The Late Mr Shakespeare (17 page)

The Wild Man breaks his tree as the Queen rides by. He
breaks his tree in two and he casts it towards her. It is meant as a gesture of abasement, but again it comes out wrong. A half of the tree, looping through the torchlit midsummer dusk, just misses hitting the Queen’s white mare across the head. Footmen rush to the horse and its rider.

‘No hurt, no hurt!’ quoth the Fairy Queen, an affable, laughing guest on this first night of her visit to her favourite, this night of her own revels here at Kenilworth, and then – so near to Will she could almost have touched him – she leans across the neck of her horse and she touches Lord Leicester. Like one of the gypsy girls who’ll go with you behind the stalls in Rother Market for a penny, the Queen of all England leans across to tickle the Earl of Leicester’s chin and his cheek, and then to fondle the great pommel of his saddle, a leer on her lips.

A high point of the revels here at Kenilworth, for which he ran half the morning, and waited in the sun all afternoon. Hard to surpass a thing like that.

Even the Kenilworth doorkeeper, got up as Hercules, mercifully with no speech to say so nothing to go wrong with that, leading a bear in chains, and the bear behaving civilly, offering the keys of the castle to this Elizabeth. Even Merlin the wizard leaving his island in the lake and breaking his wand in two and on bended knee renouncing his magic art in favour of Her Highness. Even Proteus, the mutable god, already our Will’s guardian, casting himself into many forms and fashions to crawl on the ground to please his sovereign lady.

Impossible to surpass that unprecedented moment in the revels here at Kenilworth when the Queen pulled off her gauntlet, embroidered with seed pearls, and with her naked fingers kittled her favourite’s neck.

Impossible to surpass the way she stroked him. She played him like a fiddler playing a fiddle.

‘Pretty Robin!’ she said. ‘Ah, my pretty Robin!’

And she laughed to herself, and moved her fingers on his pommel, up and down.

Queen Elizabeth’s face was hard, as though cut out from white wood or tallow wax. If such a thing had been imaginable, Will would have sworn that the great cloud of soft red hair about her head had never grown there. He remembered the tales he had been told of how in certain prisons the jailers cut their captives’ locks and sell them to be fashioned into curls to suit court ladies, and how some even said that fresh graves have been robbed when girls with long golden hair are buried. Could it be that the Queen of all England was wearing a wig?

Of course he said nothing about the matter to his father when they were riding home, John Shakespeare slumped in the saddle, relying on the nag to know the way, and Will half-asleep himself, worn out with enchantments and disenchantments, with a surfeit of delight, too warmly pleased. And he said nothing about it either to his mother when they got home, and his father fell down in a puddle, and he burst into tears. He told her, instead, the next morning, at their breakfast, of a boy he had seen riding on a dolphin, whose poem seemed to please Her Majesty.

They had been to the great revels at Kenilworth. They had seen the royal revels at Kenilworth. Their revels now, our revels now, are ended. That is the way it was. Never before had England witnessed such splendour.

But what Will remembered was the Queen doing that rude thing to Robert Dudley.

Pompey Bum was just at the door, demanding his rent. Being dunned makes me feel quite the author. I told him I would pay him some, and, as most debtors do, promise him infinitely. But I fear the man is no playgoer, and this reference to the Epilogue to the second part of
King Henry IV
was misspent on him.

It is true that I am a shiftless little person, roving and maggoty-headed, and sometimes not much better than crazed. But it is not true what Mr Anthony Wood told Mr Aubrey – that I was ever exceedingly credulous, stuffed with fooleries and misinformations. That insufferable recluse of Postmaster’s Hall does not comprehend my method. He is no amateur of country history. He does not understand me.

I pride myself somewhat on not wasting time over things which everyone knows – which you know, sir, and you know also, madam – but that I prefer rather to select the small, the forgotten, detail.

Singularities: that’s what I’m after.

And I work through metaphorics, not metaphysics.

Of course, no one
knows
what Shakespeare’s life was, even one who knew him as well as I did. It occurs to me today, with just half the rent paid, that every attempt to find out the truth of another man’s life, and to write his Life, throws light on the person who makes the attempt, as much as on the man biographied. There, I have even invented a new verb. In the main, though, I protest I am not an inventor.

Inventories, however, are quite a different matter, and much to my liking, and here in this box I have one such which I trust will interest the reader. It was compiled by Emma Careless, wife of that Reverend Henry Heicroft already mentioned, vicar of Stratford from 1569 to 1584.

I have this feeling, do you see, that there is more to say about Jenkins – that Jenkins is peculiarly important to Mr Shakespeare’s story. Where else might the poet have picked up certain tricks of his diction than from the verbal habits of a Welshman? I mean such characteristic locutions as his way of balancing two contrasting adjectives on the sea-saw of an ‘and’, and having both of them qualify a third word, always a noun. For example:

A beauty-waning and distressed widow.

That’s from
Richard III
. And then, from
The Tempest
, some twenty years later:

To act her earthy and abhorred commands.

I contend that what we hear on these sea-saws of sense is a development of what Shakespeare heard from the lips of Thomas Jenkins in his Stratford schoolroom. He makes fun of Jenkins and his mispronunciations in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. ‘What is the focative case, William?’ But if
Jenkins, like Evans in that play, made fritters of English, still Shakespeare fed on those fritters, for a purpose all his own.

Pickleherring suspects that Jenkins brought a touch of Welsh wizardry to Stratford too, perhaps telling his pupils tales drawn out of a book called
The Mabinogion
which collects such myths and legends. How else explain the way that notion of the cauldron of inspiration and science survives in local gossip as representing something that bubbled in the corner of Mary Shakespeare’s kitchen? Such a cauldron figures in Welsh stories about the poet Taliesin, so I have heard. Other elements from those tales seem remembered in
The Tempest
.

Alas, having promised you ‘more about Jenkins’, I have to confess that the ‘more’ which we really require – if my thesis has truth in it – is to hear how he spoke, and what young Will heard. That’s where Emma Careless comes in. For some reason (probably for amusement), the vicar’s wife drew up an inventory of the goods and chattels of the Welsh schoolmaster, writing it down in a manner which makes a burlesque of the sound of Jenkins’ voice. It is the nearest we’ll ever get to hearing what Shakespeare heard. You may judge for yourself if the poet learnt anything from it.

I say that Jenkins served William Shakespeare in the same capacity as Holofernes served the young Gargantua. He taught him his ABC backwards.

When sober, John Shakespeare taught his son the spartan vices.

When a gentleman has had his arms and legs broken, he used to say, and two slow sword-thrusts through his belly, then, and not till then, he may say, ‘Really, I don’t feel well.’

Once when William was thirteen he fell and broke his arm when walking in the Forest of Arden. His father told him not to tell his mother because she had been looking peakish and the news might put her off her food.

Yet there was the occasional unexpected paternal gentleness in William Shakespeare’s upbringing also. His father did not approve of children being wakened too abruptly, for instance, and he would wake his son by singing to him, softly at first, then getting louder and louder until he had called the boy back to the waking world.

Perhaps it was when he was sober that John Shakespeare took William to witness the Coventry plays. These mysteries
were presented each Corpus Christi Day at Coventry by the trade guilds on waggons moving in procession through the streets from station to station. Father and son stood there in the street, watching one waggon after another as it rolled up, delivered its story, and then rolled away.

I think that the Coventry play which made the deepest impression upon our Shakespeare was the one acted by the Guild of Shearmen and Tailors, in which Herod of Jewry takes the leading role. Why so, sir? I will tell you why. Because in that play there is a stage direction which says that Herod is to leap off the pageant-waggon and into the crowd of spectators: ‘Here Herod rages in the pageant, and in the street also.’ We may well suppose that the vainglorious braggart was costumed in red cloak and red gloves and that to punctuate his anger he carried a big club stuffed with wool (don’t forget that these were shearmen). Further, we might well suppose that he employed this club to belabour all who came within his range (don’t forget that these were rude mechanicals). Is it beyond supposition, then, to imagine an enthusiastic actor bearing down with all the terror of this club upon the future dramatist?

Shakespeare never forgot the scene. Among the references to it in his plays I have noted the following:

What a Herod of Jewry is this! (Merry Wives
, II, 1, 20.)

It out-herods Herod! (Hamlet,
III, 2, 16.)

To whom Herod of Jewry may do homage (Antony and Cleopatra,
I, 2, 28.)

Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you / But when you are well pleased (Ibid.,
Ill, 3, 3.)

Another scene in the same play that must have deeply affected the boy William is the slaughter of the children by
Herod’s soldiers, when the women fight with pot-ladles to repulse them. He refers to it in
Henry
V: As did the wives of Jewry at Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen
(III, 3, 41.)

Was John Shakespeare sober when he summoned real actors to Stratford? Perhaps, madam. But we may doubt if he was sober when they left. Performances took place in the yard of one of the inns – either the Bear, or the Swan, or the Falcon. I have seen from the corporation records that it was during John Shakespeare’s time as high bailiff that companies of London actors came to town for the first time – the Queen’s Players, the best in the kingdom, and the Earl of Worcester’s Players, not quite so good. (The first got nine shillings from Stratford by way of reward, the second only one shilling.)

Then, in 1577, the Earl of Leicester’s Players came, under the direction of Mr James Burbage, complete with anchor on his thigh and other accoutrements. Don’t get me wrong, gentle reader. Old Burbage was a perfectly sufficient actor in his day, though not a patch on his son Richard. The plays were all piss and wind in those early times, of course, compared with what was to come in the Nineties, and a lot of the early players won their reputations merely from an ability to strut and shout and point their codpieces in the general direction of the audience.

Still, no doubt little Willy was impressed. He may even have thought that his dreams were coming to town. Dressed in satin and lace, the players would enter Stratford by Clopton Bridge, advancing up Bridge Street. You can be sure there was a trumpeter. (In those days there were always trumpeters.) Picture that trumpeter, then, as the boy Shakespeare must have seen him: all in scarlet embroidered
with gold, wheeling his horse about where Wood Street and Mere Street converge, whilst the drummer beside him beat his drum at the run.

The play was an anti-climax after that.

Sober or drunk, or somewhere in between, we can be sure that John Shakespeare showed the actors such courtesies as he could. And that both he and his son found their performances preferable to what otherwise passed for public entertainment in Stratford-upon-Avon – namely, the royal proclamations read and the sermons sometimes preached at the High Cross which stands at the north end of Bridge Street. (Stocks, pillory, and whipping-post are set near by so that the ears of those undergoing punishment might also be edified.)

I say that the play was an anti-climax after the drama of the procession, but that leaves out of account the fact that the least and crudest play has
words
in it, that plays indeed are made of words all through, and that language must already have been food and drink to the boy Shakespeare. Turn up the prologue to
The Taming of the Shrew
and you will see instantly how excited he would have been at the arrival of a troupe of travelling players. To read it is to be transported back to Stratford at the point where Leicester’s servants must have turned his mind towards the theatre in its infancy. (Madam, I mean his infancy
and
the theatre’s, for they shared a common period of nurture.) That prologue, by the by, brings us straight into the very neighbourhood where Shakespeare’s mother was brought up. The characters are local men and women he knew well, and who are still remembered in Warwickshire: Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, her servant Cicely, and the famous
village drunkard, Christopher Sly. Sly describes himself as ‘Old Sly’s son of Burton Heath’. In fact, Burton Heath is Barton-on-the-Heath, the home of William’s aunt Joan (one of those Lamberts I want to keep out of the story). For all I know, Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell were real people too. They sound as if they might have been. John Naps certainly was. You’ll meet him in my next chapter.

I wonder what age William Shakespeare was when bored by bombast he conceived the great idea of one day there being a play that has a man in it who simply wanders on stage with his dog, and sits down on the ground, and takes off his shoes, and scratches his feet, and starts to tell us stories about the dog and his shoes and his troubles? ‘This shoe is my father,’ he says. ‘No, this left shoe is my father,’ he says. ‘No, no, this left shoe is my mother,’ he says. And it’s all about as far away from out-herodding Herod as anyone could imagine.

Friends, no one before the late Mr Shakespeare put real true things like Launce and his dog on the stage. Forgive an old man his whimsey. Pickleherring likes to think that WS first entertained such dreams of the waking world with his father warm beside him in the press, perhaps at Coventry, perhaps at Stratford, but in whichever place with John Shakespeare sober.