The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty-Seven Shakespeare's Canopy, or Pickleherring in dispraise of wine

It is also probable, if you ask me, that alcohol played a part in William Shakespeare's decision to get away from Stratford. I do not mean pride, intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, no, madam. I mean alcohol of wine, the pure or rectified spirit, that impure, intoxicating element which possesses your fermented liquors.

What a weird word it is, this ALCOHOL. In my father's kidskin dictionary it says that it comes from the name of a certain black powder of lead ore which the ladies in Barbary once put upon their eyelids: AL-KA-HOL. How that glamour relates to the power of sherris-sack is beyond my knowledge.

What I do know, as I have said, is that in London the late Mr Shakespeare lived for the most part an abstemious life. My point is that no one save a Puritan takes such care as he did to avoid most occasions of debauchery unless they have suffered in its toils at some earlier stage. Since Mr William Shakespeare was no Puritan, I suspect that in his hot youth in Stratford he may have drunk with his father until he sickened himself. His going to London was his turning his back on such things.

Some interesting silences on the part of his widow - in response to this suggestion - only tended to confirm the idea in my mind. There is, besides, the matter of Shakespeare's Canopy.

Shakespeare's Canopy is the name given to a giant crab-tree in the village of Bidford, seven miles south of Stratford. I was shown this tree by Mr Thomas Jones, the ancient poacher. He told me the poet slept under it one night. The story goes as follows.

Shakespeare was a mighty drinker in those days, his old friend said, and he had come to Bidford with a band of fellows from Stratford (Tom Jones among them) to try his skill against the men of Bidford, who were famous throughout all Warwickshire as topers. Asking a shepherd for the Bidford drinkers, he was instructed that they were absent, though the Bidford sippers, who might be sufficient for him, were still here at home.

Shakespeare and company had no choice but to do battle against the sippers. They were defeated, hands down and bottoms up, and had to sleep off their drink by making their lodging under the tree for the night.

In the morning, said Jones, some of the Stratford men wanted to resume the contest, but Shakespeare refused. He declared he had drunk with:

Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,

Haunted Hillborough, hungry Grafton,

Dadgeing Exhall, Papist Wicksford,

Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.

(I do not know what 'dadgeing' is, and Mr Jones would not enlighten me.) In another version of the same story, already referred to, it is Shakespeare's father who spends the night with him under the crab-tree, both of them hopelessly drunk.

I do think that Shakespeare's crimes - his poaching expeditions - may well have been committed in his cups. There are several powerful but unnecessary passages in the plays about the abuse of alcohol, most notably in Hamlet, where the father/son relationship is plumbed most deeply. I owe this observation to the poet's daughter Susanna, who also remarked to me that Hamlet is full of things which strictly speaking have nothing to do with the story, unless you suppose some larger and untold story that lies at the back of it. I think this is true.

As to the date of Mr Shakespeare's departure from Stratford, I will tell you what makes me sure that it was 1587. In The Winter's Tale, when the shepherd finds the child Perdita, he says this:

'I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.'

Now this passage has nothing to do with the play, nor the shepherd's occupation. What's more, nor does it ring true to the life of a shepherd boy, whose years between ten and twenty-three are likely to be hard. I think the speech expresses WS's own youth, when he had nothing better to do than steal, fight, drink, wrong the ancientry, and get wenches with child. It is Shakespeare's confession. And it was in 1587 that William Shakespeare turned the age of twenty-three.

One word more concerning AL-KA-HOL, and I am done. I am now myself a water-drinker, as I have told you, but be sure that such abstinence is the outcome of my sins. I would not have you think that I am one of those who teach others to fast, and play the gluttons themselves - like watermen, that look one way and row another.

Here, then, is Pickleherring's observation, which he trusts you, reader, will find of use and interest. It is this:

That the paradise of AL-KA-HOL is achieved with the first three glasses. After that, you drink more and more with just the one purpose: to get back to that paradise of the third glass - and you always fail. Why? Because the alcohol transforms you, so that the person who drinks the fourth glass is not the one who drinks the fifth. Nor can you stop at the third glass, in paradise, since like all paradises you do not know you are in it until you have lost it. It is a paradise always lost, and a paradise never to be regained. You might say it is also a hell, and I would not deny you.