Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

Town history rests on the premise that facts tell the truth.

Country history, on the contrary, knows that facts can obscure the truth. Your country historian, your Man in the Moon, your servant Pickleherring, allows for the fact that the facts can prove anything, that they prickle and point in all directions, like the twigs on a tree that's still growing. The truth of the tree is its life. That's the green blood that springs, like a fountain, from the roots to the stars.

This book you read is mostly country history. It consists of tales I have heard told about Mr Shakespeare.

Our hero was a country-man who took the town by storm. He set the Thames on fire with what he knew from the Avon. But he remained in his heart a man of the country. And he went back to his origins to die.

I have collected most of my tales about him from people who knew him. In Stratford, in Warwick, in London. The wheres do not matter. You can be a good country historian in Paternoster Row.

What matters is that it's told tales I am telling you. Tales told me. Twice-told tales. Tales, tales, tales, tales. Here there are Canterbury tales, and old wives' tales. Here there are tales of tubs and of roasted horses. One tale is good until another's told. All are the tales of every common tongue. Tales, idle tales, fictions.

And if some of my told tales are tall, that's because in the minds of the tellers the late Mr William Shakespeare was a giant.

Town history is mostly written. Country history is all in the telling.

Town history begins and ends in the mind. Country history begins and lives in the tongue, and it can have no end while the Man in the Moon keeps on climbing.

I am, like Mr Shakespeare, motley-minded.

I have, like Mr Shakespeare, a peasant heart.

Chapter Nineteen Positively the last word about whittawers

To be a poet is to be one thing. Not so John Shakespeare. He was on the make .

So he did different jobs at different times. Then, in the end, he didn't do much at all. He diced. He drank. He told stories, but nobody listened. He mortgaged his wife's lands, and he passed his days in law-suits (which he lost). He became just a huge hill of flesh always warming his buttocks by the fire. He went about Stratford, where once he had been Chief Alderman in scarlet robes, wearing a ragged leather jerkin and an old torn pair of breeches, with his hose out at his heels, and a pair of broken slip shoes on his feet. He wore a greasy cap on his white head.

I like John Shakespeare. His life was chequered with vicissitudes. For a man on the make, he ended as an honourable failure.

Many instances of his benevolence are recorded. When not hiring it out at interest, he gave away his money freely. A broken gamester, observing him one night win five guineas at cribbage, and putting the money into his pocket with indifference, exclaimed, 'How happy that money would make me!' John Shakespeare, overhearing this, turned and placed the guineas in his palm, saying, 'Go, then, shog off and be happy!'

His gambling made him notorious even in those improvident days. I like him also for his philosophy to justify his gambling - that a man ought to have a bet every day, else he might be walking about lucky and never know it. Similarly philosophical, his excuse on one occasion, when his horse was beaten shortly, that the horse's neck was not quite long enough.

And his extempore wit was sharp enough in his prime, lending credence again to the thought that his son found Falstaff in him. As when once, at the market in Warwick, on seeing the wife of the Puritan divine Thomas Cartwright go by riding on a pony, he remarked that no doubt it was the first time the lady had ever had fourteen hands between her legs.

The truth is that there was a wild streak in the Shakespeares. In John it took some years for it to come out, but when it did it took control of his life. His father, Richard Shakespeare, the poet's grandfather, had a bad name all his days for cantankerousness. He refused to ring his swine and he let his stock run loose in the Clopton meadows. He was a husbandman, and lived by tilling the soil.

Richard Shakespeare lived at Snitterfield, to the north of Stratford, but he was not born there. The wildest Shakespeares came first from Balsall and Wroxall (where the prioress showed us her leg in the apple tree), and from a couple of other villages in the Forest of Arden. I mean the hamlets of Rowington and Baddesley Clinton. Dick Shakespeare came from one of these - I am not sure which. When he died he left an estate that was valued at PS38 17s. It is said that he bequeathed five shillings in his will specifically for his sons to get drunk for the last time at his expense.

Dick Shakespeare's other son was christened Henry. He farmed at Ingon in the parish of Hampton Lucy, staying on the land after his father's death (unlike his brother John). There's plenty of evidence that Henry ran wild all his life. When young he was fined for brawling and drawing blood in an affray against the Constable. Then in his middle years he was fined again for wearing a hat to church instead of a cap. As an old man, he went to prison twice for not paying his debts. He was also involved in disputes over tithes and sued his own brother John. But after he died it was found he had money enough in his coffers, as well as a fine mare in his stable, and much corn and hay in his barn. This was our poet's Uncle Henry, always known as 'Harry' or 'Hal'.

I weary of these wild Shakespeares - But, note well, they had spunk in them. Also they were hardy men, makers, masters and sons of the soil. If you think poets do not descend from such strong lines, madam, then I have to beg to differ. I believe Chaucer's father was a vintner. (True, Dante's was a lawyer, but we'll forgive that.) In any case, consider William Shakespeare's total craft and trade. He was not just a poet. He was a playwright. And a playwright is a wright, or maker, like a boatwright or a cartwright or a wheelwright. Where they make boats and carts and wheels, he makes his plays. He leaves his mark, as they do, on the work.

Since I weary of the subject of this chapter, and swear it will be positively the last word about whittawers in my book, permit me a little note concerning that earthquake which Mr Shakespeare must have remembered from late in his fifteenth year.

There have not been so many earthquakes in England that a boy would ever forget one he had felt with his own feet.

Not that the dead rose from their graves in Trinity churchyard, but on that evening of Easter Wednesday, 1580, the whole of the south of England felt the shaking of the ground. In London, the great clock bell at Westminster struck two with the shock, and the bells of the churches in the city were all set jangling. It is reported that the playgoers rushed out of the theatres in consternation, and that the gentlemen of the Temple, quitting their suppers, ran out of the Temple Hall with their knives in their hands. Part of the Temple Church was cast down, some stones fell from St Paul's, and two apprentices were killed at Christ Church by the fall of a gargoyle during sermon-time.

This earthquake was felt pretty generally throughout the queendom, and was the cause of much damage in Kent, where many castles and other buildings were injured; and at Dover a portion of a cliff fell, carrying with it part of the castle wall.

So alarmed were all classes, so I've heard tell, that Queen Elizabeth thought it advisable to cause a form of prayer to be used by all householders with their whole family, every evening before going to bed:

ALMIGHTY everlasting God, who lookest upon the earth, and makest it to tremble: spare them that fear thee, be merciful to them that call upon thee; that whereas we are sore afraid for thy wrath that shaketh the foundations of the earth, we may likewise feel thy mercy when thou healest the sores thereof.