The Late Mr Shakespeare (11 page)

I have outlived my own life. So I’m writing Mr Shakespeare’s.

The childhood of our immortal bard was not without the usual diseases. It fell to the Reverend Bretchgirdle to cure the little man.

The parish priest was a great believer in natural nostrums, balms, treatments, and remedies. He suffered himself from the ague. He cured it, not by wrapping a spider in a raisin and swallowing it, as you might think, sir, nor by eating sage leaves seven mornings running, madam, as you might hope, but by going out at night alone to the Church Street crossroads and as the Guildhall clock struck midnight turning round on his heels three times and driving a large iron nail into the earth up to the head. Then he walked away backwards from the nail before the clock had completed its twelfth stroke. The ague left him, passing into the tax collector who was the next person to step over the nail.

William Shakespeare caught the measles. The Reverend
Bretchgirdle cured William’s measles by cutting off his cat’s left ear and persuading the boy to swallow three warm drops of cat’s blood in a wineglassful of water.

William Shakespeare caught the jaundice. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William’s jaundice by making the boy eat nine fat lice on a piece of bread and butter. The other cure – twelve earth-worms baked on a shovel and reduced to powder to make a philter to drink every morning for a week – had failed to shift it. Ditto the tench tied to William’s bare back.

William Shakespeare had a rupture. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured it by going to the ash grove above Shottery and cutting a long sapling longitudinally and getting the lad to climb, naked, in and out of the fissure three times at sunset on St Valentine’s Day, after which the fat priest bound up the tree tightly and plastered over the crack with dung and clay. As the hole healed so did William. The other cure – the snail stopped up in the hollow oak – did not work.

William Shakespeare had the whooping cough. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William’s whoopers by taking a saucerful of brown sugar and encouraging a slug to crawl over it until the sugar was good and slimy. He then got William to eat the sugar. The muslin bag full of spiders, worn round the neck, and the hair from the boy’s head stuck between two bits of buttered toast and fed to a dog, had both failed to do the trick.

William Shakespeare had the toothache. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured that by chasing him widdershins round Holy Trinity Church and making him bite from the frosty ground the first fern to appear in spring on the banks of the Avon.

William Shakespeare had the pneumonie. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured it by tying a bullock’s milt to the sole of the lad’s left foot, and burying the milt when young Will had walked a league upon it.

William Shakespeare immediately contracted the thrush, with a terrible hick-hop. To cure him, the Reverend Bretchgirdle captured a duck from the pond by Tinkers Lane and placed its beak in the boy’s mouth so that when he tickled the duck’s throat and it opened its beak it breathed into the boy. The cold breath of the duck cured the thrush and the hiccup. The other cure – reciting the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus over the victim three times three days running – did not work in this case.

It is Christmas Eve. It is snowing. The plague seems passed, at last, thanks be to God.

So far I never mentioned the plague in this book of mine, for I wanted to keep my pages clean of all pestilence. But now that the worst is over it is time that I spoke of it.

Strange to tell, I began the present narrative just three months ago, in the week ending the 19th of September, 1665, which was the week in which (they are now saying) this memorable calamity reached its greatest pitch of destructiveness.

The infection came in from Holland in the spring. The first official notice announcing that the plague had established itself in the parish of St Giles in the Fields appeared in an order of council back in April.

During the months of May and June, the infection spread. People began to hurry out of town in great numbers, until the strictest measures were enforced to prevent the spread of
the plague to the rest of the country. The King with the Court fled in July, taking refuge so I heard in Salisbury, leaving the care of London to the Duke of Albermarle. (It’s wonderful what news you learn from whores.)

The circumstance of the summer being unusually hot, and with few breezes blowing down the Thames, the disease was nourished all the days of August. London might well be said to be all in tears. As the plague raged, and families under the slightest suspicion were shut up in their houses, the streets became deserted and overgrown with grass. It was the necessity of going out of the houses to buy provisions which was, in great measure, the ruin of the city. People caught the vile distemper, on these occasions, one from another, and even the provisions themselves were often tainted. I heard that the butchers of Whitechapel, where the greatest part of all flesh-meat is killed, were dreadfully visited by the pestilence, to such a degree that by midsummer few of their shops were kept open, and those that remained of them were killing their meat at Mile End and further, and bringing it in to market upon horses.

It is true that people used all possible precautions. The pie-maker in our basement told me that when anyone bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it out of the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hook themselves. On the other hand, the pie-maker said, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyers carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hands, as if to drive off death with a whiff of sweetness.

Even up here in my attic I witnessed the most dismal
scenes. Sometimes a man or a woman dropped down dead in the street below. Many people that had the plague upon them knew nothing of it till the inward gangrene had affected their vitals. They died then in a matter of moments. I saw one man who had just time to run to the porch of the little Quaker meeting house opposite and put on his hat to sit down in the doorway to die. By the end of the summer, such things were commonplace, and one no longer noticed them. Dead bodies lay here and there upon the ground. People stepped over them quickly, or went the long way round. By night the bearers attending the dead-cart would take up the bodies, and carry them away. I watched it by moonlight from my window. Nor did those undaunted creatures, who performed these offices, fail to pick the pockets of the dead, and sometimes strip off their clothes if they were well dressed.

The pain of the swellings in this plague was in particular very violent, and to some intolerable. I saw a woman break naked out into the street and run directly down to the river, plunging herself into the water. Nobody cared to haul her out, for fear of infection. Others just ran up and down, not knowing what they did, till they dropped down stark dead. The worst cases were where people exhausted their spirits but did not die instantly, so that they fell down in the street and lingered on for perhaps half an hour or an hour. What was most piteous was that they were sure to come to themselves entirely in that half hour or hour, and then to make most grievous and piercing cries and lamentations. I never heard such horror before in my life. It was worse than the horrors one heard in the late Civil Wars. Worse because so inward and so intimate. In time of plague the enemy is inside you. And no one can be sure that they haven’t got it.

The tale of the blind piper I had from Pompey Bum. (I will tell you all about Pompey Bum another time.) He had the story from one of the men who carted the dead to the burial places, whose name was John Hayward, and in whose cart the accident occurred. The fellow was not blind, in truth, but a simpleton so clumsy and vague that he gave that impression. He commonly went his rounds about ten o’clock at night, when he went piping along from door to door, and the people would take him in at public-houses where they knew him, and give him drink and victuals, and sometimes farthings. In return, he would pipe and sing, and talk simply, which diverted the people, and thus he lived.

The plague was no time for a piper. Yet the poor fellow went about as usual, though he was all but starving. When anyone asked how he did, he would answer, ‘The dead-cart hasn’t taken me yet, but they’ve promised to call again next week.’

It happened one night that this poor fellow, whether somebody had given him too much to drink or no, laid himself out all along upon the top of a bulk or stall, and fell fast asleep, by a door in the street near London Wall, towards Cripplegate. And upon the same bulk or stall, the people of some house in the alley, hearing the bell, which signified the coming of the dead-cart, laid out a body dead of the plague close by where the piper lay, supposing he was another corpse set out for collection. Accordingly, when John Hayward with his bell and cart came along, finding two bodies lying upon the stall, he had them taken up with the long shovel they used, and thrown into the cart. And all this while the piper slept soundly.

From hence they passed along, and took up other dead
bodies all laid out beneath the moon, until, as honest John Hayward told Pompey Bum, they must almost have buried the poor fellow alive in the cart. Yet all this while the piper slept soundly on.

At length the cart comes to the place where the bodies are to be thrown into the ground – which, as I remember, is at Mountmill – and, as the cart usually stopped some time before they were ready to pitch out the melancholy load they had in it, as soon as the cart stops, the piper wakes up, and he struggles a bit to get his head out from under all the dead bodies, but at last he sits upright in the cart and he cries out in confusion, ‘Hey! Hey! Where am I?’

This frighted the wits out of the other attendants, but stout John Hayward turned never a hair, but said: ‘Lord bless us! Here’s somebody in the cart who’s not quite dead!’

So one of the others calls out to the piper, and says: ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m the poor piper,’ the fellow answers. ‘Where am I?’

‘Where are you!’ says Hayward. ‘Why, you are in the dead-cart, and we are going to bury you.’

‘But I ain’t dead, though, am I?’
says the piper.

It was a question, not a statement, that’s the point.

So he played them a tune on his pipe, and John Hayward and his men judged that he was not dead. And they helped the poor fellow down, and he went about his business.

That’s what I’m doing, reader. I play my pipe to prove I am not dead.

I began in a week when upwards of ten thousand were reported dead. My Life of Mr Shakespeare was conceived first as an answer to the plague. Yet I was determined that the pestilence should leave my memories unscathed, which is
why I never mentioned it when I started opening my boxes and writing up their contents at the height of it.

No doubt the piper played a merry tune. For certain he never piped any dirge on that dead-cart. No more do I. I knew that the late Mr Shakespeare would be my living companion, dancing me out of doomed London. And so it has proved.

The weather began to change when I began writing, and the air became cooled and purified by the equinoctial winds. That’s why I praised the snow, of course, in Chapter Seventeen. It has fallen like a blessing on the city. It has cured the great plague that lay upon the streets.

Pompey Bum says (I know not on what authority) that more than a hundred thousand persons have perished by this terrible visitation.

But not Pickleherring, my lily lords and ladies.

At last the bells ring out tonight for a birth and not for burials. Christmas Eve, snow falling, and bells ringing. If I were not so old then I might almost be happy.

Listen, I beg you. Harken to my tales, friends.

When I was young I lived to dream, and now I am old I have to dream to live. This Life of William Shakespeare is my life now. He dreamt me up that afternoon in Cambridge. My life has been a nightmare since he died. Christmas Eve 1665, snow falling, and bells ringing. How much of my long existence has been a dream then? As in the old old story, am I the man dreaming he is a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he is a man?

Although the Reverend Bretchgirdle cut off his cat's left ear in the interests of curing the boy Shakespeare's measles, he was still very fond of the creature.

Bretchgirdle never did anything by halves. He baked a cake once in honour of the Virgin's lying-in. His friend Brownsword wouldn't eat it. No such ceremony should be observed, he pointed out, because Mary suffered no pollution, therefore needed no purification.

So these fine scholars passed their days in Stratford.

Bretchgirdle, in all truth, was a sentimentalist. It would not be too much to say that he leant towards Rome. One summer he told two of his choirboys that Lady's Thistle gets its name from the fact that Our Lady, walking near Nazareth with aching breasts, shook or squirted drops of milk upon it, to relieve the tension. The lads were kind not to report this opinion to the Bishop. It's true that the leaves of the plant are diversified with white spots. But I doubt if it ever grew in the Holy Land.

Bretchgirdle was always going on about Jesus's mother. Whether it was her virginity, her sinlessness, or her peculiar closeness to the Godhead, the present writer is not sure, but something about the woman appealed to him greatly. He wouldn't even have it that the brethren of Our Lord were Joseph's children by a former marriage. Their mother was quite another Mary, Bretchgirdle said, Mary the wife of Clopas or Alphaeus, the Virgin's sister.

Brownsword, on the other hand, was a Latinist only in the classical sense. He argued that the colourlessness of Mary's character, not only in the gospels but in the apocrypha too, makes it fatally easy to imagine her and to imagine that one understands that imagination.

Bretchgirdle ignored this thorn.

The parish priest bought a kitten in the Rother Market and christened it Dulia. When the schoolmaster heard him calling it, he said, ‘What do you call that cat?'

‘Dulia,' said Bretchgirdle.

‘After the martyr?' said Brownsword.

‘No, not Julia – Dulia,' Bretchgirdle explained.

‘I hear you now,' said Brownsword, and added, ‘I thought you had a cold.'

When the cat got bigger Bretchgirdle started calling it Hyperdulia.

It was a fat cat, kink-tailed, tabby in colour, forever shaking its head as if it wanted to lick its ear, a nasty sort of creature by all accounts. It had fleas and the fleas gave it worms. The flea-larvae swallow the eggs of the worm along with the organic matter in the bottom of the cat-box. The worm-larvae hatch from these eggs in the midgut of the flea-larvae, penetrate the midgut and arrive in the stomach
of the flea-larvae. They stay there during the pupal and adult stages of the flea, growing all the while. An animal becomes infected or re-infected by swallowing such fleas when, for example, licking its coat.

(I learnt all this from Dr Walter Warner, true discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Of course, the facts were not known in the ignorant century gone, when Bretchgirdle and Brownsword busied themselves with aspects of Mariolatry, and suchlike.)

Dulia was always licking her coat, so she was forever eating her own fleas and giving herself worms. According to Warner's
Artis Analyticae Praxis
(1631), his only book, this would have constituted a vicious circle or at least circumlocution – cat licking, cat chewing, fleas going down, worms breeding in the swallowed fleas, cat having worms, flea-larvae eating the eggs of the worms along with the organic matter in the bottom of the cat-box, cysticeroids hatching in the midgut, and so on, and so on, adult fleas copulating a few hours after their emergence from the cocoon and before having had a blood meal, the females laying a batch of fresh eggs after a day or two, but needing a blood meal before each batch.

Bretchgirdle liked his cat. Perhaps he did not love it, but he liked it.