Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

'O,' Queen Elizabeth expostulates, 'O Mr Frigspear, Mr Frigspear, and would he like a drink then? A little drink in my well, my gentleman?'

'He would,' croaks John Shakespeare. 'He would enjoy that, madam, I believe.'

'Then come in, darling donkey,' Queen Elizabeth invites. 'Only don't go in too deep or you'll drown and then be nothing, my poor thing.'

The Queen means, of course, that the extreme glacial coldness of her fissure will be the death of the interesting beast, and she is a-weary of her men's men dying on her. But as for sturdy John Shakespeare, like the angel of the Apocalypse he now has one foot on the known and the other on the unknown, and he's past counsel or caring. He can't hold anything back now, so he enters her quick, smooth, and hard.

Reader, all her long life Queen Elizabeth delighted in cerebral adoration, and the stronger the hint of corporal madness the more she delighted in it.

But now it is something else that pleases her.

Now it is something immediate.

Now it is something hard and very simple.

She forgets old Harry's lap and bad Seymour's fingers. She has no room for memory any more.

John Shakespeare has her. The father of William Shakespeare is up her. And the larks sing, and the choughs rise, and the wild thyme blows, and a donkey is braying over by Clopton Bridge, and the warming water, and the circling currents, and the bubbling springs, and the midsummer morning, and the weeping willows, and the great summer sun, and all the sweet blandishments and entreaties of all these little natural miracles make Elizabeth Tudor open her white royal legs wider and wider, make the Queen of England open her legs as she has never opened them before for any other man, so that John Shakespeare flows in, and William Shakespeare flows in, and the water flows in, and the warm flows in, and England flows in, and the world flows in, and it is all flowing warm flowing and flowing flowing warm until--

'O Mr Spermspear!' cries Queen Elizabeth. 'O Mr Shakespunk! Mr Shakespunk! Mr Shakespunk! O Mr Fuckster, O make your donkey go in deeper, my gentleman!'

So John Shakespeare does.

He does what the Queen tells him.

He does Queen Elizabeth thoroughly.

But--

'Deeper!' the Queen cries, 'Deeper yet! And harder! O my dear donkey! Do it! Do it! Do it!'

So John Shakespeare does.

He does what the Queen commands him.

He does Queen Elizabeth thoroughly all over again.

Until--

'O Warwick!' cries the Queen. 'O Warwick! Warwick!'

And the donkey finds that the well is very deep. And the donkey finds that the well is very very deep. But the donkey does not drown. And nor does the donkey freeze. On account, in part, of the warm springs and the other natural circumstances already mentioned.

John Shakespeare was very sorry to leave the water. He always came back to drink sack by Tiddington Mill. In his last years he would sit there, all under the willow trees, a fat man alone, and a drunkard, abusing the swans.

Few knew why he did it.

Queen Elizabeth was sorry to leave the water, too. In her dreams, in her later years, she would sometimes murmur and cry out 'Warwick!' Which thing caused more than one row with Lords Leicester and Essex.

Mr John Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth met thus and parted the same day. You will find their son's version of it in his play called A Midsummer Night's Dream .

Nine months after the sweet encounter in the water, to that very day, to that very hour, so they say, the poet William Shakespeare came into this world. His mother, knowing a bastard prince might bring civil war, returned home to the Palace of Westminster in London without him. The babe was left with John Shakespeare, who by that time was long married to Mary Arden. Mary had a good heart, and she brought up the child as her own.

* The fruit of the dwarf mulberry or knot-berry. So-called by the Warwickshire peasantry, and exceedingly plentiful in the lanes between Stratford-upon-Avon and Aston Cantlowe.

Chapter Twenty-One The Shakespeare Arms

Assuredly, madam, yes, if Queen Elizabeth was indeed our hero's mother then it makes Mary Shakespeare's games with him less reprehensible. Well, a mite so. A moiety. A shadow of a shade.

But no, sir, emphatically, I don't believe it either.

That's a nice word, that MOIETY. The late Mr William Shakespeare was at all times very fond of it. He was even its coiner, so far as I know, in its sense of being the smaller or lesser portion of anything. He employs it thus in the dedication to his Rape of Lucrece , and then again in The Winter's Tale , I think. Yes, I just looked it up for you - Act II, Scene 3, Leontes: Say that she were gone ... a moiety of my rest / Might come to me again . That's how I felt about Jane. But she's no part of the story. I'm telling you the Life of William Shakespeare.

A shadow of a shade less blameworthy, yes, that business of Mary Shakespeare's hand on the young William's balls and pintle, if Queen Elizabeth could be thought to be the boy's mother. I, friends, cannot believe it, all the same. Even though you might think that the source of the story's impeccable.

The source of the story?

John Shakespeare!

He told it me, directly, in his cups. I met him once, the time he came to London. Rainy autumn it was, of that year when I first met Mr Shakespeare. We did Hamlet at the Swan, with Mr Shakespeare taking the Ghost's part. His own little son had died that year, and now here was this play full of father and son stuff, and then his own father in London.

Not that John Shakespeare saw Hamlet . He'd come to town for something much more important than that. He'd come to get a coat of arms from the College of Heralds.

He was granted it, too, thanks largely to his son. The late Mr William Shakespeare had many talents, and one was the art or craft of pulling strings. The Heralds' Office was lax in bestowal of the honour, and a little influence and a liberal use of money went a long way to secure the coveted dignity. Several of the players became gentlemen this way. It was a sign that you weren't just a common actor. Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, Richard Cowley, John Heminges, and Richard Burbage - all sooner or later secured this right to display arms. In Mr Shakespeare's case, there was the added incentive that his father had already applied for the honour some thirty years earlier, at the height of his civic dignity in Stratford, but the arms had not been granted. Now he was old, and fallen on hard times, and his son seized this chance to redeem him. He made up some fiction about John Shakespeare's antecessors and how they had provided 'valiant and faithful service' to King Henry VII. He pulled, as I say, the right strings. He went in person to see the Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick, in the College of Heralds which lay just across the Thames from his Bankside lodgings.

I remember he showed me the draft. He had it all roughed out in his own hand on a great yellow scroll which he tucked under his oxter as he stepped into the wherry. I was hugely impressed. Remember, I was only thirteen, an impressionable lad, and the ways of the capital were new to me.

The coat of arms had, across a black incline, in its field of gold, a silver-tipped spear, the point upward, while for the crest or cognizance it displayed a falcon with out-stretched wings. The motto was Non sans droict . Not without right. Which Mr Ben Jonson mocked two years later in his Every Man out of His Humour as 'Not without mustard'.

Not without right . And a falcon shaking a spear. It was all very suitable, in my humble opinion. And the College of Arms thought so too. They granted the petition, and my master came back happy in the wherry.