The Late Mr Shakespeare (33 page)

Now then, my dears, before I tell you the name of the Dark Lady, let’s consider for a moment the sense in which there is
no
Dark Lady.

I mean, that sense in which outside the sonnets there is no Friend either, nor indeed a constant and unchanging (but strangely colourless) ‘I’.

No Dark Lady.

No Friend.

No I.

These are not persons. They are patterns. While individuals went into their creation, giving substance to shapes in the poet’s imagination, yet in the last and most serious analysis these figures have no existence save as the words they are, black marks on a white page.

Thus, I have already filled you in on how not just Rizley was the Friend. Pickleherring was in some small part Mr Shakespeare’s Friend, also. And (who knows now?) there
may have been others. There very probably
were
others.

Similarly, with the figure of the so-called Rival Poet who crops up in eight of the sonnets, who seems a rival not only in art but in the affections and perhaps the patronage of the Friend. I am half-convinced that Marlowe is implied here, especially when Shakespeare speaks of ‘the proud full sail of his great verse’. The epithets suit Marlowe’s verse as they suit no other of Mr S’s contemporaries, and Marlowe as we have learnt from the tender allusion to the ‘dead shepherd’ and the ‘infinite reckoning in a little room’ was the rival poet most liked and most admired by Mr Shakespeare. Yet I am equally half-sure that it is George Chapman who is sometimes thought of. There’s all that stuff in Chapman about ‘spirits’. While most people were doing their best to keep body and soul together, he was always busy trying to separate them. Admittedly his verse is less like a proud full sail than it is like the
rush
of a game of football, where its subject is like the ball kicked here and there by opposing teams of thoughts. But Chapman was known to have claimed immortal if not divine inspiration in his own behalf, saying that one day when he was sitting on a hill near Hitchin, being still a boy at the time, he had been prompted to write by the spirit of Homer. Is it not likely that Mr S had this in mind, in his sonnet 86, when he goes on from the ‘proud full sail’ bit to ask the question

In short, this 86th sonnet provides a perfect paradigm of my thinking here. I believe that in it, within the space of
a few lines, Shakespeare is invoking first Kit Marlowe then George Chapman. Both of them were rivals of his, envied and admired. Each of them figures here as Rival Poet.

Patience, madam. I agree that the Dark Lady is a far more intriguing conundrum. And I
do
still feel, as you do, that there is one woman who was (so to speak)
more
Dark Lady than all the other dark ladies who may or may not have put their shadows into her creation. I am
not
dodging the question. Pickleherring’s next chapter will answer it, in fact, to the best of a comedian’s ability.

But never forget that Mr Shakespeare’s sonnets were not all written at the same time, nor even necessarily in the same period. They were like entries in a diary kept over several years. They may not even be printed in the correct order, for that matter.

What I am trying to impress upon you is that the three exterior personages – Friend (or Fair Youth), Dark Lady, Rival Poet – are real in Shakespeare’s mind. Outside that mind there could have been several persons who contributed to each Idea or Image. For that matter, the ‘I’ of the sonnets is several persons too. WS was everyone and nobody. He did not stop being capable of dramatic characterisation when he started writing sonnets. Have you noticed that the first nine sonnets have no ‘I’ in them? And that even when the poet does speak in these sonnets in the first person singular he makes much less of an exhibition of himself than poets usually do?

Bear it in mind, sir: Mr Shakespeare was all his working life a playwright. The making of dramatic fictions was this man’s trade. It was the air he breathed, the world he knew. Consider even further, then: What if the Friend and the
Mistress, the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, were in one sense
parts
created by Shakespeare? And what if like parts in any play they were at different times played by different people? Thus Rizley played the Friend, but so did I. Thus several women were the one Dark Lady. Mr Shakespeare created the originals in his heart and his head, and then upon the page. Life copied them. Living can follow poetry in these matters. Ask any poet who is worth the name.

Reader, permit me to suggest that there is even an especial strange sense in which
I
served him later as the Dark Lady. I’ll be coming to that, when it’s time for such seasons in hell.

Meanwhile, entertain at least the possibility that both Fair Youth and Dark Lady are simple puzzles compared with the complexity of the identity of the ‘I’ that stalks and fleets through these sonnets.

Who is the Dark ‘I’ of the sonnets? That is the question. He makes his first appearance (in sonnet 10) declaring that he will change his mind, and he bows out of the action in sonnet 152
*
with a pun upon his ‘perjur’d I’ (or eye). In between, all that is constant is this elusive self’s capacity for apparent truth-telling, made the more credible by the great number of occasions on which he accuses himself of lying.

There seems, indeed, an infinite number of selves of William Shakespeare who play that part of the ‘I’ in the drama of the sonnets. Even when we think we have grasped him, this
shape-shifter
escapes definition by reminding us that he is also an actor, and that motley is his business. His poems are not just
love letters written to Henry Wriothesley, nor private jottings on the conduct of his mistress. They are the heart’s truth of William Shakespeare. But who was William Shakespeare?

Understand old Pickleherring, please. I am trying to speak simply of something complicated. I am not saying that Shakespeare’s sonnets were the artificial products of his fancy. To suppose as much (or as little) mistakes and misrepresents
all
sonnets, all poems and all poets, not just those Elizabethan artificers who are sometimes said to have written sonnets thus. When Shakespeare said that he had ‘two loves’, of ‘comfort and despair’, and that one of them was ‘a man right fair’ and the other ‘a woman colour’d ill’, believe me, gentle reader,
he was not kidding!

But then the late Mr WS was (as I hope I may be proving by this Life) both many men and no one. Therefore be sure that all that is certain is that the sonnets were written by a man or men named Will. (There are sufficient puns on the name to make this more than likely.) As to the names of the other apparent persons in them, though, nothing is certain. The Dark Lady could be all the ladies I have dealt with in the last three chapters, plus the lady I will canvas in the next, or she could be one or none. She could be a perfect fiction. Like Cleopatra. Like Shakespeare’s mother. Or like me.

Talking of perfect fictions, here is another riddle for your delight. Who was William Shakespeare when he was playing Prospero? Was he Shakespeare playing Prospero, or was he Prospero playing Shakespeare? Remember the enchanter’s last speech to the audience:

For Naples, try reading Stratford. And he goes on to say that he must remain spell-bound on stage until
we
(the audience) break the spell by our applause. In this speech Mr Shakespeare confesses the limitations of his own necromantic art, and craves our prayers, like any other sinner:

I say it is not just Prospero who exits then.

Who is the ‘I’ whose exits and whose entrances form the substance of the sonnets? That, as I say, is the question. It is the question I try to answer by this book. My method, friends, is to answer it indirectly by the asking.

Lady Southampton once referred to Mr Shakespeare as if he
was
Sir John Falstaff. ‘Your friend Sir John Falstaff,’ she wrote to Rizley. Think about it. That was a part that Shakespeare never even played when he was an actor. Yet I say there is a sense in which the lady got it right. That is the sense in which there is no Dark Lady.

Now then, at last then.

Enough metaphysics.

As my grandfather the bishop—

As
you
say, madam, and about time too, not to speak of providing a ‘simple answer’ to a ‘simple question’.

The Dark Lady: who was she?

The last time I saw a dildo like the one young Anne was wearing when she fucked the Countess it was down at Lucy Negro’s.

Lucy Negro, alias Lucy Morgan, kept a brothel in St John Street, Clerkenwell. She was known as the Abbess of Clerkenwell, head of the infamous sisterhood of the Black Nuns.

Her priory was amply provisioned, a palace of carnal delights. Once within its walls, the real world no longer existed. It was folly there to think of it, or indeed to think at all. The abbess demanded obedience, and she got it. Appliances of pleasure were everywhere. Here were women, here were boys, here were dancers, here were musicians, here was beauty in many strange forms, and here was wine. It was a convent sacred to amorous rites.

It was a soft-lit place, a maze of corridors. Each of her rooms held a different delight. There were pleasures here
to match and satisfy each taste, no matter how outlandish or extreme. Sometimes I thought of that brothel as the very house of fiction. It was like the stories in the
Decameron
, one self-complete imagination leading into another, each particular pleasure foretelling the pleasure of the next room but only when you looked
back
(so satisfying each was in itself). I never exhausted it. Nor, I believe, did Mr Shakespeare, and he was certainly in more rooms than I tried for myself.

There were seven main rooms in the house of Lucy Negro – to mirror, no doubt, the seven deadly sins. None of the rooms had windows that looked out upon the world. Instead, in each of the rooms, to the right and the left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow window looked back into the corridor which connected them. These windows were of stained glass whose colour varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue, and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange, the fifth with white, the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only the colour of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet – a deep blood-colour.

Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum amid the profusion of golden
ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers; but in the corridors that followed the suite there stood opposite each window a heavy tripod bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. I thought once that I saw Helen of Troy in the blue chamber, and Dr Faustus in the purple; then, at other times, it was Merlin the magician that seemed to stalk before me as I entered the green chamber, and the enchantress Vivian was seen dancing in the orange; as for the white chamber, I saw Joan of Arc within it, and she was burning, with her henchman Gilles de Rais in the violet room. The seventh chamber I never went inside, but I can well believe what Mr Shakespeare once told me – that he found Othello therein, and Lady Macbeth. I believe that in that western or black chamber the effect of the fire light that streamed upon the dark hangings, through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered that there were few bold enough to set foot within its precincts at any time, and fewer still who would stay there once they had got there.

In spite of these things, or because of them, the house of Lucy Negro was an enchanted place, and a home to magnificent revels. The tastes of its mistress were exotic and expensive, her imagination unparalleled when it came to any matter touching upon sensual gratification. She had a fine eye for all colours and effects. Her plans were bold and fiery, and her conceptions always glowed with barbaric lustre. There were some who would no doubt have considered her
mad. Her followers, myself among them, felt sure she was not. It was perhaps necessary to hear her, and to see her, and to touch her – to be
sure
that she was not.

She had not always been a whore, of course. Come to that, I would not have dared to call her a whore in the days that I knew her. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, to my young mind. I was only in her house a dozen times. I never even took my shoes off, though once (as you shall hear) I did perform in her clothes there. (I’ll tell you of that when it’s time, and not before.) It was a very strange place, and being in it was like being inside the mind of a very strange woman. So you’ll see, sir, this is not at all what you may have been supposing.

There are two lines in one of the sonnets addressed to the Fair Youth which I believe might first have been addressed to the Dark Lady. They run as follows:

That is Lucy Negro and her house.

Lucy means light, and Negro of course means black. Some say that her real name was Lucy Morgan. Those who can credit this put it about also that from March 1579 to January 1582, while yet very young, she had been one of Queen Elizabeth’s most favoured attendants. She was then expelled from Court after the usual fall from grace. I cannot believe that she ever did anything she did not choose to do. Who the gentleman was who first dishonoured her, I do not know. I do know that Mr Shakespeare knew her before she came into her own and established the house in St John
Street. But where she was and what she was doing when he first met her I have no idea.

She had in her possession seven sumptuous dresses, dresses which Elizabeth herself was said to have given her after wearing them on great occasions. It was one of these dresses, virgin-white, all sugared over with diamonds, which she was wearing the first time I saw her, at the revels in Gray’s Inn.

In that seventh chamber of the house of Lucy Negro a shadow prowls back and forth without ceasing. It is the shade of one denied the power to find himself outside these walls. It is the shadow of the late William Shakespeare. There he is who was my friend. A damned soul, madam? He would not have said so, and no more do I. Mr Shakespeare is on the other side of Lucy Negro’s seventh door, that’s all.

Never elsewhere have I seen such obscene furniture. She keeps two dildoes, crossed, on the wall of her jakes. She is no common doxy, dell, or bawdy-basket. Some say her mother was Lilith, and that Lilith is the devil. Her cunt is like an oyster with soft teeth.

Lucy Negro called herself a
KINCHIN-MORT
. These words I cannot find in my father’s dictionary. But when I played Pickleherring for the Germans I learnt that there a child is called a
kindchen
, and in the Netherlands the name for a brothel is a
mot-huys
. Possibly, though, that
MORT
is from
amourette
, being French for a passing love affair. Barbarous and beautiful, there was something Babylonian about the woman. She had her own argot. It was the language of a perfect blackness. ‘Master Shag-beard, I am your kinchin-mort.’

Call her up now as she appeared to me then, at the Gray’s
Inn Revels, that year at Christmas. Her pins, her little head, her crown of silver and of lace, her eyes between two shining silver candlesticks, each lifting a trembling flame to worship her, her skin that seems to be
listening
as she stands there on tiptoe, her mouth with that frozen line of irony on her lips, her swaying haunch that speaks of snake-like copulations, her wayward hair, the velvety slope of her breasts – these things are the merest echoes of her presence. Her body is only the perfume of her soul. She laughs and then she is gone. She is melted into air, into thin air.

Poor Shakespeare! Lucy Negro was his punishment. It is a demon’s arms that hold him now. Listen, down the maze of the corridors, through the seven airless, perfumed rooms, the music of her playing on the virginals. Will the door of that seventh sable chamber ever open again? Will the music of those virginals never end? The sound of the music is like the wash of waves on a far-off shore of sleep. You can scarcely hear it playing. Yet once heard you can hear nothing else. Her fingers play the music of your blood.

They say when she first came to the house in St John Street she called herself Lucy Parker. But always she was known as Lucy Negro. The name came from the colour of her skin. She was a mulatto or quadroon from the West Indies. There was African blood a-coursing through her veins.

Dusky-skinned, with eyes as black and shining as the wings of a raven, her breasts were dun, and her hair was like black wires – it was thick and twisting, curly in the extreme. By no means conventionally beautiful, she was on my oath a woman of rare beauty. Summoned, if she could be said to be summonable, amid candles and mirrors that could not hold her reflection, through flame-shaken gloom, answering to
such titles as Black Luce, or (in later years) Old Lucilla, she was in great demand with the young gentlemen of the Inns of Court. For them she wore green gowns, or fragile sheaths of crimson. These were her natural colours. Also the white of shrouds. What colour she wore for Shakespeare I do not know. I never saw them together. I know that he worshipped her.

At the Gray’s Inn Revels, at that masquerade, homage was paid to her. She sat on a throne, and she wore Queen Elizabeth’s white gown. Her raven hair was down about her shoulders, her skin gleaming like ebony where she showed her thighs and breasts to her adorers. Lucy Negro came among them with a whip.

It was said that Lucy Negro liked whipping best of all things. She would whip men’s buttocks until they were in a frenzy. It is said that men would walk miles with their pricks erect to have her whip them.

Lucy Negro called all pricks
WILLS
.

‘Get out your will,’ she would order her servants, ‘and let’s see what you’re made of.’

Or: ‘Come here with your will, little man, and let your mother see if you are willing.’

She would wear a will herself, when in the mood. ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ she used to say then. (I wonder why Mr Shakespeare never used that for one of his titles, when he was making up one of those last-minute names which told you he was tired of the whole damned play.) The word
WILL
occurs twenty times in twenty-eight lines in sonnets 135 and 136, which pun furiously on Lucy Negro’s usage, among others.

Lucy Negro was a spirit who sold her body to earn her
living. She was a mystery, she was also a common whore. When Rizley came her way, she deserted Mr Shakespeare. She was after the highest game that was available. WS, besotted, forgave them both, though perhaps the forgiveness should not be attributed to the besottedness. To Rizley he wrote:

I must admit that I do not find this very convincing. It strikes me that Mr Shakespeare was trying to cheer himself up.

The sonnet addressed to Lucy Negro is more truthful. From it, I have sometimes surmised that Shakespeare wanted the three of them in bed together. It would not much surprise me. Lucy Negro’s bed was wide. And it is said that when done whipping she liked to have two men pleasure her at the same time, one at the front door, one at the back:

This, then, was William Shakespeare’s true Dark Lady. Lucy Negro, mistress of the enchanted house in St John Street, the Abbess of Clerkenwell, was his ‘woman colour’d ill’, and his living exemplar of the fact that as he says in sonnet 127, ‘In the old age black was not counted fair’. That is the first sonnet which is addressed to the Dark Lady. Mark well that it uses the word
BLACK
three times in its fourteen lines. Not ‘dark’, sir.
BLACK
.

Never despise the obvious, my friends. When Shakespeare goes on in these sonnets about the blackness of his mistress, he means just what he says. It should be readily discernible that from the outset it is not merely a matter of the lady having dark hair. It is her total blackness that obsesses and fascinates and torments him. Her hair is black, her eyes are black, her skin is black. No doubt, since he called her his ‘female evil’, and again characterised her cunt as a ‘hell’
in the last line of sonnet 129, Mr Shakespeare would have said that Lucy Negro’s heart was black as well. And yet, as I insist, he worshipped her, which is to say that he went on loving her through hate and out the other side. He may still be imprisoned in her seventh room, but the sonnets are not.