The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Forty-Eight How Shakespeare went to sea with Francis Drake

In this box I have one remainder biscuit. It's there to provide me with tangible and tasteful evidence of another theory to account for those undocumented 'lost years' in the life of William Shakespeare.

Could he have gone to sea as a sailor with Francis Drake?

Was our Shakespeare a cabin-boy in the crew of the Golden Hind when she circumnavigated the globe?

Pickleherring brings to your notice, friends, the high incidence of shipwrecks in the plays collected in the Folio. There's one in The Tempest, there are two in Pericles. Twelfth Night starts off with Sebastian and Viola having been shipwrecked, and The Comedy of Errors starts off with a shipwreck too. Even Antonio's ships in The Merchant of Venice get wrecked one after another. Shakespeare, in short, was obsessed with shipwrecks, perhaps in the way that only a man who has nearly perished in one at an impressionable age might be. He also exhibits in his works a considerable knowledge of seas and storms, as well as deploying several familiar terms that sailors use when they're speaking of seas and storms or of their ships.

Above all, there's this fear in him of drowning. Remember poor Clarence's dream in Richard III:

O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown!

What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!

You don't write like that without first-hand experience of the matter. (I should know. I once fell off a jetty at Yarmouth.) Notice there is no nonsense in Clarence about seeing your whole past life in a flash, or of drowning being an easy way to die. Mr Shakespeare, I say, had either once nearly been drowned himself or he had listened carefully to somebody else who suffered and survived the same fate - which somebody was not me, because I kept my mouth shut.

Now then, let us consider Milford Haven.

Why does Shakespeare drag Milford Haven into Cymbeline? It was never a famous or mighty sea-port, Milford Haven. Yet Posthumus sails from Milford Haven on his way to Italy - rather than from Bristol or from Plymouth, either of which would be more likely. And he writes to Imogen to meet him at Milford Haven on his return.

If you look at the map, sir, you will see that Milford Haven is in fact the nearest port to Stratford. That is not to say much, I grant you, since the bard's birthplace is about bang in the heart of England, and the farthest you could get inland from the sea. But if you marched due west from Stratford, looking neither to left nor to right, with the idea of running away to sea in your young head, then Milford Haven is the port you'd reach.

My friend the player Weston loved this theory. He liked the notion of Shakespeare at sea as a cabin-boy with Drake, in buckle shoes, with a feather in his cap. He would quote in support of it the King's sea-sickened invocation of Sleep in Part 2 of Henry IV:

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge,

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deaf'ning clamour in the slippery shrouds ...*

My dears, you don't write stuff like that if your only experience of seafaring is crossing the Thames from Westminster Stairs to Southwark in a wherry. Nor do you learn the ropes - witness all that language taut with sea-knowledge in the first scene of The Tempest - from punting about between weirs on the River Avon.

But (and this was David Weston's clinching argument, with which with portly sails he brought his argosies of speculation home) there is one thing in Shakespeare, one remarkable thing, which makes it almost certain that at some point in his life he had gone not just on a voyage, and not just on a long voyage, but that he had sailed the five oceans of the world on a very long voyage indeed, and that thing comes, of all places, in a completely land-locked scene, back at home, in England, in the Forest of Arden, when Jaques, in the seventh scene of the second Act of As You Like It, speaking of the fool he has met in the forest, remarks that the fool's brain is 'as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage'.

Search all the works of Marlowe and Chapman, madam. They are full of sea-imagery, awash with it, their pages salt-stained. They speak much and sing more of tall ships and high seas, of tides and masts and spars and sails and stars and storms and all the windy rest of it. But in neither of these writers, nor in the work of any other writer I can think of, no not even in great Homer, is there a single mention of REMAINDER BISCUIT.

Only your true Elizabethan long-distance mariner would know of the existence of such biscuits. Drake's crew was reduced to living on them at the end of their round-the-world voyage.

How on earth (and I mean this literally), how on earth could William Shakespeare have conceived that extraordinary similitude unless he had himself been on the voyage and, yes, had himself cracked his teeth on just such a biscuit as this one, after shaking the wretched weevils out of the thing?

* The Folio has clouds. But I remember it as shrouds. Bob Benfield had the part. He always played old kings. Benfield had six teeth missing by that time, so clouds could possibly have come out as shrouds. But I think shrouds the ship-shape word, in context, as well as making more exacting sense.