by Robert Nye
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.
* Act I, Scene 1, lines 23–4.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
About Comfort Ballantine
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 thoug
ht. 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.
* See sonnet 125. The procession went from the Tower through the City, passing under seven triumphal arches. At every halt a speech or song by Thomas Dekker greeted the King and Queen, to their eventual less than delight. The great canopy over their heads was carried by eight senior members of our Company. I can’t remember which, but certainly Burbage and Heminges took part, as well as Mr S. They all wore red and black livery, with scarlet cloaks, and walked bare-headed.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
In which Pickleherring plays Cleopatra at the house in St John Street
I have often regretted my failure in the part of Isabella. My heart could do with a measure of divine love. The dignity of Portia, the energy of Beatrice, the radiant high spirits of Rosalind, the sweetness of Viola – I was shaped by the female parts I had to play, and I am missing some hunger for heaven in my make up. Had I been able to make a success of Isabella’s character I would have less of that wretched Petrarchan worship of the unattainable female in my soul. It is not really worship. It is lust.
But Isabella, I found, has impossible things to say. I mean, things that your humble servant finds impossible. Of course, madam, you are right – no one in real life ever spoke like any of William Shakespeare’s characters. His language hovers on the threshold of a dream. Yet I say that he possessed an implicit wisdom deeper even than consciousness. There is another comfort than this world … Had I been able to say such things with conviction doubtless I would have been a better player and a better man. I would certainly have been one less obsessed with the divinity of breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, or for that matter with hell heard in the shriek of a night-wandering weasel.
But without more ado about nothing, permit me to tell you that Mr John Fletcher mutilated that song Take, O take those lips away* when he dropped the echo of ‘Bring again’ and ‘Seal’d in vain’, thus achieving the remarkable feat of turning a nightingale’s song into a sparrow’s. I never had much time for Mr Fletcher, and not just because he called me mediocre. The man was an opportunist. The blossoms of his imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand. He had a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them. Nothing shows this better than that terrible thing he did to the song sung by the boy servant to the forsaken Mariana.
To this period of Mr Shakespeare’s sojourn at the Mountjoys, with his soul and his papers under the watchful eye of the cook Comfort Ballantine, belong some of his greatest writings. I mean: Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. There are odd links between them, not always noticed. You may not know, for instance, that on the twenty-seventh page of the first volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles (which was always at Shakespeare’s elbow when he was composing) there is a rough woodcut of a fellow with a villainous look and underneath it no story but a title in capital letters
IAGO
and that opposite this woodcut, on the facing page, there is a picture of Cordelia, named as daughter of King Lear. These images sank deep in our poet’s imagination, coming up in separate plays, yet beginning together. The sound of the name Iago must have seemed especially evil to Mr Shakespeare, since later in Cymbeline he rang the changes on it, and adopted for his new villain, whose character was almost as atrocious as the cunning Venetian’s, the name of Iachimo. As for the name Othello, it came (so he told me) from Moghrib: Hawth Allah. We performed the play for the first time on November 1st, 1604, in the presence of King James, Anne of Denmark and her brother Prince Frederik of Wurtemberg. It became a very popular and profitable piece. Within months Burbage reported that someone in his parish of St Leonard in Shoreditch had christened their newly-born daughter with the name of Desdemona, hitherto unknown in England. I was much flattered. Mr Shakespeare, however, quickly brought me back down to earth by telling me of another man who had called his pet rat Desdemona in honour of my performance.
Beyond these trivialities, I would like to observe that it seems to me that two things were happening in Mr Shakespeare’s work about this time. First, with the accession to the throne of King James, he found a better patron than the Earl of Southampton, not in the sense that James gave him £1000 gifts or anything of that sort but in the sense that some of Shakespeare’s earlier work had been written to divert or enflame the fancy of Southampton, ten years his junior, and that this rather led the poet into idylls. What I am trying to say is that the aristocratic futility of Southampton bred a certain kind of gold fire in WS’s works which were written if not to please him then at least with that possible pleasure sometimes in mind. When James became the chief member of WS’s audience then new elements came in – some good, some not so good, but all of them more serious. Perhaps it is just that Shakespeare grew more serious himself, though I hesitate to offer such a banality. The middle age of Mr S was all clouded over, certainly, and his days were not more happy than Hamlet’s, who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself, in his common everyday life, than any other of his characters. Yet having said that, I want to withdraw it on the instant. William Shakespeare is never to be identified by pinning him down as ‘like’ or ‘unlike’ any single one of his characters. He was like and unlike them all. He was Iago as well as he was Cordelia. Those crude remembered woodcuts were mirrors of his soul. In short, it was only by representing others that Shakespeare became himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra. But in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter’s cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired. In expressing his own thoughts, he was a mechanic. Witness even how from the beginning of his career he found himself in others – for it was only in adapting plays which had been written by other men that he first discovered his own powers. And then even when he was gradually drawn on to write original plays of his own, he nearly always derived his subjects for those plays from histories and their substance from collections of prose tales written by others.
The second thing I want to say generally about Mr Shakespeare at this point in his life is that it seems to me that with this graver tone he also turned not so much his back on fame and favour, but aside from fame and favour. From now on he was after more difficult and even more fleeting game. I will not say that it was better game, since I am no moralist. But it is surely not irrelevant that from this time forth he began to spend
more time in Stratford than he spent in London. Perhaps you are right, sir, and he simply preferred having Anne Shakespeare redding up his papers. But I think there might have been more to the matter than that.
Cleopatra as I have said was the height of my performance as a woman. I confess that I was freakish, and that my piping voice was a long time a-breaking. (And now I am old I squeak again like a boy.) Wigged, singed, perfume-sprayed, with smooth-shaven armpits and gilded eyelids, I was the fleshpot of Egypt. It was out of deference to my being no longer in the first flush of youth that Mr Shakespeare makes Cleopatra thirty-six years old at the opening of the play, with twenty years having passed since she subdued Caesar, and it being now ten years that Antony has been ‘caught in her strong toil of grace’. In fact I was twenty-four at the time of our first performance. I have never forgotten the last rehearsal Mr Shakespeare made me do for it.
I had realised from the start, of course, just who I was playing. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.* Who else could this be but Lucy Negro? It is as if the Dark Lady of the sonnets stepped forth on the public stage. Note some of the other things that are said about Cleopatra – particularly her habit of hopping to fetch her breath short for men’s arousal. This is Lucy Negro to the life. Vilest things are said to become themselves in her, and the holy priests to bless her when she is riggish. All this sounds like the tone of the sonnets to me, and the last phrase reminds me especially of a story Mr Shakespeare told me of how Lucy liked to go to confession and excite her confessor with details of her sins of lasciviousness. Since RIGGISH, besides, is the very word that my master always used of the Abbess of Clerkenwell (‘Lucy was unslakedly riggish with me last night,’ and so on) I had no doubt from the first moment I began to learn my lines who it was that he was wanting me to portray.