The Late Mr Shakespeare (44 page)

Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.

Who killed Cock Shakespeare?

I, said Ben Jonson, with slow-acting poison …

Well, ladies and gentlemen, what if his great rival did murder him? It is a possibility I have considered. Some slow-acting poison (fly-agaric, say, or colocynth) could have been slipped into Shakespeare’s cup by the bricklayer’s hand at that merry meeting. (Slow acting would suit Mr Jonson right down to the ground.) Of course we shall never know now if this is what happened. But I wouldn’t put such a stroke past the author of
Sejanus
. The fellow was when all is said and done a proven assassin. In fact old upright Alleyn always called him so. Bricklayer and assassin, I mean, rather than poet and playwright. With reference to Jonson’s early trade as a builder’s labourer, and then to his killing that actor
Gabriel Spencer with a long foil. And Alleyn, note, was a sober man, and a pious, a man in the habit of writing
JESUS
at the top of each page of his account books at the playhouse.

But perhaps William Shakespeare died of a broken heart? That Quiney business must have got him down. I mean the discovery that his son-in-law had knocked up another woman while engaged to marry Judith. It might not break your heart, but it would make you dispirited and sick. And then you might drink too much, not long after the wedding, and with the funeral of your sister’s husband
*
to remind you of your own mortality, face to face with despair that your daughter was now married to a scoundrel, and if you had no brains or guts for drinking it could make you sick to death.

The poet’s health had not been of the best for some time. He could not eat but little meat; his stomach was not good. He had this lump I noticed, by his left eyelid. It came up after he pricked his eyeball on the thorn of a sick rose. This might have been the true cause of his death. It is just the sort of accident that people do die of. After all, as he had me say as Rosalind, men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them,
but not for love
.

For love or not, the death of William Shakespeare took place in another cruel and rainy April, on another St George’s Day, 23rd April 1616. So if the poet was really born on that day, I think we should applaud him for his neatness. Unfortunately the only other notable I can think of who performed this feat of dying on his own birthday was the late and unlamented Oliver Cromwell. The coincidence is worth remark. It provides your humble servant with an
opportunity to say that Cromwell and Shakespeare had nothing else in common.

Forgive me, reader, but I suppose we have to consider the vulgar matter of Mr S’s last words. What were they? Some say that he said, ‘I have had enough.’ Others again report that he called out ‘More light!’ – at which the casement window was opened for him, only for those in attendance at his death-bed to realise that their beloved Will was speaking of spiritual illumination. Then there are those who claim that the poet’s last words were those of his own Hamlet: ‘The rest is silence.’ This last, in my opinion, is less than likely. WS was not much in the habit of quoting his own works, and I feel sure that a man of such fluency would have found new words for what was after all a unique occasion. On the other hand, there are those who assert that the Bard’s eloquence deserted him at the end, and that with his final breath what he really said was a laconic, ‘Now what?’

One strange report has it that as Shakespeare lay dying he kept shouting ‘Reynolds! Reynolds!’ all through the night. I cannot say I would care to believe this either. But others more credibly claim that his final earthly utterance was a whispered, ‘Lord, help my poor soul!’ This, I think, is my favourite from amongst his reputed Last Words. Though, at the other extreme, there is something to commend Mrs Shakespeare’s claim that on returning from his ‘merry meeting’ her husband declared: ‘I’ve had eighteen straight brandy-wines. I think that’s the record!’ (Those who credit this would also say that WS thus died of ‘an insult to the brain’.) After this boast, Mrs Shakespeare said, she cradled her husband’s head in her arms, and he said, ‘I love you, but I am alone.’ Too touching, perhaps, to be true.

Then again, some lovers of taciturnity claim that at the end William Shakespeare said nothing at all, but just smiled.

I say I hope the man laughed.

Anyway, it is not true that he called out for two meat pies as he lay dying.

Reader, he died a Papist. Nor should this surprise you. It was the faith of his mother and his father, and who could deny that you find in the plays what I would call a catholicity of images? That is to say, it is a catholic view of things which WS most readily employs and inhabits in his works, a habit of thinking through images, and while there are no strong personal expressions of belief there, and indeed there is as I have said a cast of mind at work in them which is neither Protestant nor Papist, it should not surprise us that at the end the poet chose to return to his own beginnings.

Mary Arden was always an adherent of the old faith, though she made no fuss about it, and drew no attention to herself by recusancy. As for John Shakespeare, I have heard that he once prepared and signed a Papist last will and testament of the spiritual kind – but I never saw a copy of this, I admit. Such documents were brought into England in the last century by Jesuit missionaries. They consisted of a simple declaration of orthodox faith, in fourteen articles, following the model composed by St Charles Borromeo, the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan.

The testator would declare, principally, as follows:

I am myself an unworthy member of the holy Catholic religion;

I crave the sacrament of extreme unction;

I ask the Blessed Virgin Mary to be my chief executrix;

I accept my death however it befalls me, bequeathing my
soul to be entombed in the sweet and amorous coffin of the side of Jesus Christ;

I beg that this present writing of protestation be buried with me;

And I beseech all those who love me to succour me after my death by celebrating Mass.

I never heard it claimed that William Shakespeare signed such a document himself, nor do I suppose for a minute that one now lies buried with him in Holy Trinity Church. As I say, I simply heard it claimed that his father John Shakespeare had signed one. And that the old sinner’s notorious failure to attend at Anglican celebrations of the Eucharist may not always have been for fear of having writs for debt served on him.

As regards WS: I do not claim that the mystery of his religious thought can ever be sounded. Angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly. I ask the reader only to notice that the language which he gives to his ecclesiastics, from the haughty Bishop of Carlisle to the humble Franciscan friars, Laurence, Patrick, and their brothers, shows that the Roman doctrine, its liturgy and dogmas, were familiar to him, indicating that his youthful days had been passed among those who remained faithful to the ancient church.
Measure for Measure
is the key play here. It seems to me the work of a lapsed Catholic who is intimating that one day he may return to the church against his will. But perhaps I go too far in saying this. My point is just to remark that it was common knowledge in Stratford that the late Mr Shakespeare died a Papist, and that in this he was not so much converted as reconciled to the religion of his ancestors.

Unknown friends, let us put our religious cards on the
table. My name is Robert Reynolds, called Pickleherring. I am by birth a Papist, by life abused, by copulation disappointed. Does this surprise you, sir? (I knew it would not surprise you, madam, bless you.) I think I have made no secret of my own birthright, right from the start. My being a Papist myself is why I have denigrated all fellow Papists throughout this black book. We deserve to be denigrated, reader, for Jesus Christ’s sake. And when for example I said that about Nicholas Breakspear being the only Englishman who had
sunk so low
as to be made Pope, why, I was speaking of his noblest and proudest title, and the most true – that the Pope is the servant of the servants of God. Think about it, will you, when you have a moment?

For this comedian, your humble servant, I do not think my view of God is small. And when my own end comes I hope to pray with all the means that God has let me have. I pray on my feet, sir. A man may pray on his feet, on his knees, on his back, on his head, with his mouth, and with his bones (if they should come to hand, madam). There is no rule on how to talk to God.

Your humble servant
– this useful civility and self-definition came first into England with Queen Mary, daughter of Henry IV of France, wife of King Charles I. The usual salutation before that time was ‘God keep you!’ or ‘God be with you!’ and, among the vulgar, ‘How dost thou?’ accompanied by a hearty thump across the shoulders.

Reader, I am your humble servant, but I still prefer old ways, so God be with you!

When William Shakespeare was dead his body was disembowelled and then embalmed for display. All that was mortal of him lay in state at New Place for two days and
nights in a simple oak coffin of the English sort, that tapers from the middle like a fiddle.

I have my Aeolian harp hung up in the window. It plays fierce music with the wind of the great fire. The smoke of that fire lies over the city like a fog. There is darkness at noon. Many have already perished, consumed in the flames, or crushed by the falling buildings. The river is crowded with boats where others flee away. Even the people who live on London Bridge are fleeing away. The houses there are old and as dry as any tinder. If the wind should switch round to the north, then the flames will be blown across the Bridge and we are all done for. The fire will cross the river and that will be that.

I can feel the heat of the flames as I sit here and write by my window of the death of William Shakespeare.

At this book’s beginning I told you how I first met Mr Shakespeare. Here’s how he said good-bye to me, and I to him.

Picture the scene for yourselves, my dears. To the tolling of the surly, sullen bell of the Guild Chapel (it sounds cracked and dust-tongued) the poet’s body is being borne from New Place to be buried in Holy Trinity Church by the rain-swollen River Avon. Six men, all in black, are carrying the bier on their broad shoulders. It is heavy, for William Shakespeare at the end was a substantial man. The six tread carefully between the April puddles. The big oak coffin gleams on its bed of black velvet and worsted and stretched canvas.

The poet’s family walk along behind – Mrs Anne Shakespeare, tall and thin and proud; his eldest daughter, whey-faced Susanna, with her husband, the physician Dr Hall, and their little daughter Elizabeth, aged eight; rosy-cheeked, buxom Judith, with her recently acquired husband Thomas
Quiney, whose step is complicated by alcohol; the poet’s sister Mrs Hart, greasy Joan, in widow’s weeds, who trod this way just a week ago to bury her husband, with her three sons aged respectively eight, eleven, and sixteen walking beside her; and, finally, red-haired Thomas Greene, lawyer, Town Clerk of Stratford, the poet’s cousin.

Inside, behind the closed curtains, New Place is hung with black drapes from top to bottom. Out here, in the bright April weather, the cracked bell tolls on. And now it is joined by another iron tongue in mourning, the great bell of Holy Trinity itself, a deeper and more doleful note, as if gravely to welcome home the body of William Shakespeare to the green churchyard where his father and his mother and his own son Hamlet lie buried.

All eyes are on Anne Shakespeare. She is dressed in widow’s black from head to foot. Her kirtle is fashioned of camlet, her gown of pure silk. She wears a black beaver hat with a sable silk band. She carries in her black-gloved hands a garland of spring flowers and sweet herbs, the only spot of colour about her person, from which two long black ribbons trail down to the ground. This garland she will cast in the grave with her husband. Her face is white beneath a veil of double cobweb lawn, her eyes bright with tears. Despite her age, there is something still youthful about her. She appears like a queen, like a nymph, by her gait, by her grace. Watching her walk you might well remember that hot day long ago when Will Shakespeare was caught by her wiles in Henley Street. Watching Anne Hathaway still at work in Anne Shakespeare as she follows her poet to his grave by the green flowing river you can be sure that this woman has been to him what Helena promises her lover she will be in
All’s Well That Ends Well:

But it was as the mourners passed through the lych-gate that my friend and master signalled his farewell to me. The bier had been set down a moment on the greensward to await the emergence from the church of the vicar, the Reverend John Rogers, and now as it was lifted again aloft Mr Shakespeare’s coffin-lid shone and blazed forth in a sudden great bedazzlement of sun. It was like a wave of his hand as he went to his grave inside the church. They buried him close under the north wall, not far away from the altar.

After William Shakespeare’s funeral, there was a feast. This went on for three days and three nights, in which length of time as in other respects it far surpassed the common country custom. It was as if all Stratford was unwilling to believe that its greatest son was dead. It was as if the force of life itself wanted to hold on to him.

Among notable Stratford residents in attendance at the funeral and the wake, your author counted as follows: Francis Collins, Thomas Combe, Thomas Lucas, George Quiney, William Replingham, John Robinson, Thomas Russell, Hamlet and Judith Sadler, Julius Shaw, Richard Sturley, Richard Tyler, the Reverend Richard Watts (curate to John Rogers), Robert Whatcott, and Mr Shakespeare’s little godson William Walker. Most of the gentlemen had their
wives with them, and in several cases their whole families, but I do not know the names of every single one.

From London came Comfort Ballantine, John Black, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, Thomas Dewe, Leonard Digges, Richard and Jacqueline Field, John Heminges, John Jackson, William Johnson (landlord of the Mermaid Tavern), John Lowin, Robert Pallant, John Rice (the best of my rivals in women’s parts when a boy, but who gave up the stage to become a cleric), Richard Robinson, William Rowley, Thomas Sackville, James Sands, John Shank, Richard Sharpe, Martin Slaughter, Elliard Swanston (the only actor I know who took the Parliament side in our late Civil Wars), Nicholas Tooley, and Jacky Wilson. Again, many of these brought their families with them, so well was William Shakespeare loved and mourned.

I have inspected the roll of accounts of the expenses of that great funeral feast. Provision was made of thirteen barrels of beer, twenty-seven barrels of ale, and a runlet of red wine of fifteen gallons. Meat, too, was provided in proportion to this liquor. The country round about Stratford-upon-Avon must have been swept clean of geese, chickens, capons, and such small gear, all which, with five hundred eggs, thirty gallons of milk and eight of cream, twelve pigs, thirteen calves, and seven neats, slain and roasted on spits and devoured, contributed to the fearful festivity.

Mrs Anne Shakespeare presided over the feast. There were fiddlers (which thing, I think, her puritanical son-in-law John Hall much abhorred). She sat straight-backed and bright-eyed in a tall black chair at the head of the table, eating little and drinking less, but seeing to it that her guests were well provided for. She wore a black silk calimanco gown,
with a head-dress of black tiffany upon her thick black hair that was streaked with silver at the temples. Susanna sat on her right hand, wearing a black camlet kirtle and a gown of fine black silk also. Judith sat on her left hand, again all in black, with that medal between her breasts which she kept showing me when there was no need for me to see it.

The three women looked like three versions of the one face.

At the height of the wake, as the fiddlers sawed at their instruments till the horse-hair frayed, I stole away silently from the feasting and the drinking. I had a singular need that just had to be satisfied. I went like a man in a dream, but I knew where I was going. Unobserved by any, or so I believe, I crept from the hall of New Place, and ventured where my longing was directing me – up the broad oak staircase to the room that held the second-best bed and other secrets.

Many speak of Robin Hood who never shot with his bow. I suppose I was determined that Pickleherring should do otherwise, although my will in the matter was fleshly. I had this thirst which could only be slaked the one way. If I wanted to rationalise it, I could say that I had my own way of mourning Mr Shakespeare, and of asserting and celebrating what all his works are an assertion and celebration of – the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I had a hard on. Funerals have this mandrake effect on me, madam. I do apologise, but my root was up. Remember, I was William Shakespeare’s joculator.

That’s a good word, that
JOCULATOR
. It means more than just a jester, or a minstrel, or jongleur. It means a fool who knows the wisdom of foolishness. You get this wisdom in Shakespeare which you do not get in Dante or in Homer.
That’s why there is nothing in either of those great poets that gets under your skin like Feste’s song at the end of
Twelfth Night
:

Never forget that
SILLY
once meant
BLESSED
. Nor that the first Christians were proud to be miscalled Chrestians, meaning
simpletons
. Nor that transvestite boys with phalluses erect led the Greek sacred processions of the Dionysian Oschophoria.

I stripped off all my clothes with the bedroom door shut close behind me. Putting on Anne Shakespeare’s things was ever so lovely. She had presses full of the most adorable gowns. Her wardrobe was packed with petticoats and bodices, all scented sweetly of her perfume, with ruffs and cuffs and farthingales and things. I plucked out a stomacher of incarnadine satin, smooth as snow or swansdown, that you had to lace up with two broad silver laces. Standing before her pierglass, I laced this stomacher so tight that it hurt me, quite deliciously. Then I could wait no more, but plunged my engorged and rampant member in a deep cool pool of her petticoats. When I found the drawer that held the lady’s most intimate articles of apparel, her shifts and her camisas, her silken drawers and her black and her white silk stockings, soft to my touch as cobweb, I could scarcely contain myself. I hung a pair of her drawers on my pintle while I explored. Among the items of her toilet I found powder-puffs
and paints and paint-sticks, false curls and curling irons, lacquers and lip-salves and feathers for applying henna. Mrs Shakespeare had a box of Cordovan gloves, embroidered sheaths that were shaped to the clench of her fingers. I found to my delight that they fitted me. She possessed diamond and cornelian rings, and garnet brooches, and plaits of pearls, and necklaces of sapphires. It was plain that she favoured certain colours – scarlet and black – both for her choicest gowns and her flimsiest undergarments. That she sometimes adopted worsted hose of different hues – sometimes blue, sometimes grass-green – was a small enough matter for me to regret. (Not so much for the colours, but for that one absence of silk.)

I pulled on a pair of Anne Shakespeare’s silk stockings, black as night, just like the ones she had worn to the funeral. I selected a sweet pair of garters, rosy rosettes, and smoothed and adjusted the stockings, consulting the pierglass. Lines of my parts as Juliet and as Cleopatra and as Lady Macbeth came coursing through my head and I spoke them softly aloud, my lips kissing my own image in the mirror, so that soon the glass was clouded with my breath. I selected black silken drawers from the tangle of worn garments in her linen basket. I sniffed at the gusset before I put them on. Anne Shakespeare’s drawers smelt deliciously of comfrey fritters: her essence.

I was posed and poised at play there, black silk dress and petticoats up, casting sidelong glances at my image in the pierglass, calling the one there
sir
or
madam
, depending upon what was permitted to be shown, flirting with my unruly will, having it hide between my silk-clad legs and then prick out, making it throb and dance to the flick of the gloves, I was at
work there, merrily, merrily, in the last throes of the hottest and sweetest ecstasy of self-caressing I ever knew in my life, when the door was suddenly flung open and the mistress of the house burst into her own bedroom and upon me.

Mrs Shakespeare screamed three screams, each one richer and shriller and more blood-curdling than any scream I ever heard screamed before, as she took in the scene that met her wide blue eyes. Then she seized a birch broom from the corridor, and drove me from the house all garbed as I was in her garments. I ran around the mulberry, scattering seed.

Reader, I have no regrets. It was worth the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Besides, I have reason to believe that Mrs Shakespeare came to forgive me my trespass. At least, she never again referred to the matter, when I went back to New Place more than once to ask her various questions for my planned Life of William Shakespeare. She merely took care to see that I was never allowed to go upstairs alone to enjoy her private treasury of enchantments.

I confess that I would dearly love to have performed the same necessary office dressed in Susanna’s clothes and then in Judith’s too. Susanna used spectacles, and she carried a silver whistle for her little dog, suspended at her girdle. She kept a throstle in a twiggen cage. It would have been both interesting and delightful to inhabit her woollen gown and blow the silver whistle for the dog and see what dog and bird made of their master-mistress. Mr Shakespeare’s younger daughter was an even greater temptation, since her mysteries were more provocative. That medal bewitched me. And her wardrobe contained at least one fine gown of musk-coloured taffeta that made me almost swoon whenever I saw her wearing it. It had lots of petticoats and smelt peppery to the
nostrils as she swished past. When she rode out to hounds at Stratford I saw her decked in a bastard scarlet safeguard coat and hood, Polonia style, laced with red and blue and yellow trimmings, which mightily appealed to my poor senses. I heard her giggle and say once, Judith, that none of her dresses was made by female hands. I suppose the word for this is boasting. She was a boastful creature. I could wear myself to a frazzle just thinking of her boots.

In this penultimate box, though, I do have a pair of Susanna Shakespeare’s gloves, filched long ago from Hall’s Croft when no one was looking. Sometimes I slip these on and I play Rosalind. Beside them, my other secret treasure is a pair of Mr Shakespeare’s sister’s Zebelah stockings. (Zebelah is Isabella colour, a shade of tan.) These inhesions of greasy Joan have been my comfort on many a long night. I have also Lucy Negro’s handkerchief. Don’t ask me how I got it. Once it smelt of white heliotrope. I never washed it. It is quite stiff now with seed and tears, quite yellow. But it is years since I managed either sperm or tears.

The great fire rages on. North of the river it is all on fire. Last night I watched the burning of St Paul’s. The stones flew up into the air like grenados, the melting lead ran down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements burnt red as the floor of hell. All the sky seemed on fire, like the top of a burning oven.