The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty-One Pickleherring's confession

My father left me almost nothing but debts, and my mother likewise, and my whole inheritance came to a green shirt, a pair of lugged boots, three or four pieces of crockery, and a kidskin dictionary. The Misses Muchmore volunteered to adopt me. I grew up half their son, and half their mannikin. By the time I went to London with Mr Shakespeare I was accustomed to obedience. Possessing a clear voice, an unusually sturdy constitution, and a retentive memory, I made a good actor.

So much for 'childhood memories'.

Truth to tell, I have no childhood memories. I made that up about the Misses Muchmore. They did not beat me. And I cannot even remember what the sisters looked like. The first thing I truly remember is jumping down off the wall and meeting Mr Shakespeare.

The real story is my own story, which I can't tell. It is not obviously innocent. I am like a child playing hide-and-seek, who doesn't know what he fears and wants more - to stay hidden, or to be found. Besides, what if this book where I conceal myself should be like that bridal burial box in the old story? There was a princess who played hide-and-seek on the day of her wedding. She climbed into an ornate box and shut the lid above her. By the time her bridesmaids found her and prised the lid open she had suffocated. They buried her in that box in her white wedding-gown.

I am not writing this book to say that I have nothing to say. I am writing this book to tell you all I know about the late Mr Shakespeare. I knew him well, which is also to say that I knew him well enough to know that I know nothing. There's little to know, but there is much to tell. He covered his traces as no other human being has ever done before. His best mask was his plays. By writing them he made himself many men and no one. The play's the thing. Let the author alone.

The plays, indeed, are perfect. They manifest omniscience, omnipotence, and the loftiest of mortal intentions. They must have been written by a god. And I trust that I have told you enough about the late Mr Shakespeare for you to be sure that he was not at all like any known kind of a god. Not that I come to bury him.

My purpose is to postpone and even exorcise my own death by writing the Life of Mr Shakespeare, and by certain 'magical operations' with words to make him live again before your eyes. There is a pleasure of playing with vocabulary, also. It cannot delay the fatal issue by one minute, but one can act as if it could.

Every man writes what he is, and I am a player. I see now that not just this Life of Shakespeare but all Lives of Shakespeare will be peculiar autobiographies. The sublimity of the subject ensures empathy and the impersonality of the life-record teases speculation.

I am a player - which is to say, a man speaking words that are never his own, an actor of word-works, talking because he is on stage and it is demanded that he should talk, and because he is afraid of the dark and the silence that will fall with the final curtain. Suppose such a man eager to find an audience, even of one or two, fit though few, if only they will take him with the seriousness with which he takes his task, himself, and them. He will weave you a taut web of words whatever he is talking about, a web of authenticity, of truth, plain dealing. Such a man am I, reader, despite my player's hide, your honest plain dealer.

Imagine a writer who is unable to make one clear statement without yards of equivocation, rambling on and on in a thrasonical prose which is forever clearing its throat, making its points twice over, three times, four, only to deny their validity altogether a page or two after.

Such a fellow could make an art of beating about the bush. Yet if you accused him thus, then might he not protest - hand on heart, but with his eyes averted so that you could never be sure that he was not lying when he told you he was telling a lie - that the reason he needed to beat about the bush was because there are no birds in it? This pretence of foregoing artifice would be itself an artifice, and one far more artful than the play-making art.

I was a player once. I dealt plainly in artifice. What did I play? I played parts, sir. I was a man of parts. But what did I play as a whole? Madam, I played all and everything, as I do now: comedies and tragedies, histories, interludes, morals, pastorals, and farces. You name it, I played it. And others we cannot name. All for your recreation, friends, as for your solace and your pleasure. Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. I'm sure you know your Hamlet as well as I do.

Is my writing then no more than what that prince said he was reading in his book? Words, words, words? A man is his words. But I am a player, and my words are not my own. How could they be, when I am writing the Life of the man who made me live? This book is the player's revenge. So it is not all play.

Yet I say of this writing of mine what Mr Shakespeare has his Holofernes say in criticism: 'He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.' Peregrinate Pickleherring, that's the name for me. I draw out the thread of my verbosity finer than the staple of my argument. I have lived too long on the alms-basket of words. I am a poor old man.

When I was a player I was a man of quality. I had favour even at the hands of the Queen herself. So did Mr Shakespeare.

The distillation of Mr Shakespeare's quality as a man is to be found now in the works which he left behind him. They are more really himself than anything that can be recorded about the person who produced them. Perhaps I have now got to the root of the matter. A writer should be judged not by his extravagances, meannesses, intoxications, sobrieties, quarrels, loves, vagaries, constancies, shames, honours, shortcomings as a husband, lapses from being a perfect gentleman, kindnesses towards his cat, and so forth, but solely by the extent of his achievement in what he has written.

Does it matter in what position the poet sat when he began to write 'To be or not to be'?

Yet this world matters, madam. The mind of Shakespeare, when it ceased from Hamlet and The Tempest, did not forget to use reasonable means to recover his proper dues from his debtors at Stratford.

Mr Shakespeare was a play-maker, and undoubtedly a man of many parts. He put on different masks for different people. I think sometimes that he felt he had no identity of his own and could only exist by adopting the identities of others. But despite the many faces of the man some continuities emerge. He was a man obsessed - obsessed by the pen, obsessed by private terrors. Perhaps it is only in its contradictions that the real meaning of his life is to be found. But no doubt that is true of any life.

One thing is certain: This is not the end of the story.

Of the late Mr Shakespeare what I remember is the innocence withal, the mirth, the sheer abundance. For (as Mr Jonson said) I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.

He was always very gentle, delicate, and polite. 'Sweet Mr Shakespeare' - several said that. And they were right, all of them. He was a sweet little rogue.

Yet sometimes he seemed a lost soul and his pintle was certainly in the back row. It was a little tiny thing that disgusted Lucy Negro to such a degree as to frustrate her into the most impolite abuse. I'll be coming to that.

He was always good company, though, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit. He was not like Mr Jonson. He did not live much before the public, and he did not love to take them into his confidence. He was a handsome, well-shaped man. He was no great company-keeper, and would not be debauched. If invited to, he would send down a note saying he was in pain.

I remember a story my mother told me that I never heard anywhere else. It concerned a merchant who returned from the market and brought his youngest daughter a silver saucer and a transparent apple. All day long the girl spun the apple in the saucer, gazing upon it until she beheld the cities of the earth, the rivers and the seas, the flocks and the distant markets. As a child, then, I spun the world round in a silver saucer. And so do I now, with this Life of Mr Shakespeare. It spins and spins till I am frightened by the story. It is a world I cannot hope to understand. I remember at the end of the story my mother told me the girl's sisters were jealous and killed her with an axe, and took away the transparent apple and the silver saucer. When she was dead they buried her under a birch tree and a single reed grew from her grave and a shepherd made a pipe from it and the pipe played with the voice of the merchant's daughter. That's all. That is all that I remember.

I like stories to be in books, and I like books to be full of stories, but while I like the thought of a never-ending story I like books to have a middle, a beginning, and an end, though not necessarily in that order. This bit will be the middle. I daresay I should have begun with it, but it's too late now.