The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twenty-Five Bretchgirdle's cat

Although the Reverend Bretchgirdle cut off his cat's left ear in the interests of curing the boy Shakespeare's measles, he was still very fond of the creature.

Bretchgirdle never did anything by halves. He baked a cake once in honour of the Virgin's lying-in. His friend Brownsword wouldn't eat it. No such ceremony should be observed, he pointed out, because Mary suffered no pollution, therefore needed no purification.

So these fine scholars passed their days in Stratford.

Bretchgirdle, in all truth, was a sentimentalist. It would not be too much to say that he leant towards Rome. One summer he told two of his choirboys that Lady's Thistle gets its name from the fact that Our Lady, walking near Nazareth with aching breasts, shook or squirted drops of milk upon it, to relieve the tension. The lads were kind not to report this opinion to the Bishop. It's true that the leaves of the plant are diversified with white spots. But I doubt if it ever grew in the Holy Land.

Bretchgirdle was always going on about Jesus's mother. Whether it was her virginity, her sinlessness, or her peculiar closeness to the Godhead, the present writer is not sure, but something about the woman appealed to him greatly. He wouldn't even have it that the brethren of Our Lord were Joseph's children by a former marriage. Their mother was quite another Mary, Bretchgirdle said, Mary the wife of Clopas or Alphaeus, the Virgin's sister.

Brownsword, on the other hand, was a Latinist only in the classical sense. He argued that the colourlessness of Mary's character, not only in the gospels but in the apocrypha too, makes it fatally easy to imagine her and to imagine that one understands that imagination.

Bretchgirdle ignored this thorn.

The parish priest bought a kitten in the Rother Market and christened it Dulia. When the schoolmaster heard him calling it, he said, 'What do you call that cat?'

'Dulia,' said Bretchgirdle.

'After the martyr?' said Brownsword.

'No, not Julia - Dulia,' Bretchgirdle explained.

'I hear you now,' said Brownsword, and added, 'I thought you had a cold.'

When the cat got bigger Bretchgirdle started calling it Hyperdulia.

It was a fat cat, kink-tailed, tabby in colour, forever shaking its head as if it wanted to lick its ear, a nasty sort of creature by all accounts. It had fleas and the fleas gave it worms. The flea-larvae swallow the eggs of the worm along with the organic matter in the bottom of the cat-box. The worm-larvae hatch from these eggs in the midgut of the flea-larvae, penetrate the midgut and arrive in the stomach of the flea-larvae. They stay there during the pupal and adult stages of the flea, growing all the while. An animal becomes infected or re-infected by swallowing such fleas when, for example, licking its coat.

(I learnt all this from Dr Walter Warner, true discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Of course, the facts were not known in the ignorant century gone, when Bretchgirdle and Brownsword busied themselves with aspects of Mariolatry, and suchlike.)

Dulia was always licking her coat, so she was forever eating her own fleas and giving herself worms. According to Warner's Artis Analyticae Praxis (1631), his only book, this would have constituted a vicious circle or at least circumlocution - cat licking, cat chewing, fleas going down, worms breeding in the swallowed fleas, cat having worms, flea-larvae eating the eggs of the worms along with the organic matter in the bottom of the cat-box, cysticeroids hatching in the midgut, and so on, and so on, adult fleas copulating a few hours after their emergence from the cocoon and before having had a blood meal, the females laying a batch of fresh eggs after a day or two, but needing a blood meal before each batch.

Bretchgirdle liked his cat. Perhaps he did not love it, but he liked it.