The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Ninety-Nine About the funeral of William Shakespeare & certain events thereafter

At this book's beginning I told you how I first met Mr Shakespeare. Here's how he said good-bye to me, and I to him.

Picture the scene for yourselves, my dears. To the tolling of the surly, sullen bell of the Guild Chapel (it sounds cracked and dust-tongued) the poet's body is being borne from New Place to be buried in Holy Trinity Church by the rain-swollen River Avon. Six men, all in black, are carrying the bier on their broad shoulders. It is heavy, for William Shakespeare at the end was a substantial man. The six tread carefully between the April puddles. The big oak coffin gleams on its bed of black velvet and worsted and stretched canvas.

The poet's family walk along behind - Mrs Anne Shakespeare, tall and thin and proud; his eldest daughter, whey-faced Susanna, with her husband, the physician Dr Hall, and their little daughter Elizabeth, aged eight; rosy-cheeked, buxom Judith, with her recently acquired husband Thomas Quiney, whose step is complicated by alcohol; the poet's sister Mrs Hart, greasy Joan, in widow's weeds, who trod this way just a week ago to bury her husband, with her three sons aged respectively eight, eleven, and sixteen walking beside her; and, finally, red-haired Thomas Greene, lawyer, Town Clerk of Stratford, the poet's cousin.

Inside, behind the closed curtains, New Place is hung with black drapes from top to bottom. Out here, in the bright April weather, the cracked bell tolls on. And now it is joined by another iron tongue in mourning, the great bell of Holy Trinity itself, a deeper and more doleful note, as if gravely to welcome home the body of William Shakespeare to the green churchyard where his father and his mother and his own son Hamlet lie buried.

All eyes are on Anne Shakespeare. She is dressed in widow's black from head to foot. Her kirtle is fashioned of camlet, her gown of pure silk. She wears a black beaver hat with a sable silk band. She carries in her black-gloved hands a garland of spring flowers and sweet herbs, the only spot of colour about her person, from which two long black ribbons trail down to the ground. This garland she will cast in the grave with her husband. Her face is white beneath a veil of double cobweb lawn, her eyes bright with tears. Despite her age, there is something still youthful about her. She appears like a queen, like a nymph, by her gait, by her grace. Watching her walk you might well remember that hot day long ago when Will Shakespeare was caught by her wiles in Henley Street. Watching Anne Hathaway still at work in Anne Shakespeare as she follows her poet to his grave by the green flowing river you can be sure that this woman has been to him what Helena promises her lover she will be in All's Well That Ends Well:

A mother, and a mistress, and a friend,

A phoenix, captain, and an enemy,

A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,

A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear.*

But it was as the mourners passed through the lych-gate that my friend and master signalled his farewell to me. The bier had been set down a moment on the greensward to await the emergence from the church of the vicar, the Reverend John Rogers, and now as it was lifted again aloft Mr Shakespeare's coffin-lid shone and blazed forth in a sudden great bedazzlement of sun. It was like a wave of his hand as he went to his grave inside the church. They buried him close under the north wall, not far away from the altar.

After William Shakespeare's funeral, there was a feast. This went on for three days and three nights, in which length of time as in other respects it far surpassed the common country custom. It was as if all Stratford was unwilling to believe that its greatest son was dead. It was as if the force of life itself wanted to hold on to him.

Among notable Stratford residents in attendance at the funeral and the wake, your author counted as follows: Francis Collins, Thomas Combe, Thomas Lucas, George Quiney, William Replingham, John Robinson, Thomas Russell, Hamlet and Judith Sadler, Julius Shaw, Richard Sturley, Richard Tyler, the Reverend Richard Watts (curate to John Rogers), Robert Whatcott, and Mr Shakespeare's little godson William Walker. Most of the gentlemen had their wives with them, and in several cases their whole families, but I do not know the names of every single one.

From London came Comfort Ballantine, John Black, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, Thomas Dewe, Leonard Digges, Richard and Jacqueline Field, John Heminges, John Jackson, William Johnson (landlord of the Mermaid Tavern), John Lowin, Robert Pallant, John Rice (the best of my rivals in women's parts when a boy, but who gave up the stage to become a cleric), Richard Robinson, William Rowley, Thomas Sackville, James Sands, John Shank, Richard Sharpe, Martin Slaughter, Elliard Swanston (the only actor I know who took the Parliament side in our late Civil Wars), Nicholas Tooley, and Jacky Wilson. Again, many of these brought their families with them, so well was William Shakespeare loved and mourned.

I have inspected the roll of accounts of the expenses of that great funeral feast. Provision was made of thirteen barrels of beer, twenty-seven barrels of ale, and a runlet of red wine of fifteen gallons. Meat, too, was provided in proportion to this liquor. The country round about Stratford-upon-Avon must have been swept clean of geese, chickens, capons, and such small gear, all which, with five hundred eggs, thirty gallons of milk and eight of cream, twelve pigs, thirteen calves, and seven neats, slain and roasted on spits and devoured, contributed to the fearful festivity.

Mrs Anne Shakespeare presided over the feast. There were fiddlers (which thing, I think, her puritanical son-in-law John Hall much abhorred). She sat straight-backed and bright-eyed in a tall black chair at the head of the table, eating little and drinking less, but seeing to it that her guests were well provided for. She wore a black silk calimanco gown, with a head-dress of black tiffany upon her thick black hair that was streaked with silver at the temples. Susanna sat on her right hand, wearing a black camlet kirtle and a gown of fine black silk also. Judith sat on her left hand, again all in black, with that medal between her breasts which she kept showing me when there was no need for me to see it.

The three women looked like three versions of the one face.

At the height of the wake, as the fiddlers sawed at their instruments till the horse-hair frayed, I stole away silently from the feasting and the drinking. I had a singular need that just had to be satisfied. I went like a man in a dream, but I knew where I was going. Unobserved by any, or so I believe, I crept from the hall of New Place, and ventured where my longing was directing me - up the broad oak staircase to the room that held the second-best bed and other secrets.

Many speak of Robin Hood who never shot with his bow. I suppose I was determined that Pickleherring should do otherwise, although my will in the matter was fleshly. I had this thirst which could only be slaked the one way. If I wanted to rationalise it, I could say that I had my own way of mourning Mr Shakespeare, and of asserting and celebrating what all his works are an assertion and celebration of - the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I had a hard on. Funerals have this mandrake effect on me, madam. I do apologise, but my root was up. Remember, I was William Shakespeare's joculator.

That's a good word, that JOCULATOR. It means more than just a jester, or a minstrel, or jongleur. It means a fool who knows the wisdom of foolishness. You get this wisdom in Shakespeare which you do not get in Dante or in Homer. That's why there is nothing in either of those great poets that gets under your skin like Feste's song at the end of Twelfth Night:

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

Never forget that SILLY once meant BLESSED. Nor that the first Christians were proud to be miscalled Chrestians, meaning simpletons. Nor that transvestite boys with phalluses erect led the Greek sacred processions of the Dionysian Oschophoria.

I stripped off all my clothes with the bedroom door shut close behind me. Putting on Anne Shakespeare's things was ever so lovely. She had presses full of the most adorable gowns. Her wardrobe was packed with petticoats and bodices, all scented sweetly of her perfume, with ruffs and cuffs and farthingales and things. I plucked out a stomacher of incarnadine satin, smooth as snow or swansdown, that you had to lace up with two broad silver laces. Standing before her pierglass, I laced this stomacher so tight that it hurt me, quite deliciously. Then I could wait no more, but plunged my engorged and rampant member in a deep cool pool of her petticoats. When I found the drawer that held the lady's most intimate articles of apparel, her shifts and her camisas, her silken drawers and her black and her white silk stockings, soft to my touch as cobweb, I could scarcely contain myself. I hung a pair of her drawers on my pintle while I explored. Among the items of her toilet I found powder-puffs and paints and paint-sticks, false curls and curling irons, lacquers and lip-salves and feathers for applying henna. Mrs Shakespeare had a box of Cordovan gloves, embroidered sheaths that were shaped to the clench of her fingers. I found to my delight that they fitted me. She possessed diamond and cornelian rings, and garnet brooches, and plaits of pearls, and necklaces of sapphires. It was plain that she favoured certain colours - scarlet and black - both for her choicest gowns and her flimsiest undergarments. That she sometimes adopted worsted hose of different hues - sometimes blue, sometimes grass-green - was a small enough matter for me to regret. (Not so much for the colours, but for that one absence of silk.)

I pulled on a pair of Anne Shakespeare's silk stockings, black as night, just like the ones she had worn to the funeral. I selected a sweet pair of garters, rosy rosettes, and smoothed and adjusted the stockings, consulting the pierglass. Lines of my parts as Juliet and as Cleopatra and as Lady Macbeth came coursing through my head and I spoke them softly aloud, my lips kissing my own image in the mirror, so that soon the glass was clouded with my breath. I selected black silken drawers from the tangle of worn garments in her linen basket. I sniffed at the gusset before I put them on. Anne Shakespeare's drawers smelt deliciously of comfrey fritters: her essence.

I was posed and poised at play there, black silk dress and petticoats up, casting sidelong glances at my image in the pierglass, calling the one there sir or madam, depending upon what was permitted to be shown, flirting with my unruly will, having it hide between my silk-clad legs and then prick out, making it throb and dance to the flick of the gloves, I was at work there, merrily, merrily, in the last throes of the hottest and sweetest ecstasy of self-caressing I ever knew in my life, when the door was suddenly flung open and the mistress of the house burst into her own bedroom and upon me.

Mrs Shakespeare screamed three screams, each one richer and shriller and more blood-curdling than any scream I ever heard screamed before, as she took in the scene that met her wide blue eyes. Then she seized a birch broom from the corridor, and drove me from the house all garbed as I was in her garments. I ran around the mulberry, scattering seed.

Reader, I have no regrets. It was worth the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Besides, I have reason to believe that Mrs Shakespeare came to forgive me my trespass. At least, she never again referred to the matter, when I went back to New Place more than once to ask her various questions for my planned Life of William Shakespeare. She merely took care to see that I was never allowed to go upstairs alone to enjoy her private treasury of enchantments.

I confess that I would dearly love to have performed the same necessary office dressed in Susanna's clothes and then in Judith's too. Susanna used spectacles, and she carried a silver whistle for her little dog, suspended at her girdle. She kept a throstle in a twiggen cage. It would have been both interesting and delightful to inhabit her woollen gown and blow the silver whistle for the dog and see what dog and bird made of their master-mistress. Mr Shakespeare's younger daughter was an even greater temptation, since her mysteries were more provocative. That medal bewitched me. And her wardrobe contained at least one fine gown of musk-coloured taffeta that made me almost swoon whenever I saw her wearing it. It had lots of petticoats and smelt peppery to the nostrils as she swished past. When she rode out to hounds at Stratford I saw her decked in a bastard scarlet safeguard coat and hood, Polonia style, laced with red and blue and yellow trimmings, which mightily appealed to my poor senses. I heard her giggle and say once, Judith, that none of her dresses was made by female hands. I suppose the word for this is boasting. She was a boastful creature. I could wear myself to a frazzle just thinking of her boots.

In this penultimate box, though, I do have a pair of Susanna Shakespeare's gloves, filched long ago from Hall's Croft when no one was looking. Sometimes I slip these on and I play Rosalind. Beside them, my other secret treasure is a pair of Mr Shakespeare's sister's Zebelah stockings. (Zebelah is Isabella colour, a shade of tan.) These inhesions of greasy Joan have been my comfort on many a long night. I have also Lucy Negro's handkerchief. Don't ask me how I got it. Once it smelt of white heliotrope. I never washed it. It is quite stiff now with seed and tears, quite yellow. But it is years since I managed either sperm or tears.

The great fire rages on. North of the river it is all on fire. Last night I watched the burning of St Paul's. The stones flew up into the air like grenados, the melting lead ran down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements burnt red as the floor of hell. All the sky seemed on fire, like the top of a burning oven.

This morning I can see from my window the way the flames leap after a prodigious manner from house to house and street to street, at great distances one from the other. The clouds of smoke are dismal - they must stretch from here to the Essex coast. All the Inner Temple is assuredly destroyed, all Fleet Street, the Old Bailey, Ludgate Hill, Warwick Lane, Newgate, Paul's Chain, Whitehall, Exchange, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, out to Moorefields, the Cornhill, and Watling Street, all, all reduced to ashes.

Oh miserable and calamitous spectacle! The world has not seen the like of it since its foundation, nor will this terrible fire be outdone till the universal conflagration.

Pompey Bum has gone, and all the whores. This building is deserted now, apart from Pickleherring. Pompey Bum belaboured me to leave. He roared that it is only a matter of time before the flames destroy the whole of London, and his last word to me was that packs of rats on fire have been seen running from north to south across London Bridge.

I have no more Life of William Shakespeare left to write - and only one word more about his death. I will sit here and wait for the fire to come. If the conflagration takes my book, that is the will of God. It will not take Pickleherring. Wait and see.

I pray only for Polly to be delivered from the flames, wherever she is. Polly, Polly, you whom everything identifies with dayspring and whom, for that very reason, I shall not see again - O Polly dear, I'm glad you are not here.

* Act I, Scene 1, lines 173-6.