The Late Mr Shakespeare

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by Robert Nye


  Incidentally, in the course of the Second Fruits John Florio not only gives us his opinion of the state of the English stage, but sets this in the context of a tennis game exactly like the ones he played with William Shakespeare. This is how the game is led up to:

  ‘Let us make a match at tennis.

  Agreed, this cool morning calls for it,

  And afterwards we will dine together;

  Then after dinner we will go see a play.

  The plays they play in England are not right comedies;

  Yet they do nothing else but play every day.

  Yea, but they are neither right comedies, nor right tragedies.

  How would you name them then?

  Representations of histories without any decorum.’

  I suggest that Mr Shakespeare’s eye certainly passed over these dialogues, which are spoken prose set out with some of the appearance of verse. Whether he thought that Florio was having a hit at King John and his Henry VI trilogy with that remark about ‘representations of histories without any decorum’, I could not tell you. The criticism bears some truth within it. Though it might be just revenge for a lost game at tennis.

  Florio’s major work came out in 1603 – his Englishing of the Essais of Montaigne. There can be no doubt that Mr Shakespeare read this carefully. He makes use of Montaigne’s essays on cannibals and on cruelty in passages of The Tempest, and I think there are traces of the Frenchman to be found in King Lear also, and the last revision of Hamlet. Montaigne’s thoughts on Death were much to Shakespeare’s taste in his later life. I have his copy of the Essays in Florio’s translation, with his signature in it, which is followed by the words MORS INCERTA in his neatest hand.

  John Florio’s star rose highest after his years with Southampton, when he was appointed to be one of the tutors of the greatly gifted but ill-fated Prince Henry. When that boy died young, this gentleman’s fortunes waned. He died of the plague at Fulham in 1625, having spent his last years in vain bickerings with his daughter Aurelia and his son-in-law, Dr Mollins. His wife Rose Spicer had been a sister of the poet Samuel Daniel, of whom I once heard Mr Shakespeare remark that he could never trust a poet whose name rhymed with itself.

  This was, for him, an uncommonly harsh criticism. He was nearly always generous in his appraisal of other writers – saying nothing if he could not say something good. Even of Henry Chettle, that fat fool who was responsible for publishing Greene’s upstart crow libel, he managed to find lines to like. Not that Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly (heigh-ho) nonsense, but Aeliana’s Ditty.

  The late Mr Shakespeare’s usual practice, if you happened to mention a poet’s name, was to remember at least one good line that the man had written. For that matter, if he heard good told of anyone, he would rub his hands together instinctively.

  Most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves. Not so, of course, with William Shakespeare. But it was so in the case of a now obscure writer whose work (if you will forgive the pun) certainly much appealed to WS. I mean George Peele.

  Poor Peele. He died young, and of the pox, and after his death for some reason he passed swiftly into legend as the very emblem of the witty poet, the so-called Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele, published in 1605, consisting for the most part of jokes and stories fathered on him. The author of Polyhymnia deserved a better fate. I often heard Mr Shakespeare refer with affection to him, and more than once I heard him quote the song that concludes that long poem, the lyric that begins His golden locks time hath to silver turned.

  His favourite amongst Peele’s poems, though, was not that, nor the famous Bethsabe’s Song which begins Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, / Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair, although for sure I know that he loved the latter. Mr Shakespeare esteemed his friend George Peele most highly on account of nine lines in his The Old Wife’s Tale, a song sung by a voice that speaks from a well. That song goes like this:

  Fair maiden, white and red,

  Comb me smooth, and stroke my head;

  And thou shalt have some cockle bread.

  Gently dip, but not too deep,

  For fear thou make the golden beard to weep.

  Fair maid, white and red,

  Comb me smooth, and stroke my head;

  And every hair a sheave shall be,

  And every sheave a golden tree.

  It was the fourth line in particular that Mr Shakespeare loved. Gently dip, but not too deep. I often heard him murmur it to himself, apropos as it seemed to me of nothing.

  George Peele was only thirty-eight when he died. Some called him ‘the English Ovid’. The product of London streets and gutters, brought up in the shadow of an asylum for the poor, he is said to have been frivolous, shiftless, sensual, drunken, dissipated, and depraved. His physical person went like this: squint-eyed, short of leg, swart of complexion, his voice high-pitched like a woman’s. I never met him, as he perished the self-same year that I first came to London. But I revere his memory for the reason that Mr Shakespeare did, for the way his spirit triumphed over every adversity to write that song that comes out of the well. His last act in this world, so Mr Shakespeare told me, had been to write a letter to Lord Burghley, begging for some assistance as he lay dying. Burghley, it goes without saying, did not bother to reply.

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Deaths, etc.

  But George Peele was not Mr Shakespeare’s favourite poet amongst his contemporaries. That high honour went to Edmund Spenser. It was Spenser’s way with words that Shakespeare loved. He told me once that he thought our language began with him. Notice he did not say just his own language, or the language of modern poets in general. Shakespeare seemed to credit Spenser with tapping into a vein of English which everyone could speak. He praised his older contemporary’s ear, the perfection of the music of his verse. But it was Spenser’s tongue that he loved. I remember two lines in especial that Mr Shakespeare delighted to repeat, and about which he would always murmur, ‘That is the very tongue of truth.’ The first is the refrain from Prothalamion:

  Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

  The other, odder, rougher, comes (he assured me) somewhere in The Faerie Queene, though I confess I have never myself had the patience to find it:

  Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind.

  I think Mr Shakespeare revelled in these two extremes, for he would sometimes recite the lines as if they belonged together, which of course they do not, neither in provenance nor in spirit. As to the rest, I remember him remarking idly that the entrance of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene was like Aphrodite being born from the sea, and on another occasion I heard him laugh and tell someone who was objecting to the rape and carnage in Titus Adronicus that far from being put in to please the groundlings he had intended it as a parody of Spenser. But I admit I do not know what he meant by this latter remark.

  Anyhow, what I am trying to make clear is that Shakespeare revered Spenser more for his manner than his matter. In this, as in much else, my friend’s opinion stood in direct contradiction to that of Ben Jonson, who liked to bellow in his cups that Spenser ‘writ no language’. Shakespeare, on the contrary, would have praised Spenser for being what Spenser called Chaucer – a well of English, undefiled.

  The century died with Spenser. He had been driven out of Ireland, where he did the Queen’s work, by peasants who set fire to his house in the night. The poet’s baby son was killed in the conflagration, and the final cantos of The Faerie Queene were also destroyed. Arrived back at Court on Christmas Eve, he received £8 for his service, then took lodgings with his wife and remaining three children in King Street, where he died in poverty.

  When he heard of the death of Edmund Spenser, Mr Shakespeare shut his eyes. Then he laid down his pipe as gently upon the fender as if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider’s web.

  ‘Let us go to Lucy Negro’s house,’ said he.

 
This was ever his way. The shadow of Thanatos, dark-robed lord of the dead, always drove him to the worship of Eros, god of that frenzy and confusion which some call love. Love and Death were like twin sisters in the poet’s mind. The kiss of one would lead him to seek oblivion in the arms of the other.

  So we went down to Lucy Negro’s and fucked out the night.

  The Earl of Essex paid for Spenser’s funeral. His coffin was carried from King Street to Westminster Abbey by eight of his fellow poets – Thomas Campion, George Chapman, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Hugh Holland, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. Spenser was buried beside Chaucer in the Abbey, the poets consigning his body to the earth. As the coffin went into the grave each poet with bowed head dropped on it a scroll with an elegy and quill attached thereto. Some of the poets kept copies of their elegies, but Shakespeare did not. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said only, ‘I wrote it for Edmund Spenser, not for posterity.’

  This was the first of three deaths that left their mark on Mr Shakespeare, as on all of us alive then. The second came two years later when the man who had paid for Spenser’s funeral ascended the scaffold at the Tower. Essex had been found guilty of treason after his abortive attempt to raise the citizens of London against the Queen’s counsellors. Southampton, his right-hand man, was fortunate, as I have said, to be reprieved from execution, though he remained in prison for what was left of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Mr Shakespeare himself, although the least conspiratorial of men, and by then at some convenient distance from Southampton, hardly found favour at Court because the ill-planned coup had begun with the conspirators commanding our Company to a performance of Richard II, where Essex loudly applauded the deposition scene.

  I always considered the Earl of Essex insane. But then I was only a youth in those long-ago days, and perhaps the poor fellow was merely vainglorious and headstrong. His manners were never those of a successful courtier. Witness the famous occasion when the Queen boxed his ears and he drew his sword in anger at her behaviour.

  People say that when he heard the sentence of death passed upon him, he looked as calm and contented as if invited to dance with the Queen. There is a story that Elizabeth had given her favourite a ring at the height of her love for him, promising that whatever might befall in the years to come she would grant him any wish or pardon him any offence at the sight of this jewel. Essex is supposed to have sent the ring from the Tower by the Countess of Nottingham, who was to present it to the Queen as a token of his repentance, but the Countess preferred to keep the ring for herself. Those who can credit this story say that both Essex and Elizabeth were victims of the Countess, with the Earl believing up to the last moment that the sight of the ring would save him, and the Queen only affixing her seal to her former lover’s death warrant when she took his apparent failure to send her the ring as evidence of his pride. Pickleherring has an open mind on this romantic subject. But I will tell you in a minute of something that might confirm that the story is true.

  Elizabeth did make one concession, even without the ring. The sentence of hanging and quartering went too far, she decided. Essex should be beheaded, tout court, and his body could be buried in the Tower chapel, instead of being distributed to the four corners of London for public show.

  Her lover was no doubt grateful for this favour. On the appointed day, he mounted the scaffold clad in a long robe of embossed velvet, over a suit of black satin with a short white collar, and with a black felt hat on his head. When asked to pray for the Queen, he said: ‘May God give her an understanding heart,’ and then repeated the fourth psalm. The executioner was clumsy. The first blow struck the Earl of Essex aslant. He knelt there, half-dead, his bleeding head on the block, while the executioner turned away his face to redouble the blows.

  The third death came again after an interval of two years. Just as the second death had been the death of the man who had paid for the funeral of the first to die, so the third death was the death of the woman who had commanded the execution of the second to die. It is said that Queen Elizabeth complained more than once to her confidantes that she had never known a moment’s happiness since the death of Essex. In the spring of 1603 she left her palace for the last time to visit the bedside of the dying Countess of Nottingham. There she learnt that this lady was wearing her conscience on her finger. It was Robert Devereux’s ring – the one the Queen had given him. The Countess confessed that he had confided it to her to take to the Queen, but that she had kept it. It is said that Elizabeth dealt the dying woman such a blow that her demise was hastened.

  Nor did the Queen recover from the shock of this interview. She returned to her palace at Richmond, where she could neither eat nor sleep yet refused to go to bed, crying out that under the heavy state canopy she had been visited by strange and terrible apparitions. Three days and three nights the Queen sat upright in a chair, too frightened to be put to bed, sucking her thumb like a child. She died on the 24th of March, 1603, without speaking a word.

  Mr Shakespeare once observed to me that all those of us who lived during the last century would always remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the news came to us that Queen Elizabeth was dead. For all her age and infirmity, we never counted on the death of Gloriana. For my part, when the news came I was shaving my legs in the tiring-room at the Globe and trying to learn my part of Cressida for the first performance of Troilus and C. When I asked Mr Shakespeare where he was he said that he had been in Stratford, sitting in the window of a house near to the church which overlooks the charnel. He was reworking the cemetery scene in Hamlet, he said, and finding some inspiration in the view, when his daughter Judith brought him a pippin from his orchard and the message from London that the Queen was dead.

  He might have been mocking my sense of the appropriate, of course. But he had a nose for death, and I should not be surprised if his tale was true.

  I wonder if it is simply because he is dead that the life of William Shakespeare seems so much neater and more complete than my own life, much more shapely and formal and sensible. Does not death confer a sense on any life? Perhaps I write this book in part because I have had to learn that. Good friend, perhaps you read it because you like to have assurance of a life making more sense than your own. This new cult of biography, this great passion for Lives – what if it is based upon nothing more profound or noble than our separate several feeling that life is such a mess?

  O my little heart! Misprision in the highest degree! A plague o’ these pickle-herring! All this stuff about Lives, deaths etc. is just a way of avoiding the question that really consumes my heart and my mind this minute, namely:

  Where is my dear Polly, my own Anne?

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  ‘Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth’

  Between the second death and the third death, William Shakespeare published his obscure and enigmatical poem of The Phoenix and the Turtle.

  First, though, the matter of Polly. She is gone, my little egg-girl. I have not seen her now for some three days. Pompey Bum smiles when I ask him about her absence. He is so vague and dismissive on the subject that his manner implies she might never have existed. ‘What moppet?’ he says. ‘We never have moppets in here.’ He would like me to think that my mind is going. If he could get me carted off to Bedlam then my boxes would be his, and this book as well.

  He appeared suddenly on the stairs yesterday as I was carrying out the slops. He was wearing something on his head that looked like a drowned water-rat. He called it a PERUKE, and claimed it as the very latest fashion.

  ‘I’m all behind!’ he complained, when I asked him about my love’s whereabouts.

  Pompey Bum is forever saying this, and patting the seat of his vast breeches whenever he says it. No doubt some pun is involved, and I am supposed to be bemused as he changes the subject. He means, my great whoremaster of a landlord, not just that he has many tasks to do but that he wears much horse-hair stuffing in his breeches. He always has a face like
a man at cack.

  ‘Polly who?’ he said, when I persisted with my queries.

  ‘Flinders,’ I said. ‘But I heard you call her Anne.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Pompey Bum, grinning. ‘And we never have no Annes.’

  Then he was off down the stairs, like a big monkey in trousers, holding the rat in place on his greasy skull, and chanting just to mock me a rhyme that children sing: ‘Little Polly Flinders / Sat among the cinders / Warming her pretty little toes! / Her mother came and caught her / And whipped her naughty daughter / For spoiling her nice new clothes!’

  This left me feeling hot and sick and hopeless. The blackguard had succeeded in turning my flesh-and-blood darling into something ghostly and unsubstantial by this suggestion that I had dreamt her up from a character in a nursery rhyme.

  Or perhaps it is the girl herself who has mocked me – by claiming ‘Polly Flinders’ as her name? This further thought (which came later), that she was herself the author of the fiction, was hardly comforting. Whatever, she was gone, and she is still gone.

  All night I kept hearing sweet imagined noises from the room below. But each time I fell out of bed in a sweat and removed my Ovid, only darkness met my eye when I applied it to the peep-hole. Darkness and silence. There was no one there.

  The Phoenix and the Turtle first appeared in 1601 in an octavo volume called Love’s Martyr, commemorating the marriage of Sir John Salusbury to Ursula Stanley, illegitimate daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby. The longest thing in the book is a terrible set of verses by one Robert Chester, allegedly translated ‘out of the venerable Italian Torquato Caeliano’. So far as I know, Torquato Caeliano never existed, and Robert Chester was certainly no poet. Here is a sample of his versification:

 

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