Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Let’s see if I can tell out the night.

  Coherence, continuity – that’s all. I’ll take a team of my secretaries. Worcester starts. When his hand burns with the telling, I’ll have Hanson and Nanton in. Then that lazy Scrope. And so on.

  (Fr Brackley is, of course, excused. It being the Feast of the Transfiguration. And here I might take the opportunity to explain to you, reader, whoever you are, that delay there was between my seventy-seventh and my seventy-eighth Days, and then my seventy-eighth and this present writing. It is to be confessed that your author grew overexcited in reciting Mrs Quickly’s account of country matters to Messrs Hanson and Nanton. Yes, I had to retire to bed. With Miranda. For a week. – Miranda is my medicine. She keeps me young. – Then, again, since Lammas, when I dictated to my stepson Stephen Scrope that report of how in Jerusalem I learnt how roses first came into the world, and the age of our Lady, and the precise date of the Day of Doom, I have been resting from my Acta for another week. I find it harder to say why. Something in Scrope exhausted me. Though I am glad he should at last have consented to write here, to help me, to be one of my scribes, to join our company. – Copying Reggie Tuthin’s letter didn’t count. – And I enjoyed telling him of my interviews with the three Popes there were in the world at that time, as much as I trust that you, dear reader, have enjoyed hearing about them.)

  Incidentally, it occurs to me tonight that this Great Schism, this superfluity of religion, or duplication of the Vicars of Christ, began, by a curious coincidence, in the year of my birth, namely the year of Our Forgiveness 1378. And since it is reliably reported that my coming forth into the world was an occasion for a minor earthquake which threw fishes up out of the pond of Mr Beckington, the Bishop of Wells, and onto his table where he was eating breakfast, I ask myself: Could my entrance into this little theatre of shadows have had something to do, albeit thousands of miles away from Wookey Hole, with those fifteen cardinals up and declaring the election of Urban VI invalid? Could my mother’s labour pains have affected Urban’s retort in naming twenty-eight new cardinals? And could the cutting of my birth-cord – which deed my father did with his bright sword – have metaphysically interfered with Christendom to such an extent that the first fifteen at once proceeded to elect Cardinal Robert of Geneva as Pope Clement VII, the Pope who went to live at Avignon?

  These questions are possibly due to an excess of piety, or a defect of pride, or an indigestion of lamphreys. I admit it.

  Everyone knows now that the Popes at Rome were the true Popes, the Urbanist line. Everyone knew it then, too, save the French and the Neapolitans and the Scots, who supported the Clementine claimants for political reasons. As you will know from what I told you via Scrope regarding my assessment of the personalities of John XXIII, Benedict XIII, and Gregory XII, it came as no surprise to me when the Church looked back and said that Gregory had been true Pope all along.

  And yet – and yet – that verdict of mine was a shallow and irrelevant one. The larger point is that the character of a man is not in question. A bad Pope may be a true Pope. The truth is in the office, not the man. Those antipopes could have been angels, but they would still have had no validity or authority.

  As a matter of fact, though, I liked Gregory. He was such a weak and nice old man, easily influenced, with an untouchable dignity in the middle of it. He blessed this medal which hangs around my neck.

  Such pleasure to have Scrope in our book at last! He writes a fair hand, Worcester says.

  My eyes are going.

  O the vines and demoiselles of Provence, where Bardolph and I lingered coming home. In our travels we saw many wonders. And no doubt we were wonders to other travellers, who in their travelling saw us.

  Worcester, what was it I was going to do tonight?

  Ah, yes. Benedicite. Thank you, Mr Cyclops.

  My time among knaves and kings.

  I was always one for fitting my suit to the scene. Among villains I determined early to play them at their own game, and to win if I could. I don’t know if I succeeded in this design – or if it would have been better (I will not say more ‘honourable’) to have failed. What is certain is that no man of our time has tried harder. I had, after all, a kind of court in Cheapside. The Boar’s Head tavern was my palace. There I reigned. There I ruled. A roast-beef bullcalf. The British Bacchus. England’s heart. Her hero.

  God’s teeth, her stomach.

  We laughed a lot. Yes. In risu veritas, as that Irishman said who spiked me up the bum.

  What a comedian. O we were all comedians: Bardolph and Pistol and Doll and Nell; Peto and Shallow and Nym and Hal. Especially that Hal. A great comedian.

  And I? The life and soul of the party, madam.

  Or, to put it another way: Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me. The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than I invent or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.

  Worcester, what did the doctor say about my water?

  Tell him to piss off then.

  Knaves and kings. Everyone has to start somewhere. Where did I begin?

  Threadneedle Street, if you want to know. The third street from Cheapside to the thoroughfare from London Bridge to Bishop’s Gate. That is, not New Fish Street, madam. Nor, as you might have hoped, Gracious Street.

  I would have been young. Of course. And new and raw to London. I would have been hungry.

  It was nine o’clock at night. St Mary Woolnoth had just sounded.

  I saw a confectioner’s shop. There was a basket of raisins on the counter. I whipped in, snatched it up, and set off at the trot.

  The confectioner came after me –

  ‘Stop, thief!’ –

  such nervous originality! –

  and so did all his neighbours. (Londoners at that time of night like nothing better than a spot of thief-bashing, if they can get it.)

  These gentlemen could easily have caught me – I being handicapped with raisins.

  It was a time for philosophy.

  Turning the corner of Threadneedle Street, I set the basket down quick on the ground, sat on it, and wrapped my cloak about my leg. At the same moment, most dramatically, without hesitation, I started howling. ‘God forgive him! God forgive him! God forgive the bloody bugger!’

  Up runs the honest confectioner and his cronies. ‘What’s happened?’

  I held my leg with both hands. I writhed like a centipede with gout.

  ‘I have been crippled by a running thief,’ I said.

  ‘A bastard with a basket?’

  ‘He attacked you also? The villain! Oh, my leg! He has broken my leg! Sir, have you mastered the elements of surgery?’

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘I forgive him his gross violence,’ I said. ‘The Scriptures so enjoin us, and be sure I do. Oh, sirs, for the Lord’s sake pity the lame!’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ cried the confectioner. ‘Which way?’

  ‘Down towards the Thames.’

  And off they run, with never a Christian surgeon among them to stop and succour the broken boy by the wayside.

  I went home quietly with the raisins to my lodgings in the Inns of Court. With 4lbs of prunes they made a decent supper.

  Beginner’s stuff.

  Shallow, that second-hand man, wanted to see me in action. Of course. The usual story. Being so backward and lacking in any kind of act himself. So I invited him along to see me abstract a box of peaches. This was when I was a little more advanced in my vocation. He came, with one or two others, students of law. I was to show them how best to bend or break it.

  I chose a shop not far from the previous one. (Always commit your crimes in the same place. No one will ever suspect that anyone could be so stupid. And stupidity, properly deployed, is a fine weapon in the right criminal hands.)

  When Mr Shallow saw that all the boxes in this selected shop were heaped up deep inside, so that there
was no easy reaching them by just leaning through the door, he concluded that my attack was impracticable, especially since the grocer, knowing what had happened to the confectioner, was on his guard. However, Jack Fastolf was always more than a match for anyone who needed to make his living by selling peaches.

  My method was this – and copy it to the letter next time you are in need of peaches for your lady’s tongue, to freshen that organ of sinful fantasy!

  I drew my sword on the pavement.

  I kicked open the door with my foot.

  I ran in roaring, ‘Dead, dead, dead for a ducat! Dead, sir!’ – and in the same invasion made a wild, thrasonical thrust in front of the shopman’s eyes.

  He, of course, fell flat down on the floor behind his counter. Where he squealed and shouted for help.

  My weapon, meanwhile, had passed clear and clean through a nice tight box of peaches. The sound of my sword through that thin wood was excellent music.

  I ran from the establishment with the dead meat on my blade. A trickle of peach juice followed me. We were all so busy laughing we could scarcely run. Those peaches were bleeding their sweet juice, a thin, delicious scent on the summer twilight air.

  R. Shallow of course stayed pissing himself to watch – and reported to me later that the spruce grocer had his friends strip all his clothes off him in searching for the deep imaginary wound that had felled him. When it was at length established that only a box of his peaches had been raped and rifled, the grocer’s relief was such that he fell to blessing himself as if he would never stop.

  I never ate anything that pleased my imagination half as much as those peaches.

  I might have been eating four dozen virgins.

  I was.

  Such things were the merest tricks and knaveries, slight jokes, small pickings. Apprentice work. Later I graduated to the task of disarming the watch.

  Now that was something. I had no ulterior motive. It was an exercise in the academics of deceit. It marked my transition from the status of craftsman to artist.

  I chose the watch on Blackfriars Gate. Twelfth Night, it was. We’d had lamb’s wool for our wassail bowl – roasted apples, sugar, nutmeg, ginger, wine. Spiced cake, as well. (Some actors once plotted to murder Bolingbroke as part of a play to be performed at court on Twelfth Night, but that’s another story. The Glastonbury Thorn always blossoms on Twelfth Night too.)

  That particular Twelfth Night I set forth with Mr Shallow and the usual hangers-on. I marched in front with Bardolph. Our machination this time was that while we might have looked like a party of wassailers, we steadfastly did not wassail. Instead: we wailed.

  Encountering the watch, I wrung my hands.

  ‘Is it the watch? The watch that watches over us? Oh by the Arimathean Thorn, is it really you?’

  ‘He’s drunk,’ said one.

  ‘Sir, I am sober,’ I said. ‘A sober citizen requires an officer.’

  The officer exhibited himself.

  Then I knelt down and kissed his boots and said: ‘Lord officer, it is presently in your power to do the state some service, and revenge my father’s ghost.’

  ‘How’s that?’ asked the idiot.

  ‘Step on one side,’ I advised him, ‘and I will soliloquise and tell you something very privy concerning rapers.’

  He came all ears and eagerness to the wall.

  ‘Star of the watch,’ I said, ‘I have ridden to London from Glastonbury, in pursuit of six of the most wicked men in Christendom. All are thieves, and two are murderers. Among them is one who poured poison in my father’s ears, ravished my mother, and sodomised my brother Amleth the poet, without any provocation but to give his barbarity a trot down the alley.’

  ‘Who are these vipers?’

  ‘After the ravishing and the sodomy he cut their throats.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘And just look what his accomplices have done to my poor sister’s nose!’

  ‘Your sister?’ said the watchman, squinting at Bardolph where he simpered with his lamp.

  ‘O horror! Horror! Horror!’ I howled. ‘But now, no more of that, my master. From such atrocities and beasts who stop at nothing, the law alone can save us. Law and order, that’s the stuff.’

  ‘I am law and order,’ said the officer.

  ‘Thank God,’ I said. ‘She used to be a lovely girl, and now …’

  ‘It is monstrous,’ agreed the officer, leering at poor Bardolph. ‘But you must tell me more of—’

  ‘Sssh!’ I counselled. ‘The man I dare not name is with those five other fiends I mentioned. They are keeping company with a French spy not a hundred yards from where we stand.’

  ‘French spies?’ Promotion flashed in the idiot’s gaze. He had his sword out. His eyes ran up and down the street.

  ‘In Mrs Quickly’s brothel,’ I informed him. ‘Master, be brave. Wise King Henry will reward you well. Not to speak of my mother in heaven and my brother in purgatory.’

  With fierce and moral cries, the watch, led by this beetle-brained enthusiast for justice and self-betterment, blundered up the street towards the Boar’s Head.

  I had to run like a greyhound to head them off, and divert the officer aside again into the shadows.

  ‘O sir,’ I hissed, ‘this whole business will be spoilt if you proceed so crudely. Put up your bright swords. The right way to do this apprehension is for you to send your men in one by one, unarmed. For that devil is above with sweet Doll Tearsheet, and he may turn desperate and harm innocent whores if he sees mighty officers coming after him with swords. It would be politic to go in on tiptoe with a pot of pepper each – my sister has them! Just throw the pepper in his eyes and cock. Do the job stealthily, like immortal Ulysses. The girls, I am sure, will know how to thank you.’

  The jobbernowl approved this incredible plan. (If you want the impossible done, always suggest an improbable manner of doing it.)

  He told his men to hide their swords in a heap against the wall.

  They did.

  Then they went one by one up the stairs and into Mrs Quickly’s leaping house, each getting a kiss and a pepperpot from Bardolph on the door.

  My fellows then snatched up the discarded swords and made off at speed.

  When the watch came out – to the laughter of the crowd that had gathered, and pursued by naked girls, so Shallow told me – that master officer was in a fine spermy rage at the trick I had played on his reputation. He was the more furious when he found his weapons gone. And when Nell Quickly emptied either a wassail bowl or a chamberpot over him from the upstairs window. (Shallow said the scene was so confused by then that he couldn’t be specific as to contents. But I suggest that even if this was a Twelfth Night concoction it had passed through the kidneys of half the whores in Cheapside at least once.)

  The officer sent out the watch to search for me.

  And they found me too.

  But by the time they marched into my attic, I was stretched out white and stiff upon my cot, a nightcap on my head, a candle lighted in one hand and a crucifix in the other, with Peto playing priest beside me, dribbling viaticums, and all the rest of my companions on their knees about the bed.

  ‘It’s the Glastonbury Thorn,’ said Bardolph.

  ‘The Glastonbury Thorn?’

  ‘He pricked his hand on it and ran mad since. We have to humour him, and now he’s dying. Why, would you believe it, he even thinks I’m Queen Guinever!’

  ‘But what about our swords?’

  ‘Oh them … They’re over there!’

  Bardolph pointed with his nose.

  There were the swords of the watch, all neatly arranged in a circle, stuck to the hilts in a vast, round, hairy cheese.

  ‘He’s got this thing about King Arthur, you see,’ explained Bardolph. ‘It goes with it. The Glastonbury Thorn!’

  The officer tugged his sword out of the cheddar with a grunt.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Bardolph, moving closer to the man and polishing his whelks significa
ntly, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. We’re all expecting Merlin any minute!’

  The officer wiped his sword on his bum, ambiguously.

  They didn’t know what to do, or what to say.

  ‘Pray for him,’ barked Fr Peto.

  (When the outrage is complete, put in requests for prayer.)

  (Make them peremptory.)

  Chapter Eighty

  About Bartholomew Fair

  St Bartholomew’s Day

  Look at my shadow on the rafters there!

  A fat man greeting the abyss with laughter.

  A tidy little Bartholomew boar-pig.

  That’s me.

  Father, that shadow hovers all the time on the edge of some tremendous revelation –

  A revelation, maybe, of the meaning of the word Ducdame!

  Or an initiation into what fools truly signify by all they do when called into a circle?

  I am a fool.

  Kings need their fools.

  Because there is more instruction to be had from a fool than from a wise man.

  Because the fool dares to tell the truth.

  Sir Dagonet was Arthur’s fool.

  Harun al-Reshid had a fool called Bahalul.

  Edmund Ironside’s fool was called Hitard.

  I have heard tell also of one Bertoldo, who appeared at the court of Alboin, King of the Lombards. This Bertoldo was a peasant. He was wonderfully ugly. Wonderfully truthful. And wonderfully foolish.

  Philip of Macedon kept a court fool.

  Philip of Macedon kept a court philosopher.

  Philip of Macedon was wondrous wise.

  Philip of Macedon would have been wondrous wiser to have kept one man: a foolosopher.

  Father, I stand on my head and I turn your world upside-down.

  Father, I live for the tragic merrymaking of a minute and persuade you, against your ‘better’ judgement, that this is the only way to live.

  Father, I am shameless. I make you ashamed of your shame.

  Father, I tell you my truth as jokes. I beckon you to a black pit.

  Rahere. He started Bartholomew Fair.