The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

  Before I leave the subject, ladies and gentlemen, picture to yourselves for a moment a pretty page boy pulling on a pair of Queen Elizabeth’s black silk stockings when his mistress’s back is turned. Then think of the boy’s prick nestling in a pair of the Queen’s warm discarded satin drawers, and being stirred perhaps to tumescence by the touch of their texture and the thought of Her. These images, I submit, excite both men and women. They are indifferent in their sexual excellence. It is the silk excitement makes us hot. It is the mixture of identities and tokens of sex: the Queen, the young boy, the soft and private petals, the sharp, upthrusting thorn. It is the silken confusion – that element of the forbidden, the perverse, the opposites kissing as they cross – which so fascinates and engrosses our senses. The dress is female, while groin and fist are male. This is the ultimate and primal image, the mystery enacted in that theatre of the soul which our bodies will avow before our minds. This is the play of all plays, the drama that Mr Shakespeare could not write, but which he wrote over and over by not writing it. All the secrets of creation can come down to this little scene. It is the secret dream in the darkest chamber. This is what happens in Lucy Negro’s seventh room.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  In which Mr Shakespeare is mocked by his fellows

  William Shakespeare was now so famous and successful that his rivals started mocking him. Such was ever the way of the world. They envied him his fluency and his facility, as well as the great popularity of his work with all manner of people. By this time our upstart crow had produced eight comedies and twelve tragedies. He had also published two much-reprinted poems that everyone was talking about on account of their high erotic content and mellifluous versification. And besides all this, he had been responsible for adapting and reworking at least a dozen old plays, and was always being asked by the Company to spice up and improve the plays we had in stock.

  Given this acclaim, and the spite that comes naturally to certain poets, it is not surprising that some of Mr Shakespeare’s contemporaries found fault with him. Ben Jonson, in particular, was very jealous.

  There was a deep difference of temperament between the two men. I can best suggest this by remembrance of the few occasions when Mr Shakespeare was persuaded to the Mermaid tavern by his friends (his usual habit, as I have said, being to avoid attendance by sending down a note that he was ‘in pain’). Jonson held court in the Mermaid, he was its uncrowned king. His sycophants danced attendance on him there, hanging on his every word, laughing obedience to each laboured joke that fell from his lips, licking his arse as if his shit was nectar. He would sit there sweating in his own carved chair, a mountain of flesh with pock-marked face and albino hair and eyes, wearing a coat like a coachman’s, with slits under the arm-pits. He had once been a brick-layer, then he had fought in the wars in Flanders. A mediocre actor, in truth he was at first not much more successful when he turned playwright. During these difficult years, Jonson quarrelled with an actor of Henslowe’s company, a man called Gabriel Spencer, and killed him in a duel in Hogsden Fields. He only escaped hanging by invoking the ‘Benefit of Clergy’ clause, calling for a Bible and reading in Latin the verses of the 51st psalm. This proof of erudition reduced his punishment, but his thumb was branded with a T for Tyburn.

  Down at the Mermaid, he met more than his match in Shakespeare. In their wit-combats, Jonson was like a Spanish great galleon, while our hero was an English man-of-war. Jonson, that is to say, while physically more impressive, and giving every impression of being built higher out of the water in terms of Learning, was but solid and slow in his performance. Shakespeare, our English frigate, lesser in bulk, could outmanoeuvre him in any exchange, being lighter in sailing, and able to turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.

  Needless to say, this pleased Mr Jonson no more than the fact that it was only when Mr Shakespeare got our Company to perform his Every Man in His Humour with Shakespeare himself in the part of Knowell Senior that he started to get merit as a playwright. The two rival writers passed for the best of friends, and nowadays when people who knew neither of them read Jonson’s fulsome eulogy they quickly conclude that this was indeed the case. However, I can tell you that relations between them were always in fact more complicated, on account of Jonson’s jealousy. This came out in his losing no opportunity to mock Mr Shakespeare’s pretensions to the rank of gentleman. In his satire which appeared the year a coat of arms was accorded to Mr John Shakespeare, Jonson parodies both the ‘falcon brandishing a spear’ and the device ‘Non sans droict’, giving to one of his characters, the upstart Sogliardo, similar armorial bearings with the motto, ‘Not without mustard’. As for the magnificence of his tribute to Shakespeare in the shape of that ode which Mr Heminges and Mr Condell (in their wisdom) placed as heading to the Folio of 1623, permit old crazy Pickleherring merely to point out that this came only when Jonson’s great rival was safely dead and buried, and that then the note of praise seems strained and forced, perhaps out of guilt that he had put the man down when alive.

  However, Pickleherring might be wrong to say so. I confess that I never liked either Mr Ben Jonson or his inky plays. Shall I just say that we boiled at different temperatures, before leaving the subject?

  In any case, the sharpest mocking of Shakespeare was done not by Jonson but by John Marston in his Histrio-Mastix or The Player Whipt. (Yes, madam, it is the same name as that pamphlet of Prynne’s which I gave you in the last chapter, but believe me that does not mean I am making all this up! If this were fiction, I could change the name, so that there would be no possibility of confusion. But real life is like this, full of meaningless coincidence. Consider the other Reynoldses in my narrative …)

  Marston was no albino giant. He had red hair and short legs, and in due course he gave up poetry to become a priest. But in his unregenerate days he had much fun at Mr S’s expense with his character called Post Haste.

  Post Haste is a playwright in a hurry. He is hasty, he is muddled, and he has to turn out play after play for his company. He is always eager to offer his services to the Truly Great, and glad to give a performance in exchange for a good dinner and a night’s sleep in a swansdown bed at any Lordship’s house. His repertoire parodies that passage in Hamlet where Polonius lists the accomplishments of the itinerant players:

  The Lascivious Knight and Lady Nature

  The Devil and Dives (a comedy)

  A Russet Coat and a Knave’s Cap (an infernal)

  A Proud Heart and a Beggar’s Purse (a pastoral)

  The Widow’s Apron Strings (a nocturnal)

  Mother Gurton’s Needle (a tragedy)

  What’s more, like Mr Shakespeare, Post Haste always has in hand a new play, a piece which he is just finishing, something never yet seen but which he intends to stage without delay.

  When Post Haste appears on stage his companions bow low. They count on his talents for their cakes and ale. He consents to give the actors a foretaste of his latest work, The Prodigal Son, but his voice is so broken by sobs that he can’t go on reading. Nothing daunted, he declares that he is equal to improvising a prologue appropriate to every occasion. Post Haste, in fact, has up his sleeve a Universal Prologue and a Universal Epilogue.

  Here is the Universal Prologue:

  Lords, we are here to show you what we are;

  Lords, we are here although our clothes be bare.

  Instead of flowers in season

  Ye shall gather Rime and Reason.

  And this is the Universal Epilogue:

  The glass is run, our play is done:

  Hence: Time doth call; we thank you all.

  However, what Post Haste has in hand for this particular occasion is a play on the subject of Troilus and Cressida, and in case anyone should so far have missed the object of the lampoon, when we get to Cressida bestowing her colours on her champion we have Troilus hammering home a pun on Shakespeare’s name:

  When he shakes a fur
ious spear

  The foe in shivery fearful sort

  May lay him down in death to snort.

  I think this is quite enough to show that Marston certainly had it here in mind to mock both our hero’s character and his more perfunctory dramatic procedures. The satire is not without bite, and the feeling of it may even have a touch of affection. Shakespeare’s portrait in the person of Post Haste does bear some resemblance to the man I knew.

  Talking of which, and since it was at this point in his life’s fame that I first met him, let me explain how it happened that Mr Shakespeare was in Cambridge rather than London that day when I jumped off the wall for him in 1596. The Puritans amongst the magistrates of the city of London had just at that time managed to get an order forbidding all plays in the city and its suburbs, on the pretext that large assemblies would create a public danger by increasing the risk of infection with the plague. That there was in that year no plague in London, or anywhere near London, did not deter them. But then in my definition a Puritan is one who objects to bull and bear baiting, not in pity for bull or bear, but in aversion to and envy at the pleasure of the spectators. In a word, a KILL-JOY.

  The ban did not last long, yet it was a presage of things to come, when under Cromwell the same spirit triumphed, shutting down every playhouse in the country.

  Still, I am grateful to those kill-joys for what they did in the summer of my thirteenth year. Without their mean antics, the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants would never have been touring the provinces, their shoes full of gravel and their old, blind nag laden down with baskets full of costumes, and I would never have met Post Haste and become a player myself. In which case, I suppose, it is unlikely that I would now be sitting in the attic of a Southwark brothel, munching pickled mulberries and watching the moon rise over the roofs of the stews. She makes these roofs silver. I wonder how anything can be so white, so perfectly white.

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Pickleherring’s poem

  Last night I dreamt that I was an urchin and Polly was a waif. We were the same age, the two of us, younger than she is now, and we came in together off the street hand-in-hand to present ourselves to Pompey Bum and Lucy Negro.

  ‘Whose house is this?’ I asked them.

  ‘It belongs to her,’ said Pompey Bum. ‘Her name is Madam Mitigation.’

  Polly jumped up and down. She was wearing a short white dress, and a ribbon of white velvet in her hair. ‘Goody! Goody!’ she cried. ‘You buy children, don’t you?’

  They smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, but Lucy Negro was holding a long whip. ‘We do,’ she said.

  ‘Jump up on the table and let’s have a look at you,’ said Pompey Bum.

  So Polly and I climbed up on the table in my dream. But I was frightened. ‘Why do you buy children?’ I enquired.

  ‘For love,’ said Lucy Negro.

  She was pinching and stroking my calf.

  Pompey Bum spread wide his pale-pink hands. He looked like a pork butcher. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘For love. What else?’

  Polly pouted. ‘Will we have to work?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘You will work for love, my moppet,’ said Lucy Negro.

  I didn’t like the sound of this, though it seemed not to displease Polly. She gave a twirl where she stood, beside me on the table top, showing the adults her bottom. She was not wearing drawers.

  ‘Do you have a lot of love then?’ she asked them, giggling.

  ‘My house is made of love,’ said Lucy Negro.

  She cracked her whip as she said this. I was scared. But Polly jumped up and down and clapped her hands together. ‘Oh, how soon can we have some?’ she cried out.

  Lucy Negro cracked the whip again, but it was Pompey’s fat hand that slapped pretty Polly’s impertinent arse. ‘Stand still when you’re up for sale!’ the whoremaster commanded. ‘I can’t abide a kid that keeps jigging about before the price is settled.’

  ‘They don’t love us, Poll,’ said I. ‘They don’t love us at all.’

  Some ridiculous antics followed. I can’t remember the sequence. At one point, I know, I had to jump through a hoop while Polly stood on her head in the corner and Pompey Bum inspected her. At last the owners of the brothel professed themselves satisfied. It was to me that Lucy Negro turned, and she took me by the hand. ‘You see, little pickerel,’ said she, ‘we do love you, and you will find out how much just as soon as the contract is signed.’

  ‘To whom should we make payment?’ said Pompey Bum. He was tossing a bag of money from hand to hand.

  I very much wanted to piss. And I wanted to leave. But Polly was dancing about again on the table. ‘Mr Bum and Miss Negro,’ she cried, ‘we belong to the river.’

  ‘We can’t pay the river,’ Lucy Negro said. ‘The brat must mean Mr Shakespeare.’

  Pompey Bum, though, seemed delighted that the two of us should belong to the River Thames. ‘River children! River children!’ he chanted. ‘They are children of the river! Down you come!’

  When we came down off the table he wanted to know if we had come upstream or downstream. I said nothing. I just wanted to piss. Then he asked us if we had seen a boat with a white female figurehead and a captain by the name of William Shakespeare. A man without a memory, he said.

  Polly put on a serious face. It didn’t suit her. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I think I met the gentleman.’

  ‘Liar!’ I cried. ‘You’re just saying that to please them.’

  But Polly insisted. ‘He was at the lock above Alveston,’ she went on. ‘It was the day that Pickleherring went to the fair. Captain Shakespeare put a kiss in my hand and he asked me if I would stay with him until dark. I said I would. He smelt like trees in a forest. He said, “Tell me a story.” So I told him about the swan that was cut open on Thomasina’s birthday and they found a mirror inside it. It was a little mirror, with an ivory handle and a silver back. When you looked in it, you saw yourself clearer than you are. He didn’t like that story.’

  ‘That’s our friend,’ said Pompey Bum. ‘Did he mention me?’

  Polly shook her head. ‘He didn’t say much about himself,’ she explained. ‘But he liked me. He made me take all my clothes off and we played a wee game. All about me being a wolf and he was the chickens. I wished that Captain Shakespeare was my father.’

  Pompey Bum and Lucy Negro were falling about. They seemed delighted by this story. As for me, I just wanted to have a good piss and the dream to end. You know how it is in some dreams – that you start to wake up in them. I was reaching that stage, being conscious that I wanted it to end. Meanwhile, Pompey Bum was asking Polly what the game was called, and Polly replied that the game was called PILLICOCK HILL.

  I had had enough. ‘Don’t believe it, sir and madam!’ I cried out. ‘She’s wanted to be deflowered for simply ages. Terrible she is. You can have no idea what her brothers have had to put up with. Anyway, you can’t have me without her, so make up your minds.’

  ‘Take them,’ said Pompey Bum to Lucy Negro. ‘What else is there to do when two lives come to join yours?’

  ‘It’s an odd story,’ Lucy Negro said.

  ‘You can say that for a week,’ said Pompey Bum. ‘You will still take them.’

  But Lucy Negro was shaking her lovely head. ‘I do not believe the girl’s story,’ she announced. ‘William Shakespeare would never use a word like PILLICOCK.’

  That’s where you’re wrong, lady, thought I to myself in the dream, for he uses that word in King Lear. But I was not going to tell her. Instead, I woke up and had a good piss in my chamber-pot. As I pissed I reflected that it is Lear’s ’Twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters which prompts Edgar (outcast, and posing as the idiot Poor Tom) to chant: Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill.* PILLICOCK means the male generative organs, with pilli as the testicles and cock the penis. As for PILLICOCK HILL it is the Mount of Venus + the pudendum muliebre itself. So Pillicock sitting on Pillicock Hill describes the deed of darkness by whic
h Lear’s flesh begot his daughters. No doubt it meant the same in my foolish dream.

  When I was finished pissing I heard Polly at work in the room below, but I did not want to look. Don’t ask me why, sir. I just didn’t feel like it.

  That word PILLICOCK comes somewhere in one of John Florio’s wordbooks, by the by, which is a source from which Mr Shakespeare drew many choice vocables. It comes also in my mentor Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais, but that of course was after Shakespeare’s time.

  Marston has Post Haste have a word-hoard: Plenty of Old England’s mother words. So he did, and only a fraction of it from Florio. Florio, for that matter, might have garnered PILLICOCK from Shakespeare, learning the word from him during the course of a game at tennis on Rizley’s second-best court for all I know. It is not (I just looked) in my father’s kidskin dictionary.

  Since in my last chapter I disparaged Mr Ben Jonson’s famous verses about Mr Shakespeare in the First Folio, it is only fair that now I should give you my own verses about Mr Shakespeare which I contributed to the Second Folio. These appeared there amongst the preliminary matter in 1632, but with no name attached at my request. As you will see, the verse turns on the degree to which Shakespeare is to be found rather in his works than in Droeshout’s copper-plate engraving for the title-page. Here is my poem:

  Upon the Effigies of my worthy Friend,

  the Author Master William Shakespeare,

  and his Works