The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Thirty-One About Pompey Bum + Pickleherring's Shakespeare Test

I have this garret above a whorehouse which I rent. My landlord is the pie-maker, Pompey Bum. Some of his pies - the sweetest, of course - are tarts. I like cold custard ones, myself, with nutmeg sprinkled on them.

I have this bed, which is not entirely straw. I have this to sit in that was once a chair. I have this worn-out body, and this crust to eat, of which the rats have eaten only part.

Last week, as I recall, one of the girls from below gave me a fresh-laid speckled hen's egg to boil. Such treasures in heaven! No rage, no remorse, no despair. I have this soul in pawn, and this delirious heart.

Now, not for the first time, the plague has passed me by. Pickleherring has been spared to complete his great work. I live on just to write my Life of Shakespeare.

It is a lack of teeth compels me to eat only eggs, fish, hash, and other spoon-meats. I eat when I am hungry, at any hour of the day or night. I drink when I am thirsty, but only water. And I go to bed or arise just as I feel inclined, without any reference to a clock.

It is years now since I gathered my precious data. I drank too much and I slept too little in those days. Then I would rather have broken my neck rashing downstairs than miss getting a story about Mr Shakespeare from a departing guest. The rush remains - but only in my pen. Now I commit my stories all helter-skelter to the page. Haste and muddle were always my middle names. I write, madam, tumultuarily, as these things come into my head, or as I go fishing memories out of one of my boxes. All may easily be reduced into order at your leisure, sir, by numbering my subjects with red ink, according to time and place, et cetera. Your cochineal paste is to be recommended for the office.

I write to prove that I am still alive, and that so is Mr Shakespeare. It is much to be deplored that people nowadays find it convenient to look down their enlightened noses at him. I know the modern taste calls him vulgar and crabbed, an uncouth spirit. I say his day was good, and that it will surely come again when the French fashions that swept into England with King Charles II have gone out again.

I predict that one day Mr William Shakespeare and his works will be so popular and so revered that children will be required to study the subject in schools and universities. You find the notion crazy, sir? Preposterous, madam? Well, it is not important. Humour an old man's whim; his maggot, even. I cannot imagine, for the life of me, that Mr Shakespeare himself would ever have wanted any such fate. But certainly one day his plays will all be staged again, properly, in their entirety, and not in tidied-up and 'corrected' versions to suit a newfangled classicalism. And when they are it won't be with women in the cast!

Meanwhile, here, gentle reader, just for fun, and to eke out a box with nothing in it, is an Examination Paper which I have prepared for your testing:

PICKLEHERRING'S SHAKESPEARE TEST

(Advanced Students Only)

1. What happens in Hamlet? And why?

2. How many children had Lady Macbeth?

3. Who and/or what is Silvia? (Give examples.)

4. Are people murdered in tragedies or aren't they?

5. What was Puck's average speed when flying? And Ariel's? How do we know that Puck was probably the better flyer of the two?

6. Whose bawdy hand was on whose prick in Romeo and Juliet? (Discuss.)

7. In which play does William Shakespeare name me, and wish a plague upon me? In which other play does he also name me (twice) in the first three lines of Act II (well, almost), and then go on to prescribe the exact procedure that I am employing in the writing of this book?

8. What is the effect of the word DUCDAME?

9. Is this a duck or a rabbit?

10. Where is fancy bred?