The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Two In which Pickleherring makes strides in a pair of lugged boots

The first part I ever played for Mr Shakespeare on the London stage was that of young Prince Arthur in his play of The Life and Death of King John. That's why he asked me to say I am afraid, and yet I'll venture it. It is what that poor boy says before he kills himself by jumping from the battlements of the castle where he is confined.

When I jumped down off the red-brick wall and into the back yard of the Cock Tavern, Cambridge, Mr Shakespeare stopped eating his oysters and he asked me my name and where I lived and who my father was. So I told him of the cot beneath the thatch and my fatherless fate.

As I spoke to him of fathers, I saw tears run down his cheeks. I thought it was rain.

'O my poor Hamlet,' Mr Shakespeare said.

Like a fool, I repeated the four words.

Mr Shakespeare flushed. His face was all at once a crimson rose. He blinked at me in anger through his tears. I think he thought that I was mocking him. Then he must have realised that I'd mistaken what he said for another speech to try. He pinched his nose between the thumb and the first finger of his left hand, shaking his head a moment as he did so. When he looked at me again his eyes were clear.

'Do you have perfect pitch?' Mr Shakespeare asked me.

I told him that I had. (It was a lie.)

Then Mr Shakespeare took my hand, unsmiling, and he promised me that if I chose to come with him to London and join his company he could make me a player like himself.

My heart thumped in my breast. I felt as if I had suddenly grown taller by an inch.

Well now, my dears, it happens that this part of Prince Arthur might contain the key as to why Mr Shakespeare first noticed me and thought to give me employment as a player.

I think perhaps that I put him in mind of his son.

I was wearing, do you see, a pair of lugged boots. Those boots were all the rage that year of our first meeting. They were boots of soft leather, hanging loose about the leg, turned down and fringed. I think they called them lugged because the fringes looked like ears.

Be that as it may. I learnt later that young Hamlet Shakespeare begged for a pair of these boots to wear as he lay dying. He was eleven years old. It was Mrs Shakespeare herself who told me that she got them for Hamlet to wear as he tossed on his death-bed. He never so much as walked in them anywhere.

So it might be that my lugged boots were what caught Mr Shakespeare's eye.

But then (you ask me), what has this to do with that other boy Arthur in King John?

Permit me to tell you.

Little Hamlet died not long before I first met Mr Shakespeare. I think that Mr Shakespeare was still writing King John in his head that day in Cambridge, and that in any case he was thinking of his own son when he has Queen Constance in Act III Scene 4 lament the fate of her son Arthur in these lines that follow:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

Of course, I could be wrong. My linking of the writing of this speech with what Mr Shakespeare may possibly have felt about the loss of his own (and only) son might deny the man's imagination or at the least insult it. Or it could be that I mistake or misconstrue the way the mind of a poet works upon the things that happen in the poet's life.

I confess that I never dared to question Mr Shakespeare directly in the matter. But I remember a night at the Mermaid when having recited those tender lines which he gave to Queen Constance, I expounded my theory and quizzed his fellow playwrights as to what they thought.

Mr Beaumont said I was right, and wiped away a tear.

Mr Fletcher said I was wrong, and that my supposition accused Mr Shakespeare of a want of heart, or a want of imagination, or of both wants together, and only went to prove my mediocrity.

Mr Ben Jonson said nothing, but belched and hurled a flagon at my head.

It was an empty flagon, naturally.

Ladies and gentlemen, Beroaldus (who was a wise doctor) will have drunkards, afternoon-men, and such as more than ordinarily delight in drink, to be mad. I am of his opinion from my own experience. They are more than mad, much worse than mad.

Speaking of which, before we quitted Cambridge finally Mr Shakespeare saw fit to try to teach me the joys of tobacco. He was not one of those who suppose that plant divine in its origin or its powers. But he liked his white clay pipe. He gave me sweetmeats also, and called me his doxy. It was not for such things that I loved his company.

As to why Mr Shakespeare liked mine, if he did, who now can rightly say?

I suggest only that the least that can be supposed - leaving lugged boots and young Hamlet out of it - is that the great man was pleased when he found that rainy afternoon that I said his lines plainly and true even when perched upon a red-brick wall. And perhaps it pleased him further when he discovered that I had some rudimental feeling for the shape of English verse. The Sisters Muchmore had taught me rhythm on the arse with their striped tawse.

For whatever reason, or none, Mr WS took me along with him like a prize bull-calf when he went back to London to rejoin his company of actors.

They were called the Lord Chamberlain's Servants* and they played at that time at the playhouse called the Curtain, in Shoreditch. Our master was Mr James Burbage, a stubborn old man with an anchor on his thigh, who died of a surfeit of lampreys the Easter after I made my first entrance.

I wore my lugged boots and I made great strides.

* The threefold nature of the name of the company of actors to which WS belonged has not always been well understood. Here, then, let me spell it out that the Lord Chamberlain's Servants had formerly been known (before my time) as Lord Strange's Men, and that after the accession and patronage of King James I we were proud to be known as the King's Players.