The Late Mr Shakespeare (10 page)

‘O,' Queen Elizabeth wonders, ‘O Mr Cockburn, Mr Cockburn, is your donkey thirsty now?'

‘He is,' John Shakespeare answers, between gaspings. ‘Yes, he is, madam, quite.'

‘O,' Queen Elizabeth expostulates, ‘O Mr Frigspear, Mr Frigspear, and would he like a drink then? A little drink in my well, my gentleman?'

‘He would,' croaks John Shakespeare. ‘He would enjoy that, madam, I believe.'

‘Then come in, darling donkey,' Queen Elizabeth invites. ‘Only don't go in too deep or you'll drown and then be nothing, my poor thing.'

The Queen means, of course, that the extreme glacial coldness of her fissure will be the death of the interesting beast, and she is a-weary of her men's men dying on her. But as for sturdy John Shakespeare, like the angel of the Apocalypse he now has one foot on the known and the other on the unknown, and he's past counsel or caring. He can't hold anything back now, so he enters her quick, smooth, and hard.

Reader, all her long life Queen Elizabeth delighted in cerebral adoration, and the stronger the hint of corporal madness the more she delighted in it.

But now it is something else that pleases her.

Now it is something immediate.

Now it is something hard and very simple.

She forgets old Harry's lap and bad Seymour's fingers. She has no room for memory any more.

John Shakespeare has her. The father of William Shakespeare is up her. And the larks sing, and the choughs rise, and the wild thyme blows, and a donkey is braying over by Clopton Bridge, and the warming water, and the circling currents, and the bubbling springs, and the midsummer morning, and the weeping willows, and the great summer sun, and all the sweet blandishments and entreaties of all these little natural miracles make Elizabeth Tudor open her white royal legs wider and wider, make the Queen of England open her legs as she has never opened them before for any other man, so that John Shakespeare flows in, and William Shakespeare flows in, and the water flows in, and the warm flows in, and England flows in, and the world flows in, and it is all flowing warm flowing and flowing flowing warm until—

‘O Mr Spermspear!' cries Queen Elizabeth. ‘O Mr Shakespunk! Mr Shakespunk! Mr Shakespunk! O Mr Fuckster, O make your donkey go in deeper, my gentleman!'

So John Shakespeare does.

He does what the Queen tells him.

He does Queen Elizabeth thoroughly.

But—

‘Deeper!' the Queen cries, ‘Deeper yet! And harder! O my dear donkey! Do it! Do it! Do it!'

So John Shakespeare does.

He does what the Queen commands him.

He does Queen Elizabeth thoroughly all over again.

Until—

‘O Warwick!' cries the Queen. ‘O Warwick! Warwick!'

And the donkey finds that the well is very deep. And the donkey finds that the well is very very deep. But the donkey does not drown. And nor does the donkey freeze. On account, in part, of the warm springs and the other natural circumstances already mentioned.

John Shakespeare was very sorry to leave the water. He always came back to drink sack by Tiddington Mill. In his last years he would sit there, all under the willow trees, a fat man alone, and a drunkard, abusing the swans.

Few knew why he did it.

Queen Elizabeth was sorry to leave the water, too. In her dreams, in her later years, she would sometimes murmur and cry out
‘Warwick!'
Which thing caused more than one row with Lords Leicester and Essex.

Mr John Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth met thus and parted the same day. You will find their son's version of it in his play called
A Midsummer Night's Dream
.

Nine months after the sweet encounter in the water, to that very day, to that very hour, so they say, the poet William Shakespeare came into this world. His mother, knowing a bastard prince might bring civil war, returned home to the Palace of Westminster in London without him. The babe was left with John Shakespeare, who by that time was long married to Mary Arden. Mary had a good heart, and she brought up the child as her own.

Assuredly, madam, yes, if Queen Elizabeth was indeed our hero’s mother then it makes Mary Shakespeare’s games with him less reprehensible. Well, a mite so. A moiety. A shadow of a shade.

But no, sir, emphatically, I don’t believe it either.

That’s a nice word, that
MOIETY
. The late Mr William Shakespeare was at all times very fond of it. He was even its coiner, so far as I know, in its sense of being the smaller or lesser portion of anything. He employs it thus in the dedication to his
Rape of Lucrece
, and then again in
The Winter’s Tale
, I think. Yes, I just looked it up for you – Act II, Scene 3, Leontes:
Say that she were gone … a moiety of my rest / Might come to me again
. That’s how I felt about Jane. But she’s no part of the story. I’m telling you the Life of William Shakespeare.

A shadow of a shade less blameworthy, yes, that business of Mary Shakespeare’s hand on the young William’s balls
and pintle,
if
Queen Elizabeth could be thought to be the boy’s mother. I, friends, cannot believe it, all the same. Even though you might think that the source of the story’s impeccable.

The source of the story?

John Shakespeare!

He told it me, directly, in his cups. I met him once, the time he came to London. Rainy autumn it was, of that year when I first met Mr Shakespeare. We did
Hamlet
at the Swan, with Mr Shakespeare taking the Ghost’s part. His own little son had died that year, and now here was this play full of father and son stuff, and then his own father in London.

Not that John Shakespeare saw
Hamlet
. He’d come to town for something much more important than that. He’d come to get a coat of arms from the College of Heralds.

He was granted it, too, thanks largely to his son. The late Mr William Shakespeare had many talents, and one was the art or craft of pulling strings. The Heralds’ Office was lax in bestowal of the honour, and a little influence and a liberal use of money went a long way to secure the coveted dignity. Several of the players became gentlemen this way. It was a sign that you weren’t just a common actor. Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, Richard Cowley, John Heminges, and Richard Burbage – all sooner or later secured this right to display arms. In Mr Shakespeare’s case, there was the added incentive that his father had already applied for the honour some thirty years earlier, at the height of his civic dignity in Stratford, but the arms had not been granted. Now he was old, and fallen on hard times, and his son seized this chance to redeem him. He made up some fiction about John Shakespeare’s antecessors and how they had provided
‘valiant and faithful service’ to King Henry VII. He pulled, as I say, the right strings. He went in person to see the Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick, in the College of Heralds which lay just across the Thames from his Bankside lodgings.

I remember he showed me the draft. He had it all roughed out in his own hand on a great yellow scroll which he tucked under his oxter as he stepped into the wherry. I was hugely impressed. Remember, I was only thirteen, an impressionable lad, and the ways of the capital were new to me.

The coat of arms had, across a black incline, in its field of gold, a silver-tipped spear, the point upward, while for the crest or cognizance it displayed a falcon with out-stretched wings. The motto was
Non sans droict
. Not without right. Which Mr Ben Jonson mocked two years later in his
Every Man out of His Humour
as ‘Not without mustard’.

Not without right
. And a falcon shaking a spear. It was all very suitable, in my humble opinion. And the College of Arms thought so too. They granted the petition, and my master came back happy in the wherry.

My job, meanwhile, had been to keep tabs on Mr John Shakespeare, the gentleman being ennobled. He had rolled in from Stratford as drunk as a lord, and when his son saw him he remarked that the day’s main task would be to keep the potential arms-bearer as far away as possible from the arms of the Heralds themselves.

So little Pickleherring was appointed to amuse the man. Which meant that I danced along behind him, keeping John Shakespeare company as he trundled and trolled through the taverns.

I have the list that I kept of the places he drank in. The Boar’s Head, the Poultry, the Rose, the Three Cranes, the
Mermaid, the Mitre which was next door to the Mermaid, the Nag’s Head at the corner of Friday Street, the Razor and Hen, the Leg and Seven Stars, the Eagle and Child, and the Goat in Boots.

What did John Shakespeare drink? He drank beer made of hops, and also cider. He drank claret, muscadine, and charneco. But mostly he drank sherris sack in very great quantities – which is to say, canary, white Spanish wine.

I had never seen a man drink so much before. He held his drink well, I must say, until by mid-afternoon it started to flow out of him – from his ears, mostly. By then I had equipped us with a wheelbarrow, in which it was my joy to wheel him on from one beer-boltered, sack-soaked cellar to the next. He kicked his boots in the air as he lay in the barrow. I sang
O Polly Dear
and he belched hubbubs in my face for a refrain. To tell you the truth, that day I regretted ever going on the stage. An actor’s life no longer seemed such a fine thing. Not if it meant humouring and placating Mr William Shakespeare’s father while he got a coat of arms by not showing his face.

Somewhere in the course of our pilgrimage – I believe, at the Rose – Mr John Shakespeare confided to me what he called ‘the Reason for the Falcon’. It had been Anne Bullen’s device, he said, and her daughter Queen Elizabeth had adopted it in turn. This information he imparted with a wise nod and a wink. Many winks and nods later, and many cups of sherris sack, he told me the whole story of his alleged amorous encounter with the lady who was then our sovereign. I did not believe him then, and I do not now. But that night I wrote it all down, and when I was writing my last chapter I fished those notes out of one of my black
boxes and I used them. If there was some ardent lyricism in that chapter put it down to Mr Shakespeare’s father and his wine-loosened tongue, and not to Pickleherring. You will have noticed, madam. Eros is not my style.

When John Shakespeare had finished, and sat staring into space and breathing heavily, I said (just for something to say, which I used to do in those days): ‘All suddenly you saw the Faerie Queen, then?’

But Mr Shakespeare’s father didn’t know what I was talking about.

‘Elizabeth was no fairy,’ he said shortly. ‘She was warm as toast.’

Not wanting to lose my head, I was glad when he dropped the subject, going off on a long and complicated tale about some people called Lambert and how he had sued them for cheating him. (This story is very boring, and I’ll try not to tell it, if I can.) Whether John Shakespeare believed his own drunken fantasy concerning the Queen is difficult to say. Nor does it matter. Interestingly, perhaps all the incident really afforded me was a glimpse of the crude, rude origins of what had become imagination in his son. That there
was
some link between father and son let
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
testify, for reasons already mentioned. I am sure John Shakespeare never heard of Bottom. But William must have heard some such story from him as I heard.

In short, John Shakespeare was a fantast. And the only people who’ll credit his story, and want to believe it, are snobs. That is, the sort who want all Shakespeare’s works to be written by Lord Verulam, Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Because those lads were nobles,
don’t you know, while our hero was only a clod.

At least my listening to John Shakespeare’s story helped to keep him out of trouble while his son got his coat of arms for him.

It was the only time I ever saw Mr Shakespeare senior. He was a vast man. I remember his nose like a baby’s backside in the middle of his face, and the sweat forming crystal pustules on the crags of his forehead. I remember he had white tufts of hair growing out of his nostrils. I remember he struck the board with the flat of his hand and he said very quietly, almost as if whispering a secret, ‘The Lord God Almighty is angry with Elizabeth Tudor.’ I remember he said that his bunions were killing him. I remember him farting. He stood on one leg and he farted, and then shook his foot. ‘Another Spanish galleon sunk!’ he bellowed triumphantly. A second time, when he did the same, he did not shake his foot, but said sweetly, holding up one finger: ‘Hark! Hark! The cry of an imprisoned turd!’ Despite such grossness, there was something almost delicate about him. He was like a big fat dancer, a ruined sprite. You could see he was proud of his son, but they didn’t say much to each other. He spent a long time just stroking the scroll, when William came back with it ratified.

A falcon shaking a spear. I suppose it makes sense.

I never ever saw Mr Shakespeare’s mother, not having travelled to Stratford until later days when she was dead. Unless, of course, she
was
that woman in the flame-red wig for whom John Falstaff made the wives of Windsor merry.

I think it is high time that I gave you that ballad which has now been sung three times in the course of this book – by my mother to me to get me to sleep, by me to Mr William Shakespeare when I was sitting on the wall of the yard of that tavern when I first met him, and again by me in the last chapter to amuse Mr John Shakespeare in his cups.

Here are the words, then, of
O Polly Dear:

This is the saddest song I ever heard. I think it has something to do with the sound of the rhyme changing from
there
to
here
and then back to
fair
, and perhaps also with the little variation of rhythm in the last line of the two middle verses, but I'm a comedian not a poet, and I don't really know.

Here it is with the music: