The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty-Nine What Shakespeare did when first he came to London

There are those who say we do not know what Shakespeare did when he first came to London. But I say we do. Lie back in your bath-tub, madam, and Pickleherring will tell you.

The best information comes always from the enemy. Never trust a man's friends to give you the plain truth about his life. It is those who would deny or decry his way in the world who can invariably be relied upon to provide the clearest notions of what he has been doing.

So - Let us speed forward some five years from the time of Mr Shakespeare's coming to London. It is the night of the 2nd day of September, 1592, and here in this garret in Eastcheap a man is dying. The plague rages through London, but it is not the plague that is killing him. He sits at his table and scribbles. He clutches his guts. He has a long red beard tugged and twisted into a point, and on his head he has crammed two caps, one Oxford, one Cambridge, the only things that remain in his life to remind him that once he had his Master of Arts degree from both those universities. His name is Robert Greene.

He has at his elbow a penny pot of malmsey. The shirt on his back is the shirt of his mistress's husband, borrowed for him to wear while she scrubs out the lice from his own shirt. Tomorrow morning, when she finds him dead, this good kindly woman, Mrs Isam, will crown Greene's poor head with a garland of bays. Then she will sell his sword to pay for his winding sheet (four shillings). The charge for his burial in the new churchyard near Bedlam will be borne by her husband (six shillings and fourpence).

Robert Greene is a writer, a man of letters. But writers live on hope, and he has none left. Once, this unhappy hack was almost famous. His Menaphon, published three years ago, was even reprinted. He called it Greene's Arcadia that second time around. Before that, he wrote a novel called Pandosto, which will one day provide the plot for The Winter's Tale. He has written plays as well, but now no one will put them on, even though he offers each one to two companies at the same time. His Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, once popular, would get laughed off the stage in these more sophisticated days. At thirty-four years old, Greene's considered a has-been, an umquhile man.

Like many in his case, Robert Greene has turned to religion. Now, in this last night of his life, he is at work on a diatribe, cast in the form of a letter to his 'fellow scholars', in which he intends to expose the villainies of the contemporary literary world. He can yark up a pamphlet like this in a day and a night. All it takes is a little self-righteousness and a great deal of alcohol, for Greene is an evangelist. The name of his final evangel is A Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance. (No, not a catchy title, I agree.)

Mr Greene has a good word for actors. He has four good words, in fact, each of them prompted by our reluctance to do his plays. He calls us 'apes' and 'peasants'. He calls us 'painted monsters'. But the main targets for his wrath are his fellow writers, especially those young rival dramatists whose successes he blames for his own failure. Amongst these there are two who fill him up with a particular angry vitriol. The first is Mr Christopher Marlowe, although Greene cannot bring himself to name his name, soundly berated on account of his notorious atheism. The second is another un-named fellow, an even viler villain, who inspires our dying moralist to an apoplectic outburst of disgust.

Pass me that sponge, madam. I will do your back.

What does Greene say? Here is what he says:

'There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.'

He then goes on to call this arch-enemy of all that is good a 'rude groom', after warning his fellow writers not to acquaint him with their intentions lest he should steal them.

Yes, madam, Shake-scene is Shakespeare.

Of course I am sure. That bit about his heart being wrapt in a Player's hide is a parody of a line in the third part of his Henry VI - all Greene has done is substitute the word Player for the word woman. What he is saying is that Shakespeare is an animal disguised as an actor. What he is saying is that Shakespeare is also a thief - in Horace's third epistle, the crow is the symbol of plagiarism. What Greene is saying is that this hated creature has tricked his way into the confidence of the other actors and writers, in order to mimic their styles and appropriate their works.

Some unguents? Mmm, assuredly.

Yes, madam, Greene is saying that Shakespeare is a conceited little upstart. But he's telling us more than that. He's telling us, more or less, exactly what Shakespeare has been doing since he came to London. Unpick each of his insults and it gives you a job.

Take, first, that rude groom ... Well, in the time of Elizabeth, coaches being yet uncommon, and hired coaches not at all in use, those who were too proud, too tender, or too idle to walk, went on horseback to any distant business or diversion. Many came on horseback to the play, and when Shakespeare fled to London from the terror of a criminal prosecution, I have had it from no less an authority than Sir William Davenant, our Poet Laureate, his own godson, that the great man's first expedient was to wait at the door of the playhouse, and hold the horses of those that had no servants, that they might be ready again after the performance. In this office he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness, indeed, that in a short time every man as he alighted called for 'Will Shakespeare!' and scarcely any other waiter was trusted with a horse while Will Shakespeare could be had. This was the first dawn of a better fortune, madam. Because our Will was always his father's son, with an eye to the easier way and the better profits, and in no time at all, finding more horses put into his hand than he could hold, he hired a team of boys to wait outside the theatre under his inspection, who, when 'Will Shakespeare!' was summoned, were taught to present themselves immediately, saying, 'I am Shakespeare's boy, sir!' Thus, our Will was not long a rude groom himself, but doubtless it was in that office that Greene first made his acquaintance. Besides, according to his godson, for as long as the practice of riding to the playhouse continued, the waiters that held the horses retained the appellation of Shakespeare's Boys.

Soap of Alicante? Yes! Yes! Yes!

Now then, once he got a foot inside the theatre, Shakespeare lost no time in becoming an actor, even though he was a rude, untutored country boy in the estimation of a university wit like Mr Robert Greene. That, surely, is one of the things Greene means by calling him an upstart Crow? Never forget, madam, that as I think I may have told you, your Mr Shakespeare was a handsome, well-shaped man, and of a smooth and ready wit, and as you might readily imagine (lying there in your spindrift of frothy oils) he made a very tolerable player, though he rarely appeared in the main parts in his own plays - Prospero being the exception which proves my rule. However, able as he was at bombasting out a blank verse in this next profession of actor, it was not long again before our Shakespeare managed to convince Mr James Burbage that he would be even better employed as a play-patcher, a reviser and refurbisher of old plays, Mr Greene's no doubt among them. Just picture it for yourself: The young actor protesting, 'I can't say this stuff! How about if I said this instead?' and going on to transmute Greene's verbal base metal into pure Shakespearean gold as he stood on the spot. Imagine the great Mr Robert Greene, M.A. of two universities, having to submit to the indignity of finding his plays improved and his scansion corrected by this upstart he had first but half-noticed as he chucked him the reins when he found time to pay a visit to the playhouse! No wonder he calls Shakespeare an absolute Johannes fac totum, a horrible Jack-of-all-trades, groom turned actor, actor turned play-patcher, play-patcher turned play-maker, play-maker who in his own conceit is now reckoned the only Shake-scene in the country - which is to say, by this summer of '92, as Greene sits a-dying, the top playwright, the new man, the one who has stolen everyone else's thunder, and replaced Mr Greene and his friends in the favour of the audiences. Perhaps the most bitter pill is that Greene knows in his guts that it is true, and that this Shake-scene is his better-in every way?

Well, yes, madam, I agree that Robert Greene's prose is turgid stuff. I did not mean to spoil your lovely bath. Some fellows used words like soap in those far-off days. Euphuism, they called it. You employ a lot of rhetorical devices, such as antithesis and homoeoteleuton and paranomasia. You make elaborate comparisons and stir it all up with far-fetched metaphors without regard to any canon of verisimilitude. It is a highly analytical style, madam, which ceaselessly dissects and catalogues, compares and contrasts. It aspires thereby to represent the polite discourse of urbane and elegant persons.

Urbane, madam, and elegant, that is what I said. It was what we would call 'all the rage', then. It made thin thought seem of substance, so its writers believed. Even Mr Shakespeare tried it briefly, in his early days, though by the time of Love's Labour's Lost he is satirising such affectations. He soon pared himself of any tendency in that direction, and spared us all. The more you have to say the plainer you say it.

Right. From Greene's Groatsworth we learn that when Shakespeare first came to London he was first a groom, and then an actor, and then a Jack-of-all-trades about the theatre, and that by the summer of 1592, when he was twenty-eight years old, he was already popular enough to be considered an enviable rival by at least one other dramatist. Greene died, and his pamphlet was published. Evidently Shakespeare and his friends complained, for Henry Chettle, who had prepared the Groatsworth for the press, then offered a handsome sort of apology, saying that he had now met Shakespeare, and found him not like Greene's libels, but an amiable gentleman altogether, and--

No, madam, I did not say I had murdered Robert Greene.

I do assure you, madam, I claimed no such thing!

Look again at that conclusion to Chapter Forty-Nine, then. You will see that what I say--There, you have it! Pickle herring killed Mr Greene. A great surfeit of the buggers.

A week or so previous, do you see, he had sat down with his friend Thomas Nashe and their acquaintance William Monox to a terrible banquet of my little namesakes, washed down with tankards of strong Rhenish wine. At once Greene fell sick. That was too rich a diet for his diseased kidneys, all poisoned as they were by his jealousy of Shakespeare. (A thing which Dr Walter Warner deemed well possible - that men have been rotted away within by their own hates.)

Greene never recovered from those pickle herring. I claim no credit for the poor hack's death. I was but nine lamb-like years of age when all this happened, and still in the tender care of the Misses Muchmore, living as you may remember by a far fen.

Now, with your permission, madam, let me rub your breasts dry with this nice big fleecy white towel--