The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighty-One In which Mr Shakespeare is mocked by his fellows

William Shakespeare was now so famous and successful that his rivals started mocking him. Such was ever the way of the world. They envied him his fluency and his facility, as well as the great popularity of his work with all manner of people. By this time our upstart crow had produced eight comedies and twelve tragedies. He had also published two much-reprinted poems that everyone was talking about on account of their high erotic content and mellifluous versification. And besides all this, he had been responsible for adapting and reworking at least a dozen old plays, and was always being asked by the Company to spice up and improve the plays we had in stock.

Given this acclaim, and the spite that comes naturally to certain poets, it is not surprising that some of Mr Shakespeare's contemporaries found fault with him. Ben Jonson, in particular, was very jealous.

There was a deep difference of temperament between the two men. I can best suggest this by remembrance of the few occasions when Mr Shakespeare was persuaded to the Mermaid tavern by his friends (his usual habit, as I have said, being to avoid attendance by sending down a note that he was 'in pain'). Jonson held court in the Mermaid, he was its uncrowned king. His sycophants danced attendance on him there, hanging on his every word, laughing obedience to each laboured joke that fell from his lips, licking his arse as if his shit was nectar. He would sit there sweating in his own carved chair, a mountain of flesh with pock-marked face and albino hair and eyes, wearing a coat like a coachman's, with slits under the arm-pits. He had once been a brick-layer, then he had fought in the wars in Flanders. A mediocre actor, in truth he was at first not much more successful when he turned playwright. During these difficult years, Jonson quarrelled with an actor of Henslowe's company, a man called Gabriel Spencer, and killed him in a duel in Hogsden Fields. He only escaped hanging by invoking the 'Benefit of Clergy' clause, calling for a Bible and reading in Latin the verses of the 51st psalm. This proof of erudition reduced his punishment, but his thumb was branded with a T for Tyburn.

Down at the Mermaid, he met more than his match in Shakespeare. In their wit-combats, Jonson was like a Spanish great galleon, while our hero was an English man-of-war. Jonson, that is to say, while physically more impressive, and giving every impression of being built higher out of the water in terms of Learning, was but solid and slow in his performance. Shakespeare, our English frigate, lesser in bulk, could outmanoeuvre him in any exchange, being lighter in sailing, and able to turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.

Needless to say, this pleased Mr Jonson no more than the fact that it was only when Mr Shakespeare got our Company to perform his Every Man in His Humour with Shakespeare himself in the part of Knowell Senior that he started to get merit as a playwright. The two rival writers passed for the best of friends, and nowadays when people who knew neither of them read Jonson's fulsome eulogy they quickly conclude that this was indeed the case. However, I can tell you that relations between them were always in fact more complicated, on account of Jonson's jealousy. This came out in his losing no opportunity to mock Mr Shakespeare's pretensions to the rank of gentleman. In his satire which appeared the year a coat of arms was accorded to Mr John Shakespeare, Jonson parodies both the 'falcon brandishing a spear' and the device 'Non sans droict', giving to one of his characters, the upstart Sogliardo, similar armorial bearings with the motto, 'Not without mustard'. As for the magnificence of his tribute to Shakespeare in the shape of that ode which Mr Heminges and Mr Condell (in their wisdom) placed as heading to the Folio of 1623, permit old crazy Pickleherring merely to point out that this came only when Jonson's great rival was safely dead and buried, and that then the note of praise seems strained and forced, perhaps out of guilt that he had put the man down when alive.

However, Pickleherring might be wrong to say so. I confess that I never liked either Mr Ben Jonson or his inky plays. Shall I just say that we boiled at different temperatures, before leaving the subject?

In any case, the sharpest mocking of Shakespeare was done not by Jonson but by John Marston in his Histrio-Mastix or The Player Whipt. (Yes, madam, it is the same name as that pamphlet of Prynne's which I gave you in the last chapter, but believe me that does not mean I am making all this up! If this were fiction, I could change the name, so that there would be no possibility of confusion. But real life is like this, full of meaningless coincidence. Consider the other Reynoldses in my narrative ...)

Marston was no albino giant. He had red hair and short legs, and in due course he gave up poetry to become a priest. But in his unregenerate days he had much fun at Mr S's expense with his character called Post Haste.

Post Haste is a playwright in a hurry. He is hasty, he is muddled, and he has to turn out play after play for his company. He is always eager to offer his services to the Truly Great, and glad to give a performance in exchange for a good dinner and a night's sleep in a swansdown bed at any Lordship's house. His repertoire parodies that passage in Hamlet where Polonius lists the accomplishments of the itinerant players:

The Lascivious Knight and Lady Nature

The Devil and Dives (a comedy)

A Russet Coat and a Knave's Cap (an infernal)

A Proud Heart and a Beggar's Purse (a pastoral)

The Widow's Apron Strings (a nocturnal)

Mother Gurton's Needle (a tragedy)

What's more, like Mr Shakespeare, Post Haste always has in hand a new play, a piece which he is just finishing, something never yet seen but which he intends to stage without delay.

When Post Haste appears on stage his companions bow low. They count on his talents for their cakes and ale. He consents to give the actors a foretaste of his latest work, The Prodigal Son, but his voice is so broken by sobs that he can't go on reading. Nothing daunted, he declares that he is equal to improvising a prologue appropriate to every occasion. Post Haste, in fact, has up his sleeve a Universal Prologue and a Universal Epilogue.

Here is the Universal Prologue:

Lords, we are here to show you what we are;

Lords, we are here although our clothes be bare.

Instead of flowers in season

Ye shall gather Rime and Reason.

And this is the Universal Epilogue:

The glass is run, our play is done:

Hence: Time doth call; we thank you all.

However, what Post Haste has in hand for this particular occasion is a play on the subject of Troilus and Cressida, and in case anyone should so far have missed the object of the lampoon, when we get to Cressida bestowing her colours on her champion we have Troilus hammering home a pun on Shakespeare's name:

When he shakes a furious spear

The foe in shivery fearful sort

May lay him down in death to snort.

I think this is quite enough to show that Marston certainly had it here in mind to mock both our hero's character and his more perfunctory dramatic procedures. The satire is not without bite, and the feeling of it may even have a touch of affection. Shakespeare's portrait in the person of Post Haste does bear some resemblance to the man I knew.

Talking of which, and since it was at this point in his life's fame that I first met him, let me explain how it happened that Mr Shakespeare was in Cambridge rather than London that day when I jumped off the wall for him in 1596. The Puritans amongst the magistrates of the city of London had just at that time managed to get an order forbidding all plays in the city and its suburbs, on the pretext that large assemblies would create a public danger by increasing the risk of infection with the plague. That there was in that year no plague in London, or anywhere near London, did not deter them. But then in my definition a Puritan is one who objects to bull and bear baiting, not in pity for bull or bear, but in aversion to and envy at the pleasure of the spectators. In a word, a KILL-JOY.

The ban did not last long, yet it was a presage of things to come, when under Cromwell the same spirit triumphed, shutting down every playhouse in the country.

Still, I am grateful to those kill-joys for what they did in the summer of my thirteenth year. Without their mean antics, the Lord Chamberlain's Servants would never have been touring the provinces, their shoes full of gravel and their old, blind nag laden down with baskets full of costumes, and I would never have met Post Haste and become a player myself. In which case, I suppose, it is unlikely that I would now be sitting in the attic of a Southwark brothel, munching pickled mulberries and watching the moon rise over the roofs of the stews. She makes these roofs silver. I wonder how anything can be so white, so perfectly white.