The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighty-Two Pickleherring's poem

Last night I dreamt that I was an urchin and Polly was a waif. We were the same age, the two of us, younger than she is now, and we came in together off the street hand-in-hand to present ourselves to Pompey Bum and Lucy Negro.

'Whose house is this?' I asked them.

'It belongs to her,' said Pompey Bum. 'Her name is Madam Mitigation.'

Polly jumped up and down. She was wearing a short white dress, and a ribbon of white velvet in her hair. 'Goody! Goody!' she cried. 'You buy children, don't you?'

They smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, but Lucy Negro was holding a long whip. 'We do,' she said.

'Jump up on the table and let's have a look at you,' said Pompey Bum.

So Polly and I climbed up on the table in my dream. But I was frightened. 'Why do you buy children?' I enquired.

'For love,' said Lucy Negro.

She was pinching and stroking my calf.

Pompey Bum spread wide his pale-pink hands. He looked like a pork butcher. 'That's right,' he said. 'For love. What else?'

Polly pouted. 'Will we have to work?' she asked suspiciously.

'You will work for love, my moppet,' said Lucy Negro.

I didn't like the sound of this, though it seemed not to displease Polly. She gave a twirl where she stood, beside me on the table top, showing the adults her bottom. She was not wearing drawers.

'Do you have a lot of love then?' she asked them, giggling.

'My house is made of love,' said Lucy Negro.

She cracked her whip as she said this. I was scared. But Polly jumped up and down and clapped her hands together. 'Oh, how soon can we have some?' she cried out.

Lucy Negro cracked the whip again, but it was Pompey's fat hand that slapped pretty Polly's impertinent arse. 'Stand still when you're up for sale!' the whoremaster commanded. 'I can't abide a kid that keeps jigging about before the price is settled.'

'They don't love us, Poll,' said I. 'They don't love us at all.'

Some ridiculous antics followed. I can't remember the sequence. At one point, I know, I had to jump through a hoop while Polly stood on her head in the corner and Pompey Bum inspected her. At last the owners of the brothel professed themselves satisfied. It was to me that Lucy Negro turned, and she took me by the hand. 'You see, little pickerel,' said she, 'we do love you, and you will find out how much just as soon as the contract is signed.'

'To whom should we make payment?' said Pompey Bum. He was tossing a bag of money from hand to hand.

I very much wanted to piss. And I wanted to leave. But Polly was dancing about again on the table. 'Mr Bum and Miss Negro,' she cried, 'we belong to the river.'

'We can't pay the river,' Lucy Negro said. 'The brat must mean Mr Shakespeare.'

Pompey Bum, though, seemed delighted that the two of us should belong to the River Thames. 'River children! River children!' he chanted. 'They are children of the river! Down you come!'

When we came down off the table he wanted to know if we had come upstream or downstream. I said nothing. I just wanted to piss. Then he asked us if we had seen a boat with a white female figurehead and a captain by the name of William Shakespeare. A man without a memory, he said.

Polly put on a serious face. It didn't suit her. 'Yes, sir,' she said. 'I think I met the gentleman.'

'Liar!' I cried. 'You're just saying that to please them.'

But Polly insisted. 'He was at the lock above Alveston,' she went on. 'It was the day that Pickleherring went to the fair. Captain Shakespeare put a kiss in my hand and he asked me if I would stay with him until dark. I said I would. He smelt like trees in a forest. He said, "Tell me a story." So I told him about the swan that was cut open on Thomasina's birthday and they found a mirror inside it. It was a little mirror, with an ivory handle and a silver back. When you looked in it, you saw yourself clearer than you are. He didn't like that story.'

'That's our friend,' said Pompey Bum. 'Did he mention me?'

Polly shook her head. 'He didn't say much about himself,' she explained. 'But he liked me. He made me take all my clothes off and we played a wee game. All about me being a wolf and he was the chickens. I wished that Captain Shakespeare was my father.'

Pompey Bum and Lucy Negro were falling about. They seemed delighted by this story. As for me, I just wanted to have a good piss and the dream to end. You know how it is in some dreams - that you start to wake up in them. I was reaching that stage, being conscious that I wanted it to end. Meanwhile, Pompey Bum was asking Polly what the game was called, and Polly replied that the game was called PILLICOCK HILL.

I had had enough. 'Don't believe it, sir and madam!' I cried out. 'She's wanted to be deflowered for simply ages. Terrible she is. You can have no idea what her brothers have had to put up with. Anyway, you can't have me without her, so make up your minds.'

'Take them,' said Pompey Bum to Lucy Negro. 'What else is there to do when two lives come to join yours?'

'It's an odd story,' Lucy Negro said.

'You can say that for a week,' said Pompey Bum. 'You will still take them.'

But Lucy Negro was shaking her lovely head. 'I do not believe the girl's story,' she announced. 'William Shakespeare would never use a word like PILLICOCK.'

That's where you're wrong, lady, thought I to myself in the dream, for he uses that word in King Lear. But I was not going to tell her. Instead, I woke up and had a good piss in my chamber-pot. As I pissed I reflected that it is Lear's 'Twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters which prompts Edgar (outcast, and posing as the idiot Poor Tom) to chant: Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill.* PILLICOCK means the male generative organs, with pilli as the testicles and cock the penis. As for PILLICOCK HILL it is the Mount of Venus + the pudendum muliebre itself. So Pillicock sitting on Pillicock Hill describes the deed of darkness by which Lear's flesh begot his daughters. No doubt it meant the same in my foolish dream.

When I was finished pissing I heard Polly at work in the room below, but I did not want to look. Don't ask me why, sir. I just didn't feel like it.

That word PILLICOCK comes somewhere in one of John Florio's wordbooks, by the by, which is a source from which Mr Shakespeare drew many choice vocables. It comes also in my mentor Urquhart's translation of Rabelais, but that of course was after Shakespeare's time.

Marston has Post Haste have a word-hoard: Plenty of Old England's mother words. So he did, and only a fraction of it from Florio. Florio, for that matter, might have garnered PILLICOCK from Shakespeare, learning the word from him during the course of a game at tennis on Rizley's second-best court for all I know. It is not (I just looked) in my father's kidskin dictionary.

Since in my last chapter I disparaged Mr Ben Jonson's famous verses about Mr Shakespeare in the First Folio, it is only fair that now I should give you my own verses about Mr Shakespeare which I contributed to the Second Folio. These appeared there amongst the preliminary matter in 1632, but with no name attached at my request. As you will see, the verse turns on the degree to which Shakespeare is to be found rather in his works than in Droeshout's copper-plate engraving for the title-page. Here is my poem:

Upon the Effigies of my worthy Friend,

the Author Master William Shakespeare,

and his Works

Spectator, this life's shadow is. To see

The truer image and a livelier he

Turn reader. But observe his comic vein,

Laugh, and proceed next to a tragic strain,

Then weep. So when thou find'st two contraries,

Two different passions from thy rapt soul rise,

Say (who alone effect such wonders could)

Rare Shakespeare to the life thou dost behold.

* King Lear, Act III, Scene 4, lines 74-5.