The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighty-Eight About Comfort Ballantine

It was not long after the coronation of King James that Mr Shakespeare carried the canopy in the royal procession,* and then elected to change his London lodging. He took rooms in the house of a Huguenot wigmaker, Christopher Mountjoy, who lived with his wife and daughter in a handsome twin-gabled building at the corner of Silver Street and Monkswell Street. Here the first thing he wrote was Measure for Measure, a new kind of philosophical comedy which (like Macbeth in a different mode) was designed to appeal to the King's tastes and interests. The Duke in Measure for Measure has more than enough of James in his character. I admit that I found the part of Isabella difficult - her heart's aspiration to divine love being perhaps beyond my range. After a few unfortunate performances, the role was taken over by a new boy who had caught my master's eye, John Spencer, then up and coming, in due course to be my principal rival and enemy, especially in his incarnation abroad where he took that humorous alias of Hans Stockfish just to spite me. I remember his Isabella: a holy, dog-faced dwarf in a cart-wheel farthingale. But Stockfish can be kept for another day.

Mr Shakespeare found himself now in a fashionable part of town. Mountjoy, his landlord, made not only wigs but those pearl-sewn and jewelled head-dresses then much in favour with the ladies of the Court. One of the Huguenot's clients was Queen Anne herself. By moving to this well-to-do quarter, north of the river and away from the stews of Southwark, Shakespeare was showing how far he had risen in the world.

Not that everyone in the Mountjoy household considered him respectable. The Mountjoys kept a cook called Comfort Ballantine, a formidable woman, originally from the north country, who in addition to providing for the Mountjoys' stomachs also took a keen interest in the welfare of their souls. For Comfort Ballantine was a Puritan. While not so extreme in her views as some of her brothers and sisters in that tendency, she still rated players as masters of vice and playwrights as teachers of wantonness. When the critical cook heard that William Shakespeare was taking two rooms in the house she gave it as her opinion to the Mountjoys that this was decidedly 'poor policy'. POOR POLICY was one of Comfort Ballantine's favourite phrases. She was forever telling Mrs Mountjoy that she thought it would be Poor Policy to do thus and such. Taking in as lodger a player/playwright with as facile and likeable a reputation as William Shakespeare's was perhaps the Poorest Policy she had ever heard of.

It is a measure of Mr Shakespeare's charm that he won Comfort over. She very nearly quit when he first came to Silver Street. But before long she was tidying his papers whenever he left the house. This tidying she called REDDING UP.

'What are you doing, Mrs Ballantine?' I heard our hero ask her, the first time it happened, him fearing no doubt that she was about to consign his blossoms of sin to the flames of her kitchen stove.

'I am redding up for you, Mr Shakespeare,' the cook replied, beaming.

And from that day forth, so he told me, he never had a moment's fear but that when he returned from his daily stroll down Wood Street and through Cheapside to get a wherry across to the Globe, and back again, he would find all his scattered papers neatly assembled on his table by the window at the Mountjoys. Not that Comfort Ballantine read them. She could not read.

Consequently, of course, the papers were often in the wrong order. But William Shakespeare knew better than to complain because of that.

It was not the theatre that Comfort Ballantine changed her mind about, only Mr Shakespeare. 'Players live by making fools laugh at sin and wickedness,' she said to me once. I did not argue with her. Who am I to disagree?

As for Mr Shakespeare's success in winning the respect of this worthy woman, that was just the lively face of something I find at the heart of his art. William Shakespeare was the least of an egotist that it is possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and every feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had a mind reflecting ages past and ages present - all the people that have ever lived are there. He had only to think of anything in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. Thus he was capable even of being Comfort Ballantine, who considered all rhymers plain rogues. He treated her with dignity, accordingly, and the cook adored him for it in return.

Comfort Ballantine was a great frequenter of the public sermons of those times, of course, which sermons were called 'prophecyings'. Because she could not read it was her practice to commit the substance of all that she heard at a prophecying to memory, so that she might regurgitate it later, and dwell upon its sapience in her mind. For the help of her memory she had invented and framed a girdle of leather, long and large, which went twice about her waist when she went to the conventicle. This girdle she had divided into several parts, allotting each book in the Bible, in its order, to one of these divisions. Then, for the chapters, she had affixed points or thongs of leather to the several divisions, and made knots by fives and tens thereupon to distinguish the chapters of each book. And by other points she had divided the chapters into their particular contents and verses. This girdle she used, because she could not use pen and ink, to take notes of all the sermons which she heard; and she made such good use of it that when she came home to the Mountjoys from the conventicle just by fingering her girdle she could repeat the sermon through its several heads, and quote the various texts mentioned in it, to her own great comfort, and to the benefit of Mr Shakespeare.

This girdle of Comfort Ballantine's was kept by William Shakespeare, after the cook's decease, and he would often merrily call it his Girdle of Verity.

* See sonnet 125. The procession went from the Tower through the City, passing under seven triumphal arches. At every halt a speech or song by Thomas Dekker greeted the King and Queen, to their eventual less than delight. The great canopy over their heads was carried by eight senior members of our Company. I can't remember which, but certainly Burbage and Heminges took part, as well as Mr S. They all wore red and black livery, with scarlet cloaks, and walked bare-headed.