The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty-Eight Pickleherring's Poetics (some more about this book)

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all (even Will, his negative inversion), please note that again I have not done the obvious thing.

Namely, I have not claimed that our hero 'ran away' from Stratford-upon-Haven or whatever you feel like calling the wretched place just because he did not get on like a bed on fire with his wife.

I know that there are those who have said and will say this.

And I know well what they get up to in their sly attempts to prove it.

Their trick is to take certain bits and pieces from Mr Shakespeare's plays and to press these passages into service as if they could be made to illustrate Mr Shakespeare's private life.

For instance, such literary gossips seize on that line given to Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well (what a lovely title that is, madam, yes): 'A young man married is a young man marred.' And then they hop from there to the character of Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and they argue that because she is a nasty, nagging scold it must follow that Shakespeare intended her as a portrait of his wife. Ergo, his married youth was marred by Anne Hathaway's tongue. Ergo, he quit Stratford.

Reader, I say this is wrong.

What is wrong with it is that Parolles's cynicism suits Parolles, and Adriana belongs in her play. In other words, these things fit where they are supposed to fit, they belong where they are, and they tell us nothing about the man who wrote them save that he was a good craftsman as well as a good observer of human character. The fact is that if you take the work of a dramatist with such a wide range as Shakespeare then you can find within it items which when extracted could be used to prove anything at all if applied to his biography.

My method in this book is different in kind.

I only use those bits that do not fit.

For example, that shepherd's quite irrelevant personal outburst about the significance of attaining the age of twenty-three.

For example, the land-locked philosophical Jaques suddenly introducing REMAINDER BISCUIT into his account of the fool he has met in the Forest of Arden.

For example, Prince Hamlet on the very great perils of drunkenness.

For example, Juliet's nurse counting the years from the time of an earthquake that killed a mouse and rattled some dove-cotes in Stratford.

For example, the mistaken idea that you can cheat at chess.

These things do not belong where our playwright puts them.

They neither sit well in context, nor can it be claimed that they are alien remnants left over from the sources behind their plays. (You will find no old sea-biscuits in Ralph Holinshed.)

Your author picks up on such items because he believes that because they do not belong in their plays then they must belong to something else.

And the something else they must belong to is the life of the man who wrote those plays, the late Mr William Shakespeare.

Pickleherring is writing the Life of William Shakespeare for you now. So he snaps up all these previously unconsidered trifles that do not fit in the works where they occur, and he seeks to show where they fit in the drama of the life.

Thus, as the well-spurred Aristotle would say, the Poetics of this book that you are reading.

What do you mean, madam - you feel that you will have to take a bath?