The Late Mr Shakespeare (41 page)

Here are Anne Shakespeare and her daughter Judith, sewing. They sit on low stools by the window that looks out into the garden of New Place. Anne has a green shield across her eyes, for the evening sun is bright and the work particular. The sunlight glints on the gold medal between Judith’s breasts.

Here is a neighbour come calling – Mrs Judith Sadler, perhaps, wife of the baker Hamnet Sadler, Mrs Shakespeare’s lifelong friend. She rallies Mrs Shakespeare on her industry, remarking teasingly that all the wool spun by Penelope ‘did but fill Ithaca full of moths’. They talk over various items of gossip: who’s dead, who’s dying, Anne’s beloved granddaughter Elizabeth chasing a golden butterfly, the fruit of the mulberry tree which is too soft to stand touching just now, the price of needles. Meanwhile, the evening makes a glory of all Stratford. There was a shower just before my chapter began, but now it has stopped the rabbits are emerging from their burrows. Tradesmen are singing in their
shops. Boys play at bowls on the slippery ground, one of them tumbling past his own throw.

How do I know these things? I admit I do not. I have transposed them from a charming scene you will find in
Coriolanus
. That scene is not in Plutarch. It is pure Stratford.

Mr Shakespeare’s mind was at all times possessed with images and recollections of English rural life – but there is more to it than that. I have yet to learn that his fancy could not luxuriate in country images even amid the fogs of Southwark and the Blackfriars, but from about the time of his daughter Susanna’s wedding he had no need to feed on memories, for after that happy event he spent more and more time in the town of his birth, where his heart always lay. The masque in
The Tempest
was used originally in honour of Susanna’s wedding, by the by. She was always her father’s favourite. Having known her, I can inform you that she flits in and out of all his later works – she is Mariana in
Pericles
, and Perdita in
The Winter’s Tale
, and Miranda in
The Tempest
. A woman with a pale, ugly, clever face, she resembled neither of her parents save in her wit.

Mr Shakespeare never thought of taking a great house or a high place in London – he rather kept retired, in modest lodgings, and saved money. He was always a good man of business. By 1589, when he was only twenty-five, he was a minor shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, and of course he was afterwards a leading shareholder in the Globe. As a writer of plays for both these houses, he realised great gains, and from his thirty-third year on he was investing his profits in property in his native town. It was typical of him to return to Stratford, though none of us knew he was doing it until it was done. There was no dramatic exit. Rather, he transformed his
residence by degrees. Certainly by the time we did
Coriolanus
he would have been able to observe at first hand a scene such as his wife and daughter sewing, any day of the week. Such domesticities became much to his liking in his later years. The plays become full of forgiving wives and daughters, critical and original women who yet pardon their men. What part his daughter Judith played in this I could not tell you. She never seemed to me to have forgiven her father for his long years of absence, but then indeed she never seemed much interested in William Shakespeare at all. (She once told me she would prefer to talk of Sir Francis Drake!) She was an altogether enigmatical woman. The poet’s widow had her mysteries too, but her silences were of a different order, and I always sensed that she had welcomed her husband’s return, and made much of it, and him, and the two of them together. Yet there can be little doubt, I think, that the prime mover in the drama of the playwright’s later years in Stratford was his daughter Susanna, by then married to Dr John Hall. We shall notice in due course that she was the principal beneficiary of his will. Her epitaph deserves repeating in this connection:

In other words, Susanna was a good Christian as well as a good Shakespearean. I like to think of her as the last of her father’s heroines, and as open-eyed and original as any of the others.

I like also to think of the late Mr Shakespeare spending
the latter part of his life as all men of good sense will wish theirs to be – in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends. Of course it was not exactly like that, but while we are in the mood for idylls let us picture to ourselves, madam, the poet seated one warm evening at that same window where we just spied Judith and Anne. His hand moves on his tablet. He is engaged, no doubt, in the composition of his latest play. Again and again he is distracted, breaking off to watch his daughter Susanna and her little child Elizabeth as they run here and there among the borders of summer flowers. It crosses his mind, maybe, idly to wonder as the sunbeams seek to pierce the shadows of the rose trees and a distant, drowsy humming makes soft music in his ears which thing it is he likes the better – that freshly fashioned Ariel song of his:

or – the real sound of the bees, and the reality of the child and her mother there among the flowers?

New Place was a very fine house, the embodiment and emblem of Mr Shakespeare’s success in the world. He had built it up over the years, entrusting the supervision of these improvements to his cousin Thomas Greene. I measured it once: it was thirty yards long, and thirty feet high. The main facade with its wide bay windows, columned doorway and three ornamented gables stood imposingly on Chapel Street. Walking up to it, you couldn’t help thinking it was quite a palace for a butcher’s son who had once wielded the sledded pole-axe and spat on his palm himself. The house contained
ten rooms and cellars, apart from the large central hall. A staircase of carved oak led to the upper floor. I will tell you soon enough what I found and did there.

In this grand house, with its orchards and gardens, surrounded by his family, William Shakespeare now wrote three new plays in a final style:
The Winter’s Tale,
and
Cymbeline
, and
The Tempest
. From each is derived an impression of moral serenity. Even
Cymbeline
, which the author calls a tragedy, ends in reconciliation. I always thought myself, when young, that Posthumus in that play gets forgiven too quick and easy. But Mr S would have it no other way. And now that I am old I complain no longer.

Living mostly in Stratford, eating according to the recipes in Mrs Shakespeare’s cook-book, Mr Shakespeare cultivated in his latter days a considerable belly. Anne Shakespeare had a huge manuscript book of recipes. It was the only book I ever saw her keeping company with. Cooking and sewing were her life, I think. Her room at New Place after her husband died was adorned with needlework of various kinds, cut works, spinning, bone-lace, and many pretty devices, with which the cushions, chairs, and stools were strewed and covered.

Mr Shakespeare’s corpulence never quite rivalled that of his own Falstaff, but it might have done had he lived long enough. He could well afford to eat, and to eat well. By the time of his retirement to Stratford, he was oozing with gold. You can see from the bust that Dutchman did for his memorial in Trinity Church just how fat the Bard got. He had in addition three false teeth. His first false tooth was made of iron. His second false tooth was made of silver. His third false tooth was made of gold.

The return to Stratford was a confirmation of the roots of Shakespeare’s art. It took a poet’s imagination to realise the debt owed by humanity to the rude mechanicals of Warwickshire. Had the drama not been deeply rooted in the native soil, it could not have borne such excellent fruit. It was to the village festival and the goat song in honour of Dionysus that Shakespeare returned.

In his native place, I noticed that people tended to favour a short pronunciation of the first syllable of our hero’s name:
Shax
rather than
Shakes
. This makes me think it possible that the name derives after all from the Anglo-Saxon personal name,
SEAXBERHT
.

Idylls over, good friends, I think at the end that Mr WS was bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama; that he was bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams. In these last years at Stratford I see him as half-enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half-bored to death.

He also had barns full of grain, at a time when there was a general shortage. But we’ll speak no more of that. Sufficient to say that Mr John Shakespeare was not the only one in the family with a Midas touch of the usurer about him. William Shakespeare drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.

But what is the point of dwelling upon such things? They contribute nothing to our gratitude, and gratitude is all that we should feel. If you have to be negative, better to try to conceive of a world without Shakespeare. It is only by holding our breath that we begin to understand how necessary breathing is. And the best way of bringing before our minds the true magnitude of our debt to Shakespeare is to imagine
for a moment or two that he never existed. His faults then pale into mere significance. He was a necessary man.

Even so, reader, I confess it – that the closer I get to Shakespeare, the more I recoil from him. That villain had all my life. He had my youth in my playing. He had the rest in that the rest followed on from my playing – I mean what Jane did, and what Polly is. And now he has my age which I have spent in writing about him. I have given him my life to write his Life.

That man deceived me. I used to have a trusting nature. No more the spaniel now, sir; my innocent old eyes worship him no longer. I have my Aeolian harp, if I want music.

I had a wife once. I failed her. That’s the way of the world.

My mother, though, she is a different story. Her name was Lalage. Her hair was the colour of blazing treacle and her eyes were reticent. Women can see through you when they want, but mothers don’t do it. I loved this mother, this Lalage. I had a song about her:

More about her? More about Lalage? Very well, sir. She had a rocking-horse. She sat me on the rocking-horse and she rocked it to and fro, to and fro, the rain falling, the window
open, the fire burning, and all the time she sang. Such long, long music. It was the song of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But it came out to the words of
O Polly Dear.

You shut me up, sir?

Madam, you are right. In truth the only thing I remember about my mother was the way she used to shave her legs. All the way up. And every day.

And
this
happy song which she sang to me:

I hope that makes you smile. That would be something.

Today I have practised smiling in new ways. Listening to the breeze on the strings of the harp that Polly gave me, I have practised a smile for death. Listening to the rats in the wainscot, I have practised a smile for ugliness. Listening to nothing in particular, I have practised above all a smile for the next time I see Polly. I shall have also a special smile for the beggar I refuse a penny to. And another smile for the spaces between the stars.

The only trouble is: I have no mirror.

Steady now, Pickleherring. But consider this, old pickpocket. Leonardo
made
a smile. First he cut up the mouth and looked at the muscles, and maybe he pulled them this way and that to see how they moved. Then he sat this lady down and taught her to pull her mouth up at the edges. The lady was irrelevant, but the smile is immortal and much
discussed and it means nothing at all but Smile. It is the record of the muscles of the mouth.

To such experiment I lay my hand. I have a lot to learn in the way of smiling. But I shall become the master of the rictus. And I will not go out of the door of this room of mine again until I am borne hence in a last black box on the shoulders of six men.

Talking of Leonardo, it occurs to me to say in all modesty that if ever I had been good for anything besides
play-acting
it would have been as a painter. I can fancy a thing so strongly, and have so clear an idea of it. But I’ve a turnip that bleeds for a heart, so there’s an end of that. Without an old gossip like me there would be no remembrance. And if you find fault with Pickleherring for saying this, then I can only agree; yet I’d say that it is my faults that give my work vivacity, and perhaps also vitality, and (I trust) a palpable sincerity.

Here is a question for you:
Did Shakespeare write Bacon?
I knew a man once on Primrose Hill who affected to believe that it was possible. (I knew another who said that the Bard kept a shed full of monkeys, and that these monkeys wrote
Hamlet
for him. I have forgotten why they did not succeed in writing the other plays. But that man ended up in the Bridewell.) Anyway, if Shakespeare did write Bacon then it must have been in his Stratford days, I reckon. He would not have been so philosophical in Southwark, nor dared to deceive so much at the house of the Mountjoys under the kindly eye of Comfort Ballantine. A third picture for your inward eye, dear reader: Shakespeare in his retirement from the stage, under his mulberry tree, dashing off
Novum Organum
in the gathering gloom.