The Late Mr Shakespeare (8 page)

I would like to describe for you this room in which I write.

It is a small room in the shape of a triangle. My door is at the point of it. All three walls are lined with my bookcases. There's a small window like an eye in the middle of the wall that's opposite my door. I have my table there, to get the light. My bed's to the right of the table. Sometimes I move the table and push the bed under the window and work in bed. Sometimes at night I push the bed into the door and sleep with my feet against it. The exercise is good for me, and an old man can't be too careful these naughty days.

I'm on the third floor. Downstairs is a whorehouse. In the basement, a pie-maker's. So you see I'm well catered for.

Madam, don't fret yourself. Pickleherring jests. It's twenty years since I bothered with a woman. And I keep a spare diet, sir. It's thirty years since I bothered with a pie.

All my work is done here.

All my life is in this room.

In addition to my books I have one hundred small black boxes stacked along my bookshelves. Each box is tied with red ribbon and sealed with red sealing-wax. These one hundred boxes contain all my notes and queries concerning Mr Shakespeare. I take a box down and I work. My boxes hold little objects also – things cogent to the subject of the papers in them. While writing that last chapter, for instance, I had Martin Jimp's bright needle on my table. Touching it was inspiring. It gave me ideas. I have to do stuff like this since I am not really a writer. Such things are my props. I'm just one of your harlotry players after all.

I am seated at my table writing this.

To my left, on the top of a little drawer-desk, stands a green lacquered tray bearing a cup and saucer, a jug of water, and a silver egg-cup with its egg as yet unboiled but waiting for me. Beside the egg-cup there's my (once) white napkin lying. That's rolled in a whorled napkin ring in the shape of two snakes coupling.

Those boxes contain all the matter I've accumulated for my chapters. For instance, names and dates and figures copied out from parish registers. For instance, stories that I heard in Stratford. For instance, play-bills.

Under the bed I've a porcelain pot which I piss in.

It's been bitter cold this winter. That I welcome. The snow lies on the roofs I see from my window. The blessed snow does not discriminate. It blesses both the taverns and the stews. No doubt it even blesses the Bishop of Winchester. This Liberty of the Clink lies under him. But I can't see St Mary Overy's from here.

There's a view, could I lean out, of five fine prisons – the Marshalsea, the King's Bench, the White Lion, the Counter,
the Clink itself. Once upon a time you could have seen our Globe from this same window. But that was torn down by Cromwell, who was no play-goer. Before that, of course, it caught fire in 1613. We were doing
King Henry VIII
. I was playing Anne Bullen. (Not much of a part, but by then I was well past my prime.) It was old Heminges' fault. The text calls for hautboys. So he goes and gets trumpets. Then to go with those trumpets he has this great ordinance set off. The effect was dramatic. But wadding from out of the barrel set fire to the thatch. It took only two hours to dissolve Shakespeare's Globe after all. The mercy is no one killed, though that Sly the critic had his breeches set on fire, which would perhaps have broiled him, if he'd not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.

Here I sit every day to my great work. I wear two coats to keep the winter out. It's not warm in this room, though you'd think the heats below would filter up. On
very
cold days I wrap over my coats that vasty black star-spangled cloak that was once part of my costume as Cressida. The whole working suit is bound round my body by a leather girdle.

In the trunk by my feet I keep my costumes, though some hang up on pegs between my books. There is Cordelia's wig. Here Portia's law gown. I sometimes still sleep in the nightgown of Lady Macbeth for a treat on a warm summer's night. But I wear my jerkin over it, not to speak of my leggings. I have to. My blood would stop, otherwise.

My boots are covered with patches. No surprise in that. They've been my companions now for thirty-three years.

I feel the cold keenly. I put my feet in a box of straw under my table when I'm sitting working. If you keep your feet
warm then the rest of you doesn't seize up. I wear mittens on my paws. Two pair when I'm writing.

I won't list all my books, since that would be tedious. Sufficient to say it's a good job the girls downstairs can't read. If one of them learnt to, and took it into her unpretty little head to creep up here, then she might come to the conclusion that there's some kind of Aladdin's Cavern above her in the attic of the whorehouse.

I'll mention only that I possess all the necessary books. Which is to say: Holinshed's
Chronicles
, John Stow's
Annals
, North's translation of Plutarch, some anonymity's Plautus, Belleforest's
Histoires Tragiques
, Cinthio's
Hecatommithi,
an execrable French version of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's
Il Pecorone
, Arthur Brake's translation from the Italian of Bandello's
Novelle
, and Golding's great Englishing of the
Metamorphoses
of Ovid.

Who gave me these books?

Mr Shakespeare did.

Yes, madam, he loved me, but that's not the only reason. I've told you he covered his tracks. These were his source books, you see.

For example, the plot and much of the matter for
Romeo and Juliet
comes straight out of Brake's rendering of that old Bandello story. Nor do I believe that I dishonour Mr Shakespeare in pointing this out. While he makes little change in the plot, he impregnates it with his own poetic fervour. His Mercutio and his Nurse relieve in their different ways what was mere solemn melodrama in the original. He compresses what takes nine months in Broke to a single week of hot days and hot nights, and he reduces Juliet's age from fifteen to thirteen. As for the language which he gives the two
young lovers – it is on fire, where Broke is not even kindling. Imagine the balcony scene with turd like this:

That's from Brooke's
Romeus and Juliet
. Pyramus and Thisbe, eat your hearts out. If alchemy is what they say it is – the art of transmuting base matter into gold – then Mr William Shakespeare was an alchemist.

By the way, friends, while everyone knows that this is one of Mr Shakespeare's earliest plays, I believe that I can date the thing precisely. Forgetting Verona, wholly caught up in creating the part of the Nurse, he has her declare '
Tis since the earthquake now eleven years
*
– and there hasn't been an earthquake in England since 1580. Which must mean Mr Shakespeare was writing it in 1591, in the 27th year of his age. Well, I like to think so, anyway. He revised the piece considerably after its first playing, augmenting the part of Juliet just for me. You'll see that for yourselves if you care to compare the First and Second Quartos. (I bore the fair copy for the latter, in '99, on behalf of Cuthbert Burbie to his printer Creede at the Katherine Wheel in Thames Street.)

My pride is of course my First Folio of Mr Shakespeare's plays. This was given to me by the printer William Jaggard for a fortieth-birthday present. It sits to my right hand on my
table whenever I write. I refer to it each time I quote for you, having only an actor's memory; I mean, I can recall
verbatim
my own parts, but not the others.

I have all my prompt-books too, from the days when I served with the Company. These I keep under the bed, to the left of my piss-pot.

I am not poor. I am not rich.
Nihil est, nihil deest
: I have little, I want nothing. All my treasure is in Minerva's tower.

All the same, somewhere in this room – but I will not write down
where
a great secret is hidden. I shall come to that in due course. A time for everything, and everything in its time, as my grandfather the bishop used to say. (He was a martyr to the pox for the last twenty years of his life.) Suffice it for now that I tell you that this secret of mine consists of all that remains of a play of Mr Shakespeare's that is otherwise lost.

Here's a riddle for you: it's not
lost
, for the
lost
one you have already. This is the lost
un
lost one.

No need to bruise your brains unduly on such wit-work.

It is my plan to include this play in my book!

That's a good warm word that
GALLIGASKINS
which I used in my last chapter. Some say it came over from the French, but I reckon that farfetched. It's a sailor word – from the galleys, do you see? I don't think it necessary to salvation to believe that such thoroughly English breeches were ever worn in Gascony. I believe they must just be gallant gaskins – good, bold pairs of breeks.

I could do with some Shakespeare breeches myself as I sit here and write this morning. The brass monkeys outside the pawnshop in the alley below just gave a high falsetto shriek.

I'm sucking a pickled mulberry I picked long ago from the tree of that astringent fruit which Mr Shakespeare planted in his garden. I like the taste of mulberries. It is like my own.

Talking of the famous play of Pyramus and Thisbe, that most lamentable comedy, Mr Quince, the carpenter, gives due directions, as follows: ‘One must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of moonshine.’ And this order is realised. ‘All I have to say,’ concludes the performer of this strange part, ‘is, to tell you, that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man i’ the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.’

Who is this
Man in the Moon
, this person of moonshine? I will tell you. He is the annalist or chronicler of what I call country history. More of that in a minute. For the moment, gentle reader, prove to yourself your gentleness by not despising him. Be like Duke Theseus, and acknowledge that
never anything can be amiss, / When simpleness and duty tender it
. Remember that while Mr Shakespeare ridicules those entertainments and interludes which were presented by
the rustic amateurs before great people, yet he, at the same time, furnishes the best and most generous defence of them. He teaches us how such simple-minded if ridiculous efforts should be treated by all persons of good breeding.
The kinder we
, as the Duke says,
to give them thanks for nothing
.

So then:
THE MAN IN THE MOON
, who is he?

It is, I agree, sir, a familiar expression, to which few persons attach any definite idea.

Many would be found – yes, madam – under a belief such as yours, that it refers merely to that faint appearance of a face which the moon presents when full.

But those, dear friends, who are better acquainted with natural objects, and with folk matters, will be aware that the Man in the Moon – the thing referred to under that name – is a dusky resemblance to a human figure which appears on the western side of the lunar luminary when she is eight days old, being somewhat like a man carrying a thorn-bush on his back, and at the same time engaged in climbing, while a detached object in front looks like his dog going on before him.

It is a very old popular notion (or so my mother taught me), that this figure is no less than the man referred to in the Book of Numbers (chap. xv, v, 32
et seq
) as having been detected by the children of Israel in the wilderness, in the act of gathering sticks on the Sabbath-day, and whom the Lord directed (in absence of a law on the subject) to be stoned to death without the camp.

One would have thought this poor benighted stick-gatherer sufficiently punished in the Biblical history. Nevertheless, the popular mind has assigned him the additional pain of a perpetual pillorying in the moon.

There he is with his burden of sticks upon his back! See how he is continually climbing up that shining height with his little dog before him! Observe that he never gets a single step higher! And so it must be while this world endures …

Yet I say that the Man in the Moon is an historian.

Or, at least, the patron of a certain sort of history.

Consider: there are two ways of looking at the moon and the sun. Of the moon, you can see her as the satellite of the earth, a mere secondary planet, or you can see her as a deity, the queen of tides and poets. Of the sun, when it rises, one man might say he saw a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea, while another man might say he saw an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’

The second way is the way Mr Shakespeare saw the world. (Though he understood the other way of seeing it, or he would not have made a playwright.)

The second way is the way that I see his life’s story. (Though I do my best all the same to be true to the things in my black boxes.)

Reader, just as there are two ways of seeing, so there are two ways of historizing.

Reader, there are, in truth, as I would now make clear for your better understanding of this sorry, mad book of mine, two kinds of history, as different from each other as chalk and cheese.

There is
town
history and there is
country
history.

Town history is cynical and exact. It is written by wits and it orders and limits what it talks about. It relies on facts and figures. It is knowing. Dry and sceptical and clever, it is ruled by the head. Beginning in the shadow of the law
courts, at the end of the day your town history tends to the universities – it becomes academic. Town history is believable and reliable. Offering proofs, it never strains credulity. But sometimes it can’t see the Forest of Arden for the trees. And it falls probably short of the mark when it comes up against Mr Shakespeare.

Your country history is a different matter. Country history is faithful and open-ended. It is a tale told by various idiots on the village green, all busy contradicting themselves in the name of a common truth. It exaggerates and enflames what it talks about. It delights in lies and gossip. It is unwise. Wild and mystical and passionate, it is ruled by the heart. Beginning by the glow of the hearth, at the end of the night your country history tends to pass into balladry and legend – it becomes poetic. Country history is fanciful and maggoty. Easy to mock, it always strains belief. But sometimes it catches the ghostly coat-tails of what is otherwise ungraspable. It is the only possible way of accounting for Mr Shakespeare.

Town history is quickly written down and printed.

Country history is told for years, passing from mouth to mouth before anyone bothers to write it down. And when it
is
written down, it loses something. Publishing stops it.

Town history rests on the premise that facts tell the truth.

Country history, on the contrary, knows that facts can obscure the truth. Your country historian, your Man in the Moon, your servant Pickleherring, allows for the fact that the facts can prove anything, that they prickle and point in all directions, like the twigs on a tree that’s still growing. The truth of the tree is its life. That’s the green blood that springs, like a fountain, from the roots to the stars.

This book you read is mostly country history. It consists of tales I have heard told about Mr Shakespeare.

Our hero was a country-man who took the town by storm. He set the Thames on fire with what he knew from the Avon. But he remained in his heart a man of the country. And he went back to his origins to die.

I have collected most of my tales about him from people who knew him. In Stratford, in Warwick, in London. The wheres do not matter. You can be a good country historian in Paternoster Row.

What matters is that it’s told tales I am telling you. Tales told me. Twice-told tales. Tales, tales, tales, tales. Here there are Canterbury tales, and old wives’ tales. Here there are tales of tubs and of roasted horses. One tale is good until another’s told. All are the tales of every common tongue. Tales, idle tales, fictions.

And if some of my told tales are tall, that’s because in the minds of the tellers the late Mr William Shakespeare was a giant.

Town history is mostly written. Country history is all in the telling.

Town history begins and ends in the mind. Country history begins and lives in the tongue, and it can have no end while the Man in the Moon keeps on climbing.

I am, like Mr Shakespeare, motley-minded.

I have, like Mr Shakespeare, a peasant heart.