The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Forty-Three The speech that Shakespeare made when he killed a calf

There are those who say that William Shakespeare never sold fireworks, and so was never in Warwick Jail with a phantom flute.

Mr John Aubrey, for instance, will have it that when Shakespeare was a boy he exercised his father's trade of butcher, but that when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech.

Now, there is some truth in this, but like all the things that Mr Aubrey tells his friends it is spoilt by carelessness, as well as by a complete failure to give any tangible examples in proof of what he says.

It could not have been for his father, in fact, that young William ever worked as a butcher's apprentice. By the time that he had to leave the grammar school to earn his living, his father's butchery business was forspent.

It was probably to his neighbour, Thomas Giles, established as a butcher in Sheep Street, or perhaps to Ralph Cowdrey similarly established in Bridge Street, that jolly Jack Shakespeare offered his son's services. The families of Giles, Cowdrey, and Shakespeare were already linked by the skin and leather trade. And when Jack stopped butchering he didn't stop drinking with other butchers.

So when William came back from Warwick and returned home like the prodigal son, it was a neighbour's fatted calf that he had to kill. And it would have been either in Giles's butcher shop, or (at a pinch) Cowdrey's, that he made that high-style speech still remembered in Stratford.

But what was that speech?

You might well ask, sir.

What did Shakespeare actually say?

That, my dear madam, is a very good question.

Mr Aubrey does not tell us.

Mr Aubrey may not know, indeed. But Mr Robert Reynolds does.

Here then, gentle reader, from Pickleherring's 43rd box, carefully copied down nearly half a century ago after Mr Shakespeare's funeral from the tear-oiled lips of a fellow mourner (Lucy Hornby, widow of the blacksmith Richard Hornby) is the speech that Shakespeare made when he killed a calf.

The bard's famous calf-killing speech, never before published.

Mrs Hornby told me she heard it twice. She had never been able to forget the boy William standing there in the sawdust, cleaver in hand, eyes rolling, apron cross-hatched and boltered with blood, nor the words that came pouring forth in a red torrent as she waited with some impatience for her joint.

This is what Shakespeare said:

I am the butcher takes away the calf

And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays,

And bears it to the bloody slaughter-house.

Hark how his dam runs lowing up and down,

Looking the way her harmless young one went!

She can do naught but wail her darling's loss ...

I am the butcher, &. etc., & etc., & etc.

That is, old Mrs Hornby claimed that Shakespeare repeated what he had said. He would say the lines over and over, she insisted, rather than get on with the job in hand, and actually cut up the calf.

(I must say that I doubt this repetition. Mr Shakespeare in my experience never repeated himself. More likely that my informant was disguising her own failure to remember more.)

Some of the other customers, the widow Hornby told me, made complaints to the management. They appreciated neither the tenderness of the sentiments expressed in the verse nor the toughness of the steaks carved out by Shakespeare.

The way in which the apprentice reminded his audience just what the meat on the end of their forks really is cannot have been much good for business either. But I think it took more than a few dissatisfied customers to put an end to William Shakespeare's too brilliant career as a butcher, and to drive him forth again from the bounds of Stratford.

It took, my dears, a death, and a birth, and an earthquake.