The Late Mr Shakespeare (39 page)

Do you know the real names of the three witches in
Macbeth?

Agnes Thomson, Violet Leys, and Janet Wishart – that’s who.

You will find their names in that book by King James called
News from Scotland
. In it he describes the atrocious life of the notable sorcerer, Dr Fian, whose trial he followed, and whose interrogation he conducted. The King was present at many other trials of the sort. Witchcraft was his passion – I mean, the elimination of it. In 1596 he set up a commission including the provost of Aberdeen to judge witches and sorcerers. In the course of that year, twenty-three women and one man were found guilty of sorcery, and put to death. James himself was present at the trial of Agnes Thomson and other witches who boasted of having raised a storm while the King of Scots was on a voyage. She was sent to sea with a whole concourse of sister-witches, each one riding in a riddle or sieve. They took hands and danced singing all in one voice while the master of their coven, Giles Duncan, played upon
a Jew’s trump. At the trial this scene was re-enacted to the King’s satisfaction. Agnes Thomson confessed that ‘she took a black toad and did hang the same up by the heels three days and gathered the venom as it dropped and fell from it in an oyster shell’. She also took a cat and christened it, which caused such a tempest that the vessel perished ‘wherein was sundry jewels and rich gifts which should have been presented to the now Queen of Scotland’. The ship in which James sailed would have met the same fate if the King’s ‘faith had not prevailed above their intentions’. All this you can find for yourselves, good readers, in that silly
News from Scotland
.

I call it silly since I think James was. What Mr Shakespeare thought of him I do not know. I do know that he wrote
Macbeth
in part to please him. So he worked in bits and pieces borrowed from the King’s writings on the theme of witches and witchcraft – from James’s
Daemonology
as well as
News from Scotland
. He wrote it very swiftly, while our Company was in Scotland. We went there after the Essex affair, when we were in disfavour with Queen Elizabeth on account of that performance of
Richard II
commissioned by the plotters in trust that it would stir up feeling against her. We were not punished, but we made ourselves scarce.

We played before King James in Edinburgh. After, we went by royal orders to Dunfermline, where we played before his Queen in the palace of Linlithgow. At Aberdeen, we were received in pomp by the provost William Cullen. We stayed there for most of the month of October, performing in the town hall to great audiences. The Scots are very good to strolling players. In Aberdeen we dined at the town’s expense. At Linlithgow twelve of us players slept in feather beds.

Sir William Davenant, the poet’s godson, claims to have in his possession a letter to Mr Shakespeare signed by the King of Scots, and highly complimentary. I have not seen this letter, but I do not disbelieve in it. King James enjoyed the theatre, and he liked his Shakespeare. That, at least, is one of the things Ben Jonson got right in his Folio eulogy.

Macbeth
is soaked in WS’s experience of Scotland. Banquo’s first question ‘How far is’t called to Forres?’ sounds rather more Scotch than English to my ear.
QUELL
for murder,
SKIRR
for search,
LATCH
instead of catch,
GRUEL
for broth,
SLAB
for sticky,
CRIBBED
for enclosed, all these are northern words which Shakespeare uses only in
Macbeth
. The receptiveness of his ear was quite remarkable. I was in lodgings with him at Inverness, for example, and our hostess remarked approvingly of the porridge which she had boiled for us that it was
thick and slab
– the phrase went straight into the Scottish play, used of the contents of the witches’ cauldron.

At Inverness, the close proximity into which we were thrown enabled me for the first and last time to observe Mr Shakespeare at work from the inception to the completion of a play. With Holinshed’s
Chronicles
open at his elbow, and the Scottish King’s two books of witchcraft not far away across the table, he sat down to write on a rainy October morning. He wrote fast and he did little crossing out. The first two Acts of
Macbeth
came in a single marvellous day and night. Words poured from Shakespeare’s pen in a torrent like one of those I watched tumbling down the mountainside. He created all those early scenes at the gallop, and the power and the urgency of their writing shows (in my opinion) both in the intensity of
the verse and the way those scenes always play themselves fast in the theatre. The rest came more slowly, with pauses for reflection, but without apparent trouble. Sometimes he muttered phrases to himself, once or twice I heard him chanting them quite loudly. For example,
‘And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air.’
I remember that particularly because it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I first heard it, and I’m sure it would do so still if I was able to get to a modern playhouse and there was a performance that did not cut it out. Such things are omitted in these enlightened days. How, they would say, can a baby stride a blast? It is a prime example of what is now regarded as Shakespeare’s barbarity.

I regard it as a prime example of his genius, friends.

Mr Shakespeare’s writing method was straightforward. Each page was divided into columns. On the left-hand side he would put the name of the speaker, on the right-hand side he would put the exits and the entrances. The poetry was written in the middle. He would write fifty lines on one side, fifty lines on the other. Sometimes, in full flood, he would forget to write the name of the speaker, and just make a squiggle in the margin, for the initial letter of the character’s name; then he would go back and spell out the identity later. Similarly, with the exits and the entrances. Each page got dropped to the floor as soon as he had written it. At the end of that long first night in Inverness, as the sun came up, I woke from fitful slumbers and saw Mr Shakespeare still crouched at his table, his eyes red and staring, his hand scuttling back and forth across the page like a crab trapped
in a bucket, the sweat running down his face, and the floor of the room covered with sheets inscribed with his rustic gothic handwriting, all straight-flowing letters. It is something I’ll never forget. It was like waking and finding yourself in the cavern of a demi-urge, or in some place where a man takes dictation from angels.

Mr Shakespeare stared sightlessly at me. Then he blinked. ‘What’s for breakfast?’ he demanded. ‘I’m starving! Be a good lad and fetch me some pippins, will you? Or a taste of dry biscuit. Or a slice of salted pork. Anything but Mrs MacDiarmid’s porridge!’

Did a discarnate spirit guide my master’s pen in Scotland? He said he was in the grip of Hecate when he wrote that play, but he said it with a grin and a shrug, and at such times I could never tell if he was serious. Later, though, I remember him remarking that the Witch Sycorax had him in her power when he wrote much of his last play of
The Tempest
.

It is possible that he always wrote his first drafts very fast, and that these first drafts (with some notable exceptions, such as
Hamlet
) were not much changed before it came to performance. I know that
The Merry Wives of Windsor
was written, rehearsed, and performed in the space of a fortnight, at Queen Elizabeth’s express command, Her Majesty having declared her wish to see a play done at Court which would show ‘Sir John Falstaff in love’.
Twelfth Night
was such another, hurriedly prepared for a royal command performance at Whitehall on the twelfth night of January, 1601, at which the Duke Virginio Orsino, newly arrived in London from Italy, was gloriously entertained.

Perhaps what I saw for myself in Scotland was William
Shakespeare’s usual practice. In the
Dream
he speaks of the poet’s
fine
frenzy
. Against this, the character called Poet in
Timon of Athens
is made to say

Frenzy or gum, as Mr Heminges and Mr Condell report in introducing the works in the Folio, there were never many blots in William Shakespeare’s foul papers.

And that night in Inverness I thought the page would catch fire from the fury of his quill.

Unlike mine, in this. There is still no sign of that sad, adorable, enchanted child who told me her name was Polly. I would be heart-broken were it not that I have had no heart to break after poor Jane. Even as it is, I can barely lift my pen, it seems so heavy, and as for the ink it smells like juice of wormwood.

Reader, I know I ought to cut out every reference to this whore-child in my book. She is not relevant to my Life of Shakespeare. All that she did was fetch me a few eggs, then make my fancy dance with her girlish ways. Sir, I resolve to effect this act of exorcism as soon as it comes to the time for revision.

Madam, Jane my wife is a different case. She has had her part to play from the time of my Acknowledgements. Without her, I would not be where I am. I said that then, and I say it now again. The difference is that the first time I said it, you did not know where I was, whereas now you know I’m an old, mad man who lives at the top of a brothel.

I suppose things started to go wrong when Jane started
walking behind me in the street, imitating my walk. My wife would copy every single movement that I made. If I ran, she ran; if I dawdled, she dawdled; if I stopped, she stopped, so that I could never stop her. When I tried to talk to her about it, she laughed and denied that she was doing it. I was going mad with all my play-acting, she said; I was imagining things. She had better things to do, she said, than copy me. Yet it was not long before her mimicking of me extended to my gestures. It was cruel. People would stop to watch us in the streets, and they would laugh at the pantomime. I did not laugh. I tried not looking round at her. But I knew when she was there. I knew all right.

Then, one day, Jane fell down, and I fell down. I can’t explain it. First I felt a sudden stab of pain in my leg, then I fell down. My wife had fallen down first. But her fall was deliberate. She had mimicked me so exactly, with such perfection, that it was as if she had
become
me, so that I fell down in the street as an echo or an answer to her fall. I considered this, at the time, a form of witchcraft. In fact, I read somewhere of witches who do no less. They follow their victims, they copy their victims’ every movement, then by their falling down they make their victims fall and break their necks.

I did not break my neck. It was Jane who broke hers, though not in the street and not when copying me. She took a lover. Then she took another. One night I watched her at it with her lover. Another night I watched while the second man had her. I never said what I had seen her doing. I never repeated the words I heard her say – not deliberately. Did Jane know I had watched her? Did my actions or reactions betray to her my knowledge? I don’t know. That is something I will never know, not in this life. All I can say is that my very living once depended utterly
on my close observation of women, and my imitation of them, and it is possible that I repeated in bed with Jane some word or trick of one of her lovers, or more likely of her own, and thus betrayed to my dear wife the fact that I had watched her do it with other men. It is possible, as I say, but it is not likely. It is not impossible, but it is, I think, unlikely.

In the morning I found her hanging there from the rafters. She was wearing her shift as if it was a shroud. Over it she wore her black top-coat that always smelt of pepper. She was strangled in her own hair as well as the rope. Hair and rope were all twisted together where she had twined and plaited them. I had to cut her hair to cut her down. With all the while that peppery scent in my nostrils.

It was then I suppose that I determined to write my Life of William Shakespeare, though the relation between the two things is something I cannot explain. It took me, of course, many years to get this book started. First there were the years of collecting all the matter for it. Then came the years of clearing my head for the writing. And now I have the writing to keep me going.

But I owe my Life of Shakespeare to the death of my wife Jane. Don’t ask me why or how, for I could not tell you. But that the one followed the other as the day the night is something I know in my bones, and can never forget.

Mulberries are grateful, and they are cooling, and astringent. I have a jar of pickled mulberries beside me as I write. I do not write quickly. I suck on a mulberry and think, and I chew and I scribble. I have a pot of good mulberry jam also, though the top is furred over, all that is left of the several Jane made for me from the fruit I once stole from Mr Shakespeare’s mulberry tree. I spread it on my crusts that I get from the pie-shop in the basement.

It was not long after the coronation of King James that Mr Shakespeare carried the canopy in the royal procession,
*
and then elected to change his London lodging. He took rooms in the house of a Huguenot wigmaker, Christopher Mountjoy, who lived with his wife and daughter in a handsome twin-gabled building at the corner of Silver Street and Monkswell Street. Here the first thing he wrote was
Measure for Measure
, a new kind of philosophical comedy which (like
Macbeth
in a different mode) was designed to appeal to the King’s tastes and interests. The Duke in
Measure
for Measure
has more than enough of James in his character. I admit that I found the part of Isabella difficult – her heart’s aspiration to divine love being perhaps beyond my range. After a few unfortunate performances, the role was taken over by a new boy who had caught my master’s eye, John Spencer, then up and coming, in due course to be my principal rival and enemy, especially in his incarnation abroad where he took that humorous alias of Hans Stockfish just to spite me. I remember his Isabella: a holy, dog-faced dwarf in a cart-wheel farthingale. But Stockfish can be kept for another day.

Mr Shakespeare found himself now in a fashionable part of town. Mountjoy, his landlord, made not only wigs but those pearl-sewn and jewelled head-dresses then much in favour with the ladies of the Court. One of the Huguenot’s clients was Queen Anne herself. By moving to this well-to-do quarter, north of the river and away from the stews of Southwark, Shakespeare was showing how far he had risen in the world.

Not that everyone in the Mountjoy household considered him respectable. The Mountjoys kept a cook called Comfort Ballantine, a formidable woman, originally from the north country, who in addition to providing for the Mountjoys’ stomachs also took a keen interest in the welfare of their souls. For Comfort Ballantine was a Puritan. While not so extreme in her views as some of her brothers and sisters in that tendency, she still rated players as masters of vice and playwrights as teachers of wantonness. When the critical cook heard that William Shakespeare was taking two rooms in the house she gave it as her opinion to the Mountjoys that this was decidedly ‘poor policy’.
POOR POLICY
was
one of Comfort Ballantine’s favourite phrases. She was forever telling Mrs Mountjoy that she thought it would be Poor Policy to do thus and such. Taking in as lodger a player/playwright with as facile and likeable a reputation as William Shakespeare’s was perhaps the Poorest Policy she had ever heard of.

It is a measure of Mr Shakespeare’s charm that he won Comfort over. She very nearly quit when he first came to Silver Street. But before long she was tidying his papers whenever he left the house. This tidying she called
REDDING UP
.

‘What are you doing, Mrs Ballantine?’ I heard our hero ask her, the first time it happened, him fearing no doubt that she was about to consign his blossoms of sin to the flames of her kitchen stove.

‘I am redding up for you, Mr Shakespeare,’ the cook replied, beaming.

And from that day forth, so he told me, he never had a moment’s fear but that when he returned from his daily stroll down Wood Street and through Cheapside to get a wherry across to the Globe, and back again, he would find all his scattered papers neatly assembled on his table by the window at the Mountjoys. Not that Comfort Ballantine read them. She could not read.

Consequently, of course, the papers were often in the wrong order. But William Shakespeare knew better than to complain because of that.

It was not the theatre that Comfort Ballantine changed her mind about, only Mr Shakespeare. ‘Players live by making fools laugh at sin and wickedness,’ she said to me once. I did not argue with her. Who am I to disagree?

As for Mr Shakespeare’s success in winning the respect of this worthy woman, that was just the lively face of something I find at the heart of his art. William Shakespeare was the least of an egotist that it is possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and every feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had a mind reflecting ages past and ages present – all the people that have ever lived are there. He had only to think of anything in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. Thus he was capable even of being Comfort Ballantine, who considered all rhymers plain rogues. He treated her with dignity, accordingly, and the cook adored him for it in return.

Comfort Ballantine was a great frequenter of the public sermons of those times, of course, which sermons were called ‘prophecyings’. Because she could not read it was her practice to commit the substance of all that she heard at a prophecying to memory, so that she might regurgitate it later, and dwell upon its sapience in her mind. For the help of her memory she had invented and framed a girdle of leather, long and large, which went twice about her waist when she went to the conventicle. This girdle she had divided into several parts, allotting each book in the Bible, in its order, to one of these divisions. Then, for the chapters, she had affixed points or thongs of leather to the several divisions, and made knots by fives and tens thereupon to distinguish the chapters of each book. And by other points she had divided the chapters
into their particular contents and verses. This girdle she used, because she could not use pen and ink, to take notes of all the sermons which she heard; and she made such good use of it that when she came home to the Mountjoys from the conventicle just by fingering her girdle she could repeat the sermon through its several heads, and quote the various texts mentioned in it, to her own great comfort, and to the benefit of Mr Shakespeare.

This girdle of Comfort Ballantine’s was kept by William Shakespeare, after the cook’s decease, and he would often merrily call it his Girdle of Verity.