The Late Mr Shakespeare (31 page)

In general of Mr Shakespeare's sonnets it has been observed that there are many footprints around the cave of this mystery, none of them pointing in the outward direction.

Pickleherring will now try to clear a few things up for you, dear reader.

First, bearing in mind that at the present time this is the most difficult to obtain of Shakespeare's writings, and that the only recent edition was a catchpenny pirated job which tampered with the text to make lines addressed to a man read as though addressed to a woman, permit me to pen a few paragraphs in simple description of these sonnets. Sir, a connoisseur such as yourself can skip on down the page. Madam, please bear with me; I know that you know everything.

William Shakespeare's
Sonnets
were first printed in 1609, only seven years before their author's death, by George Eld for Thomas Thorpe, a fly-by-night publisher who died in
an almshouse at Ewelme. The little volume is hard to get hold of because Mr S did not authorise its publication, and bought up copies where he could, and did his best altogether to suppress it, the reason being the private and indeed scandalous nature of some of the work it contained. It was his poetic diary, so to speak, much of it written for his own eyes only, and while he had every reason not to be ashamed of it, and in fact was not, at the same time I believe he would have preferred it if the poems had not been made available for public reading in his lifetime.

The volume, quarto-size, was dedicated by Thorpe to ‘Mr W. H.' – William Hervey, Rizley's stepfather, who had provided him with copies of the poems. By that time, there was no love lost between Mr Shakespeare and any of the Southamptons.

The poems in the book fall into two sections – the first 126 being concerned mainly with a Friend whom the poet addresses in terms of growing intimacy, first exhorting him to marry and beget children, then praising his beauty and promising to immortalise it by means of the verse, then upbraiding him for various acts of betrayal including the seduction of the poet's own mistress. The self-love of the Friend is at all points harped upon. Yet Shakespeare persists in loving him, and in forgiving him. The rest of the sonnets, from number 127 onwards, are concerned with the poet's relationship with his mistress, the Dark Lady, a
woman
coloured ill
who is also described as a
female evil
, among other choice epithets. She is as skilled at playing upon men as she is skilled at playing upon the virginals. While from several physical descriptions we learn that she is in no way conventionally beautiful, yet she possesses a sexual
magnetism which the poet cannot resist. Some would not use the word
love
to define their need for such a woman, but Shakespeare does. Several of the poems are bitter about this Dark Lady's infidelity with the Friend, and sore on the subject of her sexual appetites, and express the poet's self-disgust at his own lust for her – sonnet 129, for instance, describes
lust in action
as
th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
. Yet by the strength of the truth in the poetry Shakespeare can be said in the end to forgive the Dark Lady as he forgives the Friend.

Now then, it ill behoves the present writer to say it, but in the final analysis poetry as good as this makes biography irrelevant. It does not matter who these people were. What matters is the truth that the poet has wrung from them. Was the poet sincere? The question is stupid.
The poetry is sincere
. That is all that there is to be said. Shakespeare's sonnets have a smell of unmistakable necessity. As my friend the poet Martin Seemore once remarked, they were written by a man who desperately wanted to exist well: ‘to learn how to live and love truly'.

That is the real secret in the cave. Human nature being what it is, though, can I say anything about those footprints?

First, who was Shakespeare's Friend?

I hope you will not find it facetious if I answer that question by saying that the late Mr WS had several Friends. I will in any case add immediately that as I have already told you the Friend of the sonnets began as Rizley, with all those exhortations to him to marry, written at the behest of Lady Southampton, his mother.

But the Friend of the sonnets is not always Rizley.

Later, for example, it was me.

Yes, sir, I admit it. I was Shakespeare's boy, sir! On occasion, on dire or sweet occasion, and much against my will, I, Pickleherring, was the master-mistress of the great man's passion.

Madam, I do apologise, believe me. But, alas, I am not ashamed.

I had better tell you this, for your understanding. When I was playing all those female parts I had to watch my erections. I found the touch of the dresses against my genitals very provoking. I was a boy who was easily provoked. And of course my male protruberance was at all times something of a difficulty.

My skirts covered that well enough, of course, when I was wearing skirts. But there was the odd time, such as when Rosalind or Viola was swaggering about trying to look as butch as possible, when I had to mask or disguise the fact that I did indeed have a bulge between my legs.

I employed a tight, wet bandage.

But then the trouble was that this bandage sometimes made me randy in itself.

So I used to have to wank a lot, offstage, spinning myself off, before going on, to keep my man small and amenable. Such are the secrets of the profession.

Forgive an old comedian his candour, madam. No doubt you have some secrets of your own?

What you must realise is what the Puritans (albeit in their foolish way) most assuredly knew: namely, that the theatre is a temple of Dionysus. The getting of hard pricks is to the point. Your subtle fellow might come off listening to
Romeo and Juliet
. At the ancient festivals, where all drama was born, the procession was led by boys dressed up as girls. Forgive
me, I have smaller Latin and less Greek even than You Know Who, but I believe that dithyrambs come from Dionysus Dithyrambus, the ritual song of the god, where
di + thura
=
DOUBLE DOOR
. The god is born through two doors, one male, one female. Dressed in the part of a woman, I was an initiate in ancient mysteries. It is an honourable craft, this transvestism.

Well, then, I come to the point. Although my voice was years in the breaking, years during which I piped a between-times treble that Mr S pronounced ideal for such roles as Rosalind, in other respects I was soon more a man than a boy. I spoke with a reed voice, like that merchant's daughter buried by her sisters in my mother's story – the one who had the world as a transparent apple to spin on a silver saucer. But I had something between my legs which no merchant's daughter ever had.

Reader, I was well endowed. Not only that, but I got my erections at the drop of a hat, or the turn of an ankle, in those days, and I could in no wise
prevent
myself from getting them at inopportune moments. This proved an increasing embarrassment, though in a perverse way I reckon it added a spice to my performance of certain parts. For instance, Lady Macbeth, when she has to call upon the spirits to unsex her.

Anyway, one evening, when we were doing
Hamlet
, and I was about to trip on stage for the final scene as Ophelia, scattering rosemary and rue and doing my mad bit, I found to my dismay that unseen I was yet crescive in my faculty. In other words, my cock was sticking up in my gown like a little truncheon. Worse, I had just burnt my hand on one of the stage lamps and the skin on the palm was raw and giving me agony. There was no way I could jerk off in the usual
fashion, to ensure the smooth performance of my role.

I was standing there, in misery, in the wings, with my Ophelia dress disfigured at the front by this throbbing erection, which seemed to get worse by the moment as I tried to will it down, wringing my hands together with a damp cloth, when Mr Shakespeare himself appeared beside me, still wearing his costume as the Ghost.

‘You can't go on like
that
, boy,' he said, pointing.

‘No, sir! Sorry, sir!' I said.

‘So what are you going to do about it?' Mr Shakespeare demanded.

I explained, very quickly, my singular predicament.

Mr Shakespeare's face cracked into a smile through its heavy Ghost make-up. ‘I see,' said he. ‘Well, in that case there's only one thing for it …'

He took me in hand, sir. He cherished me. He stirred me up and tickled me. Then he disedged me.

That's right, madam. William Shakespeare proceeded to bring my erection down by his own manual ministrations.

It was after this little incident that he wrote sonnet 20, the one that begins

In it, he goes on to say that I was first created to be a woman, till nature fell a-doting over me and added to my person ‘one thing' (to his purpose nothing); in a word, my prick:

Notice, if you please, that he says my penis is no use to him. And know from this that Mr Shakespeare was no sodomite, though some have said he was. He played with my pintle when I was in female costume, that is all, for the play's sake. He tossed me off quickly before I went on stage.

I must admit that I do not know if it was altogether for the sake of art (or appearance) that he did the same thing to me when I was garbed in that doublet and hose in which I played Rosalind playing the part of a boy. Both my male and my female costumes in that role seemed much to his liking. Quite often, when we were doing
As You Like It
, he would unpack my prick from my doublet or my petticoats, and tease it and kiss it and fondle it and dandle it. Invariably, he brought me off like this. I never touched him, nor was I required to.

Much of this, as I have explained, was for professional purposes. But some (I must confess) seemed no such thing. He appeared addicted for a while to certain parts of mine – for example, Cleopatra and Juliet, as well as Rosalind. As for the last named, I have even wondered sometimes if that play's title should be seen as a private joke between us.
As You Like It
. It was certainly as he liked it. But I did too.

O my balls, O my little witnesses, William Shakespeare took you both in hand. He called us to a reckoning.

Ah well, friends, all that was long ago and (as Mr Marlowe would have said) in another country, and besides the wench is dead – or at least defunct.

Meanwhile, back in the world of the sonnets, Rizley was having carnal knowledge of the poet's mistress – the so-called Dark Lady, she whose eyes were nothing like the sun, and who had bad breath. And the tedious Earl
was doing this not because he wanted her, but because he knew that Mr Shakespeare wanted her.
Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her
, as it says in sonnet 42. I doubt if Rizley was even excited by the triangle. Like Angelo in
Measure for Measure
when he made water his urine was congealed ice.

But who
was
the Dark Lady?

That is the question I shall answer next.

Some say the Dark Lady of the sonnets was a woman named Mary Fitton.

This Mary Fitton was one of Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honour, a coveted position she first assumed at the age of seventeen, though even by then she had little honour left and was probably not a maid. She owed her advancement to Sir William Knollys, a friend of her father’s. Knollys, a married man, was besotted with this girl who was thirty years his junior. He made a laughing-stock of himself by his pursuit of her, even dyeing his beard in a pathetic attempt to look young.

Miss Mary had a mania for men. She was of good ancestry, highly cultured, sweet-natured, very modest-looking, and blushed easily. Yet she was always the terror of her family. It was said that from the age of twelve she had been in the habit of masturbating her brothers. The whole Court knew that she performed the same office for Knollys, since the fool
boasted of it. She always wore a fur glove for the act, he said, and silver bracelets which he had given her for her fifteenth birthday. Her bracelets tinkled as she played the harlot with him. Old Knollys adored it.

Mary Fitton was not long at Court before making herself the cause of an even greater scandal. She fell pregnant by William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. It is said that she used to slip out of Elizabeth’s chambers to meet her lover in the dead of night, disguised as a man in a long white cloak, with her lady-in-waiting’s skirts tucked up. Pembroke had her regularly on a tomb in Westminster churchyard – Will Kempe, that lugubrious flea, once pointed it out to me, though God knows how he knew which one it was. The influence of the tomb could not have been good for her. Her unfortunate infant died soon after birth. Pembroke behaved swinishly throughout, refusing to marry the mother of his child, even though the Queen in her usual fashion took this as a personal insult and packed him off to the Fleet Prison for a spell in an attempt to concentrate his mind upon the matter.

Miss Mary then became the mistress of Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, who took her to sea with him in the garb of a cabin-boy. After he died, worn out with voyaging, in 1605, she found a husband of her own at last, a retired sea captain called Polwhele, with one leg, and the rest of her life was Cornish and respectable.

Mary Fitton’s claim to Dark Lady status rests on no more, in reality, than the fame and the scandal of the way men of all ages flocked to her like moths to a candleflame when she was young.

I never heard the late Mr Shakespeare so much as mention
her, though he would have known her name, and she may have crossed his mind from time to time when he was not busy.

I saw this lady once myself, at a bear-baiting in the Paris Garden, when the great bear Sackerson was in his prime. She was eating tarts beneath the smoke-dried leaves. She had a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of curls falling on each side of her face under a shepherdess’s hat. She had big, bright eyes.

Unfortunately for history, those curls were soft and fair – not at all like the
black wires
which Shakespeare mentions as growing on the head of his mistress in sonnet 130. As for those eyes: in sonnet 127 the mistress’s eyes are described as
raven black
, but the eyes I saw at the bear-baiting were not only bright, they were grey as squirrels.

All things considered, I do not think the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton.