The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Thirteen Was John Shakespeare John Falstaff?

Mr John Shakespeare suffered badly from indigestion.

'Are you aware,' said the Reverend Bretchgirdle, 'that the bile in your belly could burn a hole in the carpet?'

'Go on,' said John.

'I tell you true,' promised the lumpish ecclesiastic. 'In the third and fourth centuries, Lampridius and Jerome established this,' he added, 'not to say Isidore. Your bile is one of your four humours: sangius, melancolia, phlegma, and cholera. Cholera's what you've got. It's what makes you so irascible, Mr S.'

'Sometimes I belch hubbubs,' admitted John.

'Hubbubs?' the priest invigilated. 'What colour hubbubs?'

'Hubbubs the colour of pixies,' said John Shakespeare. 'Green ones and black ones. I can't stand my own smell when I do.'

'Do you eat a lot of butter?' asked Bretchgirdle. Then, without waiting for any answer, he went on, 'Just last year, so I heard, Dr Timothy Bright poured half a pint of green bile onto a Turkey carpet at St Bartholomew's Hospital in Smithfield. Do you know what happened?'

'A hole,' John suggested.

'A hole as big as a saucer,' Bretchgirdle says.

'But my bile's mostly black,' John Shakespeare counters hopefully. 'It's only my hubbubs come green. Will I have to be purged?'

'Not at all,' his priest tells him. 'Mr Shakstaff, yours is the black choler, Trevisa's cholera nigra. All we must do is to shave off the foreign ferment from your crude ventricle.'

While the poor bewildered whittawer is failing to digest this, and before he can open his foam-flecked mouth to reply, Bretchgirdle hands over a folded sheet of paper.

'Read this,' he says.

It was a holograph manuscript in cursive script, the signature sprawling and sea-stained. John Shakespeare read as follows:

I have been a martyr to cholera for five years, went to divers surgeons and physicians, gained no benefit. I essayed everything, but was unable to take solid food. My wife advised BRETCHGIRDLE'S DIGESTIF CORDIAL. After using it, I improved, and was able to enjoy buttered pippin-pies and to consume a mutton chop at will. Now I carry a flask of BRETCHGIRDLE'S DIGESTIF CORDIAL in my pocket when I go on any voyage, and drink a sip of it after each and every meal. It has been to me a godsend.

(signed) Sir Francis Drake, Admiral;

MP for Bosinney, Cornwall.

John Shakespeare never bothered to learn to write, and he's a very slow reader. When he's read the commendation through he whistles, and then taps at his front tooth with it. 'That's remarkable,' he says at last. 'Can I ask you one thing though - do you take this drink yourself?'

'Each bottle blessed by Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury,' his vicar says neutrally. 'It tastes just like honeysuckle,' he explains, 'but believe me it's manna by the time it comes to meet all that thick, acrid fluid secreted in your kidneys. Choler, farewell. Indigestion ceases instanter. You can eat anything, Mr Shakestaff.'

'Anything?' John Shakespeare asks slyly.

'Take two sips after each confession but before making your communion,' advises the Pelagian.

Reader, you will have noticed in this colloquy that Bretchgirdle twice addressed our hero's father as Shakstaff and Shakestaff. This is not idle fancy on Pickleherring's part. In fact I have inspected a document in which the late Mr William Shakespeare's father is listed as Richard Shakstaff. That makes it quite thinkable that John Shakespeare could be known as John Shakestaff. But where is all this staff-stuff leading us, you wonder?

Sir, I would like to suggest that the character of Sir John Falstaff is based directly on Mr Shakespeare's father John! Madam, consider it without tilting your nose, if you please. I do not mean only to say that they had indigestion in common. Nor big, round bellies.

Members of the poet's family proved understandably reticent when I broached this subject. I cannot blame them. Who would want to admit to the fat, cowardly knight in his family tree - that liar, that misleader of youth, that great drunkard? Joan Hart (Shakespeare's sister) looked away when I mentioned it. Susanna Hall had her Puritan husband show me the door. Only Judith Quiney, the poet's younger daughter, did not bat an eyelid at my theorem. Dear Judith, but I don't know what she thought. She seemed never very interested in her father's work. It was long after her own tosspot of a husband had upped and left her that I got around to asking if it had ever crossed her mind that Falstaff and her grandfather were the same. As I say, she didn't bat an eyelid. She just stared at me. One of her tricks was to wear a medal low on her chest. Whenever I asked to see it, instead of drawing it out she leant forwards for me to look. Although I often asked to see that medal, I never did find out what it represented.

But think of what I'm saying. John Shakespeare was a drunkard. He was fat. He was witty. He spent most of his time in the ale-house. He told lies. He rose Alderman-high* in Stratford before he fell ruffian-low. The boy William's first memories of him would have been of a great man in a red gown with white ermine collar and trimmings. And John's fall from grace must have come in William's youth. I am sure John Shakespeare cast a long shadow over his son's life. Yes, and a fat shadow too, I'm convinced of that.

But don't take my word for it. Look at the names on this black list. It's a list that I turned up in Stratford - of men not attending Trinity Church in the year of 1592:

I have underlined the three names that prove there must be something to my case. Here we see John Shakespeare linked in disrepute with two of Falstaff's cronies: Bardolph and Fluellen. Of the real-life Fluellen I know nothing, save that his widow died in the Stratford almhouse. But George Bardolfe was much like the rogue in the plays - in Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He started as a mercer and a grocer, and ended up as a drunk. Writs of arrest were issued against him for debt. He was imprisoned for it in the year he appeared on the list. They say he had friends in high places, and that the under-sheriff of Warwickshire, Basil Trymnell, let this Bardolfe out to drink in a tavern in Warwick but when warned that he might escape kept him 'in a much straighter manner' and secured him by 'a lock with a long iron chain and a great clog'.

The character and nature of John Shakespeare and his associates seems to me as near a match as you will find for the character and nature of John Falstaff and his associates. Who says the people in the plays are not real people? I think they had flesh and blood in our poet's mind.

Besides which, Thomas Plume, the Archdeacon of Rochester, told me that Sir John Mennis once saw Mr John Shakespeare in his shop in Henley Street. This would have been at the end of the last century. He was a merry-cheeked old man, he said. He said also that the father said that Will was 'a good honest fellow', but he 'durst have cracked a jest with him at any time'. Who else can this remind you of but Falstaff and Prince Hal? Do thou stand for my Father, as the poet has the prince say true to Falstaff.

I should not be surprised one day to learn that John Shakespeare died crying out 'God, God, God', as Mistress Quickly says John Falstaff did. Some say he died a Papist, like his son. But more of that later.

That hubbub's an Irish war-cry: Ub! Ub! Ubub!

As for Doctor Timothy Bright, he was a very fine physician in his day, and the odious Bretchgirdle's invoking him should in no wise be permitted to detract from his excellent fame. In addition to his treatise on preserving health, called Hygieina, he wrote a good one on restoring the same commodity, Therapeutica. He also invented a shorthand system that was used by Robert Cecil and his spies. His Treatise of Melancholy, published in 1586, distinguishes between the mental and the physical roots of that affliction. The late Mr Shakespeare was fond of this little book. I often saw him reading in it, and he may even have derived from thence the phrase 'discourse of reason' which comes in Hamlet's first soliloquy.

I doubt myself that Dr Bright ever poured bile on any carpet. Nor would Grindal have blessed a bottle. He leant towards Geneva in such matters.

I met John Shakespeare myself, but just the once. I'll be telling you all about that when we come to it.

* Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One goes out of his way to say that when younger he 'could have crept into any Alderman's thumb-ring'. This is followed by a passage in which he says to Hal: 'Thou art my son.'