The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty How Shakespeare went to the wars & sailed the seas (again) & took a long walk in the Forest of Arden & captured a castle

OR - (and sometimes I think that OR should be this book's sub-title, not that there is much should-ness* in my spirit) - or, some say, Shakespeare turned soldier and went to the wars in Holland, seeking reputation even in the cannon's mouth. Well, perhaps not quite its mouth, but somewhere in the vicinity of a cannon. Since every able man in England between the ages of sixteen and sixty was liable for military service at that time, it is unlikely that our Willy eluded the net.

Here is Corporal Shakespeare reporting for duty, sir. He served under the Earl of Leicester, in that brigade of poets led by Sir Philip Sidney, the hero of us all. Shakespeare was not a hero. Auctors aren't. Shakespeare escaped being mentioned in dispatches. But perhaps he carried them, for Sidney does mention, as the messenger bearing home to his wife a letter from the Netherlands, a certain Will whom he calls 'the jesting player'. Shakespeare the regimental jester? Will the wag of the mess-room? Who knows? There is an authentic whiff of gunpowder to the stuff about small sieges in the history plays. It makes you think that their author knows what it's like to be under fire. Best of all, when Talbot speaks with scorn of 'Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish' you hear the voice of an English soldier in foreign parts, mocking the natives and making himself at home by pronouncing their words as English words. The men who went to Agincourt always put a T on the end of it, and called Ypres 'Wipers'. So we can take it that Shakespeare knew his pack-drill. Unlike belligerent Ben Jonson, though, he never killed a man in single combat.

After military service, WS went off again to sea. This time he sailed in a merchant vessel called The Tiger, bent on making his fortune, or some of it, only to be shipwrecked off the sea-coast of Bohemia. Shaking the brine from his hair, he made his way to Italy where he rescued the young Earl of Southampton, who had been set upon by thieves while travelling on vacation from St John's College, Cambridge. The grateful boy arranged for his saviour's passage back to London after a brief idyll in France where Shakespeare met the Countess of Rousillon and picked up the ingredients for the syllabub which is Love's Labour's Lost. (Remind me to give you Love's Labour's Won when it's time for that.)

OR perhaps he never went abroad at all? Perhaps he never crossed the Channel in his life? Perhaps WS just lost his 'lost years' by getting lost himself - at home, in England, going for a long walk in the Forest of Arden, picking flowers, stealing birds' eggs, writing sonnets, climbing trees, spitting with the wind, pissing in the ditches, forgetting the way out of the woods. Lost in a green dream, he was turning into 'Shakespeare'.

He went for a long walk, if he did, like many another likely lad, under shady boughs, in dewy dells, where no doubt he came across maidens, and others who were no longer in that condition. He explored the Cotswolds, and the wilds of Gloucestershire, and the hinterland of his own heart. He hawked and he hunted. It was at this time in his life that he got to know Will Squele and Old Double the archer, drinking small beer with them in country taverns where they were served at their benches outdoors by maids in sprig muslin with holes in their stockings. Perhaps he drank with his father too, larger and more various potations, and slept all night under the crab tree with him at Bidford, intolerably intoxicated, both of them, too drunk to crawl home and face Mary Arden. The furthest he ventured from Stratford might well have been Daventry, where he perceived through the dregs of his dissipation the red nose of the innkeeper. Then he wandered on again, lost again, in the Forest of Arden again, until he met a fool, a fool in the forest, and the fool was him, and young Will found himself, a motley fool, and came sober out of the trees as WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Bit neat, that.

Bit too neat for me, madam.

The truth in it would be that if nobody knows where Shakespeare lost his 'lost years' then perhaps it is because Shakespeare did not know himself where they were spent.

But Nobody does know.

I'm Nobody, Nicholas Nemo, and I know.

That's why I put 'lost years' in inverted commas.

I, nobody, Reynolds, Reynolds, good Reynaldo, your fool, your zany, your Jack Pudding, your clown, my own buffoon, I know and now I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen.

Am I not your accredited, true and original Engelische Comedien und Tragedien sampt dem Pickelhering?

So they say in Germany, which is I think germane.

I am he, mein herr.

Gnadige frau, it is Singing Simpkin at your service here. Take down your drawers and prepare for action.

In France, of course, they call me Jean Pottage.

In Italy, Maccaroni.

I am that droll whom every nation calls by the name of the dish of meat which it loves best.

So, in good round English, I am known honestly, which is without salt or mustard, as your simple Pickleherring.

Did I not tell you this at the outset - before I ever fell like Humpty Dumpty off the wall, and met our Mr Shakespeare?

I did.

And have I not at all points been concerned to explain to you, gentle reader, that what you are holding in your hands is in no known sense a work of literature?

It is, in fact, what all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put together again.

Herzchen, let there be no doubt about it.

This book consists of what my German audience used to call (in my latter hey-day) a series of Pickelharings-spiele.

Me, madam?

I call it plain pickery.

So, little students of OR-atory, no need to rack your brains or stew your wits with wondering which is the true or more favoured as the probable account - land-locked Willy in Lancashire as private tutor to little Papists with a taste for amateur theatricals, of barnacle Bill the sailor all at sea and munching horrible biscuit with the (eventual) Member of Parliament for Bosinney, Cornwall.

No call for a Corporal Shakespeare either, nor even a Lance-Corporal Shakespeare (ha! ha! not among the trumpets).

Best of all, most devoutly to be wished, abolish and expunge from the tables of your memory, ladies and gentlemen, all trivial, fond records of the truly abominable thought of William Shakespeare at work as a provincial lawyer's clerk.

I, Pickleherring Pickle-Bottle, can tell you exactly where our man was and what he was doing in those 'lost years'.

I, Pick-Purse Pickleherring, will tell you precisely where William Shakespeare was and what he was doing in those years which were not lost at all.

There is no mystery.

Here are the facts of the matter.

He went away.

He went away to a far-away island.

There Mr Shakespeare studied certain works on magic until abjuring the mystic art he proceeded to Naples, and thence to Milan. Here he fell into the hands of brigands who, pleased by his gentle address and ready wit, made him their chief. At the head of this band, Shakespeare captured the castle of Mondragon, which became then the base for his many expeditions of plunder and looting. In his lust for treasure (or, as he called it, finance) the outlaw WS dispatched his enemies with a 'disembraining spoon'. He would gather his loot into an enormous sack, which it was his pleasure to drag behind him. This sack he called his 'bombard', presumably because of its resemblance to a primitive type of cannon.

Surrounded at last in his castle by a superior force of brigands which had crept up disguised as trees, Shakespeare made his escape in a large basket of soiled linen - leaving, alas, his bombard behind him.

Then he came home to England.

And the rest is history.

* Like Claudius in Hamlet, I tend to think this should is like a spendthrift sigh, / That hurts by easing.