Chapter Seventeen Pickleherring's room (in which he is writing this book)

I would like to describe for you this room in which I write.

It is a small room in the shape of a triangle. My door is at the point of it. All three walls are lined with my bookcases. There's a small window like an eye in the middle of the wall that's opposite my door. I have my table there, to get the light. My bed's to the right of the table. Sometimes I move the table and push the bed under the window and work in bed. Sometimes at night I push the bed into the door and sleep with my feet against it. The exercise is good for me, and an old man can't be too careful these naughty days.

I'm on the third floor. Downstairs is a whorehouse. In the basement, a pie-maker's. So you see I'm well catered for.

Madam, don't fret yourself. Pickleherring jests. It's twenty years since I bothered with a woman. And I keep a spare diet, sir. It's thirty years since I bothered with a pie.

All my work is done here.

All my life is in this room.

In addition to my books I have one hundred small black boxes stacked along my bookshelves. Each box is tied with red ribbon and sealed with red sealing-wax. These one hundred boxes contain all my notes and queries concerning Mr Shakespeare. I take a box down and I work. My boxes hold little objects also - things cogent to the subject of the papers in them. While writing that last chapter, for instance, I had Martin Jimp's bright needle on my table. Touching it was inspiring. It gave me ideas. I have to do stuff like this since I am not really a writer. Such things are my props. I'm just one of your harlotry players after all.

I am seated at my table writing this.

To my left, on the top of a little drawer-desk, stands a green lacquered tray bearing a cup and saucer, a jug of water, and a silver egg-cup with its egg as yet unboiled but waiting for me. Beside the egg-cup there's my (once) white napkin lying. That's rolled in a whorled napkin ring in the shape of two snakes coupling.

Those boxes contain all the matter I've accumulated for my chapters. For instance, names and dates and figures copied out from parish registers. For instance, stories that I heard in Stratford. For instance, play-bills.

Under the bed I've a porcelain pot which I piss in.

It's been bitter cold this winter. That I welcome. The snow lies on the roofs I see from my window. The blessed snow does not discriminate. It blesses both the taverns and the stews. No doubt it even blesses the Bishop of Winchester. This Liberty of the Clink lies under him. But I can't see St Mary Overy's from here.

There's a view, could I lean out, of five fine prisons - the Marshalsea, the King's Bench, the White Lion, the Counter, the Clink itself. Once upon a time you could have seen our Globe from this same window. But that was torn down by Cromwell, who was no play-goer. Before that, of course, it caught fire in 1613. We were doing King Henry VIII. I was playing Anne Bullen. (Not much of a part, but by then I was well past my prime.) It was old Heminges' fault. The text calls for hautboys. So he goes and gets trumpets. Then to go with those trumpets he has this great ordinance set off. The effect was dramatic. But wadding from out of the barrel set fire to the thatch. It took only two hours to dissolve Shakespeare's Globe after all. The mercy is no one killed, though that Sly the critic had his breeches set on fire, which would perhaps have broiled him, if he'd not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.

Here I sit every day to my great work. I wear two coats to keep the winter out. It's not warm in this room, though you'd think the heats below would filter up. On very cold days I wrap over my coats that vasty black star-spangled cloak that was once part of my costume as Cressida. The whole working suit is bound round my body by a leather girdle.

In the trunk by my feet I keep my costumes, though some hang up on pegs between my books. There is Cordelia's wig. Here Portia's law gown. I sometimes still sleep in the nightgown of Lady Macbeth for a treat on a warm summer's night. But I wear my jerkin over it, not to speak of my leggings. I have to. My blood would stop, otherwise.

My boots are covered with patches. No surprise in that. They've been my companions now for thirty-three years.

I feel the cold keenly. I put my feet in a box of straw under my table when I'm sitting working. If you keep your feet warm then the rest of you doesn't seize up. I wear mittens on my paws. Two pair when I'm writing.

I won't list all my books, since that would be tedious. Sufficient to say it's a good job the girls downstairs can't read. If one of them learnt to, and took it into her unpretty little head to creep up here, then she might come to the conclusion that there's some kind of Aladdin's Cavern above her in the attic of the whorehouse.

I'll mention only that I possess all the necessary books. Which is to say: Holinshed's Chronicles, John Stow's Annals, North's translation of Plutarch, some anonymity's Plautus, Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, Cinthio's Hecatommithi, an execrable French version of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone, Arthur Brake's translation from the Italian of Bandello's Novelle, and Golding's great Englishing of the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

Who gave me these books?

Mr Shakespeare did.

Yes, madam, he loved me, but that's not the only reason. I've told you he covered his tracks. These were his source books, you see.

For example, the plot and much of the matter for Romeo and Juliet comes straight out of Brake's rendering of that old Bandello story. Nor do I believe that I dishonour Mr Shakespeare in pointing this out. While he makes little change in the plot, he impregnates it with his own poetic fervour. His Mercutio and his Nurse relieve in their different ways what was mere solemn melodrama in the original. He compresses what takes nine months in Broke to a single week of hot days and hot nights, and he reduces Juliet's age from fifteen to thirteen. As for the language which he gives the two young lovers - it is on fire, where Broke is not even kindling. Imagine the balcony scene with turd like this:

What if your deadly foes, my kinsmen, saw you here?

Like lions will, your tender parts asunder would they tear.

In truth and in disdain, I, weary of my life,

With cruel hand my mourning heart would pierce

with bloody knife.

That's from Brooke's Romeus and Juliet. Pyramus and Thisbe, eat your hearts out. If alchemy is what they say it is - the art of transmuting base matter into gold - then Mr William Shakespeare was an alchemist.

By the way, friends, while everyone knows that this is one of Mr Shakespeare's earliest plays, I believe that I can date the thing precisely. Forgetting Verona, wholly caught up in creating the part of the Nurse, he has her declare 'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years* - and there hasn't been an earthquake in England since 1580. Which must mean Mr Shakespeare was writing it in 1591, in the 27th year of his age. Well, I like to think so, anyway. He revised the piece considerably after its first playing, augmenting the part of Juliet just for me. You'll see that for yourselves if you care to compare the First and Second Quartos. (I bore the fair copy for the latter, in '99, on behalf of Cuthbert Burbie to his printer Creede at the Katherine Wheel in Thames Street.)

My pride is of course my First Folio of Mr Shakespeare's plays. This was given to me by the printer William Jaggard for a fortieth-birthday present. It sits to my right hand on my table whenever I write. I refer to it each time I quote for you, having only an actor's memory; I mean, I can recall verbatim my own parts, but not the others.

I have all my prompt-books too, from the days when I served with the Company. These I keep under the bed, to the left of my piss-pot.

I am not poor. I am not rich. Nihil est, nihil deest: I have little, I want nothing. All my treasure is in Minerva's tower.

All the same, somewhere in this room - but I will not write down where a great secret is hidden. I shall come to that in due course. A time for everything, and everything in its time, as my grandfather the bishop used to say. (He was a martyr to the pox for the last twenty years of his life.) Suffice it for now that I tell you that this secret of mine consists of all that remains of a play of Mr Shakespeare's that is otherwise lost.

Here's a riddle for you: it's not lost, for the lost one you have already. This is the lost unlost one.

No need to bruise your brains unduly on such wit-work.

It is my plan to include this play in my book!

That's a good warm word that GALLIGASKINS which I used in my last chapter. Some say it came over from the French, but I reckon that farfetched. It's a sailor word - from the galleys, do you see? I don't think it necessary to salvation to believe that such thoroughly English breeches were ever worn in Gascony. I believe they must just be gallant gaskins - good, bold pairs of breeks.

I could do with some Shakespeare breeches myself as I sit here and write this morning. The brass monkeys outside the pawnshop in the alley below just gave a high falsetto shriek.

I'm sucking a pickled mulberry I picked long ago from the tree of that astringent fruit which Mr Shakespeare planted in his garden. I like the taste of mulberries. It is like my own.

* The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 3, line 23.

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