by Robert Nye
I remember he played Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show at Mile End Green. He was an upstart and appalling actor. I played King Arthur himself of course in the same play, the Mort d’Arthur, in which Dagonet is Arthur’s fool, and Arthur has to knight him. One night I knighted Sir Dagonet Shallow so hard that he saw the constellation Pleiades complete with its invisible star Electra.
Doit, Barnes, Pickbone, Squele and I all liked one another’s company. And Shallow tagged along. We helped each other whenever there was a row in Turnbull Street or anywhere. Our watchword was ‘Hem, boys!’ – this Hem meaning h’m, or hm, or even hem, and signifying a slight half-cough, the cry of the born toper, if you don’t know, when there are to be no heel taps. (If you really don’t know, sir, how have you managed to read this far? Could you have read this far without being drunk? Or without knowing, what it is to be drunk? Or without needing to be drunk in order to know why you are reading me? These are great questions. Madam, you are excused. They are not questions for a lady. But I promise to come back from the tomb and haunt forever any male fool wise enough to try and answer them.
Where’s Scrope? He’s always got an excuse for not being here when it’s story time.)
Doit and Barnes and Pickbone and Squele (yes, and Shallow) and I – we made the Strand ring with our songs as we rolled home of an evening. We heard the chimes at midnight. Ah, yes. The chimes at midnight. When the watch had locked the gates and we had to climb, or bluff, or bully, or wheedle our way into London’s fastness after hours.
Hem – that’s slang for Drink up.
We had more:
Bube – that’s the pox;
Cuffin-Quire – that’s a Justice of the Peace;
Chats – the gallows;
Couch a hogshead – take a nap;
Cly the jerk – to get whipped;
Clapperdogeon – a born beggar;
Deuswins – tuppence;
By the Pope’s holy farts, sir, and a whole dictionary more. A language. A vocabulary. It was London talk. It was only partly talk of my circle round and about the Inns of Court, for there it was learnt from our slight contact with what I would call the Underworld Proper. I began to pick up the rudiments of the grammar from such as Squele and Pickbone. The syntax came later, with Pistol and Bardolph and the rest.
I’ll give you more of the real King’s English in due course, perhaps. It must also be revealed, before that, what we did when we lay all night in the windmill in St George’s fields.
It was not corn grinding.
Bugger all these dialectics – I think I may say that I was the life and soul of my party. Poor Shallow was its butt. And its butt end. Alas, poor Shallow. He looked like a man made after supper of a cheese paring. When he was naked he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. He was so forlorn that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible. Imperceptible. He was the very genius of famine. Some of his friends called him the mandrake. He came ever in the rearward of the fashion, Robert Shallow – wearing liripipe hats, for instance, long after everyone else had given his to his donkey.
He came also in the rearward of the fashion in another sense. (Madam, read no further. Back to your lovely Gower. The rude knight is about to perpetrate more homicide, or honeyseed, or honeysuckle. You have been warned.) This Shallow was the very first man that I ever knew who preferred to take his pleasure with women, as they say, arsey-versey, which means with his engine of pleasure in the backward quarters (or halves?) of their anatomy.
His engine – I dignify the dejected tool with such grand comparisons of metaphor. To tell you the truth, although he spoke much of his fame and prowess among the bona-robas – more slang, this time from the Italian for courtesan, which in turn derives from the smart robes or dresses afforded by the higher class of whores – although Shallow boasted of his success in these directions, I say, he lacked either the person or the acumen or the salt for such encounters. His prey was more often the over-scutched huswives, the threepenny whores with well-whipped backs, both from the beadle and their own hot-blooded clients.
Shallow himself did not whip girls. But he liked to watch while others did. There was never a Hem! or a H’m to be heard from him then. You could have heard a pin drop, or his heart beat, he was so quiet.
He liked best to stand with his watery eye pressed bloodshot to the keyhole while Doit or Pickbone or myself disported ourselves with a brace of wantons up from the country and burning for a dock or a good wap. Shallow would watch and mark points. Later, if sore provoked by our sweet rutting, he would try a trick himself, coming ever in the rearward of the fashion, as I have explained. Yet for buggery itself – the act between men (oh, Gower off!) – he had neither taste nor courage. Barnes tried once to bugger him, and had to cease for Shallow’s squealing. It was just like a stuck pig.
It was this Mr Shallow’s habit also to whistle to his 3d whores the tunes which he had heard the carmen whistle – and he would swear that they were his own fancies and goodnights, his personal improvisations on a theme of love.
To be fair to the poor fool fellow – for all his made-up talk of bona-robas – I must now recall the one occasion when I did succeed in bringing him face to face (well, you know by now what I mean) with a couple of high-class whores in his own chambers. Seeing that he begged me most piteously to stay and help him out, I did. I suppose it did not take a deal of begging. One of the girls was fair and buxom, reminding me a little of my nectarious Ophelia. I had not seen Ophelia for about six months at that time. I slaked my thirst well between the thighs of her counterfeit.
R. Shallow sat up in bed in a red cotton nightcap, with a floppy tassel, studying us.
‘Oh Jack!’ he moaned. ‘Oh, Pyramus and Thisbe! Romeo and Juliet! Hero and Leander!’ He applauded a specific thrust of mine. ‘If only,’ he sighed, ‘if only I could do something like that …’
Biting my tongue which was requiring to say a word about running down to the fruitshop to see if Mrs Sampson Stockfish was available, I urged my envious friend to concentrate as hard as he could upon his own quite beddable wench. She had dark hair, soft and lustrous, fine bubbies, and a round white belly, the bottom part of it covered with a thicket of jet-black curls. From where I lay on my own wanton, I could see the dear delicious slit on this, her friend. The dark girl had evidently been aroused by the sight of her companion’s pleasuring. Two plump and rosy lips gaped slightly open – I’m talking about her cunny, Hanson – as though the sweet little aperture wanted itself to express surprise, and declare what it desired done to it.
The dark girl made a grab for Shallow’s apology. She seized that flaccid organ in her hands, and began to rub it for him with a deal of alacrity, as if she wished to start a fire from the results.
Poor Shallow’s prick stayed desolate.
I whispered in the ear of my own whore. She smiled obligingly, rolled her eyes, and turned her head to take Shallow’s flimsy weapon in her mouth. She sucked. She sucked hard. She licked and nibbled and gnawed and sought to swallow the damned thing.
Shallow went a shade pink in the chops, and his nose ran, but nothing else.
‘This is about as exciting as taking the ferry to the Isle of Dogs,’ complained the blonde bona-roba, removing her sucky lips from Shallow’s effort, and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked up at me shrewdly, ‘Is it boys your friend wants?’
‘Oh no,’ moaned Shallow, closing his eyes, and clenching his teeth. His face was flattened in like a thing of one dimension. ‘I could never abide boy flesh,’ he whined. ‘Boy flesh is like cold pork. Never abide it.’
I stretched out my arm and stroked his whore’s white belly tenderly. Her cunt had a pretty mouth, with the longest clitoris I had ever seen. It was like a catkin. I put my finger on it, and tickled her a bit. She wriggled. I squeezed. It seemed such a waste, to me, but for friendship’s sake, for Shallow’s sake, I said –
‘Turn over!’
‘You mean he—?’
‘That’s right,’ I advised her briefly. ‘Mr Shallow likes to plough the netherlands.’
The little dark beauty raised her eyes long-sufferingly to heaven (or, more exactly, to the beams of our chambers in the Inns of Court), but then she rolled over on her belly as I had bade her, offering my friend the freedom of her buttocks. She had a fine bottom. Hardly a virgin fortress, I suspect, but not over-visited.
‘Now then, Shallow old shakes,’ said I, ‘you can do your worst there. Spear up, man!’
Shallow still hesitated.
‘They’re the best bona-robas, Jack? I’ve your word for it?’
‘The finest in Cheapside, tell your pocky friend,’ said my blonde in my ear, as she tempted me on again, with ankles crossed behind my back and fingers contriving to frig us both at the same time. Such sweet impossibility! ‘Which is the best outside the Palace of Westminster,’ she added in a provocative whisper, winking her eye as if to tell me that she had heard from higher companions in the trade that the four princes were skilled in other sorts of tilting than the sort that went on in public.
For some reason, I found that last piece of information infinitely delectable. I gave myself wholly to her. Hard. The bed cracked under our thumping.
Shallow meanwhile moved tentatively upon his wanton’s bottom. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. Like a swan looking for somewhere to land.
‘Barlaam and Josaphat and Jormungander!’ cried the girl, who had evidently had religious clients in her time. ‘It tickles! It’s like being stung by butterflies! It’s like sitting on a pin covered with angels!’
‘Silence!’ shrieked Shallow. ‘Oh do tell her to be quiet, Jack,’ he implored me, ‘or I shan’t ever be able to manage, and then there’ll be – nothing – nothing to look back upon – in my old – in my old age …’
He was doing his best. Indicate that by dashes, if you please.
I was completing my third stanza of rhyme royal with the blonde.
‘You shut up, Miss Metaphysics,’ I grunted to her companion, where she lay beside us, face down on the one green pillow, ‘or I’ll do both ends of you when my friend has finished!’
I did anyway.
I had to – since Shallow couldn’t.
I worked like a Turk, while my poor friend stood and watched, his miserable spindly carrot in his fist.
The blonde bona-roba stretched out her fingers – out of sheer goodness of heart, in that mood of overflowing generosity which can sometimes possess a woman well-satisfied – she stretched out her skilful fingers to take his twitching member and assist him.
‘Hands off!’ squealed Shallow, slapping her away. ‘I’m being Jack! I’m doing what he’s doing!’
His trouble was he couldn’t. Though he tried.
I never needed to knock at the back door, either – although if one of the girls wanted it, and I was weary of the other, I had no aversion to giving it to them there as well. Witness Mrs Ford, and friend.
Mr Shallow, poor Shallow, on the occasion I am speaking of, he succeeded in capering about with his tiny trout in one hand and a lawyer’s ruler in the other. With the ruler he gave the bona-robas a few stings. The blonde got angry with him, because he hit too hard, when she had expected playfulness, or that his ruler would be as ineffective as his cock. She leapt from the bed and chased him round the room. She caught him one almighty thwack which had all her fleshy arm behind it.
‘O times! O morals!’ cried poor Shallow, and ejaculated in the chamberpot.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
About some more figs
27th April
I have been told that figs won’t grow in England.
They will for me!
Dionysus planted a fig tree at the gates of Hell.
Zaccheus climbed up a fig tree to see our Lord.
Judas hanged himself on one.
If you don’t believe me, if you can’t accept the word of an English knight – go, and see for yourself!
Besides, that giant faces south.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
About great events in the wide world
28th April
And at this time, when I was whooping it up in my mad days in the city of London, with little Doit and big Black Barnes and all the rest, what was happening in the wide world, you say? What were the great men doing?
Reader, they were doing what I was doing. Only on a larger scale.
The bloody Mongols were defeating the bloody Lithuanians at the River Vorskla.
The singing masons were building a hammerbeam roof on Westminster Palace.
Henry IV took to addressing Parliament in English for the first time. He was short of money.
Timur the Lame carried off all the craftsmen from Damascus, and shut down the steel factories there.
A very rich Welshman called Owen Glendower had a quarrel with his neighbour, Reggie, Lord Grey of Ruthin, over a field which both of them wanted. For whatever it’s worth, I think Glendower had the better claim. But the point was that when he presented his case before the King, Henry went and muttered something about barefooted scrubs – and then the Welsh fat was really in the fire. Glendower went home a nationalist. There followed a sort of uproar for about six years, until Hal put an end to it, with help from me. More of that in due course.
There was the usual war between England and Scotland.
There were Lollards.
Poland got married to Lithuania.
The Spaniards starting building a cathedral in Seville – which is still not half-way finished at the date of this writing.
Timur the Lame defeated and captured Bajazet at Ankara.
Valais joined the Swiss League.
Baghdad was being rebuilt – following Timur the Lame’s visit, of course.
There was some sort of nasty alliance between Manuel II and Suleiman, the Emir of Turkey.
The Scots, etc, etc.
The Welsh, etc, etc, etc.
And the Irish. Always, of course, the Irish. Etc, etc, and ad infinitum, ad libitum, ad unum omnes, ad Graecas Calendas. I have the inside story on the Irish Question. I was there. I was the man. Wait for it.
History!
History (have you noticed, madam?) is so much piss and wind.
Clio is the Muse of History. And who was Clio’s mother?
Mnemosyne.
Mrs Memory.
That’s who.
And who was Clio’s father?
Your author.
Chapter Thirty
Sir John Fastolf’s humble address to his readers
29th April
Your HOLINESS, my Lord Archbishop, your Beatitude, your Excellencies, your Graces, Right Reverend Monsignors, dear Provosts, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, Men and Women, Children, Embryos, and Spermatozoa – was that last chapter boring enough?
I rather fear it wasn’t. And all on account of that Timur the Lame.
To put matters right with you, and more especially with my critics, the Historians – that girl Clio sleeps with anyone these days – I issue now a solemn warning and promise that my next chapter, tomorrow’s Day, will prove VERY BORING INDEED. In fact, I think I may claim even in advance of the event that it is more boring than Gower’s Confessio Amantis laid end to end with his Vox Clamantis (and both poems refusing, of course, to give us a bit of the old 69).
In other words, a piece of history. Of the ‘great’ sort. Not cribbed from Higden either. None of your Polychronicon staining these pages, thank you. Nor your De proprietatibus rerum. I use that stuff of Glanville’s to light the fire.
No, my dear Readers, what I have in hand, by Clio’s clitoris, no less, is a unique document. Here is history before it is writ.
Remember Reggie? Lord Grey of Ruthin. That toady who started Glendower off on his nationalism. Reginald Ruthin. Lord, Lord, I could tell you a thing or two about him. Did you know that aftery Henry IV’s coronation banquet he pinched all the tablecloths, and sold them for fat fees
as souvenirs? But never mind that. It’s History with a capital H you’re after. And a dose of that I can now provide. In the shape of a letter. An authentic letter. A letter as real as my boots.
How do I come to have it, since it was written by Reggie Ruthin to the Prince of Wales? Never mind that. You’ll soon be learning how close was the company I kept with Hal. If he lived in my pockets, I sometimes lived in his. Take it that my old mistress Ursula – I mean Mrs Helen Quickly – discovered it among my effects after that grand impersonation of a death which I had once to do at the Boar’s Head tavern. Less of a death than an exercise in debt, if you must know. And by the time I got to France I had other things on my mind than Reggie Ruthin’s creeping letter, wanting Hal to come and sort out his Welsh problems for him with an expense of English blood.
This letter came to light again when I bought the Boar’s Head, later.
Enough preamble. Prepare for serious reading.
(Scrope must be got for copying out this crap. Only his mean little hand, just the right size for a column of figures all adding up neatly, can possibly do justice to its slavishness.)
The next chapter should really be called The Art of Royal Arse-licking.
Verb, sap.: it’s very average balls.
You can skip it if you’re young, and female, and like tomatoes.
That is my private dispensation. John Fastolf, his decree.
Meanwhile, prostrate at the feet of your HOLINESS, I have the honour to profess myself with the most profound respect, your HOLINESS’s most obedient and humble servant, your Eminence’s earwig, your Beatitude’s own bastard, and so on and so forth.