The Late Mr Shakespeare (25 page)

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all (even Will, his negative inversion), please note that again I have not done the obvious thing.

Namely, I have not claimed that our hero ‘ran away' from Stratford-upon-Haven or whatever you feel like calling the wretched place just because he did not get on like a bed on fire with his wife.

I know that there are those who have said and will say this.

And I know well what they get up to in their sly attempts to prove it.

Their trick is to take certain bits and pieces from Mr Shakespeare's plays and to press these passages into service as if they could be made to illustrate Mr Shakespeare's private life.

For instance, such literary gossips seize on that line given to Parolles in
All's Well That Ends Well
(what a lovely title that is, madam, yes): ‘A young man married is a young man
marred.' And then they hop from there to the character of Adriana in
The Comedy of Errors
and they argue that because she is a nasty, nagging scold it must follow that Shakespeare intended her as a portrait of his wife. Ergo, his married youth was marred by Anne Hathaway's tongue. Ergo, he quit Stratford.

Reader, I say this is wrong.

What is wrong with it is that Parolles's cynicism suits Parolles, and Adriana belongs in her play. In other words, these things fit where they are supposed to fit, they belong where they are, and they tell us nothing about the man who wrote them save that he was a good craftsman as well as a good observer of human character. The fact is that if you take the work of a dramatist with such a wide range as Shakespeare then you can find within it items which when extracted could be used to prove anything at all if applied to his biography.

My method in this book is different in kind.

I only use those bits that do not fit.

For example, that shepherd's quite irrelevant personal outburst about the significance of attaining the age of twenty-three.

For example, the land-locked philosophical Jaques suddenly introducing
REMAINDER BISCUIT
into his account of the fool he has met in the Forest of Arden.

For example, Prince Hamlet on the very great perils of drunkenness.

For example, Juliet's nurse counting the years from the time of an earthquake that killed a mouse and rattled some dove-cotes in
Stratford
.

For example, the mistaken idea that you can cheat at chess.

These things do not belong where our playwright puts them.

They neither sit well in context, nor can it be claimed that they are alien remnants left over from the sources behind their plays. (You will find no old sea-biscuits in Ralph Holinshed.)

Your author picks up on such items because he believes that because they do not belong in their plays then they must belong to something else.

And the something else they must belong to is the life of the man who wrote those plays, the late Mr William Shakespeare.

Pickleherring is writing the Life of William Shakespeare for you now. So he snaps up all these previously unconsidered trifles that do not fit in the works where they occur, and he seeks to show where they fit in the drama of the life.

Thus, as the well-spurred Aristotle would say, the
Poetics
of this book that you are reading.

What do you mean, madam – you feel that you will have to take a bath?

There are those who say we do not know what Shakespeare did when he first came to London. But I say we do. Lie back in your bath-tub, madam, and Pickleherring will tell you.

The best information comes always from the enemy. Never trust a man’s friends to give you the plain truth about his life. It is those who would deny or decry his way in the world who can invariably be relied upon to provide the clearest notions of what he has been doing.

So – Let us speed forward some five years from the time of Mr Shakespeare’s coming to London. It is the night of the 2nd day of September, 1592, and here in this garret in Eastcheap a man is dying. The plague rages through London, but it is not the plague that is killing him. He sits at his table and scribbles. He clutches his guts. He has a long red beard tugged and twisted into a point, and on his head he has crammed two caps, one Oxford, one Cambridge, the only things that remain in his life to remind him that once he had
his Master of Arts degree from both those universities. His name is Robert Greene.

He has at his elbow a penny pot of malmsey. The shirt on his back is the shirt of his mistress’s husband, borrowed for him to wear while she scrubs out the lice from his own shirt. Tomorrow morning, when she finds him dead, this good kindly woman, Mrs Isam, will crown Greene’s poor head with a garland of bays. Then she will sell his sword to pay for his winding sheet (four shillings). The charge for his burial in the new churchyard near Bedlam will be borne by her husband (six shillings and fourpence).

Robert Greene is a writer, a man of letters. But writers live on hope, and he has none left. Once, this unhappy hack was almost famous. His
Menaphon
, published three years ago, was even reprinted. He called it
Greene’s Arcadia
that second time around. Before that, he wrote a novel called
Pandosto
, which will one day provide the plot for
The Winter’s Tale
. He has written plays as well, but now no one will put them on, even though he offers each one to two companies at the same time. His
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
, once popular, would get laughed off the stage in these more sophisticated days. At thirty-four years old, Greene’s considered a has-been, an umquhile man.

Like many in his case, Robert Greene has turned to religion. Now, in this last night of his life, he is at work on a diatribe, cast in the form of a letter to his ‘fellow scholars’, in which he intends to expose the villainies of the contemporary literary world. He can yark up a pamphlet like this in a day and a night. All it takes is a little self-righteousness and a great deal of alcohol, for Greene is an evangelist. The name of his final evangel is
A Groatsworth of Wit bought with a
Million of Repentance
. (No, not a catchy title, I agree.)

Mr Greene has a good word for actors. He has four good words, in fact, each of them prompted by our reluctance to do his plays. He calls us ‘apes’ and ‘peasants’. He calls us ‘painted monsters’. But the main targets for his wrath are his fellow writers, especially those young rival dramatists whose successes he blames for his own failure. Amongst these there are two who fill him up with a particular angry vitriol. The first is Mr Christopher Marlowe, although Greene cannot bring himself to name his name, soundly berated on account of his notorious atheism. The second is another un-named fellow, an even viler villain, who inspires our dying moralist to an apoplectic outburst of disgust.

Pass me that sponge, madam. I will do your back.

What does Greene say? Here is what he says:

‘There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide
, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute
Johannes fac totum
, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’

He then goes on to call this arch-enemy of all that is good a ‘rude groom’, after warning his fellow writers not to acquaint him with their intentions lest he should steal them.

Yes, madam, Shake-scene is Shakespeare.

Of course I am sure. That bit about his heart being
wrapt in a Player’s hide
is a parody of a line in the third part of his
Henry VI
– all Greene has done is substitute the word
Player
for the word
woman
. What he is saying is that Shakespeare is an animal disguised as an actor. What he is saying is that Shakespeare is also a thief – in Horace’s third epistle, the crow is the symbol of plagiarism. What Greene is
saying is that this hated creature has tricked his way into the confidence of the other actors and writers, in order to mimic their styles and appropriate their works.

Some unguents? Mmm, assuredly.

Yes, madam, Greene is saying that Shakespeare is a conceited little upstart. But he’s telling us more than that. He’s telling us, more or less, exactly what Shakespeare has been doing since he came to London. Unpick each of his insults and it gives you a job.

Take, first, that
rude groom
… Well, in the time of Elizabeth, coaches being yet uncommon, and hired coaches not at all in use, those who were too proud, too tender, or too idle to walk, went on horseback to any distant business or diversion. Many came on horseback to the play, and when Shakespeare fled to London from the terror of a criminal prosecution, I have had it from no less an authority than Sir William Davenant, our Poet Laureate, his own godson, that the great man’s first expedient was to wait at the door of the playhouse, and
hold the horses
of those that had no servants, that they might be ready again after the performance. In this office he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness, indeed, that in a short time every man as he alighted called for ‘Will Shakespeare!’ and scarcely any other waiter was trusted with a horse while Will Shakespeare could be had. This was the first dawn of a better fortune, madam. Because our Will was always his father’s son, with an eye to the easier way and the better profits, and in no time at all, finding more horses put into his hand than he could hold, he hired a team of boys to wait outside the theatre under his inspection, who, when ‘Will Shakespeare!’ was summoned, were taught to present themselves immediately,
saying, ‘I am Shakespeare’s boy, sir!’ Thus, our Will was not long a
rude groom
himself, but doubtless it was in that office that Greene first made his acquaintance. Besides, according to his godson, for as long as the practice of riding to the playhouse continued, the waiters that held the horses retained the appellation of
Shakespeare’s Boys.

Soap of Alicante? Yes! Yes! Yes!

Now then, once he got a foot inside the theatre, Shakespeare lost no time in becoming an actor, even though he was a rude, untutored country boy in the estimation of a university wit like Mr Robert Greene. That, surely, is one of the things Greene means by calling him an
upstart Crow
? Never forget, madam, that as I think I may have told you, your Mr Shakespeare was a handsome, well-shaped man, and of a smooth and ready wit, and as you might readily imagine (lying there in your spindrift of frothy oils) he made a very tolerable player, though he rarely appeared in the main parts in his own plays – Prospero being the exception which proves my rule. However, able as he was at
bombasting out a blank verse
in this next profession of actor, it was not long again before our Shakespeare managed to convince Mr James Burbage that he would be even better employed as a play-patcher, a reviser and refurbisher of old plays, Mr Greene’s no doubt among them. Just picture it for yourself: The young actor protesting, ‘I can’t say this stuff! How about if I said this instead?’ and going on to transmute Greene’s verbal base metal into pure Shakespearean gold as he stood on the spot. Imagine the great Mr Robert Greene, M.A. of two universities, having to submit to the indignity of finding his plays improved and his scansion corrected by this upstart he had first but half-noticed as he chucked him
the reins when he found time to pay a visit to the playhouse! No wonder he calls Shakespeare
an absolute Johannes fac totum
, a horrible Jack-of-all-trades, groom turned actor, actor turned play-patcher, play-patcher turned play-maker, play-maker who
in his own conceit
is now reckoned
the only Shake-scene
in the country – which is to say, by this summer of ’92, as Greene sits a-dying, the top playwright, the new man, the one who has stolen everyone else’s thunder, and replaced Mr Greene and his friends in the favour of the audiences. Perhaps the most bitter pill is that Greene knows in his guts that it is true, and that this
Shake-scene
is his better-in every way?

Well, yes, madam, I agree that Robert Greene’s prose is turgid stuff. I did not mean to spoil your lovely bath. Some fellows used words like soap in those far-off days. Euphuism, they called it. You employ a lot of rhetorical devices, such as antithesis and homoeoteleuton and paranomasia. You make elaborate comparisons and stir it all up with far-fetched metaphors without regard to any canon of verisimilitude. It is a highly analytical style, madam, which ceaselessly dissects and catalogues, compares and contrasts. It aspires thereby to represent the polite discourse of urbane and elegant persons.

Urbane, madam, and elegant, that is what I said. It was what we would call ‘all the rage’, then. It made thin thought seem of substance, so its writers believed. Even Mr Shakespeare tried it briefly, in his early days, though by the time of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
he is satirising such affectations. He soon pared himself of any tendency in that direction, and spared us all. The more you have to say the plainer you say it.

Right. From Greene’s
Groatsworth
we learn that when Shakespeare first came to London he was first a groom, and
then an actor, and then a Jack-of-all-trades about the theatre, and that by the summer of 1592, when he was twenty-eight years old, he was already popular enough to be considered an enviable rival by at least one other dramatist. Greene died, and his pamphlet was published. Evidently Shakespeare and his friends complained, for Henry Chettle, who had prepared the
Groatsworth
for the press, then offered a handsome sort of apology, saying that he had now met Shakespeare, and found him not like Greene’s libels, but an amiable gentleman altogether, and—

No, madam, I did
not
say I had murdered Robert Greene.

I do assure you, madam, I claimed no such thing!

Look again at that conclusion to Chapter Forty-Nine, then. You will see that what I say—There, you have it! Pickle herring killed Mr Greene. A great surfeit of the buggers.

A week or so previous, do you see, he had sat down with his friend Thomas Nashe and their acquaintance William Monox to a terrible banquet of my little namesakes, washed down with tankards of strong Rhenish wine. At once Greene fell sick. That was too rich a diet for his diseased kidneys, all poisoned as they were by his jealousy of Shakespeare. (A thing which Dr Walter Warner deemed well possible – that men have been rotted away within by their own hates.)

Greene never recovered from those pickle herring. I claim no credit for the poor hack’s death. I was but nine lamb-like years of age when all this happened, and still in the tender care of the Misses Muchmore, living as you may remember by a far fen.

Now, with your permission, madam, let me rub your breasts dry with this nice big fleecy white towel—