The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twelve Of WS: his first word & the otters

What was the boy William's first word spoken? This is plainly a matter of some pith and marrow.

His sister Joan insisted it was 'Roses!' - which word she said he learnt to say when sat upon his pot in the rose-arbour in his mother's garden. But Joan was five years younger than her brother, so she most certainly never heard this for herself. It may have been family tradition. It could have been Joan's idea of a joke - I mean, the contrast between the roses and the pot. She was an odd woman, married to a hatter called Hart, her madness always having the oddest frame of sense, as the Duke in Measure for Measure remarks of Isabella (not one of my best parts, though perhaps I should not say so).

Besides and all, poor greasy Joan was old when she told me this, and her wits sometimes wandered. Her own son was named William, and she might have meant him. 'Roses!' in my opinion is altogether too poetical a thing to be true as a poet's first comment upon the world. I have known many poets in my time, and none of the good ones was poetical.

'Cheese!' seems much more likely. It was Mr Shakespeare's brother Edmund told me this. The first word the Bard ever uttered, he said, was a good round 'Cheese!' on account of their father's fond habit of feeding his chicks little morsels of the stuff as they sat up at table. This might well have been so. The fact that Edmund was sixteen years younger than William makes me even more prone to believe it. Notice he did not claim his own first word was 'Cheese!' Poor Edmund was a modest soul, and gentle. He told me their mother always said that her William's first word was 'Cheese!' and I can credit it. 'Cheese!' has at least a petty ring of truth, or probability. Both Mr John Shakespeare, by report, and WS himself, in my own experience, were always very fond of a nice piece of cheese.

Chaddar (which some miscall Cheddar) was by way of being his favourite. And why not? Your Chaddar is a large, fine, rich and pleasant cheese - and so it should be, for I have heard that in that village near the Mendip Hills in Somerset where it is made, all the milk of the cows is brought every day into one common room, where proper persons are appointed to receive it, and they set down every person's quantity in a book kept for the purpose, which is put all together, and one common cheese made with it.

But Cheshire cheese was also to Mr Shakespeare's taste. He was partial in particular to it toasted. In The Merry Wives of Windsor he has Falstaff say, ''Tis time I were choked with a piece of toasted cheese', and I heard him say no less more than once himself. But the poet noted also that eating toasted Cheshire makes your breath stink.

Parmesan pleased him less. He reckoned it was for men who lived like mice and run squeaking up and down. And as for Banbury, pah! Nothing good ever came out of Banbury, said Mr Shakespeare. 'Not even the buns?' I asked him. 'Not even the buns,' he said. 'Not even the fine lady upon the white horse?' I asked him. 'Least of all, her,' he said. 'She would have been a Puritan,' he added. I think I know exactly what he meant. It's an odious town, that Banbury, and all the people there come loaded to their boots with religious zeal. Your Banbury-man is a bigot, sir. Your Banbury cheese is nothing but a paring. Bardolph compares Slender to Banbury cheese. It's no use at all, not even with pippins.

Of cheese in general I once heard Mr Shakespeare declare that a cheese, to be perfect, should not be like

(1) Gehazi, i.e. dead white, like a leper;

(2) not like Lot's wife, all salt;

(3) not like Argus, full of eyes;

(4) not like Tom Piper, hoven and puffed, like the cheeks you get from playing of the bagpipes;

(5) not like Crispin, leathery;

(6) not like Lazarus, poor, or raised up from the dead;

(7) not like Esau, hairy;

(8) not like Mary Magdalene, full of whey, or maudlin;

(9) not like the Gentiles, full of maggots or gentils; and

(10) not like a bishop, made of burnt milk.

I must admit that I never comprehended number 10 in his list of cheese negatives until one day during the late Civil Wars when my dear wife Jane burnt the porridge and when (mildly) I complained she shouted, 'So the bishop put his foot in it, that's all!' It turned out to be a country saying where she came from, remarked of milk or porridge that is burnt, or of meat that's over-roasted. I daresay it derives from the bishops in the bad old days being able to burn whosoever they lusted.

Well, that's sufficient I think about cheese, although truth to tell Mr WS could never get enough of it himself. I would like it to be true, what Edmund told me.

He was a sweet, ineffectual fellow, Edmund, with long hair the colour and consistency of tow. The youngest of the family, he followed William to London to join our company, playing minor female parts and second messengers. It is not true that I was jealous of him. He fathered a bastard son, Edward, who died of a trembling fit before he could speak and we buried him at St Giles, Cripplegate, in the year Mr S wrote bits of his Timon of Athens. I think it was 1607, that bad year. Edmund himself died at the end of it. He was buried on New Year's Eve. In St Saviour's, Southwark. I remember the snow falling on his coffin as we carried it into the church, and the forenoon knell of the great bell over our heads. That cost Mr Shakespeare PS1. If he had buried his brother outside, with the smaller bell, it would have cost no more than three shillings. Edmund's funeral was held in the morning so that all his fellow actors could attend.

After the funeral, we played at cards for kisses. Mr Shakespeare won. He had me dress in my costume as Rosalind before she went to the woods. He cut himself on a card. (He was very thin-skinned.) I recall him looking at his fingertip and saying, 'His silver skin laced with his golden blood'. This made no sense to me. He sniffed at his fingers also, and said that he smelt a strange, invisible perfume. But then perfumes are always invisible, I should say.

Of course, I made no such comment at the time. My dress was blue as they say the Greek sea is. It was made of silk-shag and it rustled when I crossed my legs. I wore silk stockings too, and garters pulled tight like roselets. By the time our game was finished, and all forfeits paid, Mr Shakespeare's Rosalind had nothing on but a pair of hair-coloured satin stays and a scanty quilted petticoat.

Rosalind was always one of my favourite parts. I have reason to know that Mr Shakespeare favoured it as well.

But about that Pickleherring will be silent, for the present. My lips are sealed. They might open another night.

I only just now remembered that game of cards - thinking of Edmund's burial after telling you how he told me his brother's first word was 'Cheese!' Sometimes the mind works strangely, but I count this the best way to remember. The trouble with thinking about something often is that it becomes more and more your memory of the thing rather than the thing itself remembered. So it's just as well I'd forgotten this till this minute.

Edmund Shakespeare had a long and ironical face.

He died of brandy, which in those days we called brandy-wine. Brandy is Latin for goose. Here, madam, is a pun between anser, a goose, and answer, to reply. What is the Latin for goose? Answer (anser) brandy!

Reader, my guest, I am myself a water-drinker. I drink no wine at all, which so much improves our modern wits. I am a rude writer too, loose and plain, I confess it. I call a fig a fig and a spade a spade. What my mind thinks my pen writes. I respect matter, not words. With Mr Shakespeare it was otherwise.

Let us consider then the time when the child Shakespeare rose up in the night, while his mother and his father slept.

He went from his cot out into the darkness. In the morning he came back. He was wet through, though it had not been raining. There were green weeds in his hair and about his shoulders. He looked, they thought, like the Old Man of the Sea.

The next night his mother could not sleep for worry about the boy. She saw her son go out again. She followed him to see what it was that he did.

Little WS went down through the moonlit meadows to the river. He walked along its banks till he came to the weir. On the shallow side of the weir he entered the water. He walked into the Avon until it came up to his neck.

There the child stood. There he stayed. He did not move. He did not cry out. No sound escaped him. The dark hours passed. The river flowed all around him with moonlight upon it. Mary watched. Her heart was sore for her son but her feet would not carry her to his rescue nor her tongue cry out. She was as one spellbound, witness to a mystery.

William Shakespeare did not come forth from his vigil in the River Avon until daybreak. Then he walked up the green bank, and he knelt down upon it, and he prayed. And, behind him, two otters came following, bounding from the shallows, slippery through the gloom, and they stretched themselves in his shadow in the thin morning sunlight, and they warmed his feet with their breath and they dried them on their fur.