The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Seventy-Eight Of eggs and Richard Burbage

Anne brought me two more eggs. And she told me her name. It is not Anne exactly. It is Polly!

All this has left me too excited to start writing today's chapter of my Life of the late Mr Shakespeare, which should be on the subject of some of the leading actors in our Company, and particularly Mr Richard Burbage. So I'll leave that for a moment. Here is what happened.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, the 6th of August. This is a feast day I have always kept. I love the idea of Christ's shiningness passing from his soul to his body, as he stood on Mount Tabor before St Peter, St James, and St John. The way Luke describes it in his Gospel* it must have been like the atmosphere when suddenly lit up passingly by the sun. As such, a miracle of that kind I can most readily venerate - unlike, for example, Christ's walking on the waves of the sea.

I never tasted fish nor flesh since Jane died. I never drank either wine or any beer. My chief food is oatmeal boiled with water, which some call gruel; and in summer, now and then, a salad of some cool choice herbs which I purchase of Pompey Bum. For dainties, or when I would feast myself, upon a high day such as this, I like to eat the yolk of a hen's egg, if I can. And what bread I eat, I cut out the middle part of the loaf, but of the crust I never taste. Now and then, when my stomach serves me, I eat some suckets - dried sugar-plums. But more commonly I have my mulberries.

Knowing my liking for yolks on such a day as this, you can imagine my delight when I opened my door to a gentle knock and found my whore-child standing there with a basket on her arm and a crisp white linen cloth folded over the basket. I knew at a glance what was under that napkin.

'Why do you bring me these gifts?' I made bold to ask her.

'Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow,' the sweet girl replied.

This I found extraordinary. I asked her, had she heard of Rabelais? Of course, she had not. Yet it comes in his third book, the self-same saying: Ad praesens ova, cras pullis sunt meliora. It is when Bridlegoose is going on about the scribes and scriveners. Perhaps it is one of those proverbs you get in several languages.

Anne looked so innocent, standing there with her little wicker basket. She was wearing a kirtle, grass-green, that came down to her ankles. It was almost impossible to associate this visitor with the naked nymph I had watched at Sapphic work on the body of the Countess. All the same, memories of that other sweetness did float into my mind as she flitted about the room.

I gave her a pickled mulberry. Against my window, the sunlight making a black bonfire of her hair, she leant and sucked it prettily, and pronounced it good. Her pleasure surprised me, for I do not think she would lie for the sake of politeness. I had supposed the last mulberry was not to her tender taste.

Anne did not stay more than five minutes, but they were the best five minutes I have known for years. The sunlight seemed to follow her about my chamber. She dusted my table with her green sleeve, and fanned her cheeks with the top page of my manuscript. She expressed no interest in it, though it has now achieved the height of a small hill. After she'd gone, I sat and held that top page to my nostrils. It was the last one where I wrote of Lucy Negro. Now it is soaked in the scent of a second KINCHIN-MORT.

When she said she had to go, I made her a bow. 'May I ask,' I murmured, 'to whom I owe the honour of all these eggs?' (I did not want her to know that I knew her name.)

I swear that she blushed! So I'm right, and she can't have been long at the game.

'My name is Anne Flinders,' she said. 'But those who like me call me Polly.'

I stood there, friends, mouth open, in the doorway. I could not move my tongue. She must have thought the old man living up here in the eaves of Pompey Bum's brothel was, after all, an idiot. It was simply too much for me - the thought, all at once, that this exquisite vision of loveliness who has also been so kind to a crazy stranger is known to those who like her by that name which has always been closest to my heart, the name of that girl in the song, O (long-lost!) Polly Dear.

I kissed her hand, the better to prevent her seeing the tears that had come to my eyes.

She spun in a flurry of green petticoats. Then she was gone.

Those eggs were delicious. I fear I ate each part. This has left me with a torment in my gut, but I do not regret the eating.

It occurs to me that when Anne - when Polly first brought eggs to me, why, I ate those first eggs knowing there could be plague in them. Yet that is melodramatic. Of all things brought to eat by other hands perhaps eggs were the safest while the plague still raged in London. There was a shell after all between the meat and any possible contagion. All the same, what if the very chickens were infected? It is, I suppose, not impossible. I think I knew that when I ate them, in some dark antechamber of my mind. Perhaps I longed for death at the young whore's hands? Death as her speckled gift? Death as her bright yolk given to me, a kindness granted to the old crazed man in the attic? Well, had there been death in those first eggs, I would never even have begun my Life of William Shakespeare, let alone got so far along in it as I have now.

The principal actors in our Company, known at that time as the Lord Chamberlain's Servants, were Richard Burbage, William Sly, Thomas Pope, George Bryan, and Will Kempe. Later, Augustine Phillips and Henry Condell, both members of the Lord Admiral's Company, and John Heminges, from the Queen's, joined our band. Some fifteen more players were soon added, the main ones being John Lowin, Joseph Taylor, Alexander Cook, Samuel Gilburne, William Cowley, and your servant. With the exception of Kempe, last seen trying to hop across the Alps to win a bet, all these remained faithful to the Company and died in harness. I tell a lie. Lowin became a publican in his old age, and for all I know is still alive at Brentford. Otherwise, Pickleherring must be the only one of us left.

Reader, I doubt if Mr Shakespeare would have played the leading parts in his own plays even if Richard Burbage had not existed. Shakespeare was not a genius as an actor. Burbage (in my opinion) may have been. Roles such as Romeo and Bassanio and Henry V were made for him to fill. He was a natural lover and soldier, and a hero just to look at, with a very fine, rich speaking voice besides, and much grace and charm of movement. There was never an awkward bone in his whole body, and he had that gift which some (very few) actors have, that once he came on stage your eyes never left him.

Though partial to a tot of rum, Richard Burbage never fluffed his lines. He always endeavoured to perform as near the apron as he could, so that his great rolling vocables would reach to the back of the house even when he whispered. Playing so many girls' parts opposite him, I appreciated that his breath usually smelt pleasantly of aniseed, though I never saw him chew it. So warm he was in the interpretation of his parts, so entirely believable, that he could reduce me to tears on the stage - something no other actor was ever capable of. The audience was similarly affected. One day, when he threw himself into Ophelia's grave, a spectator jumped up on stage and tried to pull him out.

The younger son of anchor-man James Burbage, the founder of our Company, he was about two years older than Mr Shakespeare, but he always looked younger. It was only in the parts of 'potent, grave, and reverend signiors' that our author had the edge - I cannot imagine Richard Burbage playing Prospero, for instance. It was his great personal charm which made plausible in Richard III that immediate conquest of the widow of the man he has murdered, a seduction which Burbage used to perform over the very coffin. I have seen other actors attempt this, but none who made it credible.

Madam, do you know why Juliet falls in love with Romeo at first sight, and Rosalind with Orlando? I will tell you. It is because Richard Burbage played Romeo and Orlando first on stage, and he was so good-looking and so full of grace when young.

Sir, do you know why Queen Gertrude says that Hamlet is fat and scant of breath and offers him her napkin during the duel with Laertes? It is because Dick Burbage, when he got older, put on weight, and he found himself often out of breath and mopping the sweat from his brow during this scene, so Mr Shakespeare wrote in those lines for Gertrude to give him a moment to rest during the fight and to provide an excuse and reason for him doing so. This was, I think, a mark of Mr Shakespeare's affection for Burbage, that he wrote this into Hamlet just for his sake. It has occurred to me, though, that anyone who does not know the physical shortcoming must find Gertrude's words and actions quite a puzzle.

Othello and Lear were Richard Burbage's other great roles, and he also played Hieronimo in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.

He was a skilled painter in oils, as well as an actor. In 1613 and 1616 he painted the device for the shield of Francis, Earl of Rutland, with Shakespeare writing the motto on the first occasion. He died three years after Mr Shakespeare, and all that was mortal of him lies buried now in the church of St Leonard's, Shoreditch, under a stone that bears a perfect epitaph for an actor:

EXIT BURBAGE.

Talking of eggs, as today I must, I have a story which says much of Richard Burbage and his appetite for life. I heard him once, at that Oxford inn where our Company were staying when on tour, lean over the bannisters and roar down the stair-well in his best King Lear voice:

'Mrs Davenant! Three of those six eggs you sent up for my breakfast were bad! I've eaten them all, but don't let it happen again!'

As for me, I seem to have written a little song to celebrate Polly's giving me more eggs on this transfigured day. It has nothing to do with the girl or the occasion, that I can see, but the lines came into my head, so I've written them down. Here they are:

Sing a song of eggshells,

Who's to pay the rent?

What's the use of fairy tales

That you never meant?

What's the use of living?

What's the use of jam?

All you get is what you want -

Never who you AM.

But I'm a comedian, not a poet, and the jingle does scant justice to my joy. It even sounds bitter, which might be considered curious and perverse.

* Luke, 9.28-36; also Matthew, 17.1-13, and Mark, 9.2-13.