The Late Mr Shakespeare (24 page)

Here is John Shakespeare busy taking his ease in a tavern. Except he is not. He is drunk, but he’s busy at work. See that orange tawny bonnet on his head? It’s a sign, a badge of office, a wink to the wise. The men who drink with him know by this what they’re dealing with. His eyes are shrewd above that Cain-coloured beard. His greedy grin.

Say John Shakespeare’s bonnet was not orange tawny, what colour would it be?

Your straw colour. Your purple in grain. Your french crown colour. Or your perfect yellow.

Those be the colours the clients of John Shakespeare would recognise. Consult Bacon’s
Of Usurie
, if you doubt me. That chicken-stuffing essayist knew his groats when it came down to the low trade of lending at high interest.

I don’t want to make too much of this, believe me, dear reader. I met John Shakespeare once and did not dislike him, despite the way he stood next to me pissing in the jakes and
kept clucking his tongue. But the fact remains that the man did rank, bad business as a usurer. No doubt butchery is too much like hard work when you’re well-oiled, and the glover’s scissors and compasses require too steady a hand. Hence the orange tawny bonnet, and the big bag of gold coins under the perfect yellow cloak. If you sit in the tavern all day, then why not let your money work for you?

It was somewhat of an open secret in Stratford, but I found no one who was prepared even many years later to talk much about it. At the time when Shakespeare’s father practised his money-lending, all forms of such activity were illegal.

So severe a view of the crime was taken by the government that informers were rewarded by a grant of a half-share of the penalties imposed upon offenders. Thus, John Shakespeare faced at least two prosecutions before the Exchequer which I have turned up.

In the first, one Anthony Harrison of Evesham, Worcestershire, accuses John Shakespeare of having lent out the sum of
£
100 to John Mussum of Wulton in Warwick, over a one-year period, at a rate of 20% interest. The transaction is reported to have taken place at Westminster. (JS travelled and traded more widely than you might think who think he was just a country yokel, sir.)

The second case arose at the instigation of one James Langrake of Whittlebury, Northamptonshire. He accused ‘Shagpere
alias
Shakespeare’, ‘glover’ of ‘Stratford upon Haven’, of lending out
£
80 over a term of one month, to be repaid with 20% interest – an extortionate annual rate of interest of some 242%!

(Usury at 10% was the highest rate ever permitted in the last century, and then only at exceptional times or in exceptional circumstances. No usury at all was lawful when jolly Jack Shakespeare was caught.)

A writ was issued to bring ‘Shagpere’ (
alias
Shylock?) to court. He complied of his own volition, and was heavily fined.

Shakespeare’s father was also found guilty of illegal wool-dealing. He had purchased 200 tods of wool (5600 pounds) in conspiracy with another illegal dealer, and 100 tods on his own account. He had no licences for any of this.

In fact, all his long life, John Shakespeare was embroiled in legal disputes. I refuse to tell the tale of the boring Lamberts. Suffice it to say that it involves his relentless pursuit of certain of his wife’s relatives for sums of money owing to him, or allegedly owing to him. William himself was dragged into this by his dad.

Enough to say that by my calculations (after researches which by no means exhaust the matter) John Shakespeare was involved in no less than twenty-five legal suits or disputes over a forty-year period. Some of these were no more than cases of tradesmen collecting their debts. But some, as I’ve just shown, were a deal more shady.

Where does this leave young William?

Well, gentles, it is possible that he had employment for a while drafting bonds for his father’s trading transactions. And it is certain that following his marriage to Anne Hathaway, the couple had to lodge in the Henley Street house. Susanna was born there, and the twins Hamlet and Judith two years later.

This, then, readers, was the world in which William Shakespeare was living – with a wife and three small children to keep, a mother perhaps unnaturally jealous of her daughter-in-law, and a father who was creeping about playing Shylock when not busy cavorting as Falstaff.

It is no wonder that our Shakespeare now turned briefly to a life of crime himself, as you shall quickly hear.

The story is soon told. Shakespeare fell in with bad company, a misfortune common enough to young, romantic fellows. Amongst them there were some who made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, and these engaged with him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to the magistrate Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford. On moonlit nights they killed rabbits as well as deer. Worse, when Lucy threatened the poachers with prosecution, Will wrote a ballad upon him, which he then went and hung on the gates of Charlecote Park.

Pickleherring has in this 56th box the first stanza of that ballad, put down in writing for him by one of Shakespeare’s accomplices in crime, the amiable Mr Thomas Jones of Tardebigge. It is all that Mr Jones could well remember. It goes like this:

Apart from the rhythm (which I count a pleasant rollick), there are several points of interest to this stanza.

First, we might learn from it what Mr Shakespeare’s voice sounded like when he was young, before he came to London –
volk
being the way he pronounced the word
folk
. Old Mr Jones was insistent upon this spelling – both that
volk
is the way Shakespeare wrote it, and also the way that he said it. ‘It is the way, besides, that King Alfred would have said it,’ he told me, with a great air of triumph. (A hit for my country history! A very palpable hit!) Yet I should in fairness add that the mild-mannered gentleman might have been missing the point, since by spelling the word
volk
Shakespeare could be extending some criticism of those among his fellows who pronounce the name
Lucy
as
lousy
. Already he is standing at a little distance from the crowd. They say Lucy as lousy. He doesn’t. He says Lucy
is
lousy.

Second, we might observe that the lampoon is scurrile. Lucy’s ass’s ears are similar equipment to a cuckold’s horns, and in lines 6 and 7 what is being suggested is that the man has to submit to buggery to achieve his sexual satisfactions. (I have even wondered whether Mr Jones modified the seventh line for what he took to be my maiden ears, and whether the fifth word in that line should not properly if improperly be
rear
.)

Third, there is a triple (if trivial) pun being made upon Lucy’s coat of arms – ‘three silver pikes gasping’. A pike is a luce is a louse.

Fourth, last, and most important, we can take pleasure in the way this whole tiny constellation of wit appears again years later in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, where foolish Shallow is Lucy, with ‘a dozen white luces’ in his coat of arms.

Reminiscing for me, Mr Thomas Jones remarked that Will had never been much of a poacher. He was ‘a cack-handed tradesman with a snare’, and much too tender-hearted – once they had taken a hare alive, and Will had let her go before they could ‘dacently’ club her. Mr Jones also described, unbidden, the hated magistrate, saying that while Lucy was very thin and queer, he was ‘lecherous as a monkey’. He had never heard of Falstaff’s description of Justice Shallow:

‘Like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring: when a’ was naked he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife.’

When I quoted this to him, my ancient informant clapped his skinny yellow hands together and cried, ‘That’s Lucy to the life!’

I see Mr Shakespeare in his role of poacher as one like Fenton in the
Wives
, who himself confesses to his ‘riots past, my wild societies’, and who capers and dances and has the eyes of youth. He does not just go out, a thief in the night, to rob a rich man of his deer (and his rabbits). He is Alan a’ Dale as well as bold Robin Hood. He writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May. Stolen venison tastes sweetest, and Will’s offence has a ring of high spirits to it, as well as youthful daring. As he asks in
Titus Andronicus:
‘What! has not thou full often struck a doe and borne her cleanly by the keeper’s nose?’ Some say he not only took the game but seduced the gamekeeper’s daughter.

But, alas, this Lucy was the same louse who had already had Shakespeare imprisoned for selling those dragons. The prospect of another term of imprisonment, or of a public whipping at the post by the High Cross, for the theft and for the libel, made up Will’s mind for him.

One night in the summer of 1587, Shakespeare kissed his wife and bairns good-bye, and slipped out of the back door of the house on Henley Street, and down across Clopton Bridge, and out of Stratford, taking the high road to London.

It is also probable, if you ask me, that alcohol played a part in William Shakespeare's decision to get away from Stratford. I do not mean pride, intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, no, madam. I mean alcohol of wine, the pure or rectified spirit, that impure, intoxicating element which possesses your fermented liquors.

What a weird word it is, this
ALCOHOL
. In my father's kidskin dictionary it says that it comes from the name of a certain black powder of lead ore which the ladies in Barbary once put upon their eyelids:
AL-KA-HOL
. How that glamour relates to the power of sherris-sack is beyond my knowledge.

What I do know, as I have said, is that in London the late Mr Shakespeare lived for the most part an abstemious life. My point is that no one save a Puritan takes such care as he did to avoid most occasions of debauchery unless they have suffered in its toils at some earlier stage. Since Mr William Shakespeare was no Puritan, I suspect that in his hot youth
in Stratford he may have drunk with his father until he sickened himself. His going to London was his turning his back on such things.

Some interesting silences on the part of his widow – in response to this suggestion – only tended to confirm the idea in my mind. There is, besides, the matter of Shakespeare's Canopy.

Shakespeare's Canopy is the name given to a giant crab-tree in the village of Bidford, seven miles south of Stratford. I was shown this tree by Mr Thomas Jones, the ancient poacher. He told me the poet slept under it one night. The story goes as follows.

Shakespeare was a mighty drinker in those days, his old friend said, and he had come to Bidford with a band of fellows from Stratford (Tom Jones among them) to try his skill against the men of Bidford, who were famous throughout all Warwickshire as topers. Asking a shepherd for the Bidford drinkers, he was instructed that they were absent, though the Bidford sippers, who might be sufficient for him, were still here at home.

Shakespeare and company had no choice but to do battle against the sippers. They were defeated, hands down and bottoms up, and had to sleep off their drink by making their lodging under the tree for the night.

In the morning, said Jones, some of the Stratford men wanted to resume the contest, but Shakespeare refused. He declared he had drunk with:

(I do not know what ‘dadgeing' is, and Mr Jones would not enlighten me.) In another version of the same story, already referred to, it is Shakespeare's father who spends the night with him under the crab-tree, both of them hopelessly drunk.

I do think that Shakespeare's crimes – his poaching expeditions – may well have been committed in his cups. There are several powerful but unnecessary passages in the plays about the abuse of alcohol, most notably in
Hamlet
, where the father/son relationship is plumbed most deeply. I owe this observation to the poet's daughter Susanna, who also remarked to me that
Hamlet
is full of things which strictly speaking have nothing to do with the story, unless you suppose some larger and untold story that lies at the back of it. I think this is true.

As to the date of Mr Shakespeare's departure from Stratford, I will tell you what makes me sure that it was 1587. In
The Winter's Tale
, when the shepherd finds the child Perdita, he says this:

‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.'

Now this passage has nothing to do with the play, nor the shepherd's occupation. What's more, nor does it ring true to the life of a shepherd boy, whose years between ten and twenty-three are likely to be hard. I think the speech expresses WS's own youth, when he had nothing better to do than steal, fight, drink, wrong the ancientry, and get wenches with child. It is Shakespeare's confession. And it was in 1587 that William Shakespeare turned the age of twenty-three.

One word more concerning
AL-KA-HOL
, and I am done.
I am now myself a water-drinker, as I have told you, but be sure that such abstinence is the outcome of my sins. I would not have you think that I am one of those who teach others to fast, and play the gluttons themselves – like watermen, that look one way and row another.

Here, then, is Pickleherring's observation, which he trusts you, reader, will find of use and interest. It is this:

That the paradise of
AL-KA-HOL
is achieved with the first three glasses. After that, you drink more and more with just the one purpose: to get back to that paradise of the third glass – and you always fail. Why? Because the alcohol transforms you, so that the person who drinks the fourth glass is not the one who drinks the fifth. Nor can you stop at the third glass, in paradise, since like all paradises you do not know you are in it until you have lost it. It is a paradise always lost, and a paradise never to be regained. You might say it is also a hell, and I would not deny you.