to that singular nose. He is most sensitive to dirt and evil odours. Put him in a room with a spaniel and a tainted bone and watch the way his eyes water and his nose twitches. His senses revolt from the way dogs are fed at table. But if he is your guest, he will say nothing. He is very polite. He is very ‘After you’.

  There is a small mole high on his left cheek.

  I said his brow was splendid, and so it is. His hair, though, soft and brown, is receding from the forehead. Cheeks and chin are firmly moulded. He has downy moustaches and a small brown tuft of beard. Although the lower lip is more prominent than the upper, both are finely shaped. Their most characteristic expression is a faint ironic smile.

  I only ever saw two portraits that came near doing this face justice. The first, the frontispiece of the Folio, that immortal piece of inferior engraving by Martin Droeshout. It is inferior, but it catches the man I knew. The other’s that Stratford bust created by Gerard Jannsen, which (again) is no great work of art, but a pretty good likeness to how Mr Shakespeare looked in his later years. Note that both the Droeshout engraving and the Jannsen bust won the approval of those who knew him best – in the first instance, his fellow players; in the second, his widow and his daughters, and his sister. Two images of the Shakespeare I knew and loved.

  In the bust, of course, the face has grown somewhat thicker, been a little bit coarsened. But the brow is still large and lofty, and the eyes do not leave you. He was always a well-built man, tall and lithe, his body nimble even when he put on weight.

  I remember once we stood together by a haystack to shun a shower, and the rain ran down his face, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Mr Shakespeare’s tongue slipping out slyly, this way and that, just the merest quick flicker, like an adder’s, to get a taste of the raindrops on their way. I did not let him know I had seen him do it. But ever afterwards I have thought that the act was essential Shakespeare. He was a man who wanted to taste the sweetness and the bitterness of everything. He would eat each day to the core, and the dark night too. He smiled to himself as he feasted on those raindrops.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Pickleherring’s list of the world’s lost plays

  There are several lost plays in this careless world. Some went down to Cromwell, some were eaten by rats. Here, I will provide you with my list of them:

  The Biter Bit

  The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl

  Rhodon and Iris

  Queen Dido

  All and Everything

  The Bride Stript Bare

  The Birth of Merlin

  Whistle Binkie

  Amends for Ladies

  The Bride’s Maids Spankt

  Cardenio

  Every Man Erect

  Fair Em

  All to Bed

  The Way Things Happen

  A Knot of Fools

  The Tragedy of Gowrie

  When a Man’s Single

  Dogs, a Masque with Music

  The Chemical Wedding

  Love Lies Bleeding

  Ninus and Semiramis

  The Elder Brother

  The Passionate Shepherdess

  Perkin Warbeck

  The Twins’ Tragedy

  Right You Are (If You Think You Are)

  Topcliffe, his Boots: or The Parsing of the Papist

  Mr Poe

  Udolpho

  Two Lovers Killed By Lightning

  The Incompetent Hawk, or In Two Fell Swoops

  Arden of Faversham

  Locrine

  The Devil’s Jig

  Dramatic Eternity: Scene 666

  Of these lost plays, only Cardenio was by William Shakespeare (writing in collaboration with Mr John Fletcher). We presented it at Whitehall, before the Duke of Savoy, quite late in Mr Shakespeare’s lifetime, but that’s all I can recall of the wretched thing. The player Thomas Betterton may have a copy of it, as he claims he has, in the handwriting of Mr Downes, the famous prompter. If so, why he has never yet ushered it into the world, I do not know. There is a tradition (which I will merely mention) that Mr Shakespeare gave the script of this play, as a present of value, to a natural daughter of his, for whose sake he wrote it, at the time of his retirement from the stage. I can only say that this daughter was not known to your humble servant.

  Mr Betterton is in the habit of talking about three other plays which he claims were the work
of Mr Shakespeare, namely:

  The History of King Stephen

  Duke Humphrey, a Tragedy

  Iphis and Iantha, or A Marriage Without a Man, a Comedy

  Frankly, I never heard of any of them, and Betterton’s story that they perished when Mrs Shakespeare ‘unluckily burnt ’em by putting ’em under pie bottoms’ speaks (in my opinion) for itself.

  Love’s Labour’s Won, though, is a different matter.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Love’s Labour’s Won

  Love’s Labour’s Won is, in fact, the first version of the play now known as All’s Well That Ends Well. It was one of Mr Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, a companion piece in spirit to his Love’s Labour’s Lost.

  I count this particular revision a spoiling and a pity. The trouble with All’s Well That Ends Well is that you can see two hands at work in it. Both of them are Shakespeare, but the second is Shakespeare in a ruthless mood. Something about the froth of the original dissatisfied him. But in slashing out several key speeches he had given to Helena he removed, in my opinion, the heart of the thing.