Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

In any case, listen closely to the words. These phrases have his ring right to the echo. GOOD FRIEND as a direct form of address, occurs at key points in his works - for example, Miranda thus addresses Ferdinand in The Tempest, and Hamlet says it to Horatio just arrived from Wittenberg. JESU for Jesus is the poet's preferred formulation - he invokes the holy name like that all over the plays. As to FORBEAR - that is a favoured verb, and often as an imprecation forbidding touching , as in the second King Henry VI: Lay not thy hands on me; forbear, I say . Then there is the fact that when Mr Shakespeare thought of death it was often to link the word ENCLOSED with the word DUST (or some similar word meaning mortal remains), as for example in Henry V, Act IV, Scene 8, line 129, where you will find The dead with charity enclosed in clay . One of the final plays, Cymbeline , employs that BLEST BE formula half a dozen times. While CURST BE comes in The Tempest , as well as in the first Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus , and Pericles . CURSED and BONES come together in The Rape of Lucrece , line 209.

In short, that poem is Shakespeare's in phrase and pulse as surely as if he had written it in his own blood on parchment made from his own skin.

The grave, I think, was William Shakespeare's best bed. Have you ever noticed how much sweet, dreamless, and untroubled sleep is longed-for throughout his life's work? Sleep was for him God's greatest benison. May he sleep now in blessings! May he rest in peace and his faults lie gently on him!

And so, good reader, pray for me, your Pickleherring. I have done what I promised I would do. I have told you all that I know about the late Mr Shakespeare. And now that it is done, now that I have finished, this whole book I dedicate to my friend's memory in the same words that he used to dedicate his Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton: 'What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have, devoted yours.' Unknown friends, this has been a lover's book.

What I have to do ... What I have to do is make my exit. I just looked down this minute through my peep-hole. The room where Polly was is now all flames. The wind in the night must have blown from the north, and the fire come. But that may not be necessary. I am telling you something new about hell-fire.

Bear with me. My old brain is troubled. Brightness falls from the air. Pickleherring's mad again! I can see nothing. I can hear nothing. I can taste nothing. I do not know what comfrey fritters smell like.

Sir, did you expect me to lie down in my Juliet dress and wait for Romeo to come in a cloak of fire? Madam, would you have me robe and crown myself as Cleopatra and clasp the flames to suck on my wrinkled dugs? Shall my last act be to encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in my arms?

I tell you, none of these is Pickleherring's exit. Nor have I caught an everlasting cold. Nor is old Pickerel, who was once your little Pickle, in the way to study a long silence.

In the beginning, when I was a boy, the late Mr Shakespeare made me jump down from the red brick wall to meet him. In the middle, the late Mr Shakespeare made me a woman before I was ever a man. But at the end, friends, at the end the late Mr Shakespeare kindly made me Ariel. This is Pickleherring's great secret. I am a spirit. I can fly away!

I will take my harp in my hand and rise above the city where it burns. I will go not just to the harp's defunctive music but my own. I will fly high above the flames, O Polly dear.

I think that is enough about what I have to do. I think that I have done enough already. I think that is enough about the late Mr Shakespeare.

An

ever

writer

to a never reader

FAREWELL

Postscript

This book contains quotations from (and variations on) the lives and works of: John Aubrey, W. H. Auden, William Barnes, John Berryman, William Blake, William Bliss, Jorge Luis Borges, Andre Breton, Robert Burton, John Bunyan, Sir Edmund Chambers, the Comtesse de Chambrun, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, John Dryden, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Florio, Edgar I. Fripp, Robert Graves, Lady Charlotte Guest, Ivor Gurney, John Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, G. B. Harrison, William Hazlitt, Warren Hope, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, John Keats, Malcolm Lowry, Edmond Malone, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, John Masefield, Marianne Moore, Thomas Nashe, Lady Anne Newdigate-Newdegate, Robert Nye, Eric Partridge, Georges Perec, Robert Pinget, Edgar Allan Poe, John Cowper Powys, Marcel Proust, Francois Rabelais, Sir Walter Ralegh, James Reeves, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Nicholas Rowe, S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, Dame Edith Sitwell, Caroline Spurgeon, Laurence Sterne, Lytton Strachey, Arthur Symons, Dylan Thomas, Anthony a Wood, Charles Williams, John Dover Wilson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

About the Author

ROBERT NYE was born in London in 1939. His novels include Merlin, The Memoirs of Lord Byron, Mrs Shakespeare , and the award-winning Falstaff . A poet, journalist, and critic, he lives near Cork, in Ireland.

By Robert Nye

Falstaff

The Late Mr Shakespeare

ALSO BY ROBERT NYE

Expansive, sprawling, unruly and oversized, these are the memoirs of the most beloved comic figure in the history of literature. Larger-than-life, irascible and still lecherous at the advanced age of eighty-one, Falstaff recounts his outrageously bawdy tales as an antidote to popular legend - they're guaranteed to tell you some things you never thought you needed to know about his life and times. Who killed Hotspur? What really went on at the battle of Agincourt? And what was it that made the wives of Windsor so merry?

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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2001.

This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2012.

Copyright (c) 1998 by ROBERT NYE

The moral right of Robert Nye to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7490-1220-5