The Late Mr Shakespeare (15 page)

My friend the player Weston used to say in support of his Polesworth conjecture that Shakespeare never mentions Stratford in any of his writings. But that’s not true.

If you stand on the eighteenth arch of Clopton Bridge (the one nearest the point where the road goes off to London), and if you watch the River Avon below when it is in flood, you will see a curious thing that Shakespeare saw.

The force of the current under the adjoining arches, coupled with the curve there is at that strait in the riverbank, produces a very queer and swirling eddy. What happens is that the bounding water is forced
back
through the arch in an exactly contrary direction.

I have seen sticks and straws, which I have just watched swirling downstream through the arch, brought back again as swiftly against the flood.

The boy Will saw this too. Here’s how he describes it:

That’s from
The Rape of Lucrece
, lines 1667-73. How many times must he have watched it, perhaps with tears in his bright eyes?

You can see the river behave like this at Stratford even on a calm day, but if you want to observe the full force of that saw-like eddy then choose a day with a violent roaring tide. At all events, here, my dears, we have something very particular and peculiar and right in the heart of his home town that William Shakespeare noticed.

Water and all its ways pleased William Shakespeare. You might almost say he was enchanted by it.

I think the Avon proved his best and sweetest tutor, and that the boy Will learnt more about poetry and the workings of the minds of men from watching that river in its different moods than he was taught by all his schoolmasters put together.

In summer he sauntered by on the river banks, observing the green current gliding with white swans upon it. In winter he watched it rage, and must often afterwards have noticed
meadows not yet dry, / With miry slime left on them
as he reports in
Titus Andronicus
.

The Avon knows flooding, in fact, both in winter and summer. Sir Hugh Clopton built his bridge at Stratford, towards the end of the fifteenth century, because before it people were refusing to come to market in town when the river was up, for fear that they might drown, and their cattle with them. Even this solid stone structure could not always
hold against the fury of the flood. In July of 1588 – during that wild, wet, and windy summer provided by God to assist England in the defeat of the Spanish Armada – the bridge was broken at both ends by the roaring tide, imprisoning in the middle three men who were in the act of crossing it.

Water in flood is an image you will find all over Shakespeare. Sometimes these images are simple, picturing an irresistible force which will suffer nothing to stop it, but
engluts and swallows
all in its way, as he says in
Othello
. At other times he makes of the flooding river an emblem of rebellion, as when Scroop in
Richard II
(Act III, Scene 2), speaking of the uprising, compares things to

I don’t think you will find as many river similes in any other of the dramatists, either Elizabethan or modern. But then I never acted much in other men’s plays. I did once take the walking-on part of Helen of Troy in Marlowe’s
Dr Faustus
, though, and I heard old Alleyn in
Tamburlaine
at the Rose, and I can tell you that I doubt if there’s a river image in the whole of Marlowe. The sea was more in his line – there’s plenty of that. As for Ben Jonson, all his river stuff is most perfunctory and of a general nature; it shows no sign of any direct observation.

I imagine the mills on the Avon were Shakespeare’s delight. There is a great mill at Barford, and another at Alveston, and two at Hampton Lucy. All these lie upstream from where
he lived. Then there is Stratford mill, just below the church where he was baptised and now lies buried. And downstream there are mills at Luddington and Binton and Welford and Bidford. There are also two mills on the Stour, which runs into the Avon about two miles below Stratford. And on the fast-flowing Alne that runs by Henley-in-Arden there’s a mill at every mile, just about. No doubt the boy Will found a fresh mill-pond to bathe in every week of the year. No doubt but he also carved toy boats and floated them down the mill-leats.

There’s not a lot to suggest that Mr Shakespeare liked fishing. His references to the sport are all rather ordinary – Claudio saying
Bait the hook well; this fish will bite
, that sort of thing. I think he preferred to stand and stare at the waters, without disturbing them with his own ambition.

Swimming’s a different matter. I know he could swim. As a boy I like to imagine him plunging into the angry waters of the Avon, as did Cassius once with Caesar in the Tiber. Only a practised swimmer could have written, as he does in the second scene of the first Act of the Scottish play:

I don’t claim he could swim like a fish like Ariel. But I was with him one night by the Thames when he tore off his clothes. ‘Be contented,’ I told him. ‘It’s a naughty night to swim in.’ He liked that well enough to put it straight into the storm scene in
King Lear.

I want to say a word about Shakespeare and weeds. Not the word
WEEDS
, mind you. When the poet uses that it is nearly always in some negative moral context – talking of evil as weeds, of weeds as faults in human character, of souls or gardens choked with weeds, and so forth.

No, I mean Shakespeare’s liking for certain wild or at any rate out-of-garden plants that few others either note or celebrate. Not the word but the things, sir, that’s what I mean.

Many poets tell you plenty about flowers. Mr Shakespeare does too. And unlike some poets what he tells you is usually true. When he mentions a flower you know that he has seen it often, growing. He makes you feel that he has plucked it with his own fingers and stroked it across his face. He was, after all, a country boy before he became a great poet. He knows every mark and spot and stamen of whatever he’s talking about.

Contrast his flowers with John Milton’s, gentle reader,
and you’ll see what I mean. I respect Mr Milton, of course, but I can’t say I love him. He will bid you bring the rathe primrose, the tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine, the white pink and the pansy freaked with jet, the glowing violet, the musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, with cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, to strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies, and all that. But apart from the fact that they couldn’t all have been in flower at the same time of year, doesn’t it sound rather as if he is giving poetical orders to his gardener? His epithets aren’t too good, either, when you think about it. Violets don’t glow. Honeysuckle is more untidy than well-attired. Madam, have you ever seen a cowslip looking pensive? As to amaranthus, I doubt if Milton ever saw one in his life. It is not so much a flower as a lovely quadrisyllable.

With Shakespeare, it is quite a different matter. He never drags in any flower just because of its name, and what he says about the look or the scent of it will always prove true. At his best in this matter, he doesn’t even
describe
the flower at all; instead, he presents you with the essence of its nature. For example, Perdita in
The Winter’s Tale
conjuring up daffodils and what they do in just sixteen simple words, not one of which is in any way remarkable, but the whole is breath-taking:

And then, to give one other example, camomile. He only mentions once this creeping herb. It has downy leaves and
flowers that are white in the ray and yellow in the disk. But none of that’s to Mr Shakespeare’s purpose. I’m sure he knew exactly what camomile looked like, but like any true countryman (not to speak of true poets) he knew also that what counts about this humble plant is its perseverance, its obstinacy, its prolifical keeping-on no matter what. So he has Falstaff say, when speaking to Prince Hal in the style of his father, the King: ‘Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though
the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows
, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’ That seems to me, in its truth not just to nature but the heart, about the opposite of the way that flowers are used in Milton.

But it’s Shakespeare’s knowledge of
weeds
that I want to stress. It’s something peculiar to him. It’s right at the core of his spirit. It’s vital to his genius, I think. No other poet I know is so curious of weeds or so familiar with them. A man might learn the names of flowers from an after-dinner stroll in his lady’s garden. Weeds he learns otherwise, and bitterly, and not because he wants to, nor because there’s any profit in it. Weeds a man learns from intimate acquaintance with wild places, from walking abroad in the sun and the wind and the rain, from personal experience of ploughing land, from lying in a ditch after a hard night’s drinking.

Whether Shakespeare ever ploughed I would not know. But I know he knows his weeds like no one else. Take, for example, that moment when Cordelia meets mad Lear:

(You’ll find it in Act IV, the fourth scene, sir, right at the start, if memory serves me right.) Or take, again, the Duke of Burgundy in
Henry V
, bemoaning the sorry war-torn state of the French countryside, and seeing:

(Yes, madam, I confess I had to look that up in my faithful Folio: Act V, Scene 2, lines 42 to 52.)

You won’t find any
KECKSIES
in the works of Mr John Milton. They’re the dry and hollow stalks of cow parsnips or wild chervil.

Pickleherring’s point, sir? (How kind of you to presume I may even have one!) Pickleherring’s point is that no one but a country boy could have written that. Yes, and one who had probably held a pruning hook in his hand and pleached a hedge.

Don’t forget that gardener, either, who knows all about the ways of weeds and caterpillars in
King Richard II
. And (my trump card, this) there’s Imogen proving the things had equal honour in our poet’s mind by strewing the supposed
grave of her Posthumus ‘with wild wood-leaves
and weeds
’.

Pickleherring’s point (and it is not just the point of this chapter, come to that) – Pickleherring’s point is that the late Mr Shakespeare not only knew the names and the nick-names and the dirty names of all the things that grew in Mary Arden’s garden by design. The late Mr Shakespeare knew just as much if not more about the plants and shrubs and flowers that grew unwanted there. And about whatever grows wild outside all our garden walls. In a word, weeds. And he knew your honest weed is not the worst thing in the world.
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds
, remember?

It was either my dear Jane or the playwright John Webster who once remarked that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world. I think that it was probably Mr Webster. He was much possessed by death. (In view of how things turned out, it would have been strange if it was Jane.)

Whatever, whichever, whomever, there were two deaths of females in Stratford-upon-Avon while William Shakespeare was young which, I have reason to believe, haunted him at some deep level at least until they found outlet in his work.

The first occurred, in fact, in the year he was born, so that it was only by repute that he could ever have heard of it. But the sad tale was current in Stratford for many years after, and in its horror seems just the sort of nightmare that would make Will’s blood run cold.

What happened was this. In the early summer of 1564 there was a sudden outbreak of plague in Stratford. (
‘Hic incepit pestis
,’ scribbled Bretchgirdle in the parish register – and I don’t think he was talking about the birth of baby S.) Corpses get
buried hurriedly and without fuss at such times, and a young girl who was believed to be dead was buried so. But when the family vault was opened again later for the coffin of another victim, the body of the unfortunate girl was found on the floor with her shroud torn off. She had been buried alive, come to her senses in her coffin, then crawled from it and scratched vainly at the door of the vault before she perished.

It is this that Mr Shakespeare was remembering, in my opinion, when he has Juliet cry, before venturing into the tomb of her ancestors:

This particular nightmare vexed the boy William all his childhood time in Stratford, I suspect, and fed into his fears of the charnel house.

The second death was the death of Katharine Hamlett. This took place in February of 1580, when Shakespeare was not quite sixteen. The girl was found drowned in the Avon, at a spot where the roots of a great willow tree dam up the current and make a deep pool in the river bed.

Katharine Hamlett’s death was the subject of a coroner’s inquest. The jury was inclined to believe that it was a case of suicide. The girl’s family, asking for Christian burial, claimed that her death had been accidental, and that Katharine had slipped when leaning over the bank to moisten her flowers. The inquest went on for eight weeks before a verdict of accidental death was brought in. But people still talked. And Shakespeare listened.

He was always a very good listener, Mr S.

At all events, madam, you will recall what he made of this when he came to write
Hamlet
, where he has Queen Gertrude thus describe the sad death of Ophelia: 

(It’s in the seventh scene of Act IV, of course. By the way, ‘long purples’ probably refers to purple cuckoo-pint or pintle rather than purple loose-strife. I never heard of loose-strife having a grosser name, while cuckoo-pintle is so called because it looks like a little prick in a state of erection.)

The death of poor Katharine Hamlett seems to have provided Mr Shakespeare not only with that passage about
the death of Ophelia, but also with much of the lugubrious conversation among the gravediggers about the right of a suicide to rest in consecrated ground. That was precisely the topic which exercised the wits and wagging tongues of Stratford for eight weeks.

Consider. Here is a poor girl probably drowned by mischance as she dips her flowers into Avon pool where Tiddington brook flows in. Up jumps vicar Heicroft (Bretchgirdle’s dead) and refuses her body burial. The laymen then decide to try to fine the corpse for felony. Her family’s grief is compounded by all this debate. It’s the town scandal until – with a touch of true Christian charity – the coroner elects to suppose that Katharine Hamlett never meant to drown, that her death is and must for ever remain a mystery,
‘per infortium et non aliter nec allio modo ad mortem suam devenit’,
as it kindly says in his report.

This, sir, is that I mean by country history. An item in the chronicles of local gossip, madam, a tale told over the punch-bowl by a roaring fire.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Mr Shakespeare remembered Katharine Hamlett when he came to kill off poor Ophelia. Her name would have floated back into his mind with his play’s title. And a boy of fifteen could not have been indifferent to a young girl’s drowning in that river that flowed right through his own mind.

What
is
surprising is the way the talk of those gravediggers in
Hamlet
echoes the words of the inquest. I have put them side by side. The resemblance is remarkable.

Only a laureate of weeds does something like that.