The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighty-Nine In which Pickleherring plays Cleopatra at the house in St John Street

I have often regretted my failure in the part of Isabella. My heart could do with a measure of divine love. The dignity of Portia, the energy of Beatrice, the radiant high spirits of Rosalind, the sweetness of Viola - I was shaped by the female parts I had to play, and I am missing some hunger for heaven in my make up. Had I been able to make a success of Isabella's character I would have less of that wretched Petrarchan worship of the unattainable female in my soul. It is not really worship. It is lust.

But Isabella, I found, has impossible things to say. I mean, things that your humble servant finds impossible. Of course, madam, you are right - no one in real life ever spoke like any of William Shakespeare's characters. His language hovers on the threshold of a dream. Yet I say that he possessed an implicit wisdom deeper even than consciousness. There is another comfort than this world ... Had I been able to say such things with conviction doubtless I would have been a better player and a better man. I would certainly have been one less obsessed with the divinity of breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, or for that matter with hell heard in the shriek of a night-wandering weasel.

But without more ado about nothing, permit me to tell you that Mr John Fletcher mutilated that song Take, O take those lips away* when he dropped the echo of 'Bring again' and 'Seal'd in vain', thus achieving the remarkable feat of turning a nightingale's song into a sparrow's. I never had much time for Mr Fletcher, and not just because he called me mediocre. The man was an opportunist. The blossoms of his imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand. He had a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them. Nothing shows this better than that terrible thing he did to the song sung by the boy servant to the forsaken Mariana.

To this period of Mr Shakespeare's sojourn at the Mountjoys, with his soul and his papers under the watchful eye of the cook Comfort Ballantine, belong some of his greatest writings. I mean: Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. There are odd links between them, not always noticed. You may not know, for instance, that on the twenty-seventh page of the first volume of Holinshed's Chronicles (which was always at Shakespeare's elbow when he was composing) there is a rough woodcut of a fellow with a villainous look and underneath it no story but a title in capital letters

IAGO

and that opposite this woodcut, on the facing page, there is a picture of Cordelia, named as daughter of King Lear. These images sank deep in our poet's imagination, coming up in separate plays, yet beginning together. The sound of the name Iago must have seemed especially evil to Mr Shakespeare, since later in Cymbeline he rang the changes on it, and adopted for his new villain, whose character was almost as atrocious as the cunning Venetian's, the name of Iachimo. As for the name Othello, it came (so he told me) from Moghrib: Hawth Allah. We performed the play for the first time on November 1st, 1604, in the presence of King James, Anne of Denmark and her brother Prince Frederik of Wurtemberg. It became a very popular and profitable piece. Within months Burbage reported that someone in his parish of St Leonard in Shoreditch had christened their newly-born daughter with the name of Desdemona, hitherto unknown in England. I was much flattered. Mr Shakespeare, however, quickly brought me back down to earth by telling me of another man who had called his pet rat Desdemona in honour of my performance.

Beyond these trivialities, I would like to observe that it seems to me that two things were happening in Mr Shakespeare's work about this time. First, with the accession to the throne of King James, he found a better patron than the Earl of Southampton, not in the sense that James gave him PS1000 gifts or anything of that sort but in the sense that some of Shakespeare's earlier work had been written to divert or enflame the fancy of Southampton, ten years his junior, and that this rather led the poet into idylls. What I am trying to say is that the aristocratic futility of Southampton bred a certain kind of gold fire in WS's works which were written if not to please him then at least with that possible pleasure sometimes in mind. When James became the chief member of WS's audience then new elements came in - some good, some not so good, but all of them more serious. Perhaps it is just that Shakespeare grew more serious himself, though I hesitate to offer such a banality. The middle age of Mr S was all clouded over, certainly, and his days were not more happy than Hamlet's, who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself, in his common everyday life, than any other of his characters. Yet having said that, I want to withdraw it on the instant. William Shakespeare is never to be identified by pinning him down as 'like' or 'unlike' any single one of his characters. He was like and unlike them all. He was Iago as well as he was Cordelia. Those crude remembered woodcuts were mirrors of his soul. In short, it was only by representing others that Shakespeare became himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra. But in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter's cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired. In expressing his own thoughts, he was a mechanic. Witness even how from the beginning of his career he found himself in others - for it was only in adapting plays which had been written by other men that he first discovered his own powers. And then even when he was gradually drawn on to write original plays of his own, he nearly always derived his subjects for those plays from histories and their substance from collections of prose tales written by others.

The second thing I want to say generally about Mr Shakespeare at this point in his life is that it seems to me that with this graver tone he also turned not so much his back on fame and favour, but aside from fame and favour. From now on he was after more difficult and even more fleeting game. I will not say that it was better game, since I am no moralist. But it is surely not irrelevant that from this time forth he began to spend more time in Stratford than he spent in London. Perhaps you are right, sir, and he simply preferred having Anne Shakespeare redding up his papers. But I think there might have been more to the matter than that.

Cleopatra as I have said was the height of my performance as a woman. I confess that I was freakish, and that my piping voice was a long time a-breaking. (And now I am old I squeak again like a boy.) Wigged, singed, perfume-sprayed, with smooth-shaven armpits and gilded eyelids, I was the fleshpot of Egypt. It was out of deference to my being no longer in the first flush of youth that Mr Shakespeare makes Cleopatra thirty-six years old at the opening of the play, with twenty years having passed since she subdued Caesar, and it being now ten years that Antony has been 'caught in her strong toil of grace'. In fact I was twenty-four at the time of our first performance. I have never forgotten the last rehearsal Mr Shakespeare made me do for it.

I had realised from the start, of course, just who I was playing. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.* Who else could this be but Lucy Negro? It is as if the Dark Lady of the sonnets stepped forth on the public stage. Note some of the other things that are said about Cleopatra - particularly her habit of hopping to fetch her breath short for men's arousal. This is Lucy Negro to the life. Vilest things are said to become themselves in her, and the holy priests to bless her when she is riggish. All this sounds like the tone of the sonnets to me, and the last phrase reminds me especially of a story Mr Shakespeare told me of how Lucy liked to go to confession and excite her confessor with details of her sins of lasciviousness. Since RIGGISH, besides, is the very word that my master always used of the Abbess of Clerkenwell ('Lucy was unslakedly riggish with me last night,' and so on) I had no doubt from the first moment I began to learn my lines who it was that he was wanting me to portray.

So what we have here is a very queer kettle of fish. For Lucy was Shakespeare's Muse, but so now was I. I was Lucy interpreted, Lucy played, Lucy made quick and amenable, the living Lucy perfected by his art and said by me. She had been turned into words and I was their incarnation. It is indeed a complex and a sinister process. Mr Shakespeare was using me to tame and to interpret his vision of the female sex. It is in this sense, best of all, that I was the master-mistress of his passion, and that I had one thing which was to his purpose nothing. He gave Lucy Negro the royal dignity of the Queen of Egypt, and then had me, a bastard boy from the fens, turn the queen back into riggish quotidian life. Never forget why Cleopatra kills herself: because she cannot bear the prospect of being paraded in parody in Caesar's triumph -

I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I' the posture of a whore.

But Lucy was a whore, and I was a boy. I played Cleopatra as myself playing Lucy Negro for the pleasure of the man she had given the pox. And for our final dress rehearsal, Mr Shakespeare had me go with him to the house in St John Street, where poet and Muse dressed me in one of Lucy's best Queen Elizabeth gowns and I was commanded to act out my part under their glittering, critical eyes. My performance seemed to satisfy them. That is, she sat on his lap to watch me, and kept wriggling her haunches, and I was dismissed from their presence long before it came to asp-time.

Consider, all you who are either true or fair, could play go further?

What the Abbess of Clerkenwell made of my impersonation of her I cannot tell you. I do know that Mr Shakespeare added two words to Antony and Cleopatra on our return to the Globe. They come where the lady Charmian follows her mistress in death, her last words as she applies an asp to her own breast: Ah, soldier! That simple phrase marks the height of Shakespeare's genius. Dante would never have thought of it, nor Homer neither.

My dear Polly is back! Last night I looked through the hole, without hope, and there was my love!

Polly was lying on her back below me, with her candles burning. She was naked save for a pair of black silk stockings. Her sweet face was most curiously made up, as though beginning with the eyes she had not had time to finish, for the rims of her eyes were dark, the rims only, and not the lids, no, not the lids at all. This effect is achieved, and achieved exclusively, by applying mascara under the lids alone. This I know well.

My heart leapt to my lips when I beheld her. They framed her name, although I did not speak.

For her part, Polly looked up at me, and she was smiling. Then she waved her hand to me, a circle in the gloom. It was a regal wave. Like Queen Elizabeth. My poor waif, my child of shame, my bride of darkness, daughter of the night, and yet for me the fairest of erth kinne - she knew I watched her, and she smiled at me; she knew I saw her, and she waved to me.

On yonder hill there stands a creature.

My lemmon she shal be.

O Polly dear.

Naked, on her back, and in her white bed, Polly saluted me gaily and gravely. My heart bowed down.

* Measure for Measure, Act IV, Scene 1, lines 1-8. Fletcher's plagiarism occurs in his play The Bloody Brother.

* Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene 2, lines 235-8.