The Late Mr Shakespeare (42 page)

I have also heard it said from time to time that the divine William is not dead. Such pious belief would have it that he went to Iceland. There the poet was trapped suddenly in an iceberg. Mr Shakespeare will remain in that Iceland iceberg for a thousand years. He awaits a virgin who will weep warm tears for him, or a winter of exceptional mildness.

Have you ever noticed how poets borrow not just from each other but from themselves? Upstart crows are thieves no less than magpies. But sometimes it’s their own shed plumage that they steal.

In this my 92nd box I have a note concerning an interesting item of self-borrowing I once discovered in the works of Mr Shakespeare.
BORROWING
is perhaps not quite the word for it. Nor is
REMEMBERING
, though we’d better not forget that Memory was the mother of all the Muses. Anyway, can I please point out that there is something small in
Titus Andronicus
which might have ‘suggested’ something big in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
I mean that the very name of Bottom and the line

It shall be called Bottom’s dream, because it hath no bottom
came to Shakespeare because of the line in
Titus
:

Is not my sorrow deep, having no bottom?

Reader, it is obvious that here we are over the border
of biography. I can neither prove nor can you disprove my case. Shakespeare wrote
Titus Andronicus
, or much of it. Shakespeare wrote the whole of the
Dream
, there is no reason to doubt. That is all that a biographer can say. The rest is poetry.

The common reader or playgoer is misled by the fact that such plays as
Titus Andronicus
and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
have apparently nothing in common. But to the poet’s mind such differences are irrelevant. What the two works have in common is
him
.

Sir, poets frequently, if not always, borrow from other poets. Pickleherring is here to remind you, madam, to what extent they do, and must, borrow from themselves.

My wife Jane had a particularly handsome bottom. It was her finest feature. I saw a man in Covent Garden once take off his hat to it as she passed by.

On the other hand, the late Mr Shakespeare’s bottom was nothing to write home about. But then I must confess it did not interest me. In fact it was one of those things about him which I think I found boring. There were some few such, as I have admitted.

A thing you may not know is that he once slipped when about to throne himself upon a piss-pot, and marked himself severely on the arse. (Madam, I do apologise for the inclusion of such base matter, but then without it my anatomy of Shakespeare would be incomplete.) The great man thus had this anal stigmata, as it were, in the form of a crucifixion on his bottom.

So are our heroes somewhat less than gods, though they may carry emblems of divinity in the most unlikely places on their persons.

I have given Polly my father’s kidskin dictionary. This present seemed to please her. She gave me in return for it, fishing beneath her bodice, a locket she once received as a prize at her convent. I expressed tender delight at a gift warmed by her contact and for so long worn by her intimately,
i.e.
between her breasts.

What have these things to do with my Life of William Shakespeare? Reader, I will tell you. They have everything to do with it, and so does Jane. I confess that I have only learnt this in the writing. When I began, for instance, it was my intention that my late wife would have only a walking-on part in this book. It is, after all, supposed to be not my life, but the Life of William Shakespeare. Yet even at the start I think I knew that the biographer is part of the story in any biography. Otherwise why should I have felt the need to tell you that I am the bastard son of a priest’s bastard? But beyond that, even, there is the
natural need to confess where one stands (or falls) in love.

It is by suffering in love, erotic suffering, that we all grow. The Greeks knew this. Their novelists were interested in stories of
EROTIKA PATHEMATA
, and so was Mr S, and so am I. The engrossing experience of love, that is the thing. It is the theme of Parthenius (Virgil’s Greek teacher). Later, among the Latin authors, it is the great theme of Petronius in the
Satyricon
. It is the theme, above all, of that great
Metamorphoses
of Apuleius – I mean the
Asinus Aureus
or
Golden Ass
. These are the works I love, the love-works against which I would match my Life of Shakespeare. But this book is intended also as a kind of
Secret History
, like that of Procopius.

Talking of love, Anne Shakespeare is of course the living statue of Hermione in
The Winter’s Tale
. There was never a more beautiful or touching embodiment on the stage of re-awakened love, in my opinion. (I am vulgar and bold, mind you; a sentimentalist, sir.) In Greene’s
Pandosto
, whose plot Mr Shakespeare follows up to this point, Queen Hermione dies of grief and King Leontes promptly falls in love with his newly found daughter Perdita, thus making his suicide inevitable. By resurrecting Hermione and giving Perdita the husband of her choice, Shakespeare makes possible Leontes’ repentance and his wife’s pardon. To this end our dramatist was obliged to invent a means by which Hermione
could
forgive her husband, and take up life with him again, after some sign that he has shed his former jealousy and that he loves her – some sort of moral rejuvenation put on stage. The problem must have been a difficult one. The Bard’s solution is nowise short of brilliant.

Leontes must be compelled to recognise in his wife other
qualities than charm and beauty. She is now sixteen years older than when he last saw her, and bears the marks of all that she has been through. Shakespeare hits on the idea of the kissed statue. If you ever want proof of his genius, this is it. Before revealing that Hermione is still alive she must be exhibited to the King as a marble statue placed on a monument – a statue of her not as she was sixteen years ago, but as she would be now had she lived on.

Leontes gazes a long time at the statue. Then overcome by emotion he cries out. No matter how mad he seem, he must kiss her lips.

Then, as we all know, the statue trembles. And Hermione steps down from her pedestal, and herself embraces Leontes.

It is a moment of pure magic. I should know, for I played it.

How so? Why did I not play Perdita? Not, I assure you, because John Spencer Stockfish was considered my superior for any part. It is just that by this time I was in fact too old for the roles of young girls. Consequently I was a natural for the part of Hermione. I believe, in any case, that Mr Shakespeare wrote that character with me in mind, wanting me to represent on stage his own wife Anne. He wished me to embody the way he was declaring he could still love her, and she love him, after their own little interval of sixteen years or more. And doubtless it appealed to his sense of irony, too, to have the once master-mistress of his passion now enacting the part of the forgiving and pacific wife. After our first performance of the
Tale
, permit me to mention, Mr Shakespeare and I played again at cards for kisses. This time there was this difference from the time when I had been his Rosalind. This time I did not let my master win.

The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that woman’s point of view is not necessarily foreign to man’s.

The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that words cool more than water, or are perhaps less likely not to.

The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that the void, the good void, the aching void of the good, which was his source and port and target, the wordless bourne of his every fugue, however sudden and eccentric, was the last place anyone would think of looking for him, the well-known long sweet home, the room where music plays itself.

Mr Shakespeare said that he was not here, being there, and having no whereness anyhow.

Mr Shakespeare said that music made his ears bleed.

Mr Shakespeare (as he lay dying) said that he really ought to try not to die, and that the light was badly painted on the wall.

Also, Shakespeare said his body was his grave;

That when it rained he fell;

That his scabby heart was unquiet if full of truth;

That his head was beginning to stink of innocence;

That he had St Catherine’s uncouth wheel printed in the roof of his mouth;

And that he was over and above the dark, one of her dateless brood all right, but still serving his apprenticeship down here.

All these things were said by William Shakespeare as he lay dying. I do not know what they mean. I am only a comedian.

The Tempest
, the late Mr Shakespeare’s last play, seems to me as perfect in its kind as almost anything we have of his. One may observe that the classical unities are kept here with an exactness uncommon to the liberties of his writing. It is a play about magic, and that magic has in it something very solemn and very poetical. I would draw your attention in particular to the character of Caliban. It is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon grotesques that ever was seen, but what is then remarkable is that it is to this uncouth, wild figure that Shakespeare gives the most delicate poetry in the play – I mean the speech beginning
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises
… Only a writer at the very top of his powers could have dared to do this. It seems to me that Shakespeare not only found out a new character in his Caliban, but also devised and adopted a new manner of language for that character.

The name Caliban is a phonetic anagram of
CANNIBAL
.
Mr Shakespeare pointed that out to me himself, one day when showers had ruined our rehearsal. As for the name Ariel, he took that from his friend Thomas Heywood’s rhymed catechism of the occult, the
Hierarchy of Blessed Angels
. In that work Ariel is named as the spirit who commands the elements and governs tempests. As for Setebos, the god adored by Caliban, that name was printed first in Thevet’s
Cosmographie
, but I think it more likely that WS got it from a popular source, probably Eden’s
History of Travayle
(1577). He only ever needed a few bits and scraps like this to set his mind in motion. And of course once he got going the whole play became profoundly autobiographical. In Prospero we look on Mr Shakespeare’s likeness. The magician breaking his wand and retiring to Naples is the poet breaking his pen and retiring to Stratford.

We had a great metal bowl with a cannon ball in it. This was our thunder for
The Tempest
(and
King Lear
). Ben Jonson makes fun of our effects in the prologue to his
Bartholomew Fair
, offering ironic excuses for not having sought applause by staging monsters (an allusion to Caliban), and for hesitating to unleash nature, ‘like those that beget Tales, Tempests’. Mr Jonson missed the point, as usual. It was not the stage properties that made
The Tempest
so moving and so memorable. It was the words.

Too old for Miranda, I took the part of Ariel. But there was more to this casting than the matter of my age. I think that Shakespeare wrote the part of Ariel
for
me, since Ariel is a spirit, something beyond man or woman. I had served my master well, and I had gone for him through the female and the male. In Ariel he recognised and rewarded my service in the sexual journey, the ways in which I had enacted on the stage the secret dreams and dramas of his heart. He set me
forth now as a creature neither male nor female, and beyond either condition. Then, at the play’s end, he set me free, even as he freed himself in the person of Prospero. No doubt it was his recognition that he had ruined my life, even as he had also made me.

If I could, would I fly backwards from the garden and up onto the wall, and unsing
Polly Dear
, and never know him?

I would not.

I am happy enough to be Ariel.

Call me a little epitome of the leavings of Dame Nature’s workshop, a compound of all sorts and sexes, a wheyfaced hermaphrodite. I shall not care to quarrel with those callings. I am what I am, and William Shakespeare made me.

Note Ariel’s last words to Prospero, my words to Mr Shakespeare in that part:

Was’t well done?

That is the only question I care to ask. His answer to it, spoken aside, still more than contents me:

Bravely, my diligence. Thou shalt be free.

I always took that for my approbation. My master’s approval of my career in his service. Not that I am free, not yet, not quite. Nor shall be till I have finished with this my book.

John Spencer Stockfish played the part of Miranda. John Spencer Stockfish had several qualities in common with Susanna Shakespeare, so shall we say that this part suited him down to the ground?

John Spencer Stockfish was my Caliban, madam.

John Spencer Stockfish was a shit, sir, yes.

I once heard Dr Donne preaching in St Paul's. He spoke of ‘that glorious creature, that first creature, the Light.' The remembrance that the Light was the first created thing has stayed with me since. I always recall it when I get up early and witness the dawn, as today.

This morning I met Pompey Bum on the stairs. The sun not long risen, that greased, cruel, potbelly whoremaster was already drunk. He sat at the turning of the bannisters, his mouth agape and drivelling. He was reading a book, with his bottle beside him. His eyes went to and fro. He read from left to right, lips moving, silently, then bent to kiss the page where he had read it. He wept and trembled. Then he burst out with a lamentable cry, saying,
‘What shall I do to be saved?'

When I asked him what he meant, he wept the more. Then he told me that he was for certain informed that this our city of London will be burnt with fire from heaven, in
which fearful overthrow we shall all miserably come to ruin.

I comforted my landlord as I could, and advised him to take more water with it.

Then I came in here to attend to my Aeolian harp. But the day is close and windless, and the strings will not speak.

The end of my book is in sight, yet there are a number of things which I meant to include in it but which now there will be no room for. Fatigue and my lack of competence may be blamed. All these are matters recorded on notes, which I have accumulated in my boxes, but which now it is too late to work into the fabric of my book. Here is a list of things despaired of, things that belong in my Life of William Shakespeare but which now I must leave for others to write about: