The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Sixteen Shakespeare breeches

When our little William Shakespeare came of sufficient age, his father John bestirred himself and determined that the boy should have a pair of breeches.

Shakespeare breeches were no ordinary breeks. They were, in fact, a kind of galligaskins, very wide and flopping in the leg, like shipmen's hose but tight into the arse, fashioned of thick, stiff whitleather to withstand the winter's fury, without points to truss them up but with the vest growing as it were spontaneously out of them, a sort of natural over-all, like branches and leaves that have sprung from the rotundity of some great oak tree.

Furthermore, to ensure goodness, these breeches had to be made in a church, upon consecrated ground.

Now this could not be done by day in Stratford, for the Reverend Bretchgirdle did not approve of tailoring on God's premises. So John Shakespeare called on Martin Jimp the tailor in his shop in Sanctity Street, and promised him that if he would consent to make the breeches by night in Holy Trinity Church he would pay him treble wages.

Jimp agreed. He was a very able tailor, as swift and deft a needle-jerker as any in Warwick.

Some three years previous, so it is said, Mr John Shakespeare had won a considerable wager as a result of this Jimp's alacrity. What happened was that the glover (and/or butcher) bet an acquaintance of his, the same George Bardolfe already mentioned, that by eight o'clock on a particular evening he would sit down to dine in a well-woven, well-dyed, well-made suit of apparel, the wool of which had formed the fleece on sheep's backs in the Shottery meadows at five o'clock on that same day's morning. It is no wonder that among the class of persons accustomed to betting such a wager should eagerly be accepted, seeing that the achievement of the challenged result appeared all but impossible. Martin Jimp was entrusted with the work.

At five in the morning of one fine June day he caused two South Down sheep to be shorn. The wool was washed, carded, stubbed, roved, spun, and woven. The cloth was scoured, fulled, tented, raised, sheared, dyed, and dressed. The tailor was at hand, and made up the finished cloth into garments. And at a quarter past six in the evening Mr John Shakespeare sat down to dinner at the head of his guests, in a complete damson-coloured suit that had been thus made - winning the wager, with an hour and three quarters to spare. Of course, every possible preparation was made beforehand; but still the achievement was sufficiently remarkable, and was long talked of with astonishment in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Jimp liked a challenge. So in the matter of the Shakespeare breeches it was not so much the glamour of the triple money that attracted him, but the knowledge that the Stratford church was haunted, and the imputation - which he resented - that a tailor might not be brave enough to spend a night there. For Martin Jimp was well acquainted with what is said of tailors: that it takes nine of them to make a man, that a tailor's sword is only a needle, that a tailor's wound is a stab in the back, and so on.

Jimp was a spruce little fellow with a mop of white hair. He walked with a stoop and wore a black patch made of velvet over one eye, but he was not without honour.

So night comes, and Martin Jimp comes to Holy Trinity Church. He approaches it from the north, passing down the avenue of lime trees that smell sweet from a sudden shower of rain, entering the building by picking the lock in the door in the porch with his clever tailor's needle, and crossing himself with the same sharp blade in hand as he slips in.

It's cold and dark inside. The air is dewy from recent burials in the crypt. The stonework seethes with damps that creep in with the fog from the nearby Avon. You can hear mice rustling among the smooth pews. Those pews gleam in sudden shafts of moonlight falling through high, pointy windows as the moon rides fast. There's a smell like rotting quinces from the charnel-house.

I should tell you that Trinity Church is cruciform in plan, consisting of a nave with aisles, a chancel (where the wearer of the breeches now lies buried), transepts, and a central tower with a spire made of wood. The charnel-house stands just beyond the chancel. It's a place of horror. The sexton digs up bones and throws them there, to make room for new graves in the church and the churchyard as more people die. I think this place loomed large in the boy Shakespeare's nightmares. In Romeo and Juliet he writes:

Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,

O'ercover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,

With reeky shanks, and yellow chapless skulls.

And then there's all that Yorick stuff in Hamlet. I think that the closeness of the charnel to the chancel in the Stratford church is one reason for the curse Shakespeare put on his grave. But I run on too fast, sir. All things in order, Pickleherring. No hasty puddings, thank you.

Jimp sits down cross-legged on the tomb of a knight and his lady just beside the choir stalls. The tomb is comfortable enough, the effigy of the lady having been removed by Bretchgirdle, with a result that there is plenty of room for a tailor on that side of the bed.

Jimp lights his candle with a spark from his tinder-box. He puts on his thimble. He threads the stout thread in his silver needle. Then he sets to work, making the breeches.

Jimp worked hard and well. The seams grew. The stitches flew. Loop, double chain, tambour, lock - he's throwing in the lot for luck, and to celebrate the extreme dexterity of his fingers, his mastery of his trade, for this Jimp's no bodger, he's the finest gentleman-tailor in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is why Shakespeare's father has employed him for such important business.

Look, madam. Watch spry Jimp at work. It is always a pleasure to see a man at one with what he is doing.

The candleflame flickers high. It illumines not just our busy little tailor crouched to his task but the choir stalls beside him. His shadow's at work on them, stitching and stitching. Those choir stalls are tall and handsomely carved. They are covered with grotesques on their misericords.

Now, all at once, Jimp sees his bright candleflame shiver.

It sputters.

He watches it.

It shakes.

He watches it.

Then the shivering and the shaking seem to stop. The flame burns bold again. His shadow on the stalls is big as ever.

Perhaps, thinks Jimp, it was just a breath of wind under the door. A draught in this draughty church. At worst, some foul exhalation from a crack in the ancient pavement. But he feels an icy chill creep to his heart. He can hear a sound like the scratching of rats' claws. He can hear a sound like the slithering of rats' tails.

But it is not rats.

And it was not a breath of the wind.

And it is not a draught or exhalation.

The candle shakes again, and again, and again. Big drops of wax flake off from it, and drip like blood. Then the flame flares and spills and suddenly goes out. And the stone floor starts cracking open at the entrance to the charnel-house.

Gazing wide-eyed with his one good eye through the chancel in a sudden bolt of lightning, Martin Jimp the tailor sees a head thrust up through the floor. It is a scaly and an ugly head, like a fist upraised, the hair long and black and matted on the skull, the eyes dreadful and staring. The mouth of the head yawns open, deep and red. Its voice when it speaks is like dead leaves rustling together on the ground, doing what children call the devil's dance.

The voice says to Martin: 'Do you see this great head of mine?'

'I see that, but I'll sew this,' says Jimp the tailor.

His heart is thumping as if to get out from the coffin of his chest. He rocks from side to side as he squats on his haunches. But he stitches and stitches away at the Shakespeare breeches.

Then, as the thunder rolls over the church, there's a cracking and a ripping sound, louder than any thunder, and the head of the thing by the entrance to the charnel-house comes up higher through the floor. The glass in the altar windows rattles and seems to splinter as poor Jimp watches. And the neck of the thing from the charnel-house comes into view, and terrible it is to see, with its throat cut, and the veins hanging out like blood-red worms, and a plague sore weeping on its Adam's apple.

The voice speaks again through the red red mouth to Martin: 'Do you see this great neck of mine?'

'I see that, but I'll sew this,' says Jimp the tailor.

He trembles and he reels to and fro as he works with his needle. His gorge rises in his throat, making him spit. But he stitches and stitches away at the Shakespeare breeches.

The storm bursts over the church. Head and neck of the thing from the charnel-house rise higher yet through the broken-open floor. Now our brave little tailor can see the chest and shoulders of a vast, enshrouded dead thing thrusting up through the fissure. It is like nothing so much as a tombstone with flesh growing on it.

Again the voice speaks to Martin: 'Do you see this great chest of mine?'

And again Jimp answers: 'I see that, but I'll sew this,' and though mad with fright he keeps on stitching, stitching at the breeches.

Thunder and lightning come together now as the dead thing keeps on rising through the pavement of Holy Trinity Church. Rain lashes the wooden spire as the thing writhes and shakes a long pair of arms with the bones poking through at the fingers in poor Jimp's face.

Then it cries: 'Do you see these great arms of mine?'

'I see those, but I'll sew this,' answers Jimp the tailor, wailing, moaning, stammering, yet ever mindful of his grammar.

And he stitches and stitches the harder at the Shakespeare breeches, for he knows that there's not much left in the way of time now. Disgust swells his bosom, but still he won't stop from his task.

Trinity Church seems shaking from crypt to spire in the grip of the storm, and Jimp is nipping off threads with his foxy little teeth and taking up the long stitches when the thing uses its horrible arms to pull up one of its legs through the floor of the chancel.

'Do you see this great leg of mine?' the thing cries, and its voice doesn't whisper any more, it sounds louder than the thunder.

'I do, sir, oh I do indeed,' Jimp answers. 'I see that, but I'll sew this, all the same!'

His fingers burn to be done. His thumbs prick to be finished. He bites his tongue. The sweat runs down his cheeks. There is blood on his fingertips. His lips are gnawed through and through where he has chewed at them. His good eye rolls in its socket. But he will not give up. His needle flashes in the lightning that strikes through the church. Jimp pants. He gasps for breath. But he pulls all the stitches fast tight in the Shakespeare breeches.

It is said that the last stitch came right under Martin Jimp's needle just as the thing from the charnel-house pulled up its other leg out of the rotting, stinking darkness from under the floor of the church.

Jimp snapped the thread.

'Ho hum!' he cried. 'Time to go!'

He jumped down from the tomb where he had been working. Turning his back on the thing, he ran down the aisle as fast as his legs would carry him, and out through the porch and out of Holy Trinity Church, with the completed Shakespeare breeches under his arm.

Once out of the church and Martin Jimp was safe. The thing could not follow him. Such things are held fast, so they say, by consecrated ground.

Never had night air smelt so sweet to his nostrils. The storm had passed as suddenly as it begun. The agony of the brave little tailor's soul found vent in one long, loud shriek of triumph as he held up the Shakespeare breeks and showed them to the moon.

Jimp did not go home straight away. He washed his hands in the Avon and then went back. He could hear the thing still ramping and stamping up and down the nave of Trinity Church. Climbing up on a rain barrel, he peeped in through a crack in a stained-glass window and he saw it sitting in the font and eating corpse flesh, both hands full and its red mouth dribbling blood.

As Jimp watched, the thing looked up and saw him. It started to howl. Then it held out a handful of corpse meat, and it started laughing. The look on its face, Jimp said, was the look of a delicate glutton. The thing beckoned him, Jimp said, with an air of great politeness, as if it would invite him back to come and share its feast.

That sight was the last straw for Jimp the tailor.

He ran away. He ran as fast as he could.

He ran and he ran till he came to John Shakespeare's shop in Henley Street. There they found him crouched in the doorway as dawn broke over Stratford.

It was this adventure that left the little tailor's hair as white as snow.

But the Shakespeare breeches were delivered and William Shakespeare wore them.