Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

Then, one day, Jane fell down, and I fell down. I can't explain it. First I felt a sudden stab of pain in my leg, then I fell down. My wife had fallen down first. But her fall was deliberate. She had mimicked me so exactly, with such perfection, that it was as if she had become me, so that I fell down in the street as an echo or an answer to her fall. I considered this, at the time, a form of witchcraft. In fact, I read somewhere of witches who do no less. They follow their victims, they copy their victims' every movement, then by their falling down they make their victims fall and break their necks.

I did not break my neck. It was Jane who broke hers, though not in the street and not when copying me. She took a lover. Then she took another. One night I watched her at it with her lover. Another night I watched while the second man had her. I never said what I had seen her doing. I never repeated the words I heard her say - not deliberately. Did Jane know I had watched her? Did my actions or reactions betray to her my knowledge? I don't know. That is something I will never know, not in this life. All I can say is that my very living once depended utterly on my close observation of women, and my imitation of them, and it is possible that I repeated in bed with Jane some word or trick of one of her lovers, or more likely of her own, and thus betrayed to my dear wife the fact that I had watched her do it with other men. It is possible, as I say, but it is not likely. It is not impossible, but it is, I think, unlikely.

In the morning I found her hanging there from the rafters. She was wearing her shift as if it was a shroud. Over it she wore her black top-coat that always smelt of pepper. She was strangled in her own hair as well as the rope. Hair and rope were all twisted together where she had twined and plaited them. I had to cut her hair to cut her down. With all the while that peppery scent in my nostrils.

It was then I suppose that I determined to write my Life of William Shakespeare, though the relation between the two things is something I cannot explain. It took me, of course, many years to get this book started. First there were the years of collecting all the matter for it. Then came the years of clearing my head for the writing. And now I have the writing to keep me going.

But I owe my Life of Shakespeare to the death of my wife Jane. Don't ask me why or how, for I could not tell you. But that the one followed the other as the day the night is something I know in my bones, and can never forget.

Mulberries are grateful, and they are cooling, and astringent. I have a jar of pickled mulberries beside me as I write. I do not write quickly. I suck on a mulberry and think, and I chew and I scribble. I have a pot of good mulberry jam also, though the top is furred over, all that is left of the several Jane made for me from the fruit I once stole from Mr Shakespeare's mulberry tree. I spread it on my crusts that I get from the pie-shop in the basement.

* Act I, Scene 1, lines 23-4.

Chapter Eighty-Eight About Comfort Ballantine

It was not long after the coronation of King James that Mr Shakespeare carried the canopy in the royal procession,* and then elected to change his London lodging. He took rooms in the house of a Huguenot wigmaker, Christopher Mountjoy, who lived with his wife and daughter in a handsome twin-gabled building at the corner of Silver Street and Monkswell Street. Here the first thing he wrote was Measure for Measure , a new kind of philosophical comedy which (like Macbeth in a different mode) was designed to appeal to the King's tastes and interests. The Duke in Measure for Measure has more than enough of James in his character. I admit that I found the part of Isabella difficult - her heart's aspiration to divine love being perhaps beyond my range. After a few unfortunate performances, the role was taken over by a new boy who had caught my master's eye, John Spencer, then up and coming, in due course to be my principal rival and enemy, especially in his incarnation abroad where he took that humorous alias of Hans Stockfish just to spite me. I remember his Isabella: a holy, dog-faced dwarf in a cart-wheel farthingale. But Stockfish can be kept for another day.

Mr Shakespeare found himself now in a fashionable part of town. Mountjoy, his landlord, made not only wigs but those pearl-sewn and jewelled head-dresses then much in favour with the ladies of the Court. One of the Huguenot's clients was Queen Anne herself. By moving to this well-to-do quarter, north of the river and away from the stews of Southwark, Shakespeare was showing how far he had risen in the world.

Not that everyone in the Mountjoy household considered him respectable. The Mountjoys kept a cook called Comfort Ballantine, a formidable woman, originally from the north country, who in addition to providing for the Mountjoys' stomachs also took a keen interest in the welfare of their souls. For Comfort Ballantine was a Puritan. While not so extreme in her views as some of her brothers and sisters in that tendency, she still rated players as masters of vice and playwrights as teachers of wantonness. When the critical cook heard that William Shakespeare was taking two rooms in the house she gave it as her opinion to the Mountjoys that this was decidedly 'poor policy'. POOR POLICY was one of Comfort Ballantine's favourite phrases. She was forever telling Mrs Mountjoy that she thought it would be Poor Policy to do thus and such. Taking in as lodger a player/playwright with as facile and likeable a reputation as William Shakespeare's was perhaps the Poorest Policy she had ever heard of.

It is a measure of Mr Shakespeare's charm that he won Comfort over. She very nearly quit when he first came to Silver Street. But before long she was tidying his papers whenever he left the house. This tidying she called REDDING UP.

'What are you doing, Mrs Ballantine?' I heard our hero ask her, the first time it happened, him fearing no doubt that she was about to consign his blossoms of sin to the flames of her kitchen stove.

'I am redding up for you, Mr Shakespeare,' the cook replied, beaming.

And from that day forth, so he told me, he never had a moment's fear but that when he returned from his daily stroll down Wood Street and through Cheapside to get a wherry across to the Globe, and back again, he would find all his scattered papers neatly assembled on his table by the window at the Mountjoys. Not that Comfort Ballantine read them. She could not read.

Consequently, of course, the papers were often in the wrong order. But William Shakespeare knew better than to complain because of that.

It was not the theatre that Comfort Ballantine changed her mind about, only Mr Shakespeare. 'Players live by making fools laugh at sin and wickedness,' she said to me once. I did not argue with her. Who am I to disagree?

As for Mr Shakespeare's success in winning the respect of this worthy woman, that was just the lively face of something I find at the heart of his art. William Shakespeare was the least of an egotist that it is possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and every feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had a mind reflecting ages past and ages present - all the people that have ever lived are there. He had only to think of anything in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. Thus he was capable even of being Comfort Ballantine, who considered all rhymers plain rogues. He treated her with dignity, accordingly, and the cook adored him for it in return.