The Late Mr Shakespeare (3 page)

William Shakespeare was born in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon on St George's Day, Sunday the 23rd of April, 1564. His father was a butcher. His father's name was John.
JOHN SHAKESPEARE
said the sign over the door of his shop on the northern side of Henley Street, Stratford,
JOHN SHAKESPEARE: BUTCHER & WHITTAWER
. It was a busy crowded
omnium gatherum
of a shop, the sort of place where people like to stand and pass the time of day. Dealing in skins and leather as well as meat, Mr John Shakespeare was master of his trade, and a popular man.

Our hero's mother was born Mary Arden. She was a farmer's daughter, and she grew up under the apple-boughs in the sweet village of Wincot, which lies three miles to the north-west of Stratford in leafy Warwickshire. But this Mary was almost not Mr Shakespeare's mother. How so? It came about like this.

Near by John Shakespeare's butcher shop, on a small
tributary of the River Avon, there stands a mill. It is ruined now, that mill, another casualty of the late Civil Wars. The place closed down for a lack not of corn but of men who knew how to grind it, in the old ways, to the ancient specifications, with water and stones, furrows and thumbs. In Shakespeare's day there was always a miller there.

The miller's taste was in his thumb. The art, on the other hand, is in the stone. It looks crude, it looks easy, two girt stones grinding together, what could be simpler? But in the cut and clarity of the furrow, the way the miller marks his stone, or the miller's man, his amanuensis, there you have it, the whole lost art.

When he opens the gate the stream runs straight. If he opened it full it would bring the mill down. So he opens it half, and the water flows through, the green water, and round and round the wheel goes, and the chalky walls shake and you can smell the flour fly, the oatmeal in the air, in the low gloom, though it's a long while now since they bore sacks up the thin stair, spread corn to warm on the worn stones, lit the fire under, and let the wind spin the chimney as it would. When you look up it still moves slightly, that chimney, then the whole twisted roof moves, and you're lost. Have you noticed millers always have bad breath?

Now when young Mr John Shakespeare was first making his way in the butchery business, the miller in that mill had a beautiful daughter. She had long, silky hair and her lips pressed together like two red rose petals. Her name was Juliet, wouldn't you know. John and Juliet did not marry because their fathers spoilt it. How did they spoil it? By plotting matrimony.

‘Listen, John,' said his father to him, ‘I want you to marry the miller's daughter.'

‘Juliet, listen,' her father said to her, ‘I want you to make a good catch for yourself – that John Shakespeare, the butcher boy, for instance.'

‘Speak nicely to her,' said Shakespeare's father's father.

‘Be agreeable to the man,' commanded the miller.

Next day the would-be lovers met.

‘Mr Shagsper,' said Juliet, ‘my father told me to marry you.'

‘Is that so?' said John Shakespeare. ‘Well, in that case I think we should sleep together first to find out if we're suited.'

The miller's daughter did not demur or delay. That night they lay together in her bed above the mill wheel. The air was salty with flour. His eyes pricked. She gnawed her lower lip in the blue darkness.

‘Mr Shagsper,' she whispered at last.

‘Yes, my love?' John whispered back.

‘Did you come round the mill pond by the dovecots?' Juliet asks him.

‘Yes, my darling,' John says, panting.

‘And did you notice a great big heap of dung under the wall?' asks Juliet.

‘I did,' John Shakespeare answers, somewhat surprised by the question.

‘Well,' says Juliet, ‘that's mine.'

‘Yours?' John Shakespeare said.

‘I did it,' Juliet told him, ‘every bit.'

The miller's daughter was a lovely lovely creature, but she did have the one shortcoming which makes me glad she was not our hero's mother – she lacked conversation.

So Mr John Shakespeare married Mary Arden—

But before we get into that I’d better say something about the way Juliet the miller’s daughter said the family name.

Shakespeare is a not uncommon surname in Warwickshire and the counties round about, along with little variations on its martial music: Shakelaunce and Brislelaunce, Lycelance and Breakspear. One of the tribe last-named, Nicholas Breakspear, even became Pope, the only Englishman to have sunk so low, calling himself Hadrian IV when he sat down in the papal chair.

What the miller’s daughter said –
Shagsper
– is just one possible spelling and pronunciation of the name. Both in Stratford and in London people say it variously, and I have come across it in many different forms. Here are a few of them:

The saying and the spelling being so mutable, you might conclude that all this speaks of a quality of mystery in the man himself. I’d not deny this. But I spell it Shakespeare. Why? Because that’s how Mr Shakespeare spelt it himself in the printed signatures to the dedications of his two narrative poems
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, when his mind must have certainly been on the job. It is in fact the form in nearly all the printings of his plays in my possession. And it is also the way his name is spelt in the text of all the legal documents relating to his property that I have seen, and in the royal licence granted to him in 1603 in his capacity as a player.

So while I must admit that you could find his father’s name spelt sixteen different ways in the Council books at Stratford (the commonest being Shaxpeare), it is my firm
conclusion that all these variaments express the way that
other people
said the family surname. As such, each variance bespeaks how these others perceived a member of the family. (
Shagsper
, for instance, tells what the miller’s daughter had in mind.)

But, in sum …

SHAKESPEARE
is how our poet wrote it (for the most part).

SHAKESPEARE
is also how he said it.

SHAKESPEARE
is finally how I always knew and called him.

Quod erat demonstrandum,
gentlemen.

Ladies, you may take it that
SHAKESPEARE
is how to spell Shakespeare.

By the way, a whittawer is a white-tawyer, which is to say one who taws skins into whitleather. (I love these old country words.) This tawing was the second side of the senior Mr Shakespeare’s trade in Henley Street, though in his later life it became his main line, so that some have spoken of him as a glover. The truth is that he was always a man with different coloured hands. For instance, he dealt in wool from the sheep he slaughtered, as well as their meat.

I confess to a certain disease at having told you that the sign above his shop said
BUTCHER & WHITTAWER
. This seems to me unlikely, even though the building was quite commodious – in fact it was
two
premises knocked into one, as can still be seen. However, I have been assured of that
BUTCHER & WHITTAWER
wording by several ancient citizens of Stratford, including Mr William Walker, the present Bailiff, who is Mr Shakespeare’s godson, and who was remembered in the poet’s will with the gift of twenty shillings in gold.

The disposition of having meat and leather for sale in the same shop is scarcely salubrious. But then things were ordered differently a hundred years ago, and not always for the better. Perhaps all that needs to be remarked, for our present purpose, is that Mr John Shakespeare made such a success of his various trades in the first two acts of his life that he rose to be Bailiff himself in 1568, and then in 1571 Chief Alderman. It was while he was Bailiff, and his son William still a boy, that the players first came with their plays to Stratford, at the town’s expense. His fortunes declined in acts three and four, but more of that later.

Wincot
, let me also tell you, is the way that Mrs Anne Shakespeare used delightfully to say the name of the village her mother-in-law came from. I have retained that particular spelling in affectionate memory of the many happy hours I spent in her company while she divulged to me little or nothing concerning her late husband. The proper spelling of the place is Wilmcote. However you spell Mary’s place of origin, as an Arden she might have been descended from the Ardens of Park Hall, a family mentioned in the Domesday Book. Mary Arden was certainly something of a minor heiress, her father having left her lands at Wincot, as well as money, so we may suppose that it was not just the miller’s daughter’s conversational shortcomings which put off Mr John Shakespeare from her marrying.

Speaking of the Domesday Book, and suchlike records, I have turned up a pretty pair of Shakespeares who managed to make their marks before our man. The first is one William Saksper, of Clopton, in Kiftesgate Hundred, Gloucestershire (about seven miles from Stratford), who in 1248 was hanged for robbery. At the other extreme, consider that Isabella
Shakspere who was prioress of Wraxall Abbey at the start of the last century. There is no evidence whatsoever that either of these was related to our poet. Yet I must say I relish the fact of them.

The late Mr Shakespeare remarked more than once in my hearing that he held within himself a devil and an angel, and that his life was their warring together, and his work the resolution of that war. So it pleases me to picture a young abbess picking apples in his family tree, her skirts kilted high to show a plump leg perhaps, while a robber dangles executed from one of the branches. Of such confusions is the best poetry made.

Before we resume our story, permit me lastly to explain to you how I can write conversations which I did not overhear. (I anticipate your criticisms, madam.)

The truth is Mr Shakespeare lessoned me. Do you think I learnt nothing from all that playing in his plays? And had you supposed he listened to King Lear?

So Mr John Shakespeare married Miss Mary Arden. But just as Mary was nearly not William Shakespeare’s mother, so John was nearly not his father, or thought he wasn’t. How so? Listen and you’ll find out.

It happened, you see, that John was a very jealous husband. He was so jealous that he couldn’t bear another man to be so much as looking at the ground where Mary’s shadow had passed. She had already borne her husband two daughters, though neither lived long after christening. John was still jealous. And he desired a son.

One night in the year before our poet’s birth there was a great storm that raged across all England. It was unseasonably cold. Sleet blew in the wind. People lit fires and huddled in their houses. Standing at the window of the room over the shop in Henley Street, Mary calls to John to come and look out and see something else that’s strange in this unnatural night. A fine coach has turned over on
the road below, its axle broken, its horses run off, harness trailing.

Then there’s loud knocking at their big front door.

John Shakespeare goes downstairs and opens it.

It’s a tall, dark-haired man in a black cloak that’s asking for shelter. John says he can give him food and a bed for the night.

The man is obviously of gentle blood. Some say it was Edward de Vere, the young Earl of Oxford. (I doubt this myself – the Earl was too young at the time.) Whoever, the man has great presence, and fills the room up with his charm. He wears his hair long, with ribbons tied in it. His sword swaps between his legs like a monkey’s tail.

As this man sits there warming his long, thin hands by the fire and looking at the lady of the house, it comes into John Shakespeare’s head that anyone glancing in at the mullioned window just now would think what a splendid married pair they make, Mary and the stranger, and himself no more than an interloper thrown up by the storm where he doesn’t belong.

You have to understand that the Ardens had for a long time been somebodies. The Shakespeares were not nobodies, but they were still over-eager to make that known. As for the stranger, Lord Oxford or not he was certainly a Somebody with a capital S.

Now, as John Shakespeare rubs his temples with this line of thinking, the stranger leans back his head and yawns. He has an uncommonly pretty red mouth and a most artful style of yawning. The next moment, almost as if to answer him, Mary yawns too.

‘It’s a sign,’ thinks John Shakespeare to himself. ‘It’s a
secret sign between them that they want to go to bed. She must have known this rogue before I married her, when she was Mary Arden.’

He sits furiously in the chimney corner. He is still and passionate, nursing his grief.

Now if Mr John Shakespeare had met a former lover of his wife’s on the road or in the tavern, he could have cut him dead or knocked him down. But this elegant fellow with the raven locks and pink mouth has come to him cunningly, in search of sanctuary from the storm, and is now a guest within his house. You can’t cut guests, and neither can you throttle them.

They eat their venison pie, the three of them, with gravy, by the hissing fire, with little speech, and none of it from John. He sits sullen. He looks sunken in his skin.

When the stranger has disappeared upstairs with his candle (and out of this book), John Shakespeare goes to the old sea-chest and takes from it a hank of hempen rope. His wife he gathers by the wrist. ‘Come,’ he commands. And he leads her out into the dark.

Mary is frightened. Going out through the door she has thrown on her cloak, but it’s small enough protection against the storm.

‘What is it?’ she cries. ‘What is it you’re wanting with me?’

‘Love,’ shouts mad John Shakespeare. ‘I want love, and I want the simple truth.’

‘But you have them both,’ cries Mary. ‘My dear, you have always had them.’

‘And I mean to keep them,’ promises her husband. ‘I mean to keep you true, madam, which means not opening
your legs for that old flame of yours who’s up in the house.’

His wife holds up her hand in the wind and the rain. ‘I swear to you,’ she cries, ‘by my own hope of heaven, I am innocent of this sin which you say is mine. I never saw that man before in my life!’

‘Strumpet!’ roars Mr John Shakespeare. ‘If that’s true, then weren’t you the quick one to be making the signs of lust – smiling between your fingers, yawning when he yawned, and all the wicked rest of it.’

He’s in a fury now, our Mr Shakespeare’s father, the bold butcher and whittawer. His fingers burn as he fashions a noose in the end of the rough hempen rope. His wife cannot believe what her eyes are seeing. He drops that noose about her neck, and pulls.

John leads Mary through the dark towards the Forest of Arden.

The wind is dropping but it still blows hard enough. They are bent in their struggle to reach the ragged trees.

As they go, John and Mary Shakespeare, a noise of wild wings goes with them. It’s a flock of small birds, fluttering against the ends of the storm, whirling above their heads where they bend into the wind.

And the moon rides out. There’s a pool of moonlight now for them to move through, like people underwater, as they reach the first tree of the forest. John Shakespeare throws his rope over the lowest bough.

Up goes the rope, and it crosses the branch, but it does not lodge there.

The birds are there first, you see, hopping and dancing, and the rope slides when it hits their beating wings, and it snakes away, and it falls back to his hand.

John Shakespeare curses. Then he tries again.

Up goes the rope, the birds’ wings beat once more, down falls the rope without purchase.

They’re beating off his rope with their small wings.

‘We will go,’ proclaims William Shakespeare’s father, ‘to the next tree in the forest. It’s an oak, if my memory serves me right, which will be the more suitable.’

With a tug at the rope, he leads his wife on by the neck.

Mary weeps as she walks there behind him.

But when they reach the great oak, the two Shakespeares, the same thing happens that has gone before. The birds are there. The rope is repulsed by the beating of their wings.

John Shakespeare drags his wife from tree to tree.

But it’s the same scene at every tree he tries. The birds are there before him. They fly through the night, in the howling storm, and their wings repulse the rope each time he throws it.

His face black with anger, Mr John Shakespeare shouts: ‘Madam, I know one tree where your friends the birds can’t save you!’

What he means is the gallows. That hanging tree stands at the dark heart of the forest, where all the ways meet to make a crossroads.

Mary Shakespeare’s weeping without ceasing now. Mary Shakespeare knows he means the gallows.

Her husband drags her on through the black wood.

When they reach the gallows John Shakespeare coils the end of the rope and then hurls it. It goes up. It seeks purchase on the crosstree. But even as the rope is snaking and looping through the air, the air is suddenly full of wings and the moon spills on them. And the moon spills on the gallows
too, and on the man hanging there, and John Shakespeare sees the flock of little birds fly down once more in a bright cloud, and settle on the crosstree, so that his rope won’t rest there. And this time there are more birds than ever, scores of them, hundreds, centuries of birds, the air’s all birds, and birds all over the dead man too, sitting on his skull and on his twisted shoulders, swallows mostly, but fieldfares and martens as well, and blackbirds and thrushes, rooks and red-legged crows, throstles and bunting larks and ouzel cocks, pigeons and turtle doves, crows, sparrows, choughs, finches, blue wings and black wings in the swing of the moon, birds falling off and hanging in the air, birds fighting for places, birds perched on every spar and splinter of the gallows, birds, birds, birds, their small bright wings aflicker in the night, so that it might as well be water the rope is trying to hold, it might as well be the Avon or the sea.

John Shakespeare was a fool, but he’s not an idiot. He knows a miracle when he’s witnessed one.

He lets loose the rope from round about Mary’s neck. He falls down on his knees. He kneels before her and the gallows in the moonlight.

‘Forgive me,’ said John Shakespeare. ‘Forgive me, wife. It is I who have sinned against you.’

Nine months later, to that very night, the poet William Shakespeare came into the world.