The Late Mr Shakespeare (5 page)

But what if the Reverend John Bretchgirdle really was our poet's father? Could that be possible? Let us consider the facts.

Bretchgirdle became vicar at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, in January 1561, three years and three months before the poet's birth. He was a portly man, and a comfortable one, and a man of parts, made B.A. at Oxford in 1545 and M.A. some two years after. Before he came to Stratford this shrewd prelate was curate at Witton in Cheshire, serving also as master of the school there. Bretchgirdle never taught in the Grammar School at Stratford, but one of his brightest pupils at Witton, John Brownsword, loved him so well that he followed him like a little dog to Stratford to schoolmaster there. More of that in a minute.

Visitations by Bretchgirdle to the house in Henley Street followed regularly upon each other after the occasion already chronicled – when he ate his dinner twice, and condemned
both Pope and Puritans. Truth to tell, hospitality was offered him more in duty than through any liking, and neither John nor Mary Shakespeare warmed to their vicar until one Sunday post-Communion afternoon when the butcher and whittawer, in the act of handing a cup of sherris sack to his guest, regretted that his latest apprentice had run away.

‘Then I will help you,' the Reverend Bretchgirdle said, with every assumption of impulsiveness. ‘I know nothing of butchery, but cobbling comes naturally to me,' he added, ‘and at the least I can do as well as one of your adolescent labourers.'

John Shakespeare thought that the fat ecclesiastic might be joking. So he did not reply. But later when he witnessed his guest trotting out to the shed and attaching insoles to the bottom of a pair of wooden lasts and fastening the whitleather down with lasting tacks, he had no choice in the matter – speech proved beyond him.

John stood watching goggle-eyed as Rev. Bretchgirdle pierced round the insoles with a bent awl, and it was only when he realised that this was not play-acting and that the priest was hard at it, that he ran to him, and begged him to desist.

‘It's not right that your reverence should so demean himself,' he protested, forgetting in his admiration the correct churchly mode of address.

‘There's nothing demeaning about it, Mr Chackosper,' purred Bretchgirdle, placing the uppers on the lasts and drawing their edges tightly round the edges of the insoles. ‘Cobbling is the only secular work in which a parish priest may profitably interest himself,' he lied. He fastened the uppers in position with lasting tacks. ‘Without prejudice to his immortal soul,' he added.

Lasting is a crucial operation, as John Shakespeare knew too well, for unless the upper is drawn neat and tight upon the last, without a crease, without a frown or wrinkle, the shape of the shoe will be spoilt.

The Reverend Bretchgirdle did not falter. He inseamed as if he had been born with an awl in his fist. Then he pared off the rough edges and levelled the bottoms with a piece of tarred felt.

‘It was the hobby of many of the patriarchs,' he explained. ‘And of Cranmer himself, in his spare moments.'

That night their rector shared the supper of the Shakespeares yet again, and for many a night thereafter, so that soon it was common knowledge in Stratford-upon-Avon that the ecclesiastical eccentric was in some sort of partnership with John Shakespeare, the butcher and whittawer who cobbled as well when he could. It was not so commonly known, however, that the priest had also taken the education of the Shakespeares in hand – slipping frogs, toads, and mice into the marital bed, teaching John and Mary to play with slow-worms and grass-snakes, measures to ensure that they developed an attitude of honest indifference to those things which might otherwise engender wasteful impulses of fastidiousness or fear.

But did the Reverend Bretchgirdle share in John Shakespeare's bed? Had that great whited sepulchre known Mary?

There is a Latin poem by John Brownsword which is a key document here. Brownsword was reckoned a good Latinist. He was schoolmaster in Stratford from 1565 to 1567, having taught in Macclesfield School before that. When Bretchgirdle died (some say of exhaustion) a few years after christening
William Shakespeare, Brownsword returned to Macclesfield, and taught there for many years until his own death in 1589. He wrote three poems addressed to Bretchgirdle, which are of no interest whatsoever to our purpose, save that we might register their tone of sycophantic amatory tenderness. A fourth, which is probably also addressed to Bretchgirdle, or which is at the least about matters which concerned him, may be only a fragment. A cryptic and broken-backed acrostic, it runs as follows:

I have put capitals to the concealed acrostic name so that you may see the more readily that it is
MARE
(or Mary)
ARDEN
. In the margin of the page Brownsword has written in his crabbed schoolmaster's hand,
Dux femina facti
… (Which is to say, ‘There's a woman at the bottom of it.') And beside this, scribbled in a macaronic mixture of English and Latin, ‘No!'
(dixit) ‘no!' ‘No!'

What is the significance of this? Let Pickleherring elucidate the mystery. In themselves the lines might be nothing but the complaint of a splenetic spirit thwarted in its love for an inappropriate object, but taken in conjunction with a tale still current in both Stratford and Macclesfield they are at least peculiar, and peculiarly haunting. That tale goes thus:

John Shakespeare having one day to journey to London
on business, he says to his wife, ‘Listen, while I am gone you're to say No to that Rev. Bretchgirdle.'

‘Say no?' says Mary. ‘What do you mean say no?'

‘I mean say No to him,' John Shakespeare says.

‘Nothing but no?' says Mary.

‘No, no, no, no, no, all the time No,' John Shakespeare says. ‘Say No in thunder, woman. Always answer No, whatever he says to you, however he comes pleading and wheedling, that lecherous old goat. And never add another word to No. Do you understand?'

Mary Shakespeare said she understood.

Her husband went on his way. He trusted his simple stratagem would prevent any harm befalling his wife.

The Reverend Bretchgirdle's in through the back door of the butcher shop in about five minutes.

‘Good morning, Mrs Shagshaft,' says the scoundrel, bowing low, and then wringing his plump white hands and studying the palms of them as one might refer to an index of human vanity. ‘You'll be missing your husband already, I expect?'

‘No,' says Mary Shakespeare.

‘Oho,' thinks vile Bretchgirdle, ‘what can this signify?'

That Mrs S is not missing her husband sounds mighty promising to the lusty vicar.

Then before long he discovers that the young wife answers No to all the things he says to her.

Bretchgirdle sees his chance. He's as clever as a bag of weasels. And persistence is his strong suit. ‘Well,' says he, ‘if I put my hand on your knee, Mrs Sexspire, you won't mind then?'

‘No,' says Mary Shakespeare.

‘And if I lift up your gown, Mrs Shakespay,' says the happy priest, his round cheeks dimpling, ‘you won't be complaining and telling your husband when he gets back?'

‘No,' says Mary Shakespeare.

So the Reverend wretched Bretchgirdle puts his hand on Mrs Mary Shakespeare's white-stockinged knee, and he lifts up her grass-green gown of linen taffety, and he takes down her mockado drawers. His mind is smelling like a rich man's funeral. His bulging eyes roll.

‘Pray tell me, Mrs Sackstuft,' he says politely, ‘would you object if your rector was to futter you?'

‘No,' says Mary Shakespeare.

So the false friar futters her, and when he has finished he says, ‘There, Mrs Sexbear, you'll be satisfied now.'

‘No,' says Mary Shakespeare.

‘Hallelujah!' cries the Reverend Bretchgirdle.

He futters the docile lady all over again, concentrating the while in order to delay the moment of ejaculation upon certain collects of Cranmer's.

‘Will that do, Mrs Shagspeer?' the priest enquires solicitously when he comes to his amen.

‘No,' says Mary Shakespeare.

Bretchgirdle falls out of bed. He wolfs a dozen oysters and a loaf of cockelty bread. Then he's back at it again.

This time he just pumps away and keeps himself going with fantasies that he is loose in a harem of virgin Turkish girls. Some of the girls are choirboys. Some of the choirboys are angels. He has to inspect, resolve, and satisfy them all. Then they must satisfy him – first the girls, and then the choirboys, and then the angels. Then angels, choirboys, and girls all come together and Bretchgirdle's the Pope and they
all have to do what he says. He doesn't say much but they do it all anyway. Meanwhile the lady beneath him claws at his back and watches a fly over his shoulder that squats upon the ceiling rubbing its hands together.

‘Mrs S,' pants the priest, ‘isn't that,' (he collapses), ‘
enough
?'

‘No,' says Mary Shakespeare.

Confused, exhausted, and contrite, a sadder and a wiser man in all ways, his balls drained, his heart pounding, his imagination in tatters, his eyes starting out of his head, his knees knocking together and his breath coming in great shuddering gasps, the unworthy Reverend Bretchgirdle withdraws, defeated, and creeps speechless away to his church by the swan-ridden river.

Nine months, nine days, and nine hours later, William Shakespeare made his entrance into this world.

You understand, madam, that I do not mean to say that the late Mr Shakespeare
was
the bastard son of a priest. (Though in all honesty there are worse things to be, and I am myself the bastard son of a bishop’s bastard.)

I only tell you stories about Shakespeare. I only tell you tales which I have heard. You are not required to believe any particular one of them. Nor is it necessary to salvation that you should. But from the over-all impress of the various stories may you perhaps come to know our poet thoroughly. One story might cancel out another. But the whole book will be more than the sum of its parts.

For what it is worth, sir, I think Shakespeare was the son of a butcher (and whittawer). Or perhaps a glover’s son.

But, having said that, what have we said in any case? What, in other words, do we mean when we say Shakespeare?

Who is Shakespeare? What is he? (that all our swains commend him). Yes, good reader,
what
is Shakespeare?
That is the question my book is trying to answer.
What is Shakespeare?
Where is he to be found? How can we tell the man from the work, and both from the stories about him? Why did the sly fellow leave so little information about himself, so few facts in the way of footprints made in Time? Why did he cover his tracks so cleverly, leaving not a rack behind? What is the proper name for the subject of our study: Shakespeare or ‘Shakespeare’?

Sometimes I think that no one has ever been so many men as this man. Like the Egyptian Proteus, he exhausts all the guises of reality.

That Proteus was a minor sea-god, herdsman of the flocks of the salt sea, its seals and its dolphins and so forth. He was a daimon, servant to Poseidon. He had this power to assume all manner of shapes, but if held till he resumed the true one, he would answer questions. And so in this book I try to hold the late Mr Shakespeare.

Not that WS was a god, you understand; nor even a demiurge or daimon. He was just a man like any other man. Only he was just a man like every other man, and more so. This means that we must think of Shakespeare as always more than we can say about Shakespeare. And, as he remarked to me once, in an unguarded moment, a moment when weariness and excitement made the mask slip and his tongue lose reticence, we must think of Shakespeare as always
less
than we can say about Shakespeare too.

What he said to me that day at the bear-garden was in fact that sometimes he did not feel as though he had written his own works. He said that sometimes he felt as if his works had been written by someone else of the same name. I do not think this betokens undue modesty. He was talking in part
about inspiration, of course – that feeling all true poets must have, that their best work comes from somewhere else, from something other than their minds, and that they are merely the conduit for it. The poet takes; he does not ask who gives. ‘Not I,’ he cries, ‘not I, but the wind that blows through me.’

But I believe my master Shakespeare meant more. That afternoon at the Paris Garden he was making reference to a certain quality or condition of being anonymous which is to be met in much of his writing. He becomes the men and women he writes about. Yet none of them is him. And then the character of his language has the same property. It attains a self-sufficing anonymity, so that no name is needed at the bottom of the page to qualify or identify what it says. It is not William Shakespeare who speaks in these plays and these poems. It is the English language speaking itself.

I say that the true life of William Shakespeare is in his plays and his poems. Yet the man himself, to my fingers, we touch nowhere in the work.

Mr Shakespeare is the hero with a thousand faces, and none.

Even the spelling of his name makes him elusive as a sliver of quicksilver.

Shakespère was my father.

William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare – the day will come when everyone will know the name, I tell you. I knew him well, sir, and I know him not at all. Madam, there was this man, called William Shakespeare, a certain man who was a fine man too, greater than Tubal Cain or Roger Bacon, an upright, downright honest man, subtler than Avicenna, wiser than Paracelsus, knowing at least as much as Cornelius Agrippa himself of the doctrine of sympathy and antipathy in
the mineral kingdom, and of the mystery which is fire (whose faithful secretary he was) – I mean, the mystery which is the fire of language – a man who lived in the old days, not so long ago, and who will live again, if you’ll hear me out, for as long as this book lasts, at least.

William Shakespeare was the son of a butcher. During his christening feast, when many guests were seated round his father’s table to eat a fatted calf, little William, being then but a few days old, was seized by a griffin and carried away. Over land and over sea the griffin flew, until it came to its stinking nest on top of a cliff in the western isles of Scotland, where it deposited the fledgling lad. One of the griffin’s brood, wishing to reserve such a delicate poetic morsel for its own delectation, caught up our hero in its talons and flapped away to a neighbouring tree. But the branch on which this junior monster perched was too weak to support a double load. It broke. The startled griffin dropped its Shakespeare in a thicket. Undismayed by thorns, young William crawled from the griffin’s reach, taking refuge in a cave. A delicious surprise awaited him there, for he found within the cave three girls who had escaped from the griffins in the same way—

Your author doesn’t think that is going to do. Try again, Pickleherring. Writing makes history possible. Least among lies is the lie told in jest
(
mendacium iocosum
)
. These fictions are jocose, and not officious. These fictions are fantastic, and not pernicious. These fictions are a comedy, and not malicious. These fictions presently form a story of beginnings. There will be middles enough and endings too, to come. Your author tells of the late Mr William Shakespeare. Your author gives an account of his origins and originals, to feed a need for stories, and to supply a Life.

Here are no legends, sagas, myths, or mysteries. Your author tells you stories about Shakespeare, and he is only too willing to explain whenever he can. For instance, Brownsword. Brownsword’s love for Bretchgirdle was more Latin than English, and even more Greek than Latin in his heart. We know no less from his verses. But Bretchgirdle’s lust for Mary Shakespeare is quite another matter. Bretchgirdle’s lust for Mary Shakespeare is mere gossip. A distinction must be drawn. Yet gossip plays its part too in the life of a man.

This book takes account of such gossip, as it takes account of the stage. The late Mr Shakespeare had his exits and his entrances, and he was one man who in his time played many parts. Nor does Pickleherring mean this merely as Jaques meant it in terms of age. Mr Shakespeare was both poet and player. I speak not just of his profession, but of his identity. He was author and actor. In a word, Mr Shakespeare was an
AUCTOR
.

That’s a good word, that
AUCTOR
. It comes as near defining what WS
did
as any other single word I know. It’s the ancient way to spell the word author. But it is more than that. An auctor is an author and an actor. And I don’t just mean that in Mr Shakespeare’s case he was a playwright who was also a player in his own plays. (Although he was.) I mean that any man is both the author and the actor of his own life. He is its auctor. Both in the world of the stage and on the world’s stage.

It is not just because I am a comedian that I keep coming back to stage business and play-talk.

I act, therefore I am.

We are all players.

What if what we like to call the self is just a series of masks and poses?

An actor’s question, and the actor’s dilemma, no doubt. But let the audience beware and go home wondering. I mean you, sir. And you, madam. Are you more than your mask? Is there a person to know behind the persona?

Now then, regarding Mr Shakespeare, what we might call the identity question is of course the wildest thing. Which is why some think that someone else wrote his work. (We shall come to this in due process. Also, the portraits.) But if his identity is the wildest question, then a mild thing is the matter of his birth-date, which so far I have taken quite for granted.

The truth is that we can’t take it for granted.

The truth is that truth is what we can never take for granted.

What do I mean?

Madam, I mean we all know that Shakespeare was born on the 23rd of April, 1564 – and that he might well not have been.

In other words, that birthday belongs to beauty, not to truth. April 23rd is of course St George’s Day. April 23rd is also without doubt or dispute the day on which Shakespeare died in 1616. So we round out our man’s little life with a timely coincidence, a chime or rhyme of dates, linked St George’s Days. But to say that WS was born on that feast is conjecture. The life of Shakespeare starts with a conjecture. We want him to be born then, so he was.

This is the story of the life of William Shakespeare. It is a story neither cosmogonic, theogonic, anthropogonic, nor eschatological. (Scatological it may be, here and there, but
then I did not invent John Shakespeare’s dunghill outside his house in Henley Street.)
*
It is a story inspired neither by hope nor fear, but a desire to come at the truth by telling lies. Mr Shakespeare was my master in this desire.

This book must not be thought of as a fable or an old wives’ tale. Nor is it so much a cock and bull story as you might care to think. Being jocose, it could even be said to be not incompatible with a taste or a hunger for truth. It offers you no information about the world as a whole. On the question of the meaning and end of life it has nothing to say. This is the story of William Shakespeare. It is a pack of lies, and my heart’s blood.