The Late Mr Shakespeare

by Robert Nye

New Place was a very fine house, the embodiment and emblem of Mr Shakespeare’s success in the world. He had built it up over the years, entrusting the supervision of these improvements to his cousin Thomas Greene. I measured it once: it was thirty yards long, and thirty feet high. The main facade with its wide bay windows, columned doorway and three ornamented gables stood imposingly on Chapel Street. Walking up to it, you couldn’t help thinking it was quite a palace for a butcher’s son who had once wielded the sledded pole-axe and spat on his palm himself. The house contained ten rooms and cellars, apart from the large central hall. A staircase of carved oak led to the upper floor. I will tell you soon enough what I found and did there.

  In this grand house, with its orchards and gardens, surrounded by his family, William Shakespeare now wrote three new plays in a final style: The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline, and The Tempest. From each is derived an impression of moral serenity. Even Cymbeline, which the author calls a tragedy, ends in reconciliation. I always thought myself, when young, that Posthumus in that play gets forgiven too quick and easy. But Mr S would have it no other way. And now that I am old I complain no longer.

  Living mostly in Stratford, eating according to the recipes in Mrs Shakespeare’s cook-book, Mr Shakespeare cultivated in his latter days a considerable belly. Anne Shakespeare had a huge manuscript book of recipes. It was the only book I ever saw her keeping company with. Cooking and sewing were her life, I think. Her room at New Place after her husband died was adorned with needlework of various kinds, cut works, spinning, bone-lace, and many pretty devices, with which the cushions, chairs, and stools were strewed and covered.

  Mr Shakespeare’s corpulence never quite rivalled that of his own Falstaff, but it might have done had he lived long enough. He could well afford to eat, and to eat well. By the time of his retirement to Stratford, he was oozing with gold. You can see from the bust that Dutchman did for his memorial in Trinity Church just how fat the Bard got. He had in addition three false teeth. His first false tooth was made of iron. His second false tooth was made of silver. His third false tooth was made of gold.

  The return to Stratford was a confirmation of the roots of Shakespeare’s art. It took a poet’s imagination to realise the debt owed by humanity to the rude mechanicals of Warwickshire. Had the drama not been deeply rooted in the native soil, it could not have borne such excellent fruit. It was to the village festival and the goat song in honour of Dionysus that Shakespeare returned.

  In his native place, I noticed that people tended to favour a short pronunciation of the first syllable of our hero’s name: Shax rather than Shakes. This makes me think it possible that the name derives after all from the Anglo-Saxon personal name, SEAXBERHT.

  Idylls over, good friends, I think at the end that Mr WS was bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama; that he was bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams. In these last years at Stratford I see him as half-enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half-bored to death.

  He also had barns full of grain, at a time when there was a general shortage. But we’ll speak no more of that. Sufficient to say that Mr John Shakespeare was not the only one in the family with a Midas touch of the usurer about him. William Shakespeare drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.

  But what is the point of dwelling upon such things? They contribute nothing to our gratitude, and gratitude is all that we should feel. If you have to be negative, better to try to conceive of a world without Shakespeare. It is only by holding our breath that we begin to understand how necessary breathing is. And the best way of bringing before our minds the true magnitude of our debt to Shakespeare is to imagine for a moment or two that he never existed. His faults then pale into mere significance. He was a necessary man.

  Even so, reader, I confess it – that the closer I get to Shakespeare, the more I recoil from him. That villain had all my life. He had my youth in my playing. He had the rest in that the rest followed on from my playing – I mean what Jane did, and what Polly is. And now he has my age which I have spent in writing about him. I have given him my life to write his Life.

  That man deceived me. I used to have a trusting nature. No more the spaniel now, sir; my innocent old eyes worship him no longer. I have my Aeolian harp, if I want music.

  I had a wife once. I failed her. That’s the way of the world.

  My mother, though, she is a different story. Her name was Lalage. Her hair was the colour of blazing treacle and her eyes were reticent. Women can see through you when they want, but mothers don’t do it. I loved this mother, this Lalage. I had a song about her:

  Weeny weedy weeky said Caesar,

  Weeny weedy weeky said he.

  Weeny weedy weeky said that old Roman geezer

  In the year 44 BC.

  I love Rome, I love Gaul,

  I love politics, but best of all

  I love Lalage.

  More about her? More about Lalage? Very well, sir. She had a rocking-horse. She sat me on the rocking-horse and she rocked it to and fro, to and fro, the rain falling, the window open, the fire burning, and all the time she sang. Such long, long music. It was the song of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But it came out to the words of O Polly Dear.

  You shut me up, sir?

  Madam, you are right. In truth the only thing I remember about my mother was the way she used to shave her legs. All the way up. And every day.

  And this happy song which she sang to me:

  I’m not Hairy Mary, I’m your Ma!

  I’m not Hairy Mary, I’m your Ma!

  I’m not Hairy Mary,

  I’m your father’s fairy!

  I’m not Hairy Mary, I’m your Ma!

  I hope that makes you smile. That would be something.

  Today I have practised smiling in new ways. Listening to the breeze on the strings of the harp that Polly gave me, I have practised a smile for death. Listening to the rats in the wainscot, I have practised a smile for ugliness. Listening to nothing in particular, I have practised above all a smile for the next time I see Polly. I shall have also a special smile for the beggar I refuse a penny to. And another smile for the spaces between the stars.

  The only trouble is: I have no mirror.

  Steady now, Pickleherring. But consider this, old pickpocket. Leonardo made a smile. First he cut up the mouth and looked at the muscles, and maybe he pulled them this way and that to see how they moved. Then he sat this lady down and taught her to pull her mouth up at the edges. The lady was irrelevant, but the smile is immortal and much discussed and it means nothing at all but Smile. It is the record of the muscles of the mouth.

  To such experiment I lay my hand. I have a lot to learn in the way of smiling. But I shall become the master of the rictus. And I will not go out of the door of this room of mine again until I am borne hence in a last black box on the shoulders of six men.

  Talking of Leonardo, it occurs to me to say in all modesty that if ever I had been good for anything besides play-acting it would have been as a painter. I can fancy a thing so strongly, and have so clear an idea of it. But I’ve a turnip that bleeds for a heart, so there’s an end of that. Without an old gossip like me there would be no remembrance. And if you find fault with Pickleherring for saying this, then I can only agree; yet I’d say that it is my faults that give my work vivacity, and perhaps also vitality, and (I trust) a palpable sincerity.

  Here is a question for you: Did Shakespeare write Bacon? I knew a man once on Primrose Hill who affected to believe that it was possible. (I knew another who said that the Bard kept a shed full of monkeys, and that these monkeys wrote Hamlet for him. I have forgotten why they did not succeed in writing the other plays. But that man ended up in the Bridewell.) Anyway, if Shakespeare did write Bacon then it must have been in his Stratford days, I reckon. He would not have been so philosophical in Southwark, nor dared to deceive so much at the house of the Mountjoys under the kindly eye of Comfort Ballantine. A third picture for your inward eye, d
ear reader: Shakespeare in his retirement from the stage, under his mulberry tree, dashing off Novum Organum in the gathering gloom.

  I have also heard it said from time to time that the divine William is not dead. Such pious belief would have it that he went to Iceland. There the poet was trapped suddenly in an iceberg. Mr Shakespeare will remain in that Iceland iceberg for a thousand years. He awaits a virgin who will weep warm tears for him, or a winter of exceptional mildness.

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  Bottoms

  Have you ever noticed how poets borrow not just from each other but from themselves? Upstart crows are thieves no less than magpies. But sometimes it’s their own shed plumage that they steal.

  In this my 92nd box I have a note concerning an interesting item of self-borrowing I once discovered in the works of Mr Shakespeare. BORROWING is perhaps not quite the word for it. Nor is REMEMBERING, though we’d better not forget that Memory was the mother of all the Muses. Anyway, can I please point out that there is something small in Titus Andronicus which might have ‘suggested’ something big in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? I mean that the very name of Bottom and the line

  It shall be called Bottom’s dream, because it hath no bottom came to Shakespeare because of the line in Titus:

  Is not my sorrow deep, having no bottom?

  Reader, it is obvious that here we are over the border of biography. I can neither prove nor can you disprove my case. Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, or much of it. Shakespeare wrote the whole of the Dream, there is no reason to doubt. That is all that a biographer can say. The rest is poetry.

  The common reader or playgoer is misled by the fact that such plays as Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream have apparently nothing in common. But to the poet’s mind such differences are irrelevant. What the two works have in common is him.

  Sir, poets frequently, if not always, borrow from other poets. Pickleherring is here to remind you, madam, to what extent they do, and must, borrow from themselves.

  My wife Jane had a particularly handsome bottom. It was her finest feature. I saw a man in Covent Garden once take off his hat to it as she passed by.

  On the other hand, the late Mr Shakespeare’s bottom was nothing to write home about. But then I must confess it did not interest me. In fact it was one of those things about him which I think I found boring. There were some few such, as I have admitted.

  A thing you may not know is that he once slipped when about to throne himself upon a piss-pot, and marked himself severely on the arse. (Madam, I do apologise for the inclusion of such base matter, but then without it my anatomy of Shakespeare would be incomplete.) The great man thus had this anal stigmata, as it were, in the form of a crucifixion on his bottom.

  So are our heroes somewhat less than gods, though they may carry emblems of divinity in the most unlikely places on their persons.

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  Some sayings of William Shakespeare

  I have given Polly my father’s kidskin dictionary. This present seemed to please her. She gave me in return for it, fishing beneath her bodice, a locket she once received as a prize at her convent. I expressed tender delight at a gift warmed by her contact and for so long worn by her intimately, i.e. between her breasts.

  What have these things to do with my Life of William Shakespeare? Reader, I will tell you. They have everything to do with it, and so does Jane. I confess that I have only learnt this in the writing. When I began, for instance, it was my intention that my late wife would have only a walking-on part in this book. It is, after all, supposed to be not my life, but the Life of William Shakespeare. Yet even at the start I think I knew that the biographer is part of the story in any biography. Otherwise why should I have felt the need to tell you that I am the bastard son of a priest’s bastard? But beyond that, even, there is the natural need to confess where one stands (or falls) in love.

  It is by suffering in love, erotic suffering, that we all grow. The Greeks knew this. Their novelists were interested in stories of EROTIKA PATHEMATA, and so was Mr S, and so am I. The engrossing experience of love, that is the thing. It is the theme of Parthenius (Virgil’s Greek teacher). Later, among the Latin authors, it is the great theme of Petronius in the Satyricon. It is the theme, above all, of that great Metamorphoses of Apuleius – I mean the Asinus Aureus or Golden Ass. These are the works I love, the love-works against which I would match my Life of Shakespeare. But this book is intended also as a kind of Secret History, like that of Procopius.

  Talking of love, Anne Shakespeare is of course the living statue of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. There was never a more beautiful or touching embodiment on the stage of re-awakened love, in my opinion. (I am vulgar and bold, mind you; a sentimentalist, sir.) In Greene’s Pandosto, whose plot Mr Shakespeare follows up to this point, Queen Hermione dies of grief and King Leontes promptly falls in love with his newly found daughter Perdita, thus making his suicide inevitable. By resurrecting Hermione and giving Perdita the husband of her choice, Shakespeare makes possible Leontes’ repentance and his wife’s pardon. To this end our dramatist was obliged to invent a means by which Hermione could forgive her husband, and take up life with him again, after some sign that he has shed his former jealousy and that he loves her – some sort of moral rejuvenation put on stage. The problem must have been a difficult one. The Bard’s solution is nowise short of brilliant.

  Leontes must be compelled to recognise in his wife other qualities than charm and beauty. She is now sixteen years older than when he last saw her, and bears the marks of all that she has been through. Shakespeare hits on the idea of the kissed statue. If you ever want proof of his genius, this is it. Before revealing that Hermione is still alive she must be exhibited to the King as a marble statue placed on a monument – a statue of her not as she was sixteen years ago, but as she would be now had she lived on.

  Leontes gazes a long time at the statue. Then overcome by emotion he cries out. No matter how mad he seem, he must kiss her lips.

  Then, as we all know, the statue trembles. And Hermione steps down from her pedestal, and herself embraces Leontes.

  It is a moment of pure magic. I should know, for I played it.

  How so? Why did I not play Perdita? Not, I assure you, because John Spencer Stockfish was considered my superior for any part. It is just that by this time I was in fact too old for the roles of young girls. Consequently I was a natural for the part of Hermione. I believe, in any case, that Mr Shakespeare wrote that character with me in mind, wanting me to represent on stage his own wife Anne. He wished me to embody the way he was declaring he could still love her, and she love him, after their own little interval of sixteen years or more. And doubtless it appealed to his sense of irony, too, to have the once master-mistress of his passion now enacting the part of the forgiving and pacific wife. After our first performance of the Tale, permit me to mention, Mr Shakespeare and I played again at cards for kisses. This time there was this difference from the time when I had been his Rosalind. This time I did not let my master win.

  The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that woman’s point of view is not necessarily foreign to man’s.

  The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that words cool more than water, or are perhaps less likely not to.

  The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that the void, the good void, the aching void of the good, which was his source and port and target, the wordless bourne of his every fugue, however sudden and eccentric, was the last place anyone would think of looking for him, the well-known long sweet home, the room where music plays itself.

  Mr Shakespeare said that he was not here, being there, and having no whereness anyhow.

  Mr Shakespeare said that music made his ears bleed.

  Mr Shakespeare (as he lay dying) said that he really ought to try not to die, and that the light was badly painted on the wall.

  Also, Shakespeare said his body was his grave;

  That when it rained he fell;

  Tha
t his scabby heart was unquiet if full of truth;

  That his head was beginning to stink of innocence;

  That he had St Catherine’s uncouth wheel printed in the roof of his mouth;

  And that he was over and above the dark, one of her dateless brood all right, but still serving his apprenticeship down here.

  All these things were said by William Shakespeare as he lay dying. I do not know what they mean. I am only a comedian.

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  A word about John Spencer Stockfish

  The Tempest, the late Mr Shakespeare’s last play, seems to me as perfect in its kind as almost anything we have of his. One may observe that the classical unities are kept here with an exactness uncommon to the liberties of his writing. It is a play about magic, and that magic has in it something very solemn and very poetical. I would draw your attention in particular to the character of Caliban. It is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon grotesques that ever was seen, but what is then remarkable is that it is to this uncouth, wild figure that Shakespeare gives the most delicate poetry in the play – I mean the speech beginning Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises … Only a writer at the very top of his powers could have dared to do this. It seems to me that Shakespeare not only found out a new character in his Caliban, but also devised and adopted a new manner of language for that character.

  The name Caliban is a phonetic anagram of CANNIBAL. Mr Shakespeare pointed that out to me himself, one day when showers had ruined our rehearsal. As for the name Ariel, he took that from his friend Thomas Heywood’s rhymed catechism of the occult, the Hierarchy of Blessed Angels. In that work Ariel is named as the spirit who commands the elements and governs tempests. As for Setebos, the god adored by Caliban, that name was printed first in Thevet’s Cosmographie, but I think it more likely that WS got it from a popular source, probably Eden’s History of Travayle (1577). He only ever needed a few bits and scraps like this to set his mind in motion. And of course once he got going the whole play became profoundly autobiographical. In Prospero we look on Mr Shakespeare’s likeness. The magician breaking his wand and retiring to Naples is the poet breaking his pen and retiring to Stratford.