The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighteen The Man in the Moon, or Pickleherring in praise of country history

Talking of the famous play of Pyramus and Thisbe, that most lamentable comedy, Mr Quince, the carpenter, gives due directions, as follows: 'One must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of moonshine.' And this order is realised. 'All I have to say,' concludes the performer of this strange part, 'is, to tell you, that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man i' the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.'

Who is this Man in the Moon, this person of moonshine? I will tell you. He is the annalist or chronicler of what I call country history. More of that in a minute. For the moment, gentle reader, prove to yourself your gentleness by not despising him. Be like Duke Theseus, and acknowledge that never anything can be amiss, / When simpleness and duty tender it. Remember that while Mr Shakespeare ridicules those entertainments and interludes which were presented by the rustic amateurs before great people, yet he, at the same time, furnishes the best and most generous defence of them. He teaches us how such simple-minded if ridiculous efforts should be treated by all persons of good breeding. The kinder we, as the Duke says, to give them thanks for nothing.

So then: THE MAN IN THE MOON, who is he?

It is, I agree, sir, a familiar expression, to which few persons attach any definite idea.

Many would be found - yes, madam - under a belief such as yours, that it refers merely to that faint appearance of a face which the moon presents when full.

But those, dear friends, who are better acquainted with natural objects, and with folk matters, will be aware that the Man in the Moon - the thing referred to under that name - is a dusky resemblance to a human figure which appears on the western side of the lunar luminary when she is eight days old, being somewhat like a man carrying a thorn-bush on his back, and at the same time engaged in climbing, while a detached object in front looks like his dog going on before him.

It is a very old popular notion (or so my mother taught me), that this figure is no less than the man referred to in the Book of Numbers (chap. xv, v, 32 et seq) as having been detected by the children of Israel in the wilderness, in the act of gathering sticks on the Sabbath-day, and whom the Lord directed (in absence of a law on the subject) to be stoned to death without the camp.

One would have thought this poor benighted stick-gatherer sufficiently punished in the Biblical history. Nevertheless, the popular mind has assigned him the additional pain of a perpetual pillorying in the moon.

There he is with his burden of sticks upon his back! See how he is continually climbing up that shining height with his little dog before him! Observe that he never gets a single step higher! And so it must be while this world endures ...

Yet I say that the Man in the Moon is an historian.

Or, at least, the patron of a certain sort of history.

Consider: there are two ways of looking at the moon and the sun. Of the moon, you can see her as the satellite of the earth, a mere secondary planet, or you can see her as a deity, the queen of tides and poets. Of the sun, when it rises, one man might say he saw a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea, while another man might say he saw an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty!'

The second way is the way Mr Shakespeare saw the world. (Though he understood the other way of seeing it, or he would not have made a playwright.)

The second way is the way that I see his life's story. (Though I do my best all the same to be true to the things in my black boxes.)

Reader, just as there are two ways of seeing, so there are two ways of historizing.

Reader, there are, in truth, as I would now make clear for your better understanding of this sorry, mad book of mine, two kinds of history, as different from each other as chalk and cheese.

There is town history and there is country history.

Town history is cynical and exact. It is written by wits and it orders and limits what it talks about. It relies on facts and figures. It is knowing. Dry and sceptical and clever, it is ruled by the head. Beginning in the shadow of the law courts, at the end of the day your town history tends to the universities - it becomes academic. Town history is believable and reliable. Offering proofs, it never strains credulity. But sometimes it can't see the Forest of Arden for the trees. And it falls probably short of the mark when it comes up against Mr Shakespeare.

Your country history is a different matter. Country history is faithful and open-ended. It is a tale told by various idiots on the village green, all busy contradicting themselves in the name of a common truth. It exaggerates and enflames what it talks about. It delights in lies and gossip. It is unwise. Wild and mystical and passionate, it is ruled by the heart. Beginning by the glow of the hearth, at the end of the night your country history tends to pass into balladry and legend - it becomes poetic. Country history is fanciful and maggoty. Easy to mock, it always strains belief. But sometimes it catches the ghostly coat-tails of what is otherwise ungraspable. It is the only possible way of accounting for Mr Shakespeare.

Town history is quickly written down and printed.

Country history is told for years, passing from mouth to mouth before anyone bothers to write it down. And when it is written down, it loses something. Publishing stops it.

Town history rests on the premise that facts tell the truth.

Country history, on the contrary, knows that facts can obscure the truth. Your country historian, your Man in the Moon, your servant Pickleherring, allows for the fact that the facts can prove anything, that they prickle and point in all directions, like the twigs on a tree that's still growing. The truth of the tree is its life. That's the green blood that springs, like a fountain, from the roots to the stars.

This book you read is mostly country history. It consists of tales I have heard told about Mr Shakespeare.

Our hero was a country-man who took the town by storm. He set the Thames on fire with what he knew from the Avon. But he remained in his heart a man of the country. And he went back to his origins to die.

I have collected most of my tales about him from people who knew him. In Stratford, in Warwick, in London. The wheres do not matter. You can be a good country historian in Paternoster Row.

What matters is that it's told tales I am telling you. Tales told me. Twice-told tales. Tales, tales, tales, tales. Here there are Canterbury tales, and old wives' tales. Here there are tales of tubs and of roasted horses. One tale is good until another's told. All are the tales of every common tongue. Tales, idle tales, fictions.

And if some of my told tales are tall, that's because in the minds of the tellers the late Mr William Shakespeare was a giant.

Town history is mostly written. Country history is all in the telling.

Town history begins and ends in the mind. Country history begins and lives in the tongue, and it can have no end while the Man in the Moon keeps on climbing.

I am, like Mr Shakespeare, motley-minded.

I have, like Mr Shakespeare, a peasant heart.