The Late Mr Shakespeare (19 page)

They had reached the end of their afternoon stint on the tread-wheel. Shakespeare turned to his companion. ‘A most strange story,’ he said. The teller turned away. He said nothing. He went to his cell.

All the rest of that day, and all night, Will thought over the story the stranger had told him. He considered it one of the best stories he had ever heard. The next morning he looked for the man in the file to the tread-wheel, to tell him so. But the man was not there.

The next day Shakespeare looked for him again. Still this particular prisoner did not appear among the others. It was a week from the day when William Shakespeare first heard the names of Lord Fox and the Lady Mary before he encountered the storyteller once more. The man was already in position on the tread-wheel. Nobody else seemed keen to share his company, so Will found it an easy matter to go and work beside him.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘how good I thought your story.’

‘But I didn’t finish it,’ the storyteller said.

‘You mean that there is more to it?’ asked William Shakespeare.

‘I mean that there is more to it,’ the storyteller said.

And he began to tell the more to it, as follows.

‘Lord Fox,’ he said, ‘had been invited to dine with us on New Year’s Day. My sister did not cancel that invitation because of what she now knew about him. So Lord Fox came, and was his usual self, the heart of charm, the soul of wit. Ted and I were ready to fall in with his pleasantness, just as we always had been. But the Lady Mary was not. She sat stroking spoons until after dinner, when Lord Fox turned to her with a sudden smile and said, “You are very quiet this evening, my dear.” My sister did not look at him, but she answered him sidelong: “It is because of a strange dream I had at Christmas.” “Dreams,” said Lord Fox, “always make me wake up feeling hungry.” “I do not think that you would
like this one,” said Lady Mary. But Lord Fox insisted that he would like it, and Ted and I said that we were curious to hear it too, so Lady Mary began telling it, and this is what she said: “I dreamt that I visited your house, Lord Fox, just as you invited me to. I set out north of north, east of east, south of south, and west of west, and in no time at all I found it: Bold House. I knocked on the door, Lord Fox, but there was no answer, so I went in, and down the long, dark hall, and up the turning stair, round and round, until I came to the gallery. That gallery I went down, Lord Fox, and at the end of it I found a door. And on the door some words were written,” my sister said. Lord Fox was frowning at my sister, sir, frowning, frowning, as though he would think her out of existence. “Really?” he said. “Really,” said Lady Mary. “Oh, but in my dream,” she added. “Strange dream,” said Lord Fox. “Tell me, dear lady,” he pursued, “what did the words say?” “They said,” said Lady Mary,
“Be bold, be bold, but not too bold – lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.”
She did not look at our guest as she said this. “But remember,” she added, “that this is only a dream, and of course it is not so in your real house, Lord Fox, is it?” “It is not so,” agreed Lord Fox readily. “Nor was it so,” he added. “Of course not,” said Lady Mary. “Well,” she went on, “I opened the door of the room at the end of the gallery and looked in, Lord Fox, and there I found, all in my dream, of course, skeletons on hooks, and tubs full of blood, and subtle skulls galore. And the floor, Lord Fox, the floor was strewn with coils of human hair. But, of course, it is not so in your real house, is it?” Lord Fox bit his tobacco pipe in half. “It is not so,” he muttered, “nor was it so.” “Of course not,” said Lady Mary. “Well,” she went on, “I did not stay
to look long at that room. In my strange dream, that is, Lord Fox. But looking from the window, looking from the little diamond-shaped window, leaning to look across the sill of that little window with the leaded panes in shapes of hearts and diamonds, I saw you, Lord Fox, coming through the snow across the lawns, and you had your collar up, Lord Fox, and your drawn sword in your left hand, naked naked sword, naked naked hand, your naked sword in your naked hand, those nakednesses touching, and with your right hand, also naked, you dragged a poor shrieking girl by the hair.” “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” cried out Ted. “This was the work of the night-mare,” I added. “Why, Lord Fox, if any of this dark dream of my sister’s were the least bit true, you would be a monster, sir, a devil in disguise.” “That’s right,” said Lady Mary, “but it is not so, is it, Lord Fox?” Lord Fox was sweating now. His eyes went to and fro. His hands shook. He pulled on his gloves. His fingers played with each other, touching through the skin of the gloves. They were fine yellow gloves, made of kidskin.
*
Lord Fox opened his mouth. “It is not so,” he said, his voice like dead leaves rustling together on the ground. “It is not so,” he said, “nor it was not so, and God forbid it should be so.” My sister ignored him. “I hid myself under the stair,” she went on. “You came in, Lord Fox, and you did not see me. You came in and you did not see me there. You dragged that poor girl down the hall. She was kicking and fighting and begging you, Lord Fox, begging you most piteously to let her go. But you had no pity, Lord Fox. You started to drag her up the stair.” “Enough!” cried Lord Fox. “It is not
so,” he cried. “Nor was it so,” he cried. “And God forbid it should be so,” he added. My sister ignored him. “That poor girl caught hold of the bannister to try to stop you,” she went on, “and you struck at her hand, which had a silver bracelet about the wrist, you struck at her hand, Lord Fox, and you cut her hand off, Lord Fox, you cut her hand off. Cut. Cut.” “No, no, no,” cried Lord Fox, “no, no, no, no, no. It is not so, nor it was not so, and God forbid it should be so!” “Be calm, Lord Fox,” said Edward, moving his hand up and down his sword-hilt. “Be calm, be calm, sir, for my sister merely tells her dream.” “Her Christmas dream,” said I, fingering my own good sword. “No dream,” said then the Lady Mary. “No dream at all, Lord Fox,” she cried, “for it is so, and it was so, and here the hand I have to show!” And my sister snatched the hand and its silver bracelet from where they lay hidden in her lap, and she threw the bloody bundle in Lord Fox’s face. That devil roared with rage. He ran to the door. But we had locked the door. Then Lord Fox was at the window, clawing, clawing, but not before us. For we had known, Edward and I, known from the start, sir, that our sister Mary’s dream was not a dream. We met him with our swords, sir, that wicked Lord Fox, and we fell upon him, sir, and we cut him into a hundred little pieces. And we threw the hundred pieces into the sea, where they boiled and hissed and turned the water black as pitch before they sank from sight and were seen no more.’

The stranger stopped treading on the tread-wheel. His eyes were mild as milk as he blinked in the gloom.

‘That, sir,’ he said, ‘is the end.’

A good story,’ said Shakespeare. ‘I do not know,’ he added, ‘which half I liked the better.’

The storyteller looked at him, then he stopped looking at him, then he went away. His work on the wheel was not done, but then he went away.

‘Come back,’ mouthed William Shakespeare, without speaking.

The man did not come back.

Nor did Shakespeare see him again during the remainder of his spell in Warwick Jail.

On the day of his release he asked a jailer what had happened to the fine fellow with the white hair who had worked beside him betimes on the tread-wheel, the man the other prisoners seemed to shun. Had he gone home? Had he escaped? Had he been moved to another prison?

‘Not him,’ said the jailer. ‘That was Jack Naps the murderer.’

‘Murder?’ said Shakespeare.

‘Didn’t you hear all about it in Stratford?’ the jailer said, mockingly. ‘He cut up his sister with a carving knife. She’d been making the beast with two backs with a tinker from Greete moor. Just enjoying a bit of luxury, poor girl. You know how it is, some brothers are that jealous.’

‘What happened to him though?’ demanded Shakespeare.

‘He went for a long walk,’ the jailer replied.

Shakespeare asked no more questions. He had been in prison long enough to know what that meant. The walk in question is done with a hank of hempen rope about one’s neck. It does not end in sights.

When William Shakespeare was in Warwick Jail, to pass away the gloomy hours he took a rail out of the wooden stool belonging to his cell and, with the knife he had for cutting of his meat, he fashioned it into a flute.

The keeper, hearing music, followed the sound of the music to Shakespeare’s cell. But while they were unlocking the door, the ingenious prisoner replaced the rail in the stool, so that the searchers were unable to resolve the mystery.

Nor, during the remainder of Shakespeare’s residence in the jail, did they ever discover how the music had been produced. And, on his last day there, Shakespeare managed to fall on the stool so that all the rails were broken and the thing was thrown away as useless.

Thus William Shakespeare was remembered in Warwick Jail as the prisoner who had been attended by music, but it was never discovered how the music had been there for Shakespeare, or if he had made it himself.

I like this story.

There are those who say that William Shakespeare never sold fireworks, and so was never in Warwick Jail with a phantom flute.

Mr John Aubrey, for instance, will have it that when Shakespeare was a boy he exercised his father’s trade of butcher, but that when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech.

Now, there is some truth in this, but like all the things that Mr Aubrey tells his friends it is spoilt by carelessness, as well as by a complete failure to give any tangible examples in proof of what he says.

It could not have been for his father, in fact, that young William ever worked as a butcher’s apprentice. By the time that he had to leave the grammar school to earn his living, his father’s butchery business was forspent.

It was probably to his neighbour, Thomas Giles, established as a butcher in Sheep Street, or perhaps to Ralph
Cowdrey similarly established in Bridge Street, that jolly Jack Shakespeare offered his son’s services. The families of Giles, Cowdrey, and Shakespeare were already linked by the skin and leather trade. And when Jack stopped butchering he didn’t stop drinking with other butchers.

So when William came back from Warwick and returned home like the prodigal son, it was a neighbour’s fatted calf that he had to kill. And it would have been either in Giles’s butcher shop, or (at a pinch) Cowdrey’s, that he made that high-style speech still remembered in Stratford.

But what was that speech?

You might well ask, sir.

What did Shakespeare actually say?

That, my dear madam, is a very good question.

Mr Aubrey does not tell us.

Mr Aubrey may not know, indeed. But Mr Robert Reynolds does.

Here then, gentle reader, from Pickleherring’s 43rd box, carefully copied down nearly half a century ago after Mr Shakespeare’s funeral from the tear-oiled lips of a fellow mourner (Lucy Hornby, widow of the blacksmith Richard Hornby) is the speech that Shakespeare made when he killed a calf.

The bard’s famous calf-killing speech, never before published.

Mrs Hornby told me she heard it twice. She had never been able to forget the boy William standing there in the sawdust, cleaver in hand, eyes rolling, apron cross-hatched and boltered with blood, nor the words that came pouring forth in a red torrent as she waited with some impatience for her joint.

This is what Shakespeare said:

That is, old Mrs Hornby claimed that Shakespeare repeated what he had said. He would say the lines over and over, she insisted, rather than get on with the job in hand, and actually cut up the calf.

(I must say that I doubt this repetition. Mr Shakespeare in my experience never repeated himself. More likely that my informant was disguising her own failure to remember more.)

Some of the other customers, the widow Hornby told me, made complaints to the management. They appreciated neither the tenderness of the sentiments expressed in the verse nor the toughness of the steaks carved out by Shakespeare.

The way in which the apprentice reminded his audience just what the meat on the end of their forks really is cannot have been much good for business either. But I think it took more than a few dissatisfied customers to put an end to William Shakespeare’s too brilliant career as a butcher, and to drive him forth again from the bounds of Stratford.

It took, my dears, a death, and a birth, and an earthquake.

The death, first. The death was that of Shakespeare’s sister Anne.

All the Annes in this book are important, and I suggest you mark them well with your red ink, sir – even those, like Lady Anne Rainsford (Michael Drayton’s ‘Idea’) who play no real part in the story. Soon we shall be meeting Mr Shakespeare’s future wife, Anne Hathaway. And a very elusive lady called Anne Whateley, who may never have existed except on a page in a book. Early and late, our poet’s life was riddled with women called Anne. Sometimes I even wonder if the so-called Dark Lady of the sonnets could have been another one, although as you will see for yourselves when we come to that mystery so far there are no Annes among the suspects. As for Anne Shakespeare, Will’s sister, she was important to him both in the matter and the manner of her death.

Little Anne Shakespeare was only a child when she died. Those who remembered her spoke of an angel-like creature.
She was frail as she was fair, with golden hair so long that she could sit on it. Her surviving relatives referred to her always with a wistful mixture of awe and affection, as if talking about a beautiful spirit that had come briefly to visit them, and found this world intolerable, and gone back therefore to that realm of light which was its true home. For years after Anne’s death they kept her tiny wicker chair in the corner of the kitchen by the stove. None of the other children would ever have presumed or dared to sit in it.

Anne Shakespeare died in the springtime of the year, as well as her own springtime. She was just seven years and six months old. Mrs Shakespeare, the bard’s widow, used to say that Anne was eight, but she was not. With a creature so evanescent, it seems vital to get the one or two facts right, and I have consulted both the register of the parish church of Holy Trinity (for her birth) and the chamberlain’s accounts Council Book A in Stratford (for her death).

Here is the entry for her baptism:

‘28 September, 1571, christened Anna filia magistri Shakspere.’

And here is the entry for her burial:

April 4th, 1579, 8d paid for the bell & pall of
Mr Shakspeare’s
dawter.’

So, you see, the poor soul never reached the age of eight.

But facts break down now, and we pass into a misty shire of pure superstition, for Mrs Shakespeare always used to repeat the versions of little Anne’s death which she had heard from Mary Arden, her mother-in-law, old wives’ tales that had for their moral burden the insistence that the child perished as a direct consequence of bringing hawthorn blossom across the threshold of the house on Henley Street.

There is a saying amongst country folk, many centuries old, that you must never bring the hawthorn into the house when you go gathering it to celebrate the coming of the spring, which they call going a-maying. If you cross the threshold with the may, it means a death. The hawthorn is the may, the blossom of life, but to fetch it into the house is to ask death in.

Mrs Shakespeare told me this herself, with every appearance of perfect sincerity, and I respected her. You hang hawthorn in the front porch, she said, and you hang it round the doorposts. You may even decorate your sills and windows with it, outside. But you never, never, never bring hawthorn across the threshold, and into the body of the house.

Anne Shakespeare did.

In her innocence that pretty child came running into the house on Henley Street with her arms full of blossoms, and she crowned herself Queen of the May with a fatal sprig of hawthorn.

She died a few days later, no one knew how. There was no fret or fever. She simply died.

Let us hope that Anne Shakespeare was buried deep in flowers. Larded with sweet flowers, madam, yes. With rosemary, pansies, and fennel. With columbines, daisies, and rue. Like Ophelia, she wore her rue with a difference. (And observe that there is no hawthorn in Ophelia’s list of flowers.)

Anne’s death doubtless provided John Shakespeare with another reason to be drunk and neglect his business, and I’m certain it left its mark on William too. He never directly referred to it, but then there was no reason why he should, not in my company. But the boy was not yet fifteen when his sister perished, and such things go in deep at any age.

I cannot think of Anne Shakespeare running innocently into the house in Henley Street with her little sprig of flowering hawthorn in her hand without the tears welling up in my eyes. I confess it, reader. To shed a few tears for the death of a girl you never knew is unquestionably the mark of some foul sentiment, but there it is. I have to live with such discomfortable things.

And here is a song for her, which song I found on a bit of yellow vellum, three centuries old, in the great public library founded at Oxford by Sir Thomas Bodley:

EVERYKUNĒ
is every kind, with the mark over the
e
to show us how they said it;
BLOWET SUOTES
is bloweth sweetest;
LEMMON
is leman or lover.

Nice poem.

A year after Anne’s death, there was a birth in the family. I quote again from the parish register, the entry I found:

‘3 May, 1580, christened, Edmund sonne to Mr John Shakespeare.’

Was there an odour of hawthorn about the new baby’s cradle? Had John and Mary tried in their grief to call poor lost Anne back? This last offspring of their union, Edmund,
was certainly a late child, an afterthought, six years younger than his nearest sibling, and some sixteen years younger than William, their eldest.

Here, if I give you a table of the Shakespeare children, you will discern the pattern:

All lived to maturity, except the unfortunate Anne, though Edmund was only twenty-eight when he died, of brandy-wine, a player, but not one of the King’s Men.

We may well suppose that William, as the eldest, was required to help to care for the smaller children. Discounting the indignity felt by an adolescent pressed into such a role, perhaps this might be considered positively as his earliest training for his work as a dramatist, in that it gave him some of his insight into the warring elements not just of family life but of human nature as a whole.

But look again at my table.

And remember that William, a disappointed scholar, brimming with poetry, either with or without the brief taste of the wide world provided by his adventures as a fireworks salesman, was now back at home in a household where there was first the sudden death of a child full of promise, and then a new baby, another mouth to feed, an infant rival, with him having to work at a trade which by no stretch of the imagination
can he have found congenial, while his father (who
was
a butcher) preferred to work at nothing much but the indulgence of his paternal belly by the satisfaction of his infernal thirst.

Anne’s death and Edmund’s birth, in the circumstances, would have been enough, I think, to make young William restless.

But then, to cap it all, there was an earthquake.

It was only a small earthquake, as befits England, as we know, but all the same the good earth moved and trembled. On the evening of Easter Wednesday, 1580, in that very month when his brother Edmund was hatched, the solid Warwickshire countryside threatened to dissolve beneath the feet of William Shakespeare.

Such things do more in the mind of a poet than they do to the world as a whole.

Of that earthquake’s physical effects in Stratford-upon-Avon there is report only of chimneystacks twisted anti-clockwise, and the like. There was one fatality – a stone fell from one of the arches in the south transept of Holy Trinity Church, killing a field-mouse.

But who can say what that small earthquake did to Shakespeare?

Consider, reader.

We know, from
Romeo and Juliet
, that he never forgot it. We know, indeed, as I pointed out in my seventh chapter, that like the Nurse in that play, he even measured the years from the date of it. So the earthquake was plainly of some importance in his life. How could it not be? An intimation – however slight or minor – that the world might end, that the world
will
end, that the fabric of the earth can crack and perish, could hardly fail to make a lasting impression on anyone who suffers it. It is one
thing to think (as young poets do) of identifying yourself with the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. It is quite another to feel the spear of your own being shaken by it.

There is a little wind before an earthquake.

Everyone knows that, even Pickleherring who was never in one.

There is always a little wind before an earthquake. (God knows why.)

The late Mr Shakespeare spoke more than once to me about that wind. But of the earthquake itself, the ‘quake’ of which he felt beneath his own feet, he said little and that little belittling, even disparaging.

He said he had been sitting by a dove-house in his mother’s garden, and that the earthquake was no more than the shaking of the dove-house as the doves prepare to fly. In its homeliness, as in its precision, the image tells us much of the shock of the tremor. In all this, of course, his experience matches that which he gives to Juliet’s nurse.

What else happened?

A mirror cracked from top to bottom in the hatter’s shop of young William Hart, just starting to make his way in Mere Street; some copies of Lyly’s
Grammar
were spilt from a shelf in the King’s New School; six bricks fell down the chimney and into the men’s dormitory at the poorhouse.

A small earthquake, but sufficient.

Sufficient, that is, to make William Shakespeare shake the familiar dust of Stratford from his shoes once the earth stopped shaking under them.