Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

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?

Chapter Eighty-Six 'Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth'

Between the second death and the third death, William Shakespeare published his obscure and enigmatical poem of The Phoenix and the Turtle.

First, though, the matter of Polly. She is gone, my little egg-girl. I have not seen her now for some three days. Pompey Bum smiles when I ask him about her absence. He is so vague and dismissive on the subject that his manner implies she might never have existed. 'What moppet?' he says. 'We never have moppets in here.' He would like me to think that my mind is going. If he could get me carted off to Bedlam then my boxes would be his, and this book as well.

He appeared suddenly on the stairs yesterday as I was carrying out the slops. He was wearing something on his head that looked like a drowned water-rat. He called it a PERUKE, and claimed it as the very latest fashion.

'I'm all behind!' he complained, when I asked him about my love's whereabouts.

Pompey Bum is forever saying this, and patting the seat of his vast breeches whenever he says it. No doubt some pun is involved, and I am supposed to be bemused as he changes the subject. He means, my great whoremaster of a landlord, not just that he has many tasks to do but that he wears much horse-hair stuffing in his breeches. He always has a face like a man at cack.

'Polly who?' he said, when I persisted with my queries.

'Flinders,' I said. 'But I heard you call her Anne.'

'Not me,' said Pompey Bum, grinning. 'And we never have no Annes.'

Then he was off down the stairs, like a big monkey in trousers, holding the rat in place on his greasy skull, and chanting just to mock me a rhyme that children sing: 'Little Polly Flinders / Sat among the cinders / Warming her pretty little toes! / Her mother came and caught her / And whipped her naughty daughter / For spoiling her nice new clothes!'

This left me feeling hot and sick and hopeless. The blackguard had succeeded in turning my flesh-and-blood darling into something ghostly and unsubstantial by this suggestion that I had dreamt her up from a character in a nursery rhyme.

Or perhaps it is the girl herself who has mocked me - by claiming 'Polly Flinders' as her name? This further thought (which came later), that she was herself the author of the fiction, was hardly comforting. Whatever, she was gone, and she is still gone.

All night I kept hearing sweet imagined noises from the room below. But each time I fell out of bed in a sweat and removed my Ovid, only darkness met my eye when I applied it to the peep-hole. Darkness and silence. There was no one there.

The Phoenix and the Turtle first appeared in 1601 in an octavo volume called Love's Martyr , commemorating the marriage of Sir John Salusbury to Ursula Stanley, illegitimate daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby. The longest thing in the book is a terrible set of verses by one Robert Chester, allegedly translated 'out of the venerable Italian Torquato Caeliano'. So far as I know, Torquato Caeliano never existed, and Robert Chester was certainly no poet. Here is a sample of his versification:

Where two hearts are united all in one,

Love like a King, a Lord, a Sovereign,

Enjoys the throne of bliss to sit upon,

Each sad heart craving aid, by Cupid slain:

Lovers be merry, Love being dignified,

Wish what you will, it shall not be denied.

Finis quoth R. Chester.

Finis, indeed. When I asked Mr Shakespeare who R. Chester was he told me he was Salusbury's secretary. Salusbury himself was a Papist Welshman, knighted by Elizabeth as a reward for his loyalty during the Essex rebellion. He had married the bastard Ursula some fifteen years before, and in fact she had given him eleven sons and daughters, which might make WS's praise of married chastity seem a bit odd. Still, no doubt the phoenix and turtle-dove imagery of Chester's original rigmarole was appropriate at the time of the marriage, since Mr Shakespeare explained to me that Salusbury was then the sole remaining male in a family, seeking to win back its good name and perpetuate it in a love-match - John Salusbury's elder brother having been executed for complicity in the Babington Plot. Salusbury was a pugnacious character, a wine-bibber, a friend of poets, and he may well have reminded Mr Shakespeare of his own father in that year when Jack Shakespeare turned Papist and died. For whatever reason, he liked Salusbury well enough to let him use his own poem on the phoenix and the turtle theme in an appendix to the Chester drivel. Other poet-friends of Salusbury's also contributed to the volume: George Chapman, John Marston, and Ben Jonson. But it is William Shakespeare's poem that stands out.

The Phoenix and the Turtle is certainly a strange and difficult poem. To unassisted readers, it would appear to be a lament on the death of a poet, and of his poetic mistress. But the poem is so quaint, and so charming in diction, tone, and allusions, as in its perfect metre and harmony, that I for one would be sad to have its meaning ever explained. I consider this piece a good example of the rule that there is a poetry for poets proper, as well as a poetry for the world of readers. This poem, if published for the first time, and without a known author's name, would find no general reception. Only the poets would save it.

The Phoenix and the Turtle is William Shakespeare's darkest allegory of love. It celebrates a marriage in tones more appropriate to a funeral. It talks of love in terms of perfection, and of perfection in terms of a love that is transcendental and sublime without ever ceasing to be physical. Its distillation of the nature of self-hood in love (Either was the other's mine) reminds me of such things as John Donne's The Ecstasy , which I know that Mr Shakespeare read in manuscript when it was circulating in the Inns of Court. Donne's obscurities are mere smoke, though, compared with the blazing bonfire of Shakespeare's thought here. The poem is such a pure, such a concentrated mystery that we ought just to point out the simple things that can be said about it, before submitting our minds to the power of its music. All but six of its sixty-seven lines are in truncated trochaic tetrameters; the other six employ the final syllable of the trochaic line. The only action takes place in the sixth stanza, where the two birds flee away together. All the rest of the poem is preparation for this action and comment upon it. The birds are a female phoenix and a male turtle dove. Here is the poem: