The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twenty-Eight Of little WS and the cauldron of inspiration and science

Some say that in the corner of Mary Shakespeare's kitchen there stood a cauldron of inspiration and science. It was a giant cauldron and the brew it contained was dark and thick. Those who believe this say that as soon as the boy William was strong enough his mother set him the task of stirring the contents of her cauldron for a year and a day.

Bretchgirdle died, and Brownsword went back to Macclesfield. But Mary had learnt from the fat vicar before he died most of the magical virtues and vices of the flowers and ferns that grew in the fields about Stratford and in that green forest which bore her maiden name.

For instance, she knew of the heart-shaped wood-sorrel which warms the blood, and of moonwort which waxes and wanes with the moon and turns mercury into silver and will unshoe any horse that treads upon it. And she knew of the yellow juice of the celandine which will cure jaundice, and of liver-wort which is good for the liver. Also, you can take it that Shakespeare's mother was familiar with polypody which grows on old oaks and stops the whooping cough rather more effectively than the slug-slimed brown sugar Bretchgirdle had favoured. Certainly she would have known that the simple marigold is sovereign against melancholy, and that herb-dragon (speckled like a dragon) is the perfect antidote to adder bites.

Some of these plants, and many others that were stranger, went into the giant cauldron. Those who believe that Mary Shakespeare was a witch report that often she would be away from the house on Henley Street for weeks on end, searching in far and desolate places for rare herbs - for cassia out of Egypt, to the Transylvanian mountains for the purple-flowered hellebore, or getting aloes from Zocotora.

Was Mary Shakespeare a witch, then?

I do not know. I do not care to think so. Yet Mr John Shakespeare - in his cups, in London, that only time I met him - spoke darkly of a woman he knew well who had only to whistle for the wind to rise, and only to sigh for it to fall again. However, he did not say this woman was his wife. He implied that she was young, so he might have meant Mrs Anne Shakespeare, his daughter-in-law. Assuredly there was something witchy about her. But then so there was about all the women I ever met who were in any way close to the late Mr Shakespeare. Lucy Negro once claimed she could keep lightning in a bottle. Mr Shakespeare's sister Joan was invariably surrounded by black cats. And I admit that on that delicious occasion when Mr Shakespeare's widow drove me (dressed in her petticoats) from New Place, she clapped her hands thrice and a star fell out of the sky.

I prefer not to dwell on such things.

And stars fall down anyway.

Back to the cauldron, then. Those who believe in it say that Mary Shakespeare knew that when the brew in it had boiled for a year and a day then three precious drops of Inspiration from it would be sufficient to make her daughter Joan a poet. Joan was ugly and stupid and Mary had resolved, therefore, to confer poetry upon the new-born child, so that her wit and wisdom would gain her honour, and make up for her lack of grace.

As for the boy William, it is said that he never meant to taste the magic brew himself. It was an accident that he did. This is how it happened.

On the very last day, the day of the year and a day that the cauldron had to be kept boiling in the Henley Street kitchen, he was at work early, as usual, stirring with the huge wooden ladle. Perhaps he was excited by the thought that the moment had nearly come when the brew would be ready, according to his mother, perfected, for whatever reason, and his long labours ended. Perhaps he was just worn out by his mother's attentions.

Whatever the cause, the boy William Shakespeare was not stirring his mother's cauldron as steadily as he should have been. He splashed the gummy surface of the brew in dragging the ladle through it and three drops flew out of the cauldron and fell on his finger. They were so hot that - without thinking - the boy popped his finger in his mouth to suck it cool.

In that instant, as the three precious drops of Inspiration melted on his tongue, William Shakespeare was made a poet. It was as if a window had opened in his head. He looked out of the window and he saw a star so bright and clear that the light of all the other stars was swallowed up by it, and then there was only one star, giving so much light that the light seemed alive.

Then the night was gone and William Shakespeare saw a new country, just like the country around Stratford he had always known but everything in it looking fresh and strange and early, as though the world had just begun that minute. The grass in this new country was greener than any grass he had ever seen, and buttercups grew there in the green grass so gold that they hurt his eyes, bringing tears to them. Gold-belted bees made merry from flower to flower; butterflies with green-veined and gold-spotted wings dabbled in the sunlight; the trees stood like delicate green steeples; the lakes were peopled by silver swans; the rivers ran over snowy pebbles with a sound that made WS smile; the breeze smelt deliciously of new-mown hay. It was all good enough to eat. And the strange thing was that WS felt he could eat it. He had only to open his mouth and he would bite the new day to the core, taste its sunlight on his tongue, feast on the green and the gold, drink the perfect country.

But even more strangely, William Shakespeare did not want to eat it. He knew it would be wrong to. He felt good, and he was content to look at the good things around him, without feeling any greed to have them.

Then it began to rain in the perfect country. The rain fell as rain, but when it had fallen it was little sapphire men and women who ran about hand-in-hand, singing.

As he listened to their song, trying to make out the words of it, William Shakespeare's head began to spin.

He saw wars and warriors and fires that flashed through the air.

He saw ships ploughing the sea without sails or oars.

He saw other ships - like silver pencils - sail through the clouds and leave dewy snail-wakes down the blue.

He saw empires rise and fall, castles crumble and new castles rise in their places.

He saw a chicken pecking its way out of an egg - only the egg was the moon.

He saw a tree growing upside-down, its branches touching the ground, its roots in the sky.

And all the while words he could not understand burnt holes in the boy Shakespeare's thinking. His mind could hardly contain all the crowd of things in it, and he clutched his head in his hands.

Then, clearer than anything else he had seen so far, WS had a sudden vision of his mother as she was at this moment, gathering the last plants for her cauldron in the land that lies at the back of the North Wind. Even as William watched her, in his head he saw her hand freeze as it stretched to pluck a mandrake out by the roots and her eyes turned, as it seemed, towards him and she screamed with anger and cursed him.

Shakespeare fell down in his fear. Then, pulling himself together, he realised that his best hope was to use his new-found powers to protect himself against his mother's vengeance.

He fled from the house in Henley Street.

The cauldron seethed behind him in the kitchen. Purple bubbles burst from the magic brew. Hot ooze began to spill down its brazen sides.

Then the cauldron cracked in two, with a melodious twang.

This was because all the liquor it contained except the three drops of Inspiration was poisonous, and now the pure poison rose up and had its way. The cauldron split from side to side and the terrible brew flowed in a hissing snake-like stream over the floor, and out of the house, and down the streets and lanes till it came to the River Avon. Some swans on the river were poisoned instantly and fell dead in their own reflections.

Mary Arden went after her son like a fury.

When little William looked over his shoulder and saw his mother coming his heart swelled with fear so that he thought it would burst inside his chest.

Then he remembered the magic powers he had gained from the three drops of Inspiration and still running he changed himself into a hare.

But Mary had powers and wiles to equal his. Her blue eyes flashed when she saw what her son had done. She stamped her foot and changed herself into a greyhound, chasing after the hare and snapping at it with long, lean jaws.

Then WS came to the Avon and plunged into it, changing himself into a fish and diving down, down, down into the cool and deep and safety of the dark.

But Mary Arden followed quickly after him there in the shape of an otter-bitch, lank and sleek, with teeth like scissors, and she would have caught him if - in leaping down the weir at Alveston - he had not suddenly changed himself into a crow and flapped away into the air.

Seeing this, his mother flicked her otter's tail and followed after as a long-winged hawk, harrying the crow and giving him no rest in the sky.

Then, just as she was about to fall on him and tear him to pieces with her beak and talons, WS saw a barn below, and a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of the barn, and he dropped down like a stone among the wheat, and changed himself into one of the tiny white grains.

Then Mary Arden beat her long black wings and turned herself into a high-crested black hen and scratched in the wheat until she found William, and swallowed him.

And no sooner had she swallowed him than she changed back to a woman again and went home to the house on Henley Street.

Now, madam, no doubt this was a dream, or never happened. Yet Mr Shakespeare spoke more than once as if it had. I remember the tears in his eyes as he told me of the raindrop men and women.

The poet Jack Donne, later Dean of St Paul's but in early days a great visitor of ladies and a great frequenter of plays, had a pet theory that every writer leaves somewhere in his work a portrait of his mother. I asked Mr S where his was. I have never forgotten his sly smile as he answered: 'The witch Sycorax, in The Tempest.' (Sycorax, Caliban's mother, does not, of course, appear in The Tempest. But as I hardly need to point out, her broomstick shadow lies darkly across all the action.)

As for the notion that Mr Shakespeare's sister was the one who should really have been the poet, I recall that song at the end of Love's Labour's Lost with its refrain

Tu-whit, to-who,

A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

My wife Jane told me that where she came from 'keeling the pot' is adding water or other cool liquor to it to save the brew from boiling over as you stir it. The reference to the cauldron is quite clear.

What happened to the swallowed wheat-grain Shakespeare?

Why, sir, returned home, his mother Mary shat little Willy out some nine hours later, and all went on as merrily as before.