The Late Mr Shakespeare (38 page)

It was the fourth line in particular that Mr Shakespeare loved.
Gently dip, but not too deep
. I often heard him murmur it to himself, apropos as it seemed to me of nothing.

George Peele was only thirty-eight when he died. Some called him ‘the English Ovid’. The product of London streets and gutters, brought up in the shadow of an asylum for the poor, he is said to have been frivolous, shiftless, sensual, drunken, dissipated, and depraved. His physical person went like this: squint-eyed, short of leg, swart of complexion, his voice high-pitched like a woman’s. I never met him, as he perished the self-same year that I first came to London. But I revere his memory for the reason that Mr Shakespeare did, for the way his spirit triumphed over every adversity to write that song that comes out of the well. His last act in this world, so Mr Shakespeare told me, had been to write a letter to Lord Burghley, begging for some assistance as he lay dying. Burghley, it goes without saying, did not bother to reply.

But George Peele was not Mr Shakespeare’s favourite poet amongst his contemporaries. That high honour went to Edmund Spenser. It was Spenser’s way with words that Shakespeare loved. He told me once that he thought our language began with him. Notice he did not say just his own language, or the language of modern poets in general. Shakespeare seemed to credit Spenser with tapping into a vein of English which everyone could speak. He praised his older contemporary’s ear, the perfection of the music of his verse. But it was Spenser’s
tongue
that he loved. I remember two lines in especial that Mr Shakespeare delighted to repeat, and about which he would always murmur, ‘That is the very tongue of truth.’ The first is the refrain from
Prothalamion:

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The other, odder, rougher, comes (he assured me) somewhere in
The Faerie Queene
, though I confess I have never myself had the patience to find it:

Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind.

I think Mr Shakespeare revelled in these two extremes, for he would sometimes recite the lines as if they belonged together, which of course they do not, neither in provenance nor in spirit. As to the rest, I remember him remarking idly that the entrance of Belphoebe in
The Faerie Queene
was like Aphrodite being born from the sea, and on another occasion I heard him laugh and tell someone who was objecting to the rape and carnage in
Titus Adronicus
that far from being put in to please the groundlings he had intended it as a parody of Spenser. But I admit I do not know what he meant by this latter remark.

Anyhow, what I am trying to make clear is that Shakespeare revered Spenser more for his manner than his matter. In this, as in much else, my friend’s opinion stood in direct contradiction to that of Ben Jonson, who liked to bellow in his cups that Spenser ‘writ no language’. Shakespeare, on the contrary, would have praised Spenser for being what Spenser called Chaucer – a
well of English, undefiled.

The century died with Spenser. He had been driven out of Ireland, where he did the Queen’s work, by peasants who set fire to his house in the night. The poet’s baby son was killed in the conflagration, and the final cantos of
The Faerie Queene
were also destroyed. Arrived back at Court on Christmas Eve, he received
£
8 for his service, then took lodgings with his wife and remaining three children in King Street, where he died in poverty.

When he heard of the death of Edmund Spenser, Mr Shakespeare shut his eyes. Then he laid down his pipe as gently upon the fender as if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider’s web.

‘Let us go to Lucy Negro’s house,’ said he.

This was ever his way. The shadow of Thanatos, dark-robed lord of the dead, always drove him to the worship of Eros, god of that frenzy and confusion which some call love. Love and Death were like twin sisters in the poet’s mind. The kiss of one would lead him to seek oblivion in the arms of the other.

So we went down to Lucy Negro’s and fucked out the night.

The Earl of Essex paid for Spenser’s funeral. His coffin was carried from King Street to Westminster Abbey by eight of his fellow poets – Thomas Campion, George Chapman, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Hugh Holland, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. Spenser was buried beside Chaucer in the Abbey, the poets consigning his body to the earth. As the coffin went into the grave each poet with bowed head dropped on it a scroll with an elegy and quill attached thereto. Some of the poets kept copies of their elegies, but Shakespeare did not. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said only, ‘I wrote it for Edmund Spenser, not for posterity.’

This was the first of three deaths that left their mark on Mr Shakespeare, as on all of us alive then. The second came two years later when the man who had paid for Spenser’s funeral ascended the scaffold at the Tower. Essex had been found guilty of treason after his abortive attempt to raise the citizens of London against the Queen’s counsellors. Southampton, his right-hand man, was fortunate, as I have said, to be reprieved from execution, though he remained in prison for what was left of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Mr Shakespeare himself, although the least conspiratorial of men, and by then at some convenient distance from Southampton, hardly found favour at Court because the ill-planned coup had begun with the conspirators commanding our Company to
a performance of
Richard II
, where Essex loudly applauded the deposition scene.

I always considered the Earl of Essex insane. But then I was only a youth in those long-ago days, and perhaps the poor fellow was merely vainglorious and headstrong. His manners were never those of a successful courtier. Witness the famous occasion when the Queen boxed his ears and he drew his sword in anger at her behaviour.

People say that when he heard the sentence of death passed upon him, he looked as calm and contented as if invited to dance with the Queen. There is a story that Elizabeth had given her favourite a ring at the height of her love for him, promising that whatever might befall in the years to come she would grant him any wish or pardon him any offence at the sight of this jewel. Essex is supposed to have sent the ring from the Tower by the Countess of Nottingham, who was to present it to the Queen as a token of his repentance, but the Countess preferred to keep the ring for herself. Those who can credit this story say that both Essex and Elizabeth were victims of the Countess, with the Earl believing up to the last moment that the sight of the ring would save him, and the Queen only affixing her seal to her former lover’s death warrant when she took his apparent failure to send her the ring as evidence of his pride. Pickleherring has an open mind on this romantic subject. But I will tell you in a minute of something that might confirm that the story is true.

Elizabeth did make one concession, even without the ring. The sentence of hanging and quartering went too far, she decided. Essex should be beheaded,
tout court
, and his body could be buried in the Tower chapel, instead of being distributed to the four corners of London for public show.

Her lover was no doubt grateful for this favour. On the
appointed day, he mounted the scaffold clad in a long robe of embossed velvet, over a suit of black satin with a short white collar, and with a black felt hat on his head. When asked to pray for the Queen, he said: ‘May God give her an understanding heart,’ and then repeated the fourth psalm. The executioner was clumsy. The first blow struck the Earl of Essex aslant. He knelt there, half-dead, his bleeding head on the block, while the executioner turned away his face to redouble the blows.

The third death came again after an interval of two years. Just as the second death had been the death of the man who had paid for the funeral of the first to die, so the third death was the death of the woman who had commanded the execution of the second to die. It is said that Queen Elizabeth complained more than once to her confidantes that she had never known a moment’s happiness since the death of Essex. In the spring of 1603 she left her palace for the last time to visit the bedside of the dying Countess of Nottingham. There she learnt that this lady was wearing her conscience on her finger. It was Robert Devereux’s ring – the one the Queen had given him. The Countess confessed that he had confided it to her to take to the Queen, but that she had kept it. It is said that Elizabeth dealt the dying woman such a blow that her demise was hastened.

Nor did the Queen recover from the shock of this interview. She returned to her palace at Richmond, where she could neither eat nor sleep yet refused to go to bed, crying out that under the heavy state canopy she had been visited by strange and terrible apparitions. Three days and three nights the Queen sat upright in a chair, too frightened to be put to bed, sucking her thumb like a child. She died on the 24th of March, 1603, without speaking a word.

Mr Shakespeare once observed to me that all those of us who
lived during the last century would always remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the news came to us that Queen Elizabeth was dead. For all her age and infirmity, we never counted on the death of Gloriana. For my part, when the news came I was shaving my legs in the tiring-room at the Globe and trying to learn my part of Cressida for the first performance of
Troilus and C
. When I asked Mr Shakespeare where
he
was he said that he had been in Stratford, sitting in the window of a house near to the church which overlooks the charnel. He was reworking the cemetery scene in
Hamlet
, he said, and finding some inspiration in the view, when his daughter Judith brought him a pippin from his orchard and the message from London that the Queen was dead.

He might have been mocking my sense of the appropriate, of course. But he had a nose for death, and I should not be surprised if his tale was true.

I wonder if it is simply because he is dead that the life of William Shakespeare seems so much neater and more complete than my own life, much more shapely and formal and sensible. Does not death confer a
sense
on any life? Perhaps I write this book in part because I have had to learn that. Good friend, perhaps you read it because you like to have assurance of a life making more sense than your own. This new cult of biography, this great passion for Lives – what if it is based upon nothing more profound or noble than our separate several feeling that life is such a mess?

O my little heart! Misprision in the highest degree! A plague o’ these pickle-herring! All this stuff about Lives, deaths etc. is just a way of avoiding the question that really consumes my heart and my mind this minute, namely:

Where is my dear Polly, my own Anne?

Between the second death and the third death, William Shakespeare published his obscure and enigmatical poem of
The Phoenix and the Turtle.

First, though, the matter of Polly. She is gone, my little egg-girl. I have not seen her now for some three days. Pompey Bum smiles when I ask him about her absence. He is so vague and dismissive on the subject that his manner implies she might never have existed. ‘What moppet?' he says. ‘We never have moppets in here.' He would like me to think that my mind is going. If he could get me carted off to Bedlam then my boxes would be his, and this book as well.

He appeared suddenly on the stairs yesterday as I was carrying out the slops. He was wearing something on his head that looked like a drowned water-rat. He called it a
PERUKE
, and claimed it as the very latest fashion.

‘I'm all behind!' he complained, when I asked him about my love's whereabouts.

Pompey Bum is forever saying this, and patting the seat of his vast breeches whenever he says it. No doubt some pun is involved, and I am supposed to be bemused as he changes the subject. He means, my great whoremaster of a landlord, not just that he has many tasks to do but that he wears much horse-hair stuffing in his breeches. He always has a face like a man at cack.

‘Polly who?' he said, when I persisted with my queries.

‘Flinders,' I said. ‘But I heard you call her Anne.'

‘Not me,' said Pompey Bum, grinning. ‘And we never have no Annes.'

Then he was off down the stairs, like a big monkey in trousers, holding the rat in place on his greasy skull, and chanting just to mock me a rhyme that children sing:
‘Little Polly Flinders / Sat among the cinders / Warming her pretty little toes! / Her mother came and caught her / And whipped her naughty daughter / For spoiling her nice new clothes!'

This left me feeling hot and sick and hopeless. The blackguard had succeeded in turning my flesh-and-blood darling into something ghostly and unsubstantial by this suggestion that I had dreamt her up from a character in a nursery rhyme.

Or perhaps it is the girl herself who has mocked me – by claiming ‘Polly Flinders' as her name? This further thought (which came later), that she was herself the author of the fiction, was hardly comforting. Whatever, she was gone, and she is still gone.

All night I kept hearing sweet imagined noises from the room below. But each time I fell out of bed in a sweat and removed my Ovid, only darkness met my eye when I applied it to the peep-hole. Darkness and silence. There was no one there.

The Phoenix and the Turtle
first appeared in 1601 in an octavo volume called
Love's Martyr
, commemorating the marriage of Sir John Salusbury to Ursula Stanley, illegitimate daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby. The longest thing in the book is a terrible set of verses by one Robert Chester, allegedly translated ‘out of the venerable Italian Torquato Caeliano'. So far as I know, Torquato Caeliano never existed, and Robert Chester was certainly no poet. Here is a sample of his versification: 

Finis,
indeed. When I asked Mr Shakespeare who R. Chester was he told me he was Salusbury's secretary. Salusbury himself was a Papist Welshman, knighted by Elizabeth as a reward for his loyalty during the Essex rebellion. He had married the bastard Ursula some fifteen years before, and in fact she had given him eleven sons and daughters, which might make WS's praise of
married chastity
seem a bit odd. Still, no doubt the phoenix and turtle-dove imagery of Chester's original rigmarole was appropriate at the time of the marriage, since Mr Shakespeare explained to me that Salusbury was then the sole remaining male in a family, seeking to win back its good name and perpetuate it in a love-match – John Salusbury's elder brother having been
executed for complicity in the Babington Plot. Salusbury was a pugnacious character, a wine-bibber, a friend of poets, and he may well have reminded Mr Shakespeare of his own father in that year when Jack Shakespeare turned Papist and died. For whatever reason, he liked Salusbury well enough to let him use his own poem on the phoenix and the turtle theme in an appendix to the Chester drivel. Other poet-friends of Salusbury's also contributed to the volume: George Chapman, John Marston, and Ben Jonson. But it is William Shakespeare's poem that stands out.

The Phoenix and the Turtle
is certainly a strange and difficult poem. To unassisted readers, it would appear to be a lament on the death of a poet, and of his poetic mistress. But the poem is so quaint, and so charming in diction, tone, and allusions, as in its perfect metre and harmony, that I for one would be sad to have its meaning ever explained. I consider this piece a good example of the rule that there is a poetry for poets proper, as well as a poetry for the world of readers. This poem, if published for the first time, and without a known author's name, would find no general reception. Only the poets would save it.

The Phoenix and the Turtle
is William Shakespeare's darkest allegory of love. It celebrates a marriage in tones more appropriate to a funeral. It talks of love in terms of perfection, and of perfection in terms of a love that is transcendental and sublime without ever ceasing to be physical. Its distillation of the nature of self-hood in love
(Either was the other's mine)
reminds me of such things as John Donne's
The Ecstasy
, which I know that Mr Shakespeare read in manuscript when it was circulating in the Inns of Court. Donne's obscurities are mere smoke,
though, compared with the blazing bonfire of Shakespeare's thought here. The poem is such a pure, such a concentrated mystery that we ought just to point out the simple things that can be said about it, before submitting our minds to the power of its music. All but six of its sixty-seven lines are in truncated trochaic tetrameters; the other six employ the final syllable of the trochaic line. The only action takes place in the sixth stanza, where the two birds flee away together. All the rest of the poem is preparation for this action and comment upon it. The birds are a female phoenix and a male turtle dove. Here is the poem:

This is my favourite of all William Shakespeare's poems outside of his plays. I do not understand it, but I know what it means. I have copied it out now in my own handwriting because that is something I always like to do. If you copy out
The Phoenix and the Turtle
in your own handwriting you discover that you know what it means, even though you do not understand it. I recommend the exercise to every reader.

Spiritual ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that key it can only be so many strange words set in a noble rhythm for no apparent cause.

Poetry moves in many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind with their crying.

Yet, human nature being what it is, basic and obstinate questions remain.
Who was the phoenix? And who the turtle?
And if we knew, would we know or understand the poem any better?

I have heard men say that
The Phoenix and the Turtle
refers to the love of Elizabeth and Essex, but I cannot for the life of me see how. It seems even less likely that it refers to WS and Rizley, and I do not see myself in the part of either bird. For what it is worth a number of Sir John Salusbury's
own acrostic lyrics, included in
Love's Martyr
, make it clear that he was at least as much in love with his wife's sister Dorothy Halsall as he was with his wife. It is just possible that Dorothy Halsall is the phoenix and John Salusbury the turtle celebrated by all the poets in the book, including Shakespeare. Such a secret and forbidden love would at least explain the obscurity which cloaks all the poems, as well as the fact that all the poets seem to know who they are talking about. Dorothy may have been one of those women in whom the divine is sometimes felt to be incarnate. Never forget that it is Beatrice, not Virgil, who guides Dante through Paradise.

Yet, for all that, I fear that I must close the mystery up only by creating another. For once, not long after these baffling and immortal verses first appeared, at a point where I found myself confronted by the torment of their memorability, aware that for the rest of my life now I would be unable to get them out of my heart and my head, I asked Mr Shakespeare, point-blank, one thunder-rumbling London afternoon, to identify his creatures.

‘Who is the phoenix?' I asked him. ‘And who is the turtle dove?'

‘Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth,' said Mr Shakespeare.

But I never could get him to say another word on the subject, and he might have been joking.