The Late Mr Shakespeare

For instance, William Shakespeare. Tell you all about him. All there is that’s fit to know about Shakespeare. Mr William Shakespeare. All there is that’s not fit, too, for that matter. Who he was and why. Where he was and when. What he was and wherefore. And then, besides, to answer several difficult questions that might be bothering you. Such as, who was the Dark Lady of the sonnets? Such as, why did he leave his wife only his second-best bed? Such as, is it true he died a Papist, and lived a sodomite? Such as, how come he placed that curse on his own grave? All this, and more, you will find answered here. But better begin at the beginning, while we can.

Who am I? Reader, I will tell you suddenly. My name is Robert Reynolds
alias
Pickleherring and my game is that of a comedian and believe me I was well-acquainted with our famous Mr Shakespeare when I was young. I acted in his plays. I knew his ways. I played Puck to his Oberon. To his
Prosper, I was Ariel. I washed my hands sleep-walking too, as the Scottish queen. Why, once, at Blackfriars, the man was sick in my cap. I loved the lovely villain, ladies and gentlemen.

By the time I have finished I think you will have to admit it. There is no man or woman alive in the world who knows more than old Pickleherring about the late Mr Shakespeare.

I call to mind as if it was just yesterday, for instance, the first time I ever clapped eyes on the dear fellow. He was wearing a copataine hat. You won’t know those hats now, if you’re under fifty. They were good hats. They wore good hats and they wrote good verse in those days. Your copataine hat was a high-crowned job in the shape of a sugar-loaf. Some say the word should be
COPOTINK
and that it comes from the Dutch. I call a copataine hat a copataine hat. So did Mr Shakespeare, let me tell you. I never heard him say that his hat came from Holland. And in his tragical history of
Antony and Cleopatra
he has the word
COPATAINE
. Which part, friends, he wrote first for your servant: Cleopatra. I never wore a copataine hat myself, but then I was only a boy at the time we are speaking of.

I was living in those far-off but never to be forgotten days in a cottage made of clay and wattles just outside the north gate of the city of Cambridge. That cottage stood by a fen. Fatherless, motherless, I was being looked after by a pair of sisters, whiskered virgins, Meg and Merry Muchmore, two spinsters with long noses for the smelling out of knavery.

It was the pleasure of each of these ladies in turn to spank me naked while the other watched. I think they liked to see my little pintle harden. Meg’s lap smelt of liquorice but there was no pleasing Merry. I had a well-whipped childhood, I can tell you.

All their long lives these two weird sisters had dedicated themselves to piety and good works, and I, the bastard son of a priest’s bastard, conceived in a confessional, born in a graveyard, was one of the best of them. I mean, what better work than Pickleherring?

I was a posthumous child. Of my father, I heard from my mother only that his mouth was so big and cavernous that he could thrust his clenched fist into it. How often he performed this trick for her amusement I know not. I know only that he could do it, and that also he had some interest in the occult. That is an interest which I do not share.

Reader, don’t get me wrong. I believe in ghosts and visions. I pray only to be spared from seeing them.

My mother died when I was seven years old. She smelt of milk and comfrey fritters. She used to tell me tales by the chimneyside. It was from her sweet lips that I first heard of Tattercoats and of Tom-Tit-Tot and of Jack and his beanstalk. She sang to me, too, my mother – all the old English songs.

I remember her singing me to sleep with a ballad called
O Polly Dear
. But she died of a fever and then there was no more music. My bed was under thatching and the way to it was up a rope ladder.

I had never before been spoken to by a man in a copataine hat. Mr Shakespeare was tall and thin, and he wore that hat with an air of great authority. He had also a quilted silken doublet, goose-turd green; grey velvet hose; and a scarlet cloak. Never believe those who tell you he was not a dandy.

This first meeting of ours took place in the yard of a tavern called the Cock. A small rain fell like brightness from the air. Ah, what a dream it seems now, seventy years away.

One thing I can tell you that you’ll perhaps not learn
elsewhere. Mr William Shakespeare never minded a bit of rain. He sat under the springing mulberry tree that grew in the middle of the Cock’s back yard. He had a damask napkin over his knee and a little knife of silver in his hand. He was opening oysters.

As for me, I had climbed up on the red-brick wall to keep him in my sight. My friends mocked me. One of them said the man was from Wales, and an alchemist. They said he could make gold, and fly in the air. They said he was in Cambridge for blood for his lamp. I pretended not to care. I did not want his art, but I had no father.

‘Pickleherring’s mad again!’ piped my playmates.

Then they all ran away and left me on my own to face the necromancer.

Mr Shakespeare must have seen me watching him. But I don’t believe that his eyes ever left the oysters.

His voice was soft and gentle when he spoke. But it was the sort of softness that you stop and listen to, like the sound of the theorbo.

‘Boy,’ he said, suddenly.

I nearly fell down off the wall. Instead I said, ‘Yes, sir?’

I was shaking in my boots.

‘Say this, boy,’ he said.
‘I am afraid, and yet I’ll venture it.’

What kind of spell was this?

I looked at Mr Shakespeare.

He looked up from his oysters and looked at me.

Something in his look made me take him straight. So I forgot all about spells and I said the words he said. I said them simply. I do not think I can say that I said them well. But I said them more or less as he said them, which is to say that I spoke the speech trippingly on the tongue, not mouthing it, not sawing the air with my hand.

It was, as I learnt later, the way he liked it. He never could abide the ranting sort. Truth to tell, I had never then acted in my life, so I knew no worse. Also, I
was
afraid, which helped me to say that I was as though I meant it.

My performance seemed to please Mr Shakespeare.

He took off his hat to me.

‘Good,’ he said. And then, ‘Good, boy,’ he said. And then again, after a little while, ‘Good boy,’ Mr Shakespeare said finally.

He swallowed an oyster.

‘Say this,’ he said. ‘Say that.’

I mean, I can’t remember now all Mr Shakespeare bade me say then. He sat there downing oysters while I recited. Sometimes he said ‘Good’ and sometimes he said ‘Good, boy’ and once he said ‘Good boy’ again and more than once he said nothing but just wiped his mouth with his napkin.

I do recall that he asked me at last to sing.

So I sat down on the wall and I sang for Mr Shakespeare.

I had a good voice in those days.

I sang for him the ballad of
O Polly Dear
.

The sweet rain fell and the drops ran down my face and I sat there in the rain, legs dangling, singing
O Polly Dear
that my mother used to sing to me.

Mr Shakespeare listened with his eyes as well as his ears.

When I finished he nodded and he clapped his hands three times together.

It was the first applause I ever had.

Then at Mr Shakespeare’s instruction I jumped down off the wall.