The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twenty-One The Shakespeare Arms

Assuredly, madam, yes, if Queen Elizabeth was indeed our hero's mother then it makes Mary Shakespeare's games with him less reprehensible. Well, a mite so. A moiety. A shadow of a shade.

But no, sir, emphatically, I don't believe it either.

That's a nice word, that MOIETY. The late Mr William Shakespeare was at all times very fond of it. He was even its coiner, so far as I know, in its sense of being the smaller or lesser portion of anything. He employs it thus in the dedication to his Rape of Lucrece, and then again in The Winter's Tale, I think. Yes, I just looked it up for you - Act II, Scene 3, Leontes: Say that she were gone ... a moiety of my rest / Might come to me again. That's how I felt about Jane. But she's no part of the story. I'm telling you the Life of William Shakespeare.

A shadow of a shade less blameworthy, yes, that business of Mary Shakespeare's hand on the young William's balls and pintle, if Queen Elizabeth could be thought to be the boy's mother. I, friends, cannot believe it, all the same. Even though you might think that the source of the story's impeccable.

The source of the story?

John Shakespeare!

He told it me, directly, in his cups. I met him once, the time he came to London. Rainy autumn it was, of that year when I first met Mr Shakespeare. We did Hamlet at the Swan, with Mr Shakespeare taking the Ghost's part. His own little son had died that year, and now here was this play full of father and son stuff, and then his own father in London.

Not that John Shakespeare saw Hamlet. He'd come to town for something much more important than that. He'd come to get a coat of arms from the College of Heralds.

He was granted it, too, thanks largely to his son. The late Mr William Shakespeare had many talents, and one was the art or craft of pulling strings. The Heralds' Office was lax in bestowal of the honour, and a little influence and a liberal use of money went a long way to secure the coveted dignity. Several of the players became gentlemen this way. It was a sign that you weren't just a common actor. Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, Richard Cowley, John Heminges, and Richard Burbage - all sooner or later secured this right to display arms. In Mr Shakespeare's case, there was the added incentive that his father had already applied for the honour some thirty years earlier, at the height of his civic dignity in Stratford, but the arms had not been granted. Now he was old, and fallen on hard times, and his son seized this chance to redeem him. He made up some fiction about John Shakespeare's antecessors and how they had provided 'valiant and faithful service' to King Henry VII. He pulled, as I say, the right strings. He went in person to see the Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick, in the College of Heralds which lay just across the Thames from his Bankside lodgings.

I remember he showed me the draft. He had it all roughed out in his own hand on a great yellow scroll which he tucked under his oxter as he stepped into the wherry. I was hugely impressed. Remember, I was only thirteen, an impressionable lad, and the ways of the capital were new to me.

The coat of arms had, across a black incline, in its field of gold, a silver-tipped spear, the point upward, while for the crest or cognizance it displayed a falcon with out-stretched wings. The motto was Non sans droict. Not without right. Which Mr Ben Jonson mocked two years later in his Every Man out of His Humour as 'Not without mustard'.

Not without right. And a falcon shaking a spear. It was all very suitable, in my humble opinion. And the College of Arms thought so too. They granted the petition, and my master came back happy in the wherry.

My job, meanwhile, had been to keep tabs on Mr John Shakespeare, the gentleman being ennobled. He had rolled in from Stratford as drunk as a lord, and when his son saw him he remarked that the day's main task would be to keep the potential arms-bearer as far away as possible from the arms of the Heralds themselves.

So little Pickleherring was appointed to amuse the man. Which meant that I danced along behind him, keeping John Shakespeare company as he trundled and trolled through the taverns.

I have the list that I kept of the places he drank in. The Boar's Head, the Poultry, the Rose, the Three Cranes, the Mermaid, the Mitre which was next door to the Mermaid, the Nag's Head at the corner of Friday Street, the Razor and Hen, the Leg and Seven Stars, the Eagle and Child, and the Goat in Boots.

What did John Shakespeare drink? He drank beer made of hops, and also cider. He drank claret, muscadine, and charneco. But mostly he drank sherris sack in very great quantities - which is to say, canary, white Spanish wine.

I had never seen a man drink so much before. He held his drink well, I must say, until by mid-afternoon it started to flow out of him - from his ears, mostly. By then I had equipped us with a wheelbarrow, in which it was my joy to wheel him on from one beer-boltered, sack-soaked cellar to the next. He kicked his boots in the air as he lay in the barrow. I sang O Polly Dear and he belched hubbubs in my face for a refrain. To tell you the truth, that day I regretted ever going on the stage. An actor's life no longer seemed such a fine thing. Not if it meant humouring and placating Mr William Shakespeare's father while he got a coat of arms by not showing his face.

Somewhere in the course of our pilgrimage - I believe, at the Rose - Mr John Shakespeare confided to me what he called 'the Reason for the Falcon'. It had been Anne Bullen's device, he said, and her daughter Queen Elizabeth had adopted it in turn. This information he imparted with a wise nod and a wink. Many winks and nods later, and many cups of sherris sack, he told me the whole story of his alleged amorous encounter with the lady who was then our sovereign. I did not believe him then, and I do not now. But that night I wrote it all down, and when I was writing my last chapter I fished those notes out of one of my black boxes and I used them. If there was some ardent lyricism in that chapter put it down to Mr Shakespeare's father and his wine-loosened tongue, and not to Pickleherring. You will have noticed, madam. Eros is not my style.

When John Shakespeare had finished, and sat staring into space and breathing heavily, I said (just for something to say, which I used to do in those days): 'All suddenly you saw the Faerie Queen, then?'

But Mr Shakespeare's father didn't know what I was talking about.

'Elizabeth was no fairy,' he said shortly. 'She was warm as toast.'

Not wanting to lose my head, I was glad when he dropped the subject, going off on a long and complicated tale about some people called Lambert and how he had sued them for cheating him. (This story is very boring, and I'll try not to tell it, if I can.) Whether John Shakespeare believed his own drunken fantasy concerning the Queen is difficult to say. Nor does it matter. Interestingly, perhaps all the incident really afforded me was a glimpse of the crude, rude origins of what had become imagination in his son. That there was some link between father and son let A Midsummer Night's Dream testify, for reasons already mentioned. I am sure John Shakespeare never heard of Bottom. But William must have heard some such story from him as I heard.

In short, John Shakespeare was a fantast. And the only people who'll credit his story, and want to believe it, are snobs. That is, the sort who want all Shakespeare's works to be written by Lord Verulam, Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Because those lads were nobles, don't you know, while our hero was only a clod.

At least my listening to John Shakespeare's story helped to keep him out of trouble while his son got his coat of arms for him.

It was the only time I ever saw Mr Shakespeare senior. He was a vast man. I remember his nose like a baby's backside in the middle of his face, and the sweat forming crystal pustules on the crags of his forehead. I remember he had white tufts of hair growing out of his nostrils. I remember he struck the board with the flat of his hand and he said very quietly, almost as if whispering a secret, 'The Lord God Almighty is angry with Elizabeth Tudor.' I remember he said that his bunions were killing him. I remember him farting. He stood on one leg and he farted, and then shook his foot. 'Another Spanish galleon sunk!' he bellowed triumphantly. A second time, when he did the same, he did not shake his foot, but said sweetly, holding up one finger: 'Hark! Hark! The cry of an imprisoned turd!' Despite such grossness, there was something almost delicate about him. He was like a big fat dancer, a ruined sprite. You could see he was proud of his son, but they didn't say much to each other. He spent a long time just stroking the scroll, when William came back with it ratified.

A falcon shaking a spear. I suppose it makes sense.

I never ever saw Mr Shakespeare's mother, not having travelled to Stratford until later days when she was dead. Unless, of course, she was that woman in the flame-red wig for whom John Falstaff made the wives of Windsor merry.