The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twenty-Four About the great plague that was late in London (Christmas Eve, 1665)

It is Christmas Eve. It is snowing. The plague seems passed, at last, thanks be to God.

So far I never mentioned the plague in this book of mine, for I wanted to keep my pages clean of all pestilence. But now that the worst is over it is time that I spoke of it.

Strange to tell, I began the present narrative just three months ago, in the week ending the 19th of September, 1665, which was the week in which (they are now saying) this memorable calamity reached its greatest pitch of destructiveness.

The infection came in from Holland in the spring. The first official notice announcing that the plague had established itself in the parish of St Giles in the Fields appeared in an order of council back in April.

During the months of May and June, the infection spread. People began to hurry out of town in great numbers, until the strictest measures were enforced to prevent the spread of the plague to the rest of the country. The King with the Court fled in July, taking refuge so I heard in Salisbury, leaving the care of London to the Duke of Albermarle. (It's wonderful what news you learn from whores.)

The circumstance of the summer being unusually hot, and with few breezes blowing down the Thames, the disease was nourished all the days of August. London might well be said to be all in tears. As the plague raged, and families under the slightest suspicion were shut up in their houses, the streets became deserted and overgrown with grass. It was the necessity of going out of the houses to buy provisions which was, in great measure, the ruin of the city. People caught the vile distemper, on these occasions, one from another, and even the provisions themselves were often tainted. I heard that the butchers of Whitechapel, where the greatest part of all flesh-meat is killed, were dreadfully visited by the pestilence, to such a degree that by midsummer few of their shops were kept open, and those that remained of them were killing their meat at Mile End and further, and bringing it in to market upon horses.

It is true that people used all possible precautions. The pie-maker in our basement told me that when anyone bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it out of the butcher's hand, but took it off the hook themselves. On the other hand, the pie-maker said, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyers carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hands, as if to drive off death with a whiff of sweetness.

Even up here in my attic I witnessed the most dismal scenes. Sometimes a man or a woman dropped down dead in the street below. Many people that had the plague upon them knew nothing of it till the inward gangrene had affected their vitals. They died then in a matter of moments. I saw one man who had just time to run to the porch of the little Quaker meeting house opposite and put on his hat to sit down in the doorway to die. By the end of the summer, such things were commonplace, and one no longer noticed them. Dead bodies lay here and there upon the ground. People stepped over them quickly, or went the long way round. By night the bearers attending the dead-cart would take up the bodies, and carry them away. I watched it by moonlight from my window. Nor did those undaunted creatures, who performed these offices, fail to pick the pockets of the dead, and sometimes strip off their clothes if they were well dressed.

The pain of the swellings in this plague was in particular very violent, and to some intolerable. I saw a woman break naked out into the street and run directly down to the river, plunging herself into the water. Nobody cared to haul her out, for fear of infection. Others just ran up and down, not knowing what they did, till they dropped down stark dead. The worst cases were where people exhausted their spirits but did not die instantly, so that they fell down in the street and lingered on for perhaps half an hour or an hour. What was most piteous was that they were sure to come to themselves entirely in that half hour or hour, and then to make most grievous and piercing cries and lamentations. I never heard such horror before in my life. It was worse than the horrors one heard in the late Civil Wars. Worse because so inward and so intimate. In time of plague the enemy is inside you. And no one can be sure that they haven't got it.

The tale of the blind piper I had from Pompey Bum. (I will tell you all about Pompey Bum another time.) He had the story from one of the men who carted the dead to the burial places, whose name was John Hayward, and in whose cart the accident occurred. The fellow was not blind, in truth, but a simpleton so clumsy and vague that he gave that impression. He commonly went his rounds about ten o'clock at night, when he went piping along from door to door, and the people would take him in at public-houses where they knew him, and give him drink and victuals, and sometimes farthings. In return, he would pipe and sing, and talk simply, which diverted the people, and thus he lived.

The plague was no time for a piper. Yet the poor fellow went about as usual, though he was all but starving. When anyone asked how he did, he would answer, 'The dead-cart hasn't taken me yet, but they've promised to call again next week.'

It happened one night that this poor fellow, whether somebody had given him too much to drink or no, laid himself out all along upon the top of a bulk or stall, and fell fast asleep, by a door in the street near London Wall, towards Cripplegate. And upon the same bulk or stall, the people of some house in the alley, hearing the bell, which signified the coming of the dead-cart, laid out a body dead of the plague close by where the piper lay, supposing he was another corpse set out for collection. Accordingly, when John Hayward with his bell and cart came along, finding two bodies lying upon the stall, he had them taken up with the long shovel they used, and thrown into the cart. And all this while the piper slept soundly.

From hence they passed along, and took up other dead bodies all laid out beneath the moon, until, as honest John Hayward told Pompey Bum, they must almost have buried the poor fellow alive in the cart. Yet all this while the piper slept soundly on.

At length the cart comes to the place where the bodies are to be thrown into the ground - which, as I remember, is at Mountmill - and, as the cart usually stopped some time before they were ready to pitch out the melancholy load they had in it, as soon as the cart stops, the piper wakes up, and he struggles a bit to get his head out from under all the dead bodies, but at last he sits upright in the cart and he cries out in confusion, 'Hey! Hey! Where am I?'

This frighted the wits out of the other attendants, but stout John Hayward turned never a hair, but said: 'Lord bless us! Here's somebody in the cart who's not quite dead!'

So one of the others calls out to the piper, and says: 'Who are you?'

'I'm the poor piper,' the fellow answers. 'Where am I?'

'Where are you!' says Hayward. 'Why, you are in the dead-cart, and we are going to bury you.'

'But I ain't dead, though, am I?' says the piper.

It was a question, not a statement, that's the point.

So he played them a tune on his pipe, and John Hayward and his men judged that he was not dead. And they helped the poor fellow down, and he went about his business.

That's what I'm doing, reader. I play my pipe to prove I am not dead.

I began in a week when upwards of ten thousand were reported dead. My Life of Mr Shakespeare was conceived first as an answer to the plague. Yet I was determined that the pestilence should leave my memories unscathed, which is why I never mentioned it when I started opening my boxes and writing up their contents at the height of it.

No doubt the piper played a merry tune. For certain he never piped any dirge on that dead-cart. No more do I. I knew that the late Mr Shakespeare would be my living companion, dancing me out of doomed London. And so it has proved.

The weather began to change when I began writing, and the air became cooled and purified by the equinoctial winds. That's why I praised the snow, of course, in Chapter Seventeen. It has fallen like a blessing on the city. It has cured the great plague that lay upon the streets.

Pompey Bum says (I know not on what authority) that more than a hundred thousand persons have perished by this terrible visitation.

But not Pickleherring, my lily lords and ladies.

At last the bells ring out tonight for a birth and not for burials. Christmas Eve, snow falling, and bells ringing. If I were not so old then I might almost be happy.

Listen, I beg you. Harken to my tales, friends.

When I was young I lived to dream, and now I am old I have to dream to live. This Life of William Shakespeare is my life now. He dreamt me up that afternoon in Cambridge. My life has been a nightmare since he died. Christmas Eve 1665, snow falling, and bells ringing. How much of my long existence has been a dream then? As in the old old story, am I the man dreaming he is a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he is a man?