Chapter Eighty-Five Deaths, etc.
But George Peele was not Mr Shakespeare's favourite poet amongst his contemporaries. That high honour went to Edmund Spenser. It was Spenser's way with words that Shakespeare loved. He told me once that he thought our language began with him. Notice he did not say just his own language, or the language of modern poets in general. Shakespeare seemed to credit Spenser with tapping into a vein of English which everyone could speak. He praised his older contemporary's ear, the perfection of the music of his verse. But it was Spenser's tongue that he loved. I remember two lines in especial that Mr Shakespeare delighted to repeat, and about which he would always murmur, 'That is the very tongue of truth.' The first is the refrain from Prothalamion:
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The other, odder, rougher, comes (he assured me) somewhere in The Faerie Queene, though I confess I have never myself had the patience to find it:
Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind.
I think Mr Shakespeare revelled in these two extremes, for he would sometimes recite the lines as if they belonged together, which of course they do not, neither in provenance nor in spirit. As to the rest, I remember him remarking idly that the entrance of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene was like Aphrodite being born from the sea, and on another occasion I heard him laugh and tell someone who was objecting to the rape and carnage in Titus Adronicus that far from being put in to please the groundlings he had intended it as a parody of Spenser. But I admit I do not know what he meant by this latter remark.
Anyhow, what I am trying to make clear is that Shakespeare revered Spenser more for his manner than his matter. In this, as in much else, my friend's opinion stood in direct contradiction to that of Ben Jonson, who liked to bellow in his cups that Spenser 'writ no language'. Shakespeare, on the contrary, would have praised Spenser for being what Spenser called Chaucer - a well of English, undefiled.
The century died with Spenser. He had been driven out of Ireland, where he did the Queen's work, by peasants who set fire to his house in the night. The poet's baby son was killed in the conflagration, and the final cantos of The Faerie Queene were also destroyed. Arrived back at Court on Christmas Eve, he received PS8 for his service, then took lodgings with his wife and remaining three children in King Street, where he died in poverty.
When he heard of the death of Edmund Spenser, Mr Shakespeare shut his eyes. Then he laid down his pipe as gently upon the fender as if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider's web.
'Let us go to Lucy Negro's house,' said he.
This was ever his way. The shadow of Thanatos, dark-robed lord of the dead, always drove him to the worship of Eros, god of that frenzy and confusion which some call love. Love and Death were like twin sisters in the poet's mind. The kiss of one would lead him to seek oblivion in the arms of the other.
So we went down to Lucy Negro's and fucked out the night.
The Earl of Essex paid for Spenser's funeral. His coffin was carried from King Street to Westminster Abbey by eight of his fellow poets - Thomas Campion, George Chapman, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Hugh Holland, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. Spenser was buried beside Chaucer in the Abbey, the poets consigning his body to the earth. As the coffin went into the grave each poet with bowed head dropped on it a scroll with an elegy and quill attached thereto. Some of the poets kept copies of their elegies, but Shakespeare did not. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said only, 'I wrote it for Edmund Spenser, not for posterity.'
This was the first of three deaths that left their mark on Mr Shakespeare, as on all of us alive then. The second came two years later when the man who had paid for Spenser's funeral ascended the scaffold at the Tower. Essex had been found guilty of treason after his abortive attempt to raise the citizens of London against the Queen's counsellors. Southampton, his right-hand man, was fortunate, as I have said, to be reprieved from execution, though he remained in prison for what was left of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Mr Shakespeare himself, although the least conspiratorial of men, and by then at some convenient distance from Southampton, hardly found favour at Court because the ill-planned coup had begun with the conspirators commanding our Company to a performance of Richard II, where Essex loudly applauded the deposition scene.
I always considered the Earl of Essex insane. But then I was only a youth in those long-ago days, and perhaps the poor fellow was merely vainglorious and headstrong. His manners were never those of a successful courtier. Witness the famous occasion when the Queen boxed his ears and he drew his sword in anger at her behaviour.
People say that when he heard the sentence of death passed upon him, he looked as calm and contented as if invited to dance with the Queen. There is a story that Elizabeth had given her favourite a ring at the height of her love for him, promising that whatever might befall in the years to come she would grant him any wish or pardon him any offence at the sight of this jewel. Essex is supposed to have sent the ring from the Tower by the Countess of Nottingham, who was to present it to the Queen as a token of his repentance, but the Countess preferred to keep the ring for herself. Those who can credit this story say that both Essex and Elizabeth were victims of the Countess, with the Earl believing up to the last moment that the sight of the ring would save him, and the Queen only affixing her seal to her former lover's death warrant when she took his apparent failure to send her the ring as evidence of his pride. Pickleherring has an open mind on this romantic subject. But I will tell you in a minute of something that might confirm that the story is true.
Elizabeth did make one concession, even without the ring. The sentence of hanging and quartering went too far, she decided. Essex should be beheaded, tout court, and his body could be buried in the Tower chapel, instead of being distributed to the four corners of London for public show.
Her lover was no doubt grateful for this favour. On the appointed day, he mounted the scaffold clad in a long robe of embossed velvet, over a suit of black satin with a short white collar, and with a black felt hat on his head. When asked to pray for the Queen, he said: 'May God give her an understanding heart,' and then repeated the fourth psalm. The executioner was clumsy. The first blow struck the Earl of Essex aslant. He knelt there, half-dead, his bleeding head on the block, while the executioner turned away his face to redouble the blows.
The third death came again after an interval of two years. Just as the second death had been the death of the man who had paid for the funeral of the first to die, so the third death was the death of the woman who had commanded the execution of the second to die. It is said that Queen Elizabeth complained more than once to her confidantes that she had never known a moment's happiness since the death of Essex. In the spring of 1603 she left her palace for the last time to visit the bedside of the dying Countess of Nottingham. There she learnt that this lady was wearing her conscience on her finger. It was Robert Devereux's ring - the one the Queen had given him. The Countess confessed that he had confided it to her to take to the Queen, but that she had kept it. It is said that Elizabeth dealt the dying woman such a blow that her demise was hastened.
Nor did the Queen recover from the shock of this interview. She returned to her palace at Richmond, where she could neither eat nor sleep yet refused to go to bed, crying out that under the heavy state canopy she had been visited by strange and terrible apparitions. Three days and three nights the Queen sat upright in a chair, too frightened to be put to bed, sucking her thumb like a child. She died on the 24th of March, 1603, without speaking a word.
Mr Shakespeare once observed to me that all those of us who lived during the last century would always remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the news came to us that Queen Elizabeth was dead. For all her age and infirmity, we never counted on the death of Gloriana. For my part, when the news came I was shaving my legs in the tiring-room at the Globe and trying to learn my part of Cressida for the first performance of Troilus and C. When I asked Mr Shakespeare where he was he said that he had been in Stratford, sitting in the window of a house near to the church which overlooks the charnel. He was reworking the cemetery scene in Hamlet, he said, and finding some inspiration in the view, when his daughter Judith brought him a pippin from his orchard and the message from London that the Queen was dead.
He might have been mocking my sense of the appropriate, of course. But he had a nose for death, and I should not be surprised if his tale was true.
I wonder if it is simply because he is dead that the life of William Shakespeare seems so much neater and more complete than my own life, much more shapely and formal and sensible. Does not death confer a sense on any life? Perhaps I write this book in part because I have had to learn that. Good friend, perhaps you read it because you like to have assurance of a life making more sense than your own. This new cult of biography, this great passion for Lives - what if it is based upon nothing more profound or noble than our separate several feeling that life is such a mess?
O my little heart! Misprision in the highest degree! A plague o' these pickle-herring! All this stuff about Lives, deaths etc. is just a way of avoiding the question that really consumes my heart and my mind this minute, namely:
Where is my dear Polly, my own Anne?