The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eleven

About this book

You understand, madam, that I do not mean to say that the late Mr Shakespeare was the bastard son of a priest. (Though in all honesty there are worse things to be, and I am myself the bastard son of a bishop's bastard.)

I only tell you stories about Shakespeare. I only tell you tales which I have heard. You are not required to believe any particular one of them. Nor is it necessary to salvation that you should. But from the over-all impress of the various stories may you perhaps come to know our poet thoroughly. One story might cancel out another. But the whole book will be more than the sum of its parts.

For what it is worth, sir, I think Shakespeare was the son of a butcher (and whittawer). Or perhaps a glover's son.

But, having said that, what have we said in any case? What, in other words, do we mean when we say Shakespeare?

Who is Shakespeare? What is he? (that all our swains commend him). Yes, good reader, what is Shakespeare? That is the question my book is trying to answer. What is Shakespeare? Where is he to be found? How can we tell the man from the work, and both from the stories about him? Why did the sly fellow leave so little information about himself, so few facts in the way of footprints made in Time? Why did he cover his tracks so cleverly, leaving not a rack behind? What is the proper name for the subject of our study: Shakespeare or 'Shakespeare'?

Sometimes I think that no one has ever been so many men as this man. Like the Egyptian Proteus, he exhausts all the guises of reality.

That Proteus was a minor sea-god, herdsman of the flocks of the salt sea, its seals and its dolphins and so forth. He was a daimon, servant to Poseidon. He had this power to assume all manner of shapes, but if held till he resumed the true one, he would answer questions. And so in this book I try to hold the late Mr Shakespeare.

Not that WS was a god, you understand; nor even a demiurge or daimon. He was just a man like any other man. Only he was just a man like every other man, and more so. This means that we must think of Shakespeare as always more than we can say about Shakespeare. And, as he remarked to me once, in an unguarded moment, a moment when weariness and excitement made the mask slip and his tongue lose reticence, we must think of Shakespeare as always less than we can say about Shakespeare too.

What he said to me that day at the bear-garden was in fact that sometimes he did not feel as though he had written his own works. He said that sometimes he felt as if his works had been written by someone else of the same name. I do not think this betokens undue modesty. He was talking in part about inspiration, of course - that feeling all true poets must have, that their best work comes from somewhere else, from something other than their minds, and that they are merely the conduit for it. The poet takes; he does not ask who gives. 'Not I,' he cries, 'not I, but the wind that blows through me.'

But I believe my master Shakespeare meant more. That afternoon at the Paris Garden he was making reference to a certain quality or condition of being anonymous which is to be met in much of his writing. He becomes the men and women he writes about. Yet none of them is him. And then the character of his language has the same property. It attains a self-sufficing anonymity, so that no name is needed at the bottom of the page to qualify or identify what it says. It is not William Shakespeare who speaks in these plays and these poems. It is the English language speaking itself.

I say that the true life of William Shakespeare is in his plays and his poems. Yet the man himself, to my fingers, we touch nowhere in the work.

Mr Shakespeare is the hero with a thousand faces, and none.

Even the spelling of his name makes him elusive as a sliver of quicksilver.

Shakespere was my father.

William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare - the day will come when everyone will know the name, I tell you. I knew him well, sir, and I know him not at all. Madam, there was this man, called William Shakespeare, a certain man who was a fine man too, greater than Tubal Cain or Roger Bacon, an upright, downright honest man, subtler than Avicenna, wiser than Paracelsus, knowing at least as much as Cornelius Agrippa himself of the doctrine of sympathy and antipathy in the mineral kingdom, and of the mystery which is fire (whose faithful secretary he was) - I mean, the mystery which is the fire of language - a man who lived in the old days, not so long ago, and who will live again, if you'll hear me out, for as long as this book lasts, at least.

William Shakespeare was the son of a butcher. During his christening feast, when many guests were seated round his father's table to eat a fatted calf, little William, being then but a few days old, was seized by a griffin and carried away. Over land and over sea the griffin flew, until it came to its stinking nest on top of a cliff in the western isles of Scotland, where it deposited the fledgling lad. One of the griffin's brood, wishing to reserve such a delicate poetic morsel for its own delectation, caught up our hero in its talons and flapped away to a neighbouring tree. But the branch on which this junior monster perched was too weak to support a double load. It broke. The startled griffin dropped its Shakespeare in a thicket. Undismayed by thorns, young William crawled from the griffin's reach, taking refuge in a cave. A delicious surprise awaited him there, for he found within the cave three girls who had escaped from the griffins in the same way--

Your author doesn't think that is going to do. Try again, Pickleherring. Writing makes history possible. Least among lies is the lie told in jest (mendacium iocosum). These fictions are jocose, and not officious. These fictions are fantastic, and not pernicious. These fictions are a comedy, and not malicious. These fictions presently form a story of beginnings. There will be middles enough and endings too, to come. Your author tells of the late Mr William Shakespeare. Your author gives an account of his origins and originals, to feed a need for stories, and to supply a Life.

Here are no legends, sagas, myths, or mysteries. Your author tells you stories about Shakespeare, and he is only too willing to explain whenever he can. For instance, Brownsword. Brownsword's love for Bretchgirdle was more Latin than English, and even more Greek than Latin in his heart. We know no less from his verses. But Bretchgirdle's lust for Mary Shakespeare is quite another matter. Bretchgirdle's lust for Mary Shakespeare is mere gossip. A distinction must be drawn. Yet gossip plays its part too in the life of a man.

This book takes account of such gossip, as it takes account of the stage. The late Mr Shakespeare had his exits and his entrances, and he was one man who in his time played many parts. Nor does Pickleherring mean this merely as Jaques meant it in terms of age. Mr Shakespeare was both poet and player. I speak not just of his profession, but of his identity. He was author and actor. In a word, Mr Shakespeare was an AUCTOR.

That's a good word, that AUCTOR. It comes as near defining what WS did as any other single word I know. It's the ancient way to spell the word author. But it is more than that. An auctor is an author and an actor. And I don't just mean that in Mr Shakespeare's case he was a playwright who was also a player in his own plays. (Although he was.) I mean that any man is both the author and the actor of his own life. He is its auctor. Both in the world of the stage and on the world's stage.

It is not just because I am a comedian that I keep coming back to stage business and play-talk.

I act, therefore I am.

We are all players.

What if what we like to call the self is just a series of masks and poses?

An actor's question, and the actor's dilemma, no doubt. But let the audience beware and go home wondering. I mean you, sir. And you, madam. Are you more than your mask? Is there a person to know behind the persona?

Now then, regarding Mr Shakespeare, what we might call the identity question is of course the wildest thing. Which is why some think that someone else wrote his work. (We shall come to this in due process. Also, the portraits.) But if his identity is the wildest question, then a mild thing is the matter of his birth-date, which so far I have taken quite for granted.

The truth is that we can't take it for granted.

The truth is that truth is what we can never take for granted.

What do I mean?

Madam, I mean we all know that Shakespeare was born on the 23rd of April, 1564 - and that he might well not have been.

In other words, that birthday belongs to beauty, not to truth. April 23rd is of course St George's Day. April 23rd is also without doubt or dispute the day on which Shakespeare died in 1616. So we round out our man's little life with a timely coincidence, a chime or rhyme of dates, linked St George's Days. But to say that WS was born on that feast is conjecture. The life of Shakespeare starts with a conjecture. We want him to be born then, so he was.

This is the story of the life of William Shakespeare. It is a story neither cosmogonic, theogonic, anthropogonic, nor eschatological. (Scatological it may be, here and there, but then I did not invent John Shakespeare's dunghill outside his house in Henley Street.)* It is a story inspired neither by hope nor fear, but a desire to come at the truth by telling lies. Mr Shakespeare was my master in this desire.

This book must not be thought of as a fable or an old wives' tale. Nor is it so much a cock and bull story as you might care to think. Being jocose, it could even be said to be not incompatible with a taste or a hunger for truth. It offers you no information about the world as a whole. On the question of the meaning and end of life it has nothing to say. This is the story of William Shakespeare. It is a pack of lies, and my heart's blood.

* Twelve years before our hero was spawned, on the 29th of April, 1552, John Shakespeare paid a fine of one shilling for keeping this sterquinarium by his door.