Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

We played before King James in Edinburgh. After, we went by royal orders to Dunfermline, where we played before his Queen in the palace of Linlithgow. At Aberdeen, we were received in pomp by the provost William Cullen. We stayed there for most of the month of October, performing in the town hall to great audiences. The Scots are very good to strolling players. In Aberdeen we dined at the town's expense. At Linlithgow twelve of us players slept in feather beds.

Sir William Davenant, the poet's godson, claims to have in his possession a letter to Mr Shakespeare signed by the King of Scots, and highly complimentary. I have not seen this letter, but I do not disbelieve in it. King James enjoyed the theatre, and he liked his Shakespeare. That, at least, is one of the things Ben Jonson got right in his Folio eulogy.

Macbeth is soaked in WS's experience of Scotland. Banquo's first question 'How far is't called to Forres?' sounds rather more Scotch than English to my ear. QUELL for murder, SKIRR for search, LATCH instead of catch, GRUEL for broth, SLAB for sticky, CRIBBED for enclosed, all these are northern words which Shakespeare uses only in Macbeth . The receptiveness of his ear was quite remarkable. I was in lodgings with him at Inverness, for example, and our hostess remarked approvingly of the porridge which she had boiled for us that it was thick and slab - the phrase went straight into the Scottish play, used of the contents of the witches' cauldron.

At Inverness, the close proximity into which we were thrown enabled me for the first and last time to observe Mr Shakespeare at work from the inception to the completion of a play. With Holinshed's Chronicles open at his elbow, and the Scottish King's two books of witchcraft not far away across the table, he sat down to write on a rainy October morning. He wrote fast and he did little crossing out. The first two Acts of Macbeth came in a single marvellous day and night. Words poured from Shakespeare's pen in a torrent like one of those I watched tumbling down the mountainside. He created all those early scenes at the gallop, and the power and the urgency of their writing shows (in my opinion) both in the intensity of the verse and the way those scenes always play themselves fast in the theatre. The rest came more slowly, with pauses for reflection, but without apparent trouble. Sometimes he muttered phrases to himself, once or twice I heard him chanting them quite loudly. For example, 'And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air.' I remember that particularly because it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I first heard it, and I'm sure it would do so still if I was able to get to a modern playhouse and there was a performance that did not cut it out. Such things are omitted in these enlightened days. How, they would say, can a baby stride a blast? It is a prime example of what is now regarded as Shakespeare's barbarity.

I regard it as a prime example of his genius, friends.

Mr Shakespeare's writing method was straightforward. Each page was divided into columns. On the left-hand side he would put the name of the speaker, on the right-hand side he would put the exits and the entrances. The poetry was written in the middle. He would write fifty lines on one side, fifty lines on the other. Sometimes, in full flood, he would forget to write the name of the speaker, and just make a squiggle in the margin, for the initial letter of the character's name; then he would go back and spell out the identity later. Similarly, with the exits and the entrances. Each page got dropped to the floor as soon as he had written it. At the end of that long first night in Inverness, as the sun came up, I woke from fitful slumbers and saw Mr Shakespeare still crouched at his table, his eyes red and staring, his hand scuttling back and forth across the page like a crab trapped in a bucket, the sweat running down his face, and the floor of the room covered with sheets inscribed with his rustic gothic handwriting, all straight-flowing letters. It is something I'll never forget. It was like waking and finding yourself in the cavern of a demi-urge, or in some place where a man takes dictation from angels.

Mr Shakespeare stared sightlessly at me. Then he blinked. 'What's for breakfast?' he demanded. 'I'm starving! Be a good lad and fetch me some pippins, will you? Or a taste of dry biscuit. Or a slice of salted pork. Anything but Mrs MacDiarmid's porridge!'

Did a discarnate spirit guide my master's pen in Scotland? He said he was in the grip of Hecate when he wrote that play, but he said it with a grin and a shrug, and at such times I could never tell if he was serious. Later, though, I remember him remarking that the Witch Sycorax had him in her power when he wrote much of his last play of The Tempest .

It is possible that he always wrote his first drafts very fast, and that these first drafts (with some notable exceptions, such as Hamlet ) were not much changed before it came to performance. I know that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written, rehearsed, and performed in the space of a fortnight, at Queen Elizabeth's express command, Her Majesty having declared her wish to see a play done at Court which would show 'Sir John Falstaff in love'. Twelfth Night was such another, hurriedly prepared for a royal command performance at Whitehall on the twelfth night of January, 1601, at which the Duke Virginio Orsino, newly arrived in London from Italy, was gloriously entertained.

Perhaps what I saw for myself in Scotland was William Shakespeare's usual practice. In the Dream he speaks of the poet's fine frenzy . Against this, the character called Poet in Timon of Athens is made to say

Our poesy is as a gum which oozes

From whence 'tis nourisht *

Frenzy or gum, as Mr Heminges and Mr Condell report in introducing the works in the Folio, there were never many blots in William Shakespeare's foul papers.

And that night in Inverness I thought the page would catch fire from the fury of his quill.

Unlike mine, in this. There is still no sign of that sad, adorable, enchanted child who told me her name was Polly. I would be heart-broken were it not that I have had no heart to break after poor Jane. Even as it is, I can barely lift my pen, it seems so heavy, and as for the ink it smells like juice of wormwood.

Reader, I know I ought to cut out every reference to this whore-child in my book. She is not relevant to my Life of Shakespeare. All that she did was fetch me a few eggs, then make my fancy dance with her girlish ways. Sir, I resolve to effect this act of exorcism as soon as it comes to the time for revision.

Madam, Jane my wife is a different case. She has had her part to play from the time of my Acknowledgements. Without her, I would not be where I am. I said that then, and I say it now again. The difference is that the first time I said it, you did not know where I was, whereas now you know I'm an old, mad man who lives at the top of a brothel.

I suppose things started to go wrong when Jane started walking behind me in the street, imitating my walk. My wife would copy every single movement that I made. If I ran, she ran; if I dawdled, she dawdled; if I stopped, she stopped, so that I could never stop her. When I tried to talk to her about it, she laughed and denied that she was doing it. I was going mad with all my play-acting, she said; I was imagining things. She had better things to do, she said, than copy me. Yet it was not long before her mimicking of me extended to my gestures. It was cruel. People would stop to watch us in the streets, and they would laugh at the pantomime. I did not laugh. I tried not looking round at her. But I knew when she was there. I knew all right.