The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twenty-Seven The midwife Gertrude's tale

The midwife Gertrude was a great teller of stories.

Every Wednesday evening - Gertrude's Wednesdays, they used to call them - would find her seated in her rocking chair in the marketplace at Snitterfield, the breeze blowing sweet in summer from the groves of the Forest of Arden, her bottles and her boxes spread at her feet. (Yes, madam, in winter she would do her stuff indoors.)

First she would eat a spoonful of this. Then she would drink a mouthful of that. Then she would blow her nose, clean out her ears with a knitting-needle, rub her eyes on a dockleaf, gargle, spit, clear her throat, take William Shakespeare on her knee, and begin a story.

The boy William's favourite was the tale of the monk and the nightingale. It went like this.

There was once a monk who was a good man but not a good monk. He did not like praying in church with the other monks. He liked walking in the green wood in the cool of the evening, and listening to the voices of the wind, and the streams, and the birds.

One night when he should have been at prayer the little monk wandered out into the dark and sat down under a willow tree. He chose the willow because its trailing branches made a screen around him, and he wanted to be alone to think.

He was thinking that he was not a good man because he was not a good monk when all at once a bird began singing in the tree above him.

It was a nightingale. Its song was so beautiful the monk wept for joy. Yet the song was not only a flow of joy. There was sadness in it too. It was sweet and sad, laughing and crying, merry and melancholy, all in one. The bird poured out its heart and the monk listened in a trance of delight, caught up in the music, pressed close to the heart of it.

On and on the nightingale sang, as if in rapture. In fact its breast was pressed against a thorn, which was why it sang. Its music told no story, least of all the story of the thorn, but it cast such a spell of melody everywhere in the dark around, the thronging notes echoing among the other trees, that the stream seemed to stop to listen, and the night breeze hold its breath.

'Tiouou, tiouou, tiouou, tiouou,' sang the nightingale, 'lu, lu, lu, ly, ly, ly, li, li, li, li.''

When the bird stopped the monk was so exhausted with delight and gratefulness that he sat quite still in the dark for a little while, calming his heart. Then he hurried back to the church.

He saw the Abbot and went up to him. 'Father,' he said simply, 'I have heard the nightingale--'

'Who are you?' broke in the Abbot crossly.

The monk looked closely at the Abbot in the gloom. He did not recognise him. It was a new Abbot. But how could that be?

'I do not understand,' he said. 'I went out into the night and I sat a moment under a willow and listened to the nightingale. Oh, Father, it was so beautiful I have no words for it. I wished that moment could have lasted for ever.'

The Abbot seized his arm and stared into his eyes. 'Are you telling the truth?' he demanded.

'Of course I am telling the truth,' said the monk. 'The nightingale sang--'

'I know nothing of the nightingale,' said the Abbot, 'but a hundred years ago a monk went out from this church into the night - it is written in the records of the monastery - and he never came back again. The Abbot of the time searched and searched, and the monks searched, but the man was never found. It was thought that he had fled away because he was a bad man.'

'I am not a good monk,' said the monk, 'and I would not claim to be a good man, but if I was a bad man I do not think I would have heard the nightingale.'

And then there was only dust in the Abbot's hands. For in listening so attentively to the song of the nightingale the little monk had heard a moment in eternity - which may take a hundred years of time.

This, as I say, was William Shakespeare's favourite from among the many stories told by the midwife Gertrude.

She was a woman too much given to allicholly and musing. Tiny, rather plump, voluble, and obliging, with grey hair and a narrow mouth, she wore eyeglasses and a black hat pulled square across her forehead. She used to sing to herself a lot. 'Oh tennis,' she sang, 'oh tennis is the finest game and boy and girl believe / The game they love is just the same that Adam played with Eve.' This woman spoke often to William Shakespeare also of crickets - with results that you may see in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 4, line 63, and in Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 2, line 11, and in Pericles where at the start of the third Act Mr Shakespeare announces that he has taken over the writing from Mr Wilkins by having Gower speak of how crickets sing at the oven's mouth. There is also a good bit about being as merry as crickets in the first part of King Henry IV, and in The Winter's Tale where Mamillius promises Hermione and the ladies a tale of sprites and goblins and goes on thus:

There was a man ...

Dwelt by a churchyard. I will tell it softly;

Yond crickets shall not hear it.

But the best line of all with crickets in it was given to me, of course, in my role as Lady Macbeth. Which fateful play, should you be interested, was actually written in Scotland and then first performed there - but I'll be coming to that when it's time for it.

I cannot believe that the midwife Gertrude knew as much about crickets as Dr Walter Warner. From him I learnt that the wings of crickets when folded form long, thin filaments, giving the appearance of a bifid tail, while in the male they are provided with a stridulating apparatus by which the well-known chirping sound is produced. The abdomen of the female ends in a long thin ovipositor. House crickets are greyish yellow marked with brown. Field crickets are bigger and darker. It burrows in the ground, the cricket, and in the evening the male cricket is to be seen sitting at the mouth of its hole noisily stridulating until a female approaches, when the louder notes are succeeded by a more subdued tone, whilst the successful musician caresses with his antennae the mate he has won. The cricket's musical apparatus consists of upwards of 130 transverse ridges on the under side of one of the nervures of the wing cover, which are rapidly scraped over a smooth projecting nervure on the opposite wing. The mole cricket is different. Its front legs are like hands.

The midwife Gertrude had a soft, animal nature. She loved to be happy like a sheep in the sun. And to do her justice, she liked also to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun.