The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter One Hundred In which Pickleherring lays down his pen after telling of the curse on Shakespeare's grave

The last poem written by William Shakespeare is inscribed upon his gravestone! It looks like this:

That is from a rubbing of the stone which I made myself. Here is the verse written out in a modern spelling and punctuation, just for your ease of reading:

Good friend, for Jesu's sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here!

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Who is the GOOD FRIEND thus addressed? I think it is the sexton, both now and to come. The sextons of Trinity Church have been known to dig up old graves to make room for the newly deceased. The bones they uncover are then thrown upon others in the charnel-house, which stands adjoining the north wall, no more than a dozen strides from Shakespeare's grave. As I have told you, the poet had a horror of that charnel-house. But there is more to it than that.

William Shakespeare lies full seventeen foot deep in Trinity Church, deep enough to secure him, and he placed that curse upon his grave to make sure not just that he was not taken out of it but that no one else got into it. He liked in his later years to sleep alone. He did not want his grave raped, nor broken up to entertain some second guest. So he placed that curse there to make sure, I think, that he was not disturbed by anyone in his final slumbers. If for ANYONE you read Anne Shakespeare or Susanna Hall then I shall not deny you. For when Anne died seven years after her husband I heard that she left instruction that she was to be buried in Shakespeare's grave, and that so did Susanna when she died in 1649, but no sexton could be found who was willing to lift that nameless flagstone and incur the poet's curse.

Reader, I have heard it said that William Shakespeare did not write this verse himself, and that it is doggerel. I tell you he did write it, and that it is not. The test of any poem is this: Does it work? I say these four lines work very well indeed. They have done what the poet intended them to do, and they will go on doing it. No one will ever knave William Shakespeare out of his last bed. No one will ever dig up William Shakespeare while that curse is on his grave. His dust will lie there undisturbed till the day of judgement.

Besides which, just ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, would any of WS's relatives or friends have chosen or dared to have written a rhymed inscription of such an unusual kind to place on his grave? The idea that Shakespeare did not write it is absurd. And that four-beat measure, far from being doggerel, is in fact his favourite metre outside the iambic pentameter which comes so naturally to the speaking voice of a man or a woman in good health.

In any case, listen closely to the words. These phrases have his ring right to the echo. GOOD FRIEND as a direct form of address, occurs at key points in his works - for example, Miranda thus addresses Ferdinand in The Tempest, and Hamlet says it to Horatio just arrived from Wittenberg. JESU for Jesus is the poet's preferred formulation - he invokes the holy name like that all over the plays. As to FORBEAR - that is a favoured verb, and often as an imprecation forbidding touching, as in the second King Henry VI: Lay not thy hands on me; forbear, I say. Then there is the fact that when Mr Shakespeare thought of death it was often to link the word ENCLOSED with the word DUST (or some similar word meaning mortal remains), as for example in Henry V, Act IV, Scene 8, line 129, where you will find The dead with charity enclosed in clay. One of the final plays, Cymbeline, employs that BLEST BE formula half a dozen times. While CURST BE comes in The Tempest, as well as in the first Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Pericles. CURSED and BONES come together in The Rape of Lucrece, line 209.

In short, that poem is Shakespeare's in phrase and pulse as surely as if he had written it in his own blood on parchment made from his own skin.

The grave, I think, was William Shakespeare's best bed. Have you ever noticed how much sweet, dreamless, and untroubled sleep is longed-for throughout his life's work? Sleep was for him God's greatest benison. May he sleep now in blessings! May he rest in peace and his faults lie gently on him!

And so, good reader, pray for me, your Pickleherring. I have done what I promised I would do. I have told you all that I know about the late Mr Shakespeare. And now that it is done, now that I have finished, this whole book I dedicate to my friend's memory in the same words that he used to dedicate his Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton: 'What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have, devoted yours.' Unknown friends, this has been a lover's book.

What I have to do ... What I have to do is make my exit. I just looked down this minute through my peep-hole. The room where Polly was is now all flames. The wind in the night must have blown from the north, and the fire come. But that may not be necessary. I am telling you something new about hell-fire.

Bear with me. My old brain is troubled. Brightness falls from the air. Pickleherring's mad again! I can see nothing. I can hear nothing. I can taste nothing. I do not know what comfrey fritters smell like.

Sir, did you expect me to lie down in my Juliet dress and wait for Romeo to come in a cloak of fire? Madam, would you have me robe and crown myself as Cleopatra and clasp the flames to suck on my wrinkled dugs? Shall my last act be to encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in my arms?

I tell you, none of these is Pickleherring's exit. Nor have I caught an everlasting cold. Nor is old Pickerel, who was once your little Pickle, in the way to study a long silence.

In the beginning, when I was a boy, the late Mr Shakespeare made me jump down from the red brick wall to meet him. In the middle, the late Mr Shakespeare made me a woman before I was ever a man. But at the end, friends, at the end the late Mr Shakespeare kindly made me Ariel. This is Pickleherring's great secret. I am a spirit. I can fly away!

I will take my harp in my hand and rise above the city where it burns. I will go not just to the harp's defunctive music but my own. I will fly high above the flames, O Polly dear.

I think that is enough about what I have to do. I think that I have done enough already. I think that is enough about the late Mr Shakespeare.

An

ever

writer

to a never reader

FAREWELL