Chapter Ninety-Seven Fire
It had been my intention to write in this chapter of how Mr Shakespeare was dogged by fire in the last years of his life. It was as if the element followed him around, sir. There was first the outbreak of fire that destroyed our Globe theatre, and was responsible for the destruction of many of Shakespeare's manuscripts in the process. Then there was the great fire at Stratford in the summer of 1613, when fifty-four dwellings and numerous barns and stables stacked with hay, wood, and fodder fell a prey to the flames. I have notes on both these conflagrations in this first of my four remaining boxes.
But all such fire past has been overtaken now by another fire, a very present fire, an immediate conflagration. This broke out last night here in London, and already threatens to engulf the city.
Pompey Bum declares his prophecy has come true. He says it is the wrath of God, to kill us. He has all his whores running up stairs and down in a high state of excitement, I can tell you. He roars it is the end of the world, and the poor girls scream. I saw two of them on their knees, and not giving head. There's no sign of Polly in the general confusion that prevails here.
The fire seems at present confined to the north side of the river. It seems to have broken out somewhere close to the Tower, some say in Pudding Lane, but others in Fish Street. The worst of it is that the wind is high, and that this wind veers about with unaccountable caprice, blowing now east, now north, so that the flames roar before it like the devouring tongue of some marauding dragon. The weather has been hot and dry for weeks now, and the very air seems ready to ignite. The old houses catch the fire and they burn like tinder-boxes. In the middle of the night, last night, I was woken by the sound of the conflagration. The sky was full of forks and spears of flame. How Shakespeare would have liked it! I was reminded as I stood there in my nightcap of the days when he peddled his squibs in Warwick market.
But this morning through the triangle of my window I can see nothing that could give any man or woman pleasure, save perhaps a Guy Fawkes. What I behold is a very dismal spectacle indeed - the whole City in dreadful, towering flames right down to the waterfront. All the houses and other buildings from the Three Cranes down to Cheapside, all Thames Street, and right on down to the Bridge itself are being steadily consumed in this flagrant and mortifying fire.
Unknown friends, shall I tell you the strangest thing of all? It occurs to me that what I write comes true! It had been my intention to write of Shakespeare and fire, and here is London straight caught fire in the night before I wrote it! So it seems to me that what I have in mind to write may already be the truth, but I make it true by my writing of it. And this has been my task right from the beginning: to make truth come true. Mr Shakespeare did no less in his plays and his poems. Much of what he put on the stage proved strangely prophetic. Macbeth says much about Cromwell, and King Lear prefigures poor King Charles I - the king hunted, like an animal, through his own land. The late Civil Wars are everywhere foreshadowed in Shakespeare's imaginings.
But these are fancies compared with the fact of the fire. With the wind like this, and the weather like this, what can save us? The whole of London north of the Thames is already a raging inferno.
Wormwood is the name of the star that spells destruction in the Book of Revelation,* and there I set it down (with only Hamlet in mind, and Juliet's nurse remembering the day of the earthquake) at the end of my list of things despaired of. Can a word set the world on fire? If I write of a thing, must it follow?
I have now to write of the death of William Shakespeare. I think my own death won't be far behind.
* The Revelation of St John the Divine, Chapter 8, verse 11.