Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard

by Richard B. Wright

  I could see I had angered her with my questions.

  “Calm yourself, Mam.”

  “You are asking me why I didn’t say goodbye to him? But he hadn’t told me he was married and I found that vexing. I not only had committed fornication, but was now also an adulteress. And not for one moment had I ever meant to commit adultery. I was terrified that someone might find out. Can you imagine what your aunt Sarah would say if she knew I had lain with a married man? So I was ashamed of myself and eager to put it all behind me. It was better to get out of London. And to tell you the truth, as the years have passed, I mostly put your father out of mind, until I saw his name upon that book in Oxford. And then I felt you deserved to know.”

  I told her it was all right. I hadn’t meant to upset her.

  In those final days, Mam lost track of her senses from time to time, wandering off to other worlds, murmuring old names and often crying aloud from pain. In the hope of easing her mind, I was still reading the Dream, but I was weary of it and perhaps she wasn’t even listening. Yet I felt I should continue reading. I had the notion it was keeping her alive, and I knew it helped to settle my own wits. One evening, for a change, I took up Romeo and Juliet, and was reading the scene in which Mercutio invokes Queen Mab to mock the lovelorn Romeo for believing that dreams mean anything at all:

  She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

  In shape no bigger than an agate stone

  On the fore-finger of an alderman,

  Drawn with a team of little atomies

  Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.”

  I thought Mam was asleep, but then I heard her say, “He got all that at his mother’s knee. The agate stone on the alderman’s finger. I remember that.”

  “What, Mam?” I asked.

  “Your father,” she said, opening her eyes to look up at me. “It’s ‘Queen Mab’s Ride’ he’s talking about, and the words made me think of a day in Finsbury Fields when we talked of our childhoods. We’d only just met, and he said how his mother used to tell him stories of the little people and how they got around at night. I loved it, for I too knew such stories. But your father had a great memory for such things, and he told of how his mother described for him Queen Mab’s little carriage made from a nut …”

  “Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut.”

  “Yes”—she smiled—“an empty hazel-nut.”

  “Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, / Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.”

  “That’s it. He used to say how artful in detail it was. As a child he never tired of hearing his mother describe Mab’s carriage and how it took her through the night and into lovers’ dreams.”

  “And in this state she gallops night by night / Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.”

  “Yes,” said Mam, “that’s right.”

  Not long after, perhaps a day or two, I got up from the truckle bed one morning, and when I saw her lying grey and still, I knew even before I touched her cold face that she had left me in the night.

  CHAPTER 13

  TODAY AFTER EVENSONG, CHARLOTTE and Mr. Thwaites came back to the house to announce their engagement, the banns to be read on the first three Sundays of September and the wedding to take place on the Saturday following. Amid the congratulations Mr. Walter remarked that seeding time for winter wheat was always considered propitious for marriage, if we would forgive a simple farmer saying so. This made Charlotte colour prettily and we all laughed. Charlotte then displayed the gemstone on her finger and had a little weep in my arms. Mr. Walter had me fetch the brandy, and we raised glasses to the young couple’s future happiness.

  MY STORY

  CHAPTER 14

  MAM DIED IN JANUARY of 1601 at the age of forty years and ten months. It was cold and I remember a little snow on higher ground. In our parlour I was asked to put chunks of sea coal on the fire, and I was glad to have something to do; sitting before the grate I willed the coal to burn faster to keep me occupied.

  That morning the rector, Obadiah Littlejohn, came by, and he and my aunt talked in the kitchen while Uncle Jack stood by the coffin staring down at his dead sister. Now and then I looked up from the fire to watch him. He appeared more angry than sad, and I wondered if it had to do with the rector and my aunt talking apart from him. My uncle had never taken to Littlejohn, who was new to the parish—only a year or so then at St. Cuthbert’s—and a gospeller. Uncle Jack didn’t care for his fiery sermons and told me once there was too much hatefulness in them; they worked people up in the wrong way. He even wondered if the burning of Goody Figgs’s hut had been provoked by the rector’s sermon on witches and demons. I didn’t like the man either, but more for his looks than anything else. He was short and thick-set with a great black beard, his bald, egg-shaped head fringed with more black hair; by appearance at least he seemed more in league with the devil than with God. Or so I used to imagine.

  When he came into the parlour with my aunt, I listened carefully. No one took any notice of me crouched by the grate; still they conferred in whispers as though my poor mother might overhear and disapprove of their arguing above her corpse. Uncle Jack had quietly maintained that his sister was one of God’s children and deserved a Christian’s funeral. But Littlejohn was adamant about the service. Mam, he said, had been a fornicator. It was common knowledge in the parish, and the congregation wouldn’t tolerate a Christian service for her. He said he would stand at the graveside and offer words from Holy Scripture, but nothing more. Beside him Aunt Sarah was silent, but she wouldn’t meet my uncle’s eyes. I guessed that she and the rector had agreed about the funeral in the kitchen. Uncle Jack was an even-tempered man, but I could see his face darkening as he listened to Littlejohn. Where was Christian forgiveness in his teaching? he asked. Had Jesus himself not urged forgiveness to those who had sinned? Did he not teach us how to pray for sinners in Matthew, chapter 6, verses 14 and 15? For, if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

  “Those are the words of our Lord as transcribed by St. Matthew, sir,” said Uncle Jack, looking down at the ugly little man. “How do you square them with denying my sister a Christian service in the church?”

  I was proud of my uncle for opposing Littlejohn, whose great round face had also reddened, though he stood his ground and said it was indecent to have such a woman’s body accorded the full service. Uncle Jack left them then and went upstairs. I should have supported him by leaving the room too instead of poking at the fire and watching my aunt and the rector whispering by the coffin.

  Later I went out by myself to the churchyard and watched the sexton and another man digging the grave. They were talking about the snow and cold weather and about how they feared catching an ague. After they left, I stood above the open grave looking down at the hole in the earth. I had seen maggots at work in dead dogs and birds, and I knew that the same happened to all living creatures when they died. Mam’s body, which I remembered as being so warm when I lay next to her, would soon be cold as winter earth, and in time, it would be filled with worms, and I wondered how long it would take before all the flesh was gone and only bones remained. Years later at an inn yard in Oxford, while watching a performance of Hamlet, I received a start when I heard the Prince ask the gravedigger, “How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?”

  I have now come to believe that such questions are perhaps not so unusual to those with a particular cast of mind.

  On that winter morning in the churchyard, I also recall wondering if what they said in churches about the dead was true: that we all had souls within us, and that at the death of the body the soul was released and either ascended to Heaven or sank through the earth to Hell. Uncle Jack had once told me that Papists believed their souls went first to a place called Purgatory and the entrance was somewhere off the coast of Ireland. He thought the notion fanciful—but if any o
f it was true, I wondered, what judgment awaited Mam, who had lain with men outside marriage and brought a bastard into the world? That was a sin and even Uncle Jack had said as much. Would Jesus and his Father take into account her kindness, her love for her brother and for me, her tolerance of Aunt Sarah’s mean-spiritedness, her unwillingness to utter an unkind word to others, including the louts who called her names beneath our windows or schoolboys who threw stones and ran off laughing? Would all that goodness not count in her favour in God’s court? I had read enough of the gospels to know that people like my aunt and the rector paid little heed to the notion of forgiveness. They were scolders and punishers, and to them that was what religion was about. This led me to wonder further if such hard-hearted people went to Heaven, for they certainly expected to; it seemed that it was all they talked about. This life on earth to them was little more than time spent rebuking and punishing those they accounted sinners. Would such as my aunt and the rector then go to Heaven as a reward? If so, would I want to spend eternity with them?

  I may have decided on that very day as I stared down at the empty grave in St. Cuthbert’s churchyard that I no longer believed such things, if indeed I ever had. They were all made up, like stories for a child at bedtime to comfort her into sleep, or for those who were sick and feeling hopeless about their lives on this earth. Like everyone and every other living creature before her, Mam perhaps was neither in Heaven nor in Hell; perhaps she was just dead. As dead as the cat I had seen a few days before, stiff and frozen on the midden in Market Lane. And being as dead as that cat, Mam no longer cared about anything, including me. These were dark and terrible notions, and perhaps I was wrong for thinking of them. But true or not, I knew I must keep them to myself.

  Standing by that open grave a good long while with my thoughts cost me dearly, because that evening I came down with a fever and could not attend Mam’s burial next day.

  Over the next several weeks a distemper kept me listless and it was thought I had lost my will to live, and perhaps that was true. Aunt Sarah brought me bread and broth and religious books, which she said would see me to Heaven if all else failed. To humour her I looked briefly at The Path to Rightful Living, but when she’d left the room I took out my two playbooks and read them aloud as if Mam were still there to listen. In the evenings, Uncle Jack often sat with me, urging me to drink a little more broth, telling me stories about growing up and looking after Mam, his little sister. I wanted to know what Mam was like when she was my age, and he would tell me of how she enjoyed being by herself, wandering the woods and fields, a dreamy girl but pretty. The boys were always after her and he had to keep an eye out, for she liked to be admired, a failing in his estimation. But mostly Uncle Jack sat fussing over me, worrying about how frail I had become, and finally he fetched the doctor, the same fellow who had once attended Mam. He bled me too, and as I watched my blood drain into a dish I thought I might die even then, for it so weakened me. Only bread soaked in milk and apple brandy revived me, and when I awakened Uncle Jack was there holding my hand.

  “I’ve lost your mother,” he said. “I can’t lose you too, Aerlene.”

  He begged me to tell him what he might do to revive my spirits, and so I said that I would like something other than Aunt Sarah’s tracts to read. I told him that I needed something to take me out of my thoughts, which, dark and unwholesome, were depleting my will. This was guileful, I admit, but I wanted to know—perhaps at that state in my life it was the only thing I wanted to know—whether my father had written any more plays. I knew my uncle would do anything to help me recover health, but I also knew I was asking him to go against his conscience. Still, I took out the copies of my father’s plays and showed him.

  “Could there be other books by this man Shakespeare?” I told him how Mam had bought these books a year before, and how I had read the Dream to her and it lifted her spirits. By then he was leafing through the pages of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and frowning.

  “But this is a playbook, Aerlene,” he said. “With fairies and sprites and magical properties. It’s the devil’s handiwork, child. Why would your mother have bought such a thing?”

  “It was only to entertain herself and me,” I said. “In her last months I read the play to her time and time again.”

  He looked greatly puzzled by this. “But, my dear child,” he said, “why were you not reading Holy Scripture to your poor dying mother? This stuff is mere fancy.”

  “Because,” I said, “the poetry was a great comfort to her, else she would not have asked so many times to hear it. We both enjoyed it. It’s quite harmless, Uncle. It’s not the work of the devil.”

  “But who is this man Shakespeare?”

  I was ready for the question. “Just a writer of plays that my mother happened to find interesting as she was looking through the books at Gladwell’s in Oxford one Saturday when you were with friends.”

  He looked doubtful, but I sensed I was winning him over. “I just want to know,” I said, “if he has written others that might divert me from this illness. When you go into Oxford next could you perhaps bring back one?”

  “I don’t know, Aerlene,” he said. “These stories are presented in playhouses and taverns, and I am told all manner of vulgar people attend such gatherings. I have heard of drunkenness and riots and lewd behaviour. Why, it is said the authorities in London close down these playhouses by times.”

  “Well,” I said, “if it so troubles you, Uncle, don’t bother, for now I must go to sleep, as I am tired,” and I turned away from him and closed my eyes.

  It was my trump card and it won, because as he bent down to kiss me, he whispered, “If I do bring you one of these playbooks, you must be careful with your aunt. This must be our secret. And you must find a secure place where she will not find it or we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  I turned and, opening my eyes, put my arms around his neck and kissed him. “It is our secret, Uncle,” I said, “and I shall be careful.” And so I was and so was he.

  That spring and summer I read Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2. All these bore my father’s name on their title pages, but as the bookseller Gladwell came to know my uncle he told him that he was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and that there were earlier plays and poetry in print that did not bear his name but were surely of his making. And that is how I came also to read Richard III and Henry V, though the latter was a poor version of the play I would read in the Folio years later.

  All this confirmed that my father was still alive and writing and it heartened me; I had a reason now to live and to dream of going to London one day to meet him. In the meantime I had no need of others, for now I lived in the company of new acquaintances: Falstaff and Prince Hal, Beatrice and Benedict, Richard Crookback and Lady Anne. In my room, I performed the plays, taking all the parts, and reading with wonder and pride the words my father put into the mouths of these characters. I knew it went against my uncle’s beliefs to bring these books into the house, and sometimes as he handed me another, he would express his dismay, saying something like “I sometimes wonder what will become of you, Aerlene, with your head crammed with such stuff.” Yet he was happy enough to see how much improved I was in body and spirit.

  By my thirteenth birthday I felt well enough to ask another favour of him. Even such good company as I had been keeping in my imagination cannot over time replace real life, and I was growing tired of my room and Aunt Sarah asking how I occupied myself by being alone so much. I feared her discovery of my pastimes and there were close calls when she would appear suddenly at my bedroom door.

  One day I asked Uncle Jack if I could help in his shop. He thought about it and talked to Aunt Sarah, who disapproved of the idea, arguing that a bastard child would not be good for trade. She wanted to place me in service and intended to do so when I came of age at fourteen. Very well, I said, but could I not do something until then in the back of the shop? This was agreed upon and my uncle
told me to make myself useful to his only apprentice, Tom Bradley, a quiet boy with a clubfoot who was a year or two older than I. His father was a gamekeeper in the Royal Park where the Queen had once been held prisoner in the palace by her Papist sister, Mary.

  Tom’s lameness made an outcast of him in the eyes of most; he was seen as a changeling with the devil’s footprint in his clumsy gait. He said he’d heard of me; was I not the base-born child of a man who had lived in the woods and had no tongue? Such were the tales that surrounded me in my youth, and so embedded were they in people’s minds that there was nothing to be gained by contradicting them.

  On that first day, I said to Tom that we were then a likely pair, a clubfoot and a bastard, best hidden from the eyes of the innocent.

  At first he seemed perplexed by this, but then he laughed. “Why, yes,” he said, “that’s right enough, though it seems odd to hear it put that way.”

  In no time we were good friends. He showed me how to measure cloth with the yardstick and how to cut a straight line with the shears. I swept up the cuttings for him and put away things in boxes. There was really not that much to do, but I tried to keep busy. Tom was easy to talk to, and we shared our bread and cheese and cup of ale at eleven o’clock; he told me stories of his father chasing poachers in the park. Tom said that he loved living in the park and, but for his leg, would have followed his father into gamekeeping, for he preferred animals to humans and enjoyed the quiet rustle of forest life. I was soon telling him stories about magical creatures who lived in the woods and how the little people travelled by moonlight and lodged in people’s ears, where they fashioned dreams. Borrowing shamelessly from my father’s playbooks, I took on as my own the stories of Richard Crookback and the young lovers of Verona and the fat knight who once beguiled a future king of England. Tom listened like a child asking endless questions. “Who told you such things?” “Is what you say true or not?” “Where is this forest with the magical creatures?”