Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

They're beating off his rope with their small wings.

'We will go,' proclaims William Shakespeare's father, 'to the next tree in the forest. It's an oak, if my memory serves me right, which will be the more suitable.'

With a tug at the rope, he leads his wife on by the neck.

Mary weeps as she walks there behind him.

But when they reach the great oak, the two Shakespeares, the same thing happens that has gone before. The birds are there. The rope is repulsed by the beating of their wings.

John Shakespeare drags his wife from tree to tree.

But it's the same scene at every tree he tries. The birds are there before him. They fly through the night, in the howling storm, and their wings repulse the rope each time he throws it.

His face black with anger, Mr John Shakespeare shouts: 'Madam, I know one tree where your friends the birds can't save you!'

What he means is the gallows. That hanging tree stands at the dark heart of the forest, where all the ways meet to make a crossroads.

Mary Shakespeare's weeping without ceasing now. Mary Shakespeare knows he means the gallows.

Her husband drags her on through the black wood.

When they reach the gallows John Shakespeare coils the end of the rope and then hurls it. It goes up. It seeks purchase on the crosstree. But even as the rope is snaking and looping through the air, the air is suddenly full of wings and the moon spills on them. And the moon spills on the gallows too, and on the man hanging there, and John Shakespeare sees the flock of little birds fly down once more in a bright cloud, and settle on the crosstree, so that his rope won't rest there. And this time there are more birds than ever, scores of them, hundreds, centuries of birds, the air's all birds, and birds all over the dead man too, sitting on his skull and on his twisted shoulders, swallows mostly, but fieldfares and martens as well, and blackbirds and thrushes, rooks and red-legged crows, throstles and bunting larks and ouzel cocks, pigeons and turtle doves, crows, sparrows, choughs, finches, blue wings and black wings in the swing of the moon, birds falling off and hanging in the air, birds fighting for places, birds perched on every spar and splinter of the gallows, birds, birds, birds, their small bright wings aflicker in the night, so that it might as well be water the rope is trying to hold, it might as well be the Avon or the sea.

John Shakespeare was a fool, but he's not an idiot. He knows a miracle when he's witnessed one.

He lets loose the rope from round about Mary's neck. He falls down on his knees. He kneels before her and the gallows in the moonlight.

'Forgive me,' said John Shakespeare. 'Forgive me, wife. It is I who have sinned against you.'

Nine months later, to that very night, the poet William Shakespeare came into the world.

Chapter Seven All the facts about Mr Shakespeare

It has been said that all the facts about Mr Shakespeare's life could be written on a single page. Here they are then:

Known facts about WS

26th April, 1564: Christened. 'C. Gulielmus filius Johannes Stiakspere.' 27th November, 1582: Granted licence to marry. 'Item eodem die similis emanavit licencia inter Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton.' 26th May, 1583: Christening of his daughter Susanna. 'C. Susanna daughter to William Shakespeare.' 2nd February, 1585: Christening of his twin son and daughter, Hamlet & Judith. 'C. Hamnet & Judeth sonne and daughter to William Shakspere.' 11th August, 1596: Burial of Hamlet Shakespeare. 'B. Hamnet filius William Shakspere.' 8th September, 1601: Burial of his father, John. 'B. Mr Johannes Shakspeare.' 5th June, 1607: Marriage of his daughter Susanna. 'M. John Hall gentleman & Susanna Shaxspere.' 9th September, 1608: Burial of his mother, Mary. 'B. Mayry Shaxspere, wydowe.' 10th February, 1616: Marriage of his daughter Judith. 'M. Tho Queeny tow Judith Shakspere.' 25th March, 1616: Signed his will. 23rd April, 1616: Died. 25th April, 1616: Buried. 'B. Will. Shakspere, gent.'

These twelve facts are all that there is to be known for sure about William Shakespeare from the public records.

But a man's life does not just consist of facts.

Least of all, the life of our Shakespeare.

Chapter Eight Which is mostly about choughs but has no choughs in it

When in the last chapter but one I named some of the birds that helped save Mr Shakespeare's mother from the hanging tree I must admit that I took a few of their names from his plays and his poems. Why not? How else could it be when you think about it? My mind is printed with his words and phrases. (Sometimes I think he dreamt me.) I was his page, sir. Now the page writes the book.

Remember, madam, I am an ancient actor. I strutted in my time on the ivory stages.

To be an actor, what is that to be? It is to be a man who turns himself into all shapes like a chameleon. But the whole damned craft is strange, and rooted in mystery. Why does one man's yawning make another man yawn? How, when standing in the jakes, should one man's pissing provoke a second? These are questions impossible to answer except in terms of some common nerve of human sympathy. But what if that sympathy be betrayed by art? What if your first man is not tired or pissy? He is your actor. He pretends a yawn he does not have in his jaws. He peacocks a piss when there's nothing in his bladder. In all this he's as false as those witches and old women that can bewitch our children. The forcible imagination of the one party moves and alters the spirits of the other. And behind the phantom of the player stands the god of the playwright. I was myself created by Mr Shakespeare. My real name is Nicholas Nemo. I am no fowler or ornithologist, no catcher of birds or discourser upon their several kinds and conditions.

And yet not all is art. It is plain fact and verifiable that I have seen with my own eyes in the country around Stratford-upon-Avon certain among those birds I mentioned. For instance, finches. But others I know only from my trusty Folio - the chough, for instance, which I believe is not an inland bird at all, but more probably to be discovered at the sea-coast of Cornwall, where it builds its nest in the cliffs.

Reader, my procedure is to give you the warp and the weft of Mr Shakespeare's world. His mind held choughs, and his verse found places in it for those birds to fly, therefore it seems to me right that they should be here in the tale of his begetting in the night of the great storm.

Instances are on record of choughs being taught to speak, but Mr Shakespeare appears to have entertained no great opinion of their talking powers. He speaks in All's Well that Ends Well of 'chough's language, gabble enough, and good enough', and then in The Tempest the usurping Duke of Milan, talking of 'lords that can prate', says:

I myself could make

A chough of as deep chat.

Falstaff, in the scene with the Prince and Poins, when they are met to rob the travellers at Gadshill, speaks of the victims as 'fat chuffs' - no doubt from their strutting about with much noise.

By the by, Mr Shakespeare sometimes says choughs when I think he means jackdaws. For instance, in the second scene of the third Act of A Midsummer Night's Dream , where in my part of Puck he had me speak of

Russet-pated choughs, many in sort,

Rising and cawing at the gun's report.

Russet here is the French gris , a fine grey, and the head of the jackdaw about the neck and ear-coverts is precisely that colour. The head of the chough, like the rest of its body, I believe to be perfectly black.

But if you ask me our poet certainly means the cliff-haunting chough, your chough graculus or Pyrochorax , when he has Edgar at Dover in King Lear pronounce