The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twenty-Three About the childhood ailments of William Shakespeare

I have outlived my own life. So I'm writing Mr Shakespeare's.

The childhood of our immortal bard was not without the usual diseases. It fell to the Reverend Bretchgirdle to cure the little man.

The parish priest was a great believer in natural nostrums, balms, treatments, and remedies. He suffered himself from the ague. He cured it, not by wrapping a spider in a raisin and swallowing it, as you might think, sir, nor by eating sage leaves seven mornings running, madam, as you might hope, but by going out at night alone to the Church Street crossroads and as the Guildhall clock struck midnight turning round on his heels three times and driving a large iron nail into the earth up to the head. Then he walked away backwards from the nail before the clock had completed its twelfth stroke. The ague left him, passing into the tax collector who was the next person to step over the nail.

William Shakespeare caught the measles. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William's measles by cutting off his cat's left ear and persuading the boy to swallow three warm drops of cat's blood in a wineglassful of water.

William Shakespeare caught the jaundice. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William's jaundice by making the boy eat nine fat lice on a piece of bread and butter. The other cure - twelve earth-worms baked on a shovel and reduced to powder to make a philter to drink every morning for a week - had failed to shift it. Ditto the tench tied to William's bare back.

William Shakespeare had a rupture. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured it by going to the ash grove above Shottery and cutting a long sapling longitudinally and getting the lad to climb, naked, in and out of the fissure three times at sunset on St Valentine's Day, after which the fat priest bound up the tree tightly and plastered over the crack with dung and clay. As the hole healed so did William. The other cure - the snail stopped up in the hollow oak - did not work.

William Shakespeare had the whooping cough. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William's whoopers by taking a saucerful of brown sugar and encouraging a slug to crawl over it until the sugar was good and slimy. He then got William to eat the sugar. The muslin bag full of spiders, worn round the neck, and the hair from the boy's head stuck between two bits of buttered toast and fed to a dog, had both failed to do the trick.

William Shakespeare had the toothache. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured that by chasing him widdershins round Holy Trinity Church and making him bite from the frosty ground the first fern to appear in spring on the banks of the Avon.

William Shakespeare had the pneumonie. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured it by tying a bullock's milt to the sole of the lad's left foot, and burying the milt when young Will had walked a league upon it.

William Shakespeare immediately contracted the thrush, with a terrible hick-hop. To cure him, the Reverend Bretchgirdle captured a duck from the pond by Tinkers Lane and placed its beak in the boy's mouth so that when he tickled the duck's throat and it opened its beak it breathed into the boy. The cold breath of the duck cured the thrush and the hiccup. The other cure - reciting the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus over the victim three times three days running - did not work in this case.