by Robert Nye
The three women looked like three versions of the one face.
At the height of the wake, as the fiddlers sawed at their instruments till the horse-hair frayed, I stole away silently from the feasting and the drinking. I had a singular need that just had to be satisfied. I went like a man in a dream, but I knew where I was going. Unobserved by any, or so I believe, I crept from the hall of New Place, and ventured where my longing was directing me – up the broad oak staircase to the room that held the second-best bed and other secrets.
Many speak of Robin Hood who never shot with his bow. I suppose I was determined that Pickleherring should do otherwise, although my will in the matter was fleshly. I had this thirst which could only be slaked the one way. If I wanted to rationalise it, I could say that I had my own way of mourning Mr Shakespeare, and of asserting and celebrating what all his works are an assertion and celebration of – the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I had a hard on. Funerals have this mandrake effect on me, madam. I do apologise, but my root was up. Remember, I was William Shakespeare’s joculator.
That’s a good word, that JOCULATOR. It means more than just a jester, or a minstrel, or jongleur. It means a fool who knows the wisdom of foolishness. You get this wisdom in Shakespeare which you do not get in Dante or in Homer. That’s why there is nothing in either of those great poets that gets under your skin like Feste’s song at the end of Twelfth Night:
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
Never forget that SILLY once meant BLESSED. Nor that the first Christians were proud to be miscalled Chrestians, meaning simpletons. Nor that transvestite boys with phalluses erect led the Greek sacred processions of the Dionysian Oschophoria.
I stripped off all my clothes with the bedroom door shut close behind me. Putting on Anne Shakespeare’s things was ever so lovely. She had presses full of the most adorable gowns. Her wardrobe was packed with petticoats and bodices, all scented sweetly of her perfume, with ruffs and cuffs and farthingales and things. I plucked out a stomacher of incarnadine satin, smooth as snow or swansdown, that you had to lace up with two broad silver laces. Standing before her pierglass, I laced this stomacher so tight that it hurt me, quite deliciously. Then I could wait no more, but plunged my engorged and rampant member in a deep cool pool of her petticoats. When I found the drawer that held the lady’s most intimate articles of apparel, her shifts and her camisas, her silken drawers and her black and her white silk stockings, soft to my touch as cobweb, I could scarcely contain myself. I hung a pair of her drawers on my pintle while I explored. Among the items of her toilet I found powder-puffs and paints and paint-sticks, false curls and curling irons, lacquers and lip-salves and feathers for applying henna. Mrs Shakespeare had a box of Cordovan gloves, embroidered sheaths that were shaped to the clench of her fingers. I found to my delight that they fitted me. She possessed diamond and cornelian rings, and garnet brooches, and plaits of pearls, and necklaces of sapphires. It was plain that she favoured certain colours – scarlet and black – both for her choicest gowns and her flimsiest undergarments. That she sometimes adopted worsted hose of different hues – sometimes blue, sometimes grass-green – was a small enough matter for me to regret. (Not so much for the colours, but for that one absence of silk.)
I pulled on a pair of Anne Shakespeare’s silk stockings, black as night, just like the ones she had worn to the funeral. I selected a sweet pair of garters, rosy rosettes, and smoothed and adjusted the stockings, consulting the pierglass. Lines of my parts as Juliet and as Cleopatra and as Lady Macbeth came coursing through my head and I spoke them softly aloud, my lips kissing my own image in the mirror, so that soon the glass was clouded with my breath. I selected black silken drawers from the tangle of worn garments in her linen basket. I sniffed at the gusset before I put them on. Anne Shakespeare’s drawers smelt deliciously of comfrey fritters: her essence.
I was posed and poised at play there, black silk dress and petticoats up, casting sidelong glances at my image in the pierglass, calling the one there sir or madam, depending upon what was permitted to be shown, flirting with my unruly will, having it hide between my silk-clad legs and then prick out, making it throb and dance to the flick of the gloves, I was at work there, merrily, merrily, in the last throes of the hottest and sweetest ecstasy of self-caressing I ever knew in my life, when the door was suddenly flung open and the mistress of the house burst into her own bedroom and upon me.
Mrs Shakespeare screamed three screams, each one richer and shriller and more blood-curdling than any scream I ever heard screamed before, as she took in the scene that met her wide blue eyes. Then she seized a birch broom from the corridor, and drove me from the house all garbed as I was in her garments. I ran around the mulberry, scattering seed.
Reader, I have no regrets. It was worth the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Besides, I have reason to believe that Mrs Shakespeare came to forgive me my trespass. At least, she never again referred to the matter, when I went back to New Place more than once to ask her various questions for my planned Life of William Shakespeare. She merely took care to see that I was never allowed to go upstairs alone to enjoy her private treasury of enchantments.
I confess that I would dearly love to have performed the same necessary office dressed in Susanna’s clothes and then in Judith’s too. Susanna used spectacles, and she carried a silver whistle for her little dog, suspended at her girdle. She kept a throstle in a twiggen cage. It would have been both interesting and delightful to inhabit her woollen gown and blow the silver whistle for the dog and see what dog and bird made of their master-mistress. Mr Shakespeare’s younger daughter was an even greater temptation, since her mysteries were more provocative. That medal bewitched me. And her wardrobe contained at least one fine gown of musk-coloured taffeta that made me almost swoon whenever I saw her wearing it. It had lots of petticoats and smelt peppery to the nostrils as she swished past. When she rode out to hounds at Stratford I saw her decked in a bastard scarlet safeguard coat and hood, Polonia style, laced with red and blue and yellow trimmings, which mightily appealed to my poor senses. I heard her giggle and say once, Judith, that none of her dresses was made by female hands. I suppose the word for this is boasting. She was a boastful creature. I could wear myself to a frazzle just thinking of her boots.
In this penultimate box, though, I do have a pair of Susanna Shakespeare’s gloves, filched long ago from Hall’s Croft when no one was looking. Sometimes I slip these on and I play Rosalind. Beside them, my other secret treasure is a pair of Mr Shakespeare’s sister’s Zebelah stockings. (Zebelah is Isabella colour, a shade of tan.) These inhesions of greasy Joan have been my comfort on many a long night. I have also Lucy Negro’s handkerchief. Don’t ask me how I got it. Once it smelt of white heliotrope. I never washed it. It is quite stiff now with seed and tears, quite yellow. But it is years since I managed either sperm or tears.
The great fire rages on. North of the river it is all on fire. Last night I watched the burning of St Paul’s. The stones flew up into the air like grenados, the melting lead ran down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements burnt red as the floor of hell. All the sky seemed on fire, like the top of a burning oven.
This morning I can see from my window the way the flames leap after a prodigious manner from house to house and street to street, at great distances one from the other. The clouds of smoke are dismal – they must stretch from here to the Essex coast. All the Inner Temple is assuredly destroyed, all Fleet Street, the Old Bailey, Ludgate Hill, Warwick Lane, Newgate, Paul’s Chain, Whitehall, Exchange, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, out to Moorefields, the Cornhill, and Watling Street, all, all reduced to ashes.
Oh miserable and calamitous spectacle! The world has not seen the like of it since its foundation, nor will this terrible fire be outdone till the universal conflagration.
/> Pompey Bum has gone, and all the whores. This building is deserted now, apart from Pickleherring. Pompey Bum belaboured me to leave. He roared that it is only a matter of time before the flames destroy the whole of London, and his last word to me was that packs of rats on fire have been seen running from north to south across London Bridge.
I have no more Life of William Shakespeare left to write – and only one word more about his death. I will sit here and wait for the fire to come. If the conflagration takes my book, that is the will of God. It will not take Pickleherring. Wait and see.
I pray only for Polly to be delivered from the flames, wherever she is. Polly, Polly, you whom everything identifies with dayspring and whom, for that very reason, I shall not see again – O Polly dear, I’m glad you are not here.
* Act I, Scene 1, lines 173–6.
Chapter One Hundred
In which Pickleherring lays down his pen after telling of the curse on Shakespeare’s grave
The last poem written by William Shakespeare is inscribed upon his gravestone! It looks like this:
That is from a rubbing of the stone which I made myself. Here is the verse written out in a modern spelling and punctuation, just for your ease of reading:
Good friend, for Jesu’s sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosèd here!
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
Who is the GOOD FRIEND thus addressed? I think it is the sexton, both now and to come. The sextons of Trinity Church have been known to dig up old graves to make room for the newly deceased. The bones they uncover are then thrown upon others in the charnel-house, which stands adjoining the north wall, no more than a dozen strides from Shakespeare’s grave. As I have told you, the poet had a horror of that charnel-house. But there is more to it than that.
William Shakespeare lies full seventeen foot deep in Trinity Church, deep enough to secure him, and he placed that curse upon his grave to make sure not just that he was not taken out of it but that no one else got into it. He liked in his later years to sleep alone. He did not want his grave raped, nor broken up to entertain some second guest. So he placed that curse there to make sure, I think, that he was not disturbed by anyone in his final slumbers. If for ANYONE you read Anne Shakespeare or Susanna Hall then I shall not deny you. For when Anne died seven years after her husband I heard that she left instruction that she was to be buried in Shakespeare’s grave, and that so did Susanna when she died in 1649, but no sexton could be found who was willing to lift that nameless flagstone and incur the poet’s curse.
Reader, I have heard it said that William Shakespeare did not write this verse himself, and that it is doggerel. I tell you he did write it, and that it is not. The test of any poem is this: Does it work? I say these four lines work very well indeed. They have done what the poet intended them to do, and they will go on doing it. No one will ever knave William Shakespeare out of his last bed. No one will ever dig up William Shakespeare while that curse is on his grave. His dust will lie there undisturbed till the day of judgement.
Besides which, just ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, would any of WS’s relatives or friends have chosen or dared to have written a rhymed inscription of such an unusual kind to place on his grave? The idea that Shakespeare did not write it is absurd. And that four-beat measure, far from being doggerel, is in fact his favourite metre outside the iambic pentameter which comes so naturally to the speaking voice of a man or a woman in good health.
In any case, listen closely to the words. These phrases have his ring right to the echo. GOOD FRIEND as a direct form of address, occurs at key points in his works – for example, Miranda thus addresses Ferdinand in The Tempest, and Hamlet says it to Horatio just arrived from Wittenberg. JESU for Jesus is the poet’s preferred formulation – he invokes the holy name like that all over the plays. As to FORBEAR – that is a favoured verb, and often as an imprecation forbidding touching, as in the second King Henry VI: Lay not thy hands on me; forbear, I say. Then there is the fact that when Mr Shakespeare thought of death it was often to link the word ENCLOSED with the word DUST (or some similar word meaning mortal remains), as for example in Henry V, Act IV, Scene 8, line 129, where you will find The dead with charity enclosed in clay. One of the final plays, Cymbeline, employs that BLEST BE formula half a dozen times. While CURST BE comes in The Tempest, as well as in the first Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Pericles. CURSED and BONES come together in The Rape of Lucrece, line 209.
In short, that poem is Shakespeare’s in phrase and pulse as surely as if he had written it in his own blood on parchment made from his own skin.
The grave, I think, was William Shakespeare’s best bed. Have you ever noticed how much sweet, dreamless, and untroubled sleep is longed-for throughout his life’s work? Sleep was for him God’s greatest benison. May he sleep now in blessings! May he rest in peace and his faults lie gently on him!
And so, good reader, pray for me, your Pickleherring. I have done what I promised I would do. I have told you all that I know about the late Mr Shakespeare. And now that it is done, now that I have finished, this whole book I dedicate to my friend’s memory in the same words that he used to dedicate his Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton: ‘What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have, devoted yours.’ Unknown friends, this has been a lover’s book.
What I have to do … What I have to do is make my exit. I just looked down this minute through my peep-hole. The room where Polly was is now all flames. The wind in the night must have blown from the north, and the fire come. But that may not be necessary. I am telling you something new about hell-fire.
Bear with me. My old brain is troubled. Brightness falls from the air. Pickleherring’s mad again! I can see nothing. I can hear nothing. I can taste nothing. I do not know what comfrey fritters smell like.
Sir, did you expect me to lie down in my Juliet dress and wait for Romeo to come in a cloak of fire? Madam, would you have me robe and crown myself as Cleopatra and clasp the flames to suck on my wrinkled dugs? Shall my last act be to encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in my arms?
I tell you, none of these is Pickleherring’s exit. Nor have I caught an everlasting cold. Nor is old Pickerel, who was once your little Pickle, in the way to study a long silence.
In the beginning, when I was a boy, the late Mr Shakespeare made me jump down from the red brick wall to meet him. In the middle, the late Mr Shakespeare made me a woman before I was ever a man. But at the end, friends, at the end the late Mr Shakespeare kindly made me Ariel. This is Pickleherring’s great secret. I am a spirit. I can fly away!
I will take my harp in my hand and rise above the city where it burns. I will go not just to the harp’s defunctive music but my own. I will fly high above the flames, O Polly dear.
I think that is enough about what I have to do. I think that I have done enough already. I think that is enough about the late Mr Shakespeare.
An
ever
writer
to a never reader
FAREWELL
Postscript
This book contains quotations from (and variations on) the lives and works of: John Aubrey, W. H. Auden, William Barnes, John Berryman, William Blake, William Bliss, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Robert Burton, John Bunyan, Sir Edmund Chambers, the Comtesse de Chambrun, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, John Dryden, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Florio, Edgar I. Fripp, Robert Graves, Lady Charlotte Guest, Ivor Gurney, John Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, G. B. Harrison, William Hazlitt, Warren Hope, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, John Keats, Malcolm Lowry, Edmond Malone, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, John Masefield, Marianne Moore, Thomas Nashe, Lady Anne Newdigate-Newdegate, Robert Nye, Eric Partridge, Georges Perec, Robert Pinget, Edgar Allan Poe, John Cowper Powys, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, Sir Walter Ralegh, James Reeves, Edwin
Arlington Robinson, Nicholas Rowe, S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, Dame Edith Sitwell, Caroline Spurgeon, Laurence Sterne, Lytton Strachey, Arthur Symons, Dylan Thomas, Anthony à Wood, Charles Williams, John Dover Wilson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
About the Author
ROBERT NYE was born in London in 1939. His novels include Merlin, The Memoirs of Lord Byron, Mrs Shakespeare, and the award-winning Falstaff. A poet, journalist, and critic, he lives near Cork, in Ireland.
By Robert Nye
Falstaff
The Late Mr Shakespeare
ALSO BY ROBERT NYE
Expansive, sprawling, unruly and oversized, these are the memoirs of the most beloved comic figure in the history of literature. Larger-than-life, irascible and still lecherous at the advanced age of eighty-one, Falstaff recounts his outrageously bawdy tales as an antidote to popular legend – they’re guaranteed to tell you some things you never thought you needed to know about his life and times. Who killed Hotspur? What really went on at the battle of Agincourt? And what was it that made the wives of Windsor so merry?
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2001.
This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2012.
