by Robert Nye
So what we have here is a very queer kettle of fish. For Lucy was Shakespeare’s Muse, but so now was I. I was Lucy interpreted, Lucy played, Lucy made quick and amenable, the living Lucy perfected by his art and said by me. She had been turned into words and I was their incarnation. It is indeed a complex and a sinister process. Mr Shakespeare was using me to tame and to interpret his vision of the female sex. It is in this sense, best of all, that I was the master-mistress of his passion, and that I had one thing which was to his purpose nothing. He gave Lucy Negro the royal dignity of the Queen of Egypt, and then had me, a bastard boy from the fens, turn the queen back into riggish quotidian life. Never forget why Cleopatra kills herself: because she cannot bear the prospect of being paraded in parody in Caesar’s triumph –
I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ the posture of a whore.
But Lucy was a whore, and I was a boy. I played Cleopatra as myself playing Lucy Negro for the pleasure of the man she had given the pox. And for our final dress rehearsal, Mr Shakespeare had me go with him to the house in St John Street, where poet and Muse dressed me in one of Lucy’s best Queen Elizabeth gowns and I was commanded to act out my part under their glittering, critical eyes. My performance seemed to satisfy them. That is, she sat on his lap to watch me, and kept wriggling her haunches, and I was dismissed from their presence long before it came to asp-time.
Consider, all you who are either true or fair, could play go further?
What the Abbess of Clerkenwell made of my impersonation of her I cannot tell you. I do know that Mr Shakespeare added two words to Antony and Cleopatra on our return to the Globe. They come where the lady Charmian follows her mistress in death, her last words as she applies an asp to her own breast: Ah, soldier! That simple phrase marks the height of Shakespeare’s genius. Dante would never have thought of it, nor Homer neither.
My dear Polly is back! Last night I looked through the hole, without hope, and there was my love!
Polly was lying on her back below me, with her candles burning. She was naked save for a pair of black silk stockings. Her sweet face was most curiously made up, as though beginning with the eyes she had not had time to finish, for the rims of her eyes were dark, the rims only, and not the lids, no, not the lids at all. This effect is achieved, and achieved exclusively, by applying mascara under the lids alone. This I know well.
My heart leapt to my lips when I beheld her. They framed her name, although I did not speak.
For her part, Polly looked up at me, and she was smiling. Then she waved her hand to me, a circle in the gloom. It was a regal wave. Like Queen Elizabeth. My poor waif, my child of shame, my bride of darkness, daughter of the night, and yet for me the fairest of erth kinne – she knew I watched her, and she smiled at me; she knew I saw her, and she waved to me.
On yonder hill there stands a creature.
My lemmon she shal be.
O Polly dear.
Naked, on her back, and in her white bed, Polly saluted me gaily and gravely. My heart bowed down.
* Measure for Measure, Act IV, Scene 1, lines 1–8. Fletcher’s plagiarism occurs in his play The Bloody Brother.
* Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene 2, lines 235–8.
Chapter Ninety
Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song
Where Polly has been I don’t know, but she brought me back a present.
It is a curious thing – an Aeolian harp. I never saw anything like it before.
Aeolus in Roman mythology was the god of the winds. This wind-harp is a box on which strings are stretched. You do not play it, but you let it play. Polly showed me how. You hang the harp in the window, or stand it up on the windowsill. The breeze passing freely over the taut gut strings produces a haunting, long-drawn chord, rising and falling. This music is for all the world like the cry of some coy young maid half-yielding to her lover.
Hark! The wind kindles the strings again. This simplest lute placed length-wise in the casement is now my constant companion. It is as if Dame Nature told her secrets on the strings of the human heart.
Life is other than what one writes. When I thanked Polly for her gift, and made bold to kiss her hand in token of my gratitude, she spun three times round like a sweet little dervish, and then asked would I like to know what it is about me that touches her. Remembering that the night before last I am certain she knew that I spied on her naked in her bed, I hesitated. But the dear child took my hesitation for compliance, and so whispered her approbation in my ear. It is – in the way I think and speak, in my whole manner, apparently (and this is one of the compliments which has moved me most in my whole life) – my simplicity.
A harp, though a world in itself, is but a narrow world in comparison with the world of a human heart. And tonight the music of my wind-harp is not all I hear. It is raining. The rain drips and gathers in the eaves. The sound of the rain in the eaves is like Jane’s laughing.
I have a note in this box about Cordelia Annesley. Her story is soon told. She was the daughter of Sir Brian Annesley, a Kentish landowner who had been a Gentleman Pensioner to Queen Elizabeth. In the autumn of 1603 this poor fellow’s two older daughters tried to have their father certified insane so as to get their hands on his estate. Their names were Lady Sandys and Lady Wildgoose. Cordelia, his youngest daughter, protested against this proposal, in a letter to Secretary of State Cecil. She urged, as an alternative, that a guardian should be appointed for her father. On Sir Brian’s death the Wildgooses contested his will, but they failed in their attempt to stop Cordelia inheriting what was rightly hers. This woman became in 1608 the second wife of Mr W. H. – Sir William Hervey, widower of the dowager Countess of Southampton, Rizley’s mother. I think Cordelia Annesley’s story gave Mr Shakespeare some of his plot for King Lear.
I was the first Cordelia, of course. (John Spencer Stockfish was well-cast as Goneril.) My part contains only one hundred lines – forty in the first Act, sixty in the last. But my influence is felt throughout the play, and I believe beyond it. Mr Shakespeare played the part of Kent in the early performances – a role which much suited him, and also allowed him to be frequently in the wings directing what we did.
Notice the sound of the words NOTHING and PATIENCE in this play. King Lear rings with them, just as Othello is a kind of fugue on the word HONESTY. I never hear any of these words spoken but I think of Mr Shakespeare.
Reader, have you ever remarked that Cordelia and the Fool are never on the stage at the same time? This cunning of Mr Shakespeare’s was quite deliberate. It permitted me to play both parts in the play. He had me cut out for a fool as well as a truth-teller. So that when Lear says And my poor Fool is hang’d he means not only his one honest daughter who truly loved him.
Let me tell you something strange. Just as I sometimes think that William Shakespeare dreamt me up that afternoon in Cambridge, creating me as I jumped down off the wall, so it has also occurred to me that in making me double the parts of Cordelia and the Fool he taught me the voice in which I have written this book you are reading. Did Mr Shakespeare know that I would one day write his Life? Of course not. But he must have heard in me the possibility.
In this my 90th box I have kept a poem of Mr S’s that you will not know. It is a ballad sung by Edgar in King Lear. We used it to cover the noise of scene-shifting between the third and fourth scenes of Act II. For some reason it does not appear in the play as printed in the Folio. I suppose WS never wrote it down into his fair copy. He produced this song on the spot when we realised we needed it, saying it followed on naturally from Edgar’s declaring Poor Turlygod! Poor Tom! / That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am, and his lines about becoming a Bedlam beggar. When Burbage said it was several verses too long for the time it took to change our scene from the wood to Kent in the stocks before Gloucester’s castle, Mr Shakespeare scowled, then grinned, then scrunched up the offending stanzas and kicked them into the pit.
Here is the poem. It has no
title, but I call it Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song:
From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye
All the spirits that stand by the naked man
In the Book of Moons defend ye!
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken
Nor wander from yourselves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon.
While I do sing ‘Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing’
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
Of thirty bare years have I
Twice twenty been enragèd,
And of forty been three times fifteen
In durance soundly cagèd
On the lordly lofts of Bedlam
With stubble soft and dainty,
Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips ding-dong,
With wholesome hunger plenty.
And now I sing, etc.
With a thought I took for Maudlin
And a cruse of cockle pottage
With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all,
I befell into this dotage.
I slept not since the Conquest,
Till then I never wakèd
Till the roguish boy of love where I lay
Me found and stripped me naked.
And now I sing, etc.
When I short have shorn my sowce face
And swigged my horny barrel
In an oaken inn I pound my skin
As a suit of gilt apparel.
The moon’s my constant mistress
And the lonely owl my marrow,
The flaming drake and the night-crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
While I do sing, etc.
The palsy plagues my pulses
When I prig your pigs or pullen,
Your culvers take, or matchless make
Your chanticleer, or sullen.
When I want provant, with Humphrey
I sup, and when benighted
I repose in Paul’s with waking souls
Yet never am affrighted.
But I do sing, etc.
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars
And the wounded welkin weeping;
The moon embrace her shepherd
And the queen of Love her warrior,
While the first doth horn the star of the morn
And the next the heavenly Farrier.
While I do sing, etc.
The Gipsy Snap and Pedro
Are none of Tom’s comradoes;
The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn
And the roaring-boys’ bravadoes.
The meek, the white, the gentle,
Me handle, touch, and spare not,
But those that cross Tom Rhinoceros
Do what the panther dare not.
Although I sing, etc.
With an host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear, and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wild world’s end –
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing ‘Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing’
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
Reader, does this song trouble your memory? Does it make you feel that you have heard it somewhere before? Mr Shakespeare used to say that poetry is original not because it is new but because it is both new and old, something you seem to remember the first time you hear it. Poetry is original because it deals in origins. Something in poor Tom o’ Bedlam’s song reminds me of Adam. Something in poor Tom o’ Bedlam’s song reminds me of us all.
It is easy to clothe imaginary beings with our own thoughts and feelings. But to send ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of beings in circumstances wholly and strangely different from our own, and yet make those beings remind us of us all – hoc labour, hoc opus! Who has achieved it? Only Shakespeare.
Chapter Ninety-One
In which William Shakespeare returns to Stratford
Here are Anne Shakespeare and her daughter Judith, sewing. They sit on low stools by the window that looks out into the garden of New Place. Anne has a green shield across her eyes, for the evening sun is bright and the work particular. The sunlight glints on the gold medal between Judith’s breasts.
Here is a neighbour come calling – Mrs Judith Sadler, perhaps, wife of the baker Hamnet Sadler, Mrs Shakespeare’s lifelong friend. She rallies Mrs Shakespeare on her industry, remarking teasingly that all the wool spun by Penelope ‘did but fill Ithaca full of moths’. They talk over various items of gossip: who’s dead, who’s dying, Anne’s beloved granddaughter Elizabeth chasing a golden butterfly, the fruit of the mulberry tree which is too soft to stand touching just now, the price of needles. Meanwhile, the evening makes a glory of all Stratford. There was a shower just before my chapter began, but now it has stopped the rabbits are emerging from their burrows. Tradesmen are singing in their shops. Boys play at bowls on the slippery ground, one of them tumbling past his own throw.
How do I know these things? I admit I do not. I have transposed them from a charming scene you will find in Coriolanus. That scene is not in Plutarch. It is pure Stratford.
Mr Shakespeare’s mind was at all times possessed with images and recollections of English rural life – but there is more to it than that. I have yet to learn that his fancy could not luxuriate in country images even amid the fogs of Southwark and the Blackfriars, but from about the time of his daughter Susanna’s wedding he had no need to feed on memories, for after that happy event he spent more and more time in the town of his birth, where his heart always lay. The masque in The Tempest was used originally in honour of Susanna’s wedding, by the by. She was always her father’s favourite. Having known her, I can inform you that she flits in and out of all his later works – she is Mariana in Pericles, and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and Miranda in The Tempest. A woman with a pale, ugly, clever face, she resembled neither of her parents save in her wit.
Mr Shakespeare never thought of taking a great house or a high place in London – he rather kept retired, in modest lodgings, and saved money. He was always a good man of business. By 1589, when he was only twenty-five, he was a minor shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, and of course he was afterwards a leading shareholder in the Globe. As a writer of plays for both these houses, he realised great gains, and from his thirty-third year on he was investing his profits in property in his native town. It was typical of him to return to Stratford, though none of us knew he was doing it until it was done. There was no dramatic exit. Rather, he transformed his residence by degrees. Certainly by the time we did Coriolanus he would have been able to observe at first hand a scene such as his wife and daughter sewing, any day of the week. Such domesticities became much to his liking in his later years. The plays become full of forgiving wives and daughters, critical and original women who yet pardon their men. What part his daughter Judith played in this I could not tell you. She never seemed to me to have forgiven her father for his long years of absence, but then indeed she never seemed much interested in William Shakespeare at all. (She once told me she would prefer to talk of Sir Francis Drake!) She was an altogether enigmatical woman. The poet’s widow had her mysteries too, but her silences were of a different order, and I always sensed that she had welcomed her husband’s return, and made much of it, and him, and the two of them together. Yet there can be little doubt, I think, that the prime mover in the drama of the playwright’s later years in Stratford was his daughter Susanna, by then married to Dr John Hall. We shall notice in due course that she was the principal
beneficiary of his will. Her epitaph deserves repeating in this connection:
Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she’s now in bliss.
In other words, Susanna was a good Christian as well as a good Shakespearean. I like to think of her as the last of her father’s heroines, and as open-eyed and original as any of the others.
I like also to think of the late Mr Shakespeare spending the latter part of his life as all men of good sense will wish theirs to be – in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends. Of course it was not exactly like that, but while we are in the mood for idylls let us picture to ourselves, madam, the poet seated one warm evening at that same window where we just spied Judith and Anne. His hand moves on his tablet. He is engaged, no doubt, in the composition of his latest play. Again and again he is distracted, breaking off to watch his daughter Susanna and her little child Elizabeth as they run here and there among the borders of summer flowers. It crosses his mind, maybe, idly to wonder as the sunbeams seek to pierce the shadows of the rose trees and a distant, drowsy humming makes soft music in his ears which thing it is he likes the better – that freshly fashioned Ariel song of his:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie …
or – the real sound of the bees, and the reality of the child and her mother there among the flowers?