The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eight Which is mostly about choughs but has no choughs in it

When in the last chapter but one I named some of the birds that helped save Mr Shakespeare's mother from the hanging tree I must admit that I took a few of their names from his plays and his poems. Why not? How else could it be when you think about it? My mind is printed with his words and phrases. (Sometimes I think he dreamt me.) I was his page, sir. Now the page writes the book.

Remember, madam, I am an ancient actor. I strutted in my time on the ivory stages.

To be an actor, what is that to be? It is to be a man who turns himself into all shapes like a chameleon. But the whole damned craft is strange, and rooted in mystery. Why does one man's yawning make another man yawn? How, when standing in the jakes, should one man's pissing provoke a second? These are questions impossible to answer except in terms of some common nerve of human sympathy. But what if that sympathy be betrayed by art? What if your first man is not tired or pissy? He is your actor. He pretends a yawn he does not have in his jaws. He peacocks a piss when there's nothing in his bladder. In all this he's as false as those witches and old women that can bewitch our children. The forcible imagination of the one party moves and alters the spirits of the other. And behind the phantom of the player stands the god of the playwright. I was myself created by Mr Shakespeare. My real name is Nicholas Nemo. I am no fowler or ornithologist, no catcher of birds or discourser upon their several kinds and conditions.

And yet not all is art. It is plain fact and verifiable that I have seen with my own eyes in the country around Stratford-upon-Avon certain among those birds I mentioned. For instance, finches. But others I know only from my trusty Folio - the chough, for instance, which I believe is not an inland bird at all, but more probably to be discovered at the sea-coast of Cornwall, where it builds its nest in the cliffs.

Reader, my procedure is to give you the warp and the weft of Mr Shakespeare's world. His mind held choughs, and his verse found places in it for those birds to fly, therefore it seems to me right that they should be here in the tale of his begetting in the night of the great storm.

Instances are on record of choughs being taught to speak, but Mr Shakespeare appears to have entertained no great opinion of their talking powers. He speaks in All's Well that Ends Well of 'chough's language, gabble enough, and good enough', and then in The Tempest the usurping Duke of Milan, talking of 'lords that can prate', says:

I myself could make

A chough of as deep chat.

Falstaff, in the scene with the Prince and Poins, when they are met to rob the travellers at Gadshill, speaks of the victims as 'fat chuffs' - no doubt from their strutting about with much noise.

By the by, Mr Shakespeare sometimes says choughs when I think he means jackdaws. For instance, in the second scene of the third Act of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where in my part of Puck he had me speak of

Russet-pated choughs, many in sort,

Rising and cawing at the gun's report.

Russet here is the French gris, a fine grey, and the head of the jackdaw about the neck and ear-coverts is precisely that colour. The head of the chough, like the rest of its body, I believe to be perfectly black.

But if you ask me our poet certainly means the cliff-haunting chough, your chough graculus or Pyrochorax, when he has Edgar at Dover in King Lear pronounce

Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful

And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles; half way down

Hangs one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade!

Sampire did you know is the herb of St Peter (San Pierre)? It was used in the old days for pickles. But I digress.

For instance, carp is a muddy fish.

For instance, old Mr Burbage had an anchor on his thigh.

For instance, I anchor my mind fast upon Mr Shakespeare.

(One must needs scratch where it itches.)

So if I tell you now of some of the things in the country-side about Stratford, my dears, you may take it as read that I speak of what I have seen with my own eyes.

No choughs in this chapter.

The country about Stratford is pretty, well-watered, and uninteresting. A few miles away rise the Cotswold hills. These have a bold beauty, very pleasant after the flatness of the plain. The wolds towards Stratford grow many oaks and beeches. Farther east, they are wilder and barer. Little brooks spring up among the hills. The nooks and the valleys are planted with orchards. There are grey farm-houses and little grey villages. There are sheep.

Michael Drayton called Warwickshire the heart of England. (And I heard Mr Shakespeare once call Michael Drayton seven sorts of an ass.) Other wise men remark that none of our counties is richer in truly English features, and that none has more verdant or more pleasing meadows than you can discover in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Certainly the Avon is an agreeable river. There are always the swans.

This famous Shakespeare country, then, is what? Let me spell it out in his own words, as I did with the birds. It is all lady-smocks and cuckoo-buds, and it is oaten straws and cowslips' ears. Marigolds. Mary-buds. Undulating farm-lands broken with coppices, I say.

Soho! Soho! So how did Mary Arden's garden grow?

How do you think? The same as any other for miles around.

She planted it when the frost broke in March. She set out thyme and hyssop, garlic, parsley for stuffing rabbits, saffron to colour her pale pies.

Rank fumiter grows in the hedgerows round about her village of Wincot, its flowers sometimes yellow, sometimes waxy red - as red that is to say as sealing-wax.

Idle weeds choked the corn in the bad days: hardokes, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers. (And quite what those hardokes were I have no idea. In the Quarto of Lear the word is printed hor-docks. But he always made me say it out as hardokes. Yes, madam, Pickleherring played Cordelia.)

Well, I think that's quite enough pastoral for one night. The truth is I've got little to say about the country. The country doesn't exist, so far as I'm concerned. It is Nothing turned inside-out and painted green in spring and golden in the autumn. It is all illusion. All the same, I like it. I also like the town. Pickleherring is not hard to please, you see.

As for Mr Shakespeare, I once heard him give his opinion of Stratford-upon-Avon in four words. Three of them were Stratford-upon-Avon. The other was a verb he never used in his plays.*

But today I feel scurrile - idle, dull, and dry. Reader, you cannot think worse of me than I do of myself.

What am I? I am an antic actor now turned writer to be thought a polymath and get a paper-kingdom. This book is my common theatre. The subject of my discourse: William Shakespeare.

I remember a night not long after I first came to London in Mr Shakespeare's company. We were eating carp quick cooked in butter. I spilt some of their shitty grease on the front of my shirt. Instantly, seeing my embarrassment, Mr Shakespeare thrust the forefinger of his right hand into the hot dish and smeared the front of his shirt to look like mine. I never dreamt of such courtesy before. I have not seen it very often since.

Mr Shakespeare's face was always full of the vivacity of his mind. His habitual look was that of an aloof but sunny spirit. He was a man alive to his fingertips.

I was a witness to some of Mr Shakespeare's life. I was not much of an actor in any of it. Nor am I exactly his bard, though of course he is mine. He has been my guiding spirit all my days.

He was my master, and my genius. I am a dwarf. He was a giant. Yet a dwarf sitting or standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than the giant himself. So, telling you Shakespeare's story, I tell you at least one story which Shakespeare could not tell.

O my tautologies. O my toys and fopperies.

All that's too bold, though. (Not like the pancake country round about Stratford.)

This chapter has been a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills. The next one should be better. In it I'll have the birth of our hero for my theme.

* Though he does have Sir Hugh Evans allude to it punningly in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where he asks 'What is the focative case, William?' Mr Shakespeare informed me that this character he based on his Welsh master at the Stratford Grammar School.