by Robert Nye
I could tell you, for example, that he had three brothers – Gilbert, Edmund, and Richard – as well as a rather more interesting sister whose name was Joan.
I could tell you also that in 1597 he bought the second largest house in Stratford, and that the death of his father in 1601 brought him possession of the house in Henley Street as well. And that he purchased another hundred acres in Stratford from a family called Combe, and a cottage in Chapel Lane in 1602, and an interest in the tithes of Welcombe and Bishopton as well as Stratford parish.
I could tell you, for example, that he sued in Stratford court for small debts in 1604 (versus Philip Rogers, an apothecary) and in 1608 (versus a man called Addenbrooke).
I could tell you, for instance, of his 10% share in our Company’s profits. Or of how he did his bit (without getting his hands dirty) when we had to dismantle the Theatre at the Christmas of 1598, when our lease ran out, carrying each brick across the river, rebuilding our playhouse on Bankside as the Globe.
I could tell you of his various London lodgings: of how he lived for a while in a house on the north side of Fleet Street, two doors west of the end of Chancery Lane – thus under the very shadow of Temple Bar; of how subsequently he removed to the seventh house on the west side of Chancery Lane; then of his later lodging in the Liberty of the Clink just round the corner from where I’m writing now; and of his final property transaction – the purchase of the Gatehouse near King’s Wardrobe and Puddle Wharf, which he put on mortgage.
When I say that these things are uninteresting I do not mean to deny that there is a certain piquancy, for instance, in thinking of a poet whose name is wedded with lady-smocks and cuckoo-buds living at certain addresses in the din of the heart of London. I mean only that there are things like this in everyone’s life, and that they are not what matters in the end, not what makes each one of us unique, although we like to know them.
What I really have to tell you is quite other. It might also strike you as uninteresting, but it is not uninteresting in the way of these dry facts.
What I really have to tell you is not facts at all.
What I really have to tell you consists of fictions.
Reader, our real lives are fictions.
Be sure that fiction is the best biography.
Procopius knew this. So did Suetonius. So, for that matter, did the four Evangelists. Nothing better confirms the truth of what they tell us, those four, than the way they slightly contradict each other on matters of fact. They knew that the true story is what cannot be told.
Here, then, as my small contribution to the true story of William Shakespeare are several uninteresting things about him which are not facts. These fictions have at least the interest that you will not have heard them before, and that you will not learn them from any other source if Pickleherring does not put them down now in this chapter.
1. Mr Shakespeare was never at home either in London or in Stratford. He didn’t say so. He wouldn’t. He was reticent. But you could see he was thinking of something else the way he spoke to his dog. When he spoke to me it was as if he knew I was out of earshot but he didn’t blame me. He had also a way of looking at me as if he knew I was somebody else. I didn’t like days when he looked at me like that. Not that I wanted him to be kind to me, madam. He had no need to be kind to me. You could say I was kind to him, but that is an irrelevance. All right – he was a very great poet, but very great natures are not easy to get on with.
2. Truth, now. Mr Shakespeare used to talk a lot about truth. On the first night of Othello I remember him saying, ‘Truth is a whore, who requires some compensation for being summoned.’ It is a wise saying, though personally I have never kidneyed with the creatures. You could not hear him speak and not know what he meant. Clarity like that is not achieved in a day. His whole life was one long summer of creation. His very spit was eloquent, by the end. By the time of Othello we had moved from a daylight to a lamplight theatre, which is why I speak of a first night. The lamplight pleased the wits, not so much the groundlings.
3. A day spent with Shakespeare? A day spent with Shakespeare may be in your eyes, madam, something so wonderful to contemplate that you can scarcely understand that I can let many such pass without note or comment. And yet many days we did nothing but rehearse, and then rehearse. And many days we did nothing but sit and watch rats in the river. Those last were the days I felt nearest to him. I cannot recall a word he said about the rats, but I never watched rats so closely when not in his company. With anyone else, I’d have thought I was wasting my time. With Shakespeare, those rats were the meaning of existence.
4. Mr Shakespeare in his youth heard singing masons building roofs of gold. Mr Shakespeare in his middle years drank a drop of happiness, an old brown drop of golden wine. Mr Shakespeare in his last years looked down a well of eternity – the joyous, awful noontide abyss.
5. I never caught William Shakespeare looking at the new moon through glass. He was not fond of the moon, not overmuch. He was fastidious regarding her. But the full moon in the Thames, Mr Shakespeare would smile at that. And the sunsets over the Pool of London, sometimes. Let me get this right, what did Mr Shakespeare say about sunsets? ‘I detest sunsets: their composition is careless.’ But a moonless night now, that was a different story. Once, about the time when storms destroyed the second Armada, we were looking at the sky above the Curtain, the audience gone home, the stage in darkness, and I made bold to ask him which star he had fixed his eye on, and he answered, ‘I am not looking at a star; I am looking past the stars.’ His eyes were like icicles, and when I looked into them I saw that it was true – I, Pickleherring, saw beyond the stars, but only in the eyes of William Shakespeare.
6. The day that Mr Shakespeare drank himself blind. He wore a black coat, white gloves, in his hat-band a red rose. His hat itself was grey. It was that sleek copataine, high-crowned, he had been wearing when first I met him. He met John Florio in the park, who was jealous of him. John Florio had cause. They did not speak. Not a word was exchanged between them on this occasion. Mr Shakespeare had a hawk upon his wrist, and he let it fly at the white turtle doves that fluttered about Mr Florio. Blood and white feathers fell about the two men’s heads, but they never moved. Mr Shakespeare raised his hat when the slaughter was over.
7. I remember when I played the flute for him at Windsor and he said, ‘Don’t’. He was right, of course, he had reason. The music made his ear bleed. Though I had something of a reputation, madam, I may say. (All flute-players are mad: In comes music at one ear, out goes wit at the other.) As I was playing I saw Mr Shakespeare’s left hand go bloodless. And he never used it well, I think, after that night. Not that it was a blemish. It was an act of criticism.
8. I shall never forget the day he (almost) shook hands with the Earl of Essex. He had been writing Henry V, and inventing helmets. Essex was cross. He liked the helmets, certainly. But he said, quote When the sun shines upon them it will give away the disposition of our troops unquote. But Mr Shakespeare was ready for Robert Devereux. He replied, ‘If your dispositions are such that they can be interpreted by the enemy I shall take my helmets elsewhere.’ The Earl was thunderstruck. It was then that they shook hands, almost. In sight of the whole army. Essex approached from the east. The sun was glinting on his helmet (he had put it on at once). Mr Shakespeare came at him from the north, limping ever so slightly. The plume in my master’s hat, green, green as goose turd, tossed in the light summer breeze. Mr Shakespeare never wore a helmet, to my knowledge. Essex marched at a lope. Mr Shakespeare, at a canter. The dogs were scratching themselves in the sun. Towards the end, the Earl, alarmed, saw that the necessary junction of soldier and poet was by no means inevitable. His right hand, outstretched, brushed the shining back of Mr Shakespeare’s coat as he sped downhill. Let us recapitulate. Mr Shakespeare is speeding down the hillock towards the south, and indeed towards the Irish rebels. The Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, is, as it were, unreturnably advanced towards the west, laying his
shadow behind him on the evening turf, but nonetheless at some risk. He is already within gunshot of Tyrone’s battery on that monticle. The English troops, at a loss, have the sun in their eyes. The Lord Lieutenant and his friend’s poet are being unaccountably careless. Then both men halt, as the bagpipes skirl. They laugh, Mr Shakespeare first, then the Earl joining in, though separated by no less than a furlong of bogland. Tyrone and his cartload of priests are surprised and vexed. I forget what happened next, but it was first-class. Tyrone stamps his foot and all hell’s let loose. The Earl of Essex laid men upon the turf, to left and right, until his troops came up, and then sought out Southampton’s pet once more. Mr Shakespeare danced among the cannonballs. He spat upon them where they landed, to hear the hot iron hiss. It was against all the proper usages of war.
9. Was Mr Shakespeare mad, madam? The question is ridiculous. He was the least mad man I ever knew. Yet love (if you will pardon me for saying so) is itself a madness, a war, a hell, an incurable disease, and William Shakespeare was in love with Lucy Negro, an impossible object for any man’s desire. Let lovers sigh out the rest. I’m sure they will.
Chapter Eighty
In which boys will be girls
Some of those wretched Puritans got it right. They knew, at least, the sex of it, the way the audience’s excitement at a performance of Romeo and Juliet, say, was something both peculiar and perverse. What was being enacted in our playhouse was the same hot thing that had been enacted centuries before, in the beginning of the theatre, at those exaltations which formed part of the worship of the god Dionysus. Aeschylus calls that god ‘the womanly one’. In Euripides, he is ‘the womanly stranger’. At times he has also been termed ‘man-womanish’. The sexes are fused in him. The arousal he causes in his followers is like nothing else. He is the great enigma at the heart of a mystery.
You get the same idea in alchemy. There the hierosgamos or coniunctio is the chemical wedding of male and female in one. No alchemist myself, I know what this means.
When I put on my rose-coloured petticoats and my high-heeled shoes with roses, when I wore quilted and beaded under-skirts and long, hard bodices stiffened with whalebone and encrusted with embroidery and gold lace, when I pulled up my cart-wheel farthingale to be spanked as the shrew, or bewailed all the perfumes of Arabia as I sleep-walked in Lady Macbeth’s nightgown of Judas-colour satin faced with fur, I was both female and male, the flower and the thorn. Sometimes, quite intoxicated by my roles, bewildered and bewitched by all the woman’s words I had to say, I think I imagined myself one of those devotees of the goddess Isis, who castrated themselves and changed sex to become her. At such times, no doubt, my performance was particularly good, and in the eyes of the audience I perhaps became Cordelia or Desdemona, Cleopatra or Juliet. At other times, though, more thoroughly and more often, I was the perfect androgyne, male and female in one, changing from boy to girl and back again, to the very great excitement of my audience. That it excited me, and how, I have already told you. The fervour and fever in the spectators was mostly to be inferred from their rapt and breathless silence. But once or twice I saw certain poor souls in the shadows quite carried away, jerking off under cover of their cloaks, or pressed up hard against their neighbours. I was never insulted by this. It stood tribute to my art, as to the mystery of our craft.
Consider: in all orgies, at all times in history, cross-dressing has been of the essence. Put a man in a woman’s clothes, or a woman in a man’s, and you have instantly an invitation to sweet disorder, to sexual riot and confusion, and to a breakdown of all the usual inhibitory canons of behaviour.
I say that the spectacle of boys dressed as women on our stage was meant to be erotically exciting. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or is lying. What’s more, Mr Shakespeare’s plays, more than any other plays ever written, play about with this sexual confusion to a point where I insist I do not exaggerate by likening their effect to what happened in the worship of the great god Dionysus.
Some of the Puritans knew this, as I said. Here is John Rainoldes (no relation!), writing in 1599 on Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Plays, after seeing me as Beatrice kissing Benedick at the end of Much Ado About Nothing:
‘When Critobulus kissed the son of Alcibiades, a beautiful boy, Socrates said he had done amiss and very dangerously: because, as certain spiders, if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a kind of poison, the poison of incontinency.’
In another passage in the same pamphlet, Rainoldes gets even hotter on the subject:
‘Those monsters of nature, which burning in their lust one towards another, men with men work filthiness, are as infamous as Sodom: not the doers only, but the sufferers also.’
This Rainoldes must have been a closet sodomite, since that is all the thrust of his argument. No sodomite myself, I say our subversions were more terrible even than he imagined. Making men burn for men was only one aspect of the matter.
Here is Phillip Stubbes, whose The Anatomy of Abuses was published in the year that I was born, so he cannot be talking about my performances, yet the general argument is much the same:
‘It is written in the 22nd chapter of Deuteronomy that what man so ever weareth woman’s apparel is accursed, and what woman weareth man’s apparel is accursed also … Our apparel was given us as a sign extinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, & therefore one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the verity of his own kind. Wherefore these women may not improperly be called Hermaphroditi, that is, monsters of both kinds, half women, half men.’
Now, I, old Tiresias Pickleherring, say that there is much truth in Mr Stubbes’s wholesome fulminations, and I should know. When I wore a woman’s dress and spoke the woman’s words written for me by Mr Shakespeare I did indeed PARTICIPATE with a woman’s sex, and no doubt (thus initiate) I was guilty of adulterating the verity of my own kind. And yet how sweet, how very sweet it was! And what is my own kind, in any case, since all my long life it has seemed to me that I am Sappho imprisoned in a man’s body?
Stubbes does at least do credit to the general disorder inspired by our cross-dressing, not just concentrating on the issue of effeminacy to the exclusion of all else. He sees quite clearly that the theatre is a pagan temple (which is why he abhors it), and that the god who is worshipped there is not Jehovah (nor even perhaps a male deity), and that the worshippers leave the place filled with a spirit which moves them to several different expressions of human passion:
‘For proof whereof, but mark the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then, these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomites, or worse.’
Regarding the strange gender of the spirit behind the ecstasy of the playhouse, Stubbes is also on to something real when he associates the practice of cross-dressing with the power of women over men:
‘I never read or heard of any people except drunken with Circe’s cups, or poisoned with the exorcisms of Medea that famous and renowned sorceress, that ever would wear such kind of attire as is not only stinking before the face of God, and offensive to man, but also painteth out to the whole world the venereous inclination of their corrupt conversation.’
I have just the one more pamphlet in this box. It is the most arresting of them all – the Histrio-Mastix of William Prynne, published in London in 1633. Prynne sees that boys dressing as girls not only excites the boys ‘to self-pollution (a sin for which Onan was destroyed) and to that unnatural sodomitical sin of uncleaness to which the reprobate Gentil
es were given over’, it also transforms them into women:
‘And must not our own experience bear witness of the unvirility of playacting? May we not daily see our players metamorphosed into women on the stage, not only by putting on the female robes, but likewise the effeminate gestures, speeches, pace, behaviour, attire, delicacy, passions, manners, arts and wiles of the female sex, yea, of the most petulant, unchaste, insinuating strumpets that either Italy or the world affords?’
This is the finest critique I ever had! That Mr Prynne in his youth had seen me in the part of Cleopatra I have no doubt, especially since elsewhere in his Histrio-Mastix he works himself into another lather over such matters as Cleopatra’s clothing herself in the habit of Isis during the course of that play, not to speak of her dressing her lover in her own ‘tires and mantles’ whilst she straps on his sword:
‘A man’s clothing himself in maid’s attire is not only an imitation of effeminate idolatrous priests and pagans who arrayed themselves in woman’s apparel when they sacrificed to their idols, and their Venus, and celebrated plays unto them (which as Lyra, Aquinas, and Alensis well observe was one chief reason why this text of Deuteronomy prohibits men’s putting on of women’s apparel as an abomination to the Lord), but a manifest approbation and revival of this their idolatrous practice. Therefore it must certainly be abominable, and within the very scope and letter of this inviolable Scripture, even in this regard.’
