Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

Comfort Ballantine was a great frequenter of the public sermons of those times, of course, which sermons were called 'prophecyings'. Because she could not read it was her practice to commit the substance of all that she heard at a prophecying to memory, so that she might regurgitate it later, and dwell upon its sapience in her mind. For the help of her memory she had invented and framed a girdle of leather, long and large, which went twice about her waist when she went to the conventicle. This girdle she had divided into several parts, allotting each book in the Bible, in its order, to one of these divisions. Then, for the chapters, she had affixed points or thongs of leather to the several divisions, and made knots by fives and tens thereupon to distinguish the chapters of each book. And by other points she had divided the chapters into their particular contents and verses. This girdle she used, because she could not use pen and ink, to take notes of all the sermons which she heard; and she made such good use of it that when she came home to the Mountjoys from the conventicle just by fingering her girdle she could repeat the sermon through its several heads, and quote the various texts mentioned in it, to her own great comfort, and to the benefit of Mr Shakespeare.

This girdle of Comfort Ballantine's was kept by William Shakespeare, after the cook's decease, and he would often merrily call it his Girdle of Verity.

* See sonnet 125. The procession went from the Tower through the City, passing under seven triumphal arches. At every halt a speech or song by Thomas Dekker greeted the King and Queen, to their eventual less than delight. The great canopy over their heads was carried by eight senior members of our Company. I can't remember which, but certainly Burbage and Heminges took part, as well as Mr S. They all wore red and black livery, with scarlet cloaks, and walked bare-headed.

Chapter Eighty-Nine In which Pickleherring plays Cleopatra at the house in St John Street

I have often regretted my failure in the part of Isabella. My heart could do with a measure of divine love. The dignity of Portia, the energy of Beatrice, the radiant high spirits of Rosalind, the sweetness of Viola - I was shaped by the female parts I had to play, and I am missing some hunger for heaven in my make up. Had I been able to make a success of Isabella's character I would have less of that wretched Petrarchan worship of the unattainable female in my soul. It is not really worship. It is lust.

But Isabella, I found, has impossible things to say. I mean, things that your humble servant finds impossible. Of course, madam, you are right - no one in real life ever spoke like any of William Shakespeare's characters. His language hovers on the threshold of a dream. Yet I say that he possessed an implicit wisdom deeper even than consciousness. There is another comfort than this world ... Had I been able to say such things with conviction doubtless I would have been a better player and a better man. I would certainly have been one less obsessed with the divinity of breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, or for that matter with hell heard in the shriek of a night-wandering weasel.

But without more ado about nothing, permit me to tell you that Mr John Fletcher mutilated that song Take, O take those lips away * when he dropped the echo of 'Bring again' and 'Seal'd in vain', thus achieving the remarkable feat of turning a nightingale's song into a sparrow's. I never had much time for Mr Fletcher, and not just because he called me mediocre. The man was an opportunist. The blossoms of his imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand. He had a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them. Nothing shows this better than that terrible thing he did to the song sung by the boy servant to the forsaken Mariana.

To this period of Mr Shakespeare's sojourn at the Mountjoys, with his soul and his papers under the watchful eye of the cook Comfort Ballantine, belong some of his greatest writings. I mean: Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra . There are odd links between them, not always noticed. You may not know, for instance, that on the twenty-seventh page of the first volume of Holinshed's Chronicles (which was always at Shakespeare's elbow when he was composing) there is a rough woodcut of a fellow with a villainous look and underneath it no story but a title in capital letters

IAGO

and that opposite this woodcut, on the facing page, there is a picture of Cordelia, named as daughter of King Lear. These images sank deep in our poet's imagination, coming up in separate plays, yet beginning together. The sound of the name Iago must have seemed especially evil to Mr Shakespeare, since later in Cymbeline he rang the changes on it, and adopted for his new villain, whose character was almost as atrocious as the cunning Venetian's, the name of Iachimo. As for the name Othello, it came (so he told me) from Moghrib: Hawth Allah . We performed the play for the first time on November 1st, 1604, in the presence of King James, Anne of Denmark and her brother Prince Frederik of Wurtemberg. It became a very popular and profitable piece. Within months Burbage reported that someone in his parish of St Leonard in Shoreditch had christened their newly-born daughter with the name of Desdemona, hitherto unknown in England. I was much flattered. Mr Shakespeare, however, quickly brought me back down to earth by telling me of another man who had called his pet rat Desdemona in honour of my performance.

Beyond these trivialities, I would like to observe that it seems to me that two things were happening in Mr Shakespeare's work about this time. First, with the accession to the throne of King James, he found a better patron than the Earl of Southampton, not in the sense that James gave him PS 1000 gifts or anything of that sort but in the sense that some of Shakespeare's earlier work had been written to divert or enflame the fancy of Southampton, ten years his junior, and that this rather led the poet into idylls. What I am trying to say is that the aristocratic futility of Southampton bred a certain kind of gold fire in WS's works which were written if not to please him then at least with that possible pleasure sometimes in mind. When James became the chief member of WS's audience then new elements came in - some good, some not so good, but all of them more serious. Perhaps it is just that Shakespeare grew more serious himself, though I hesitate to offer such a banality. The middle age of Mr S was all clouded over, certainly, and his days were not more happy than Hamlet's, who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself, in his common everyday life, than any other of his characters. Yet having said that, I want to withdraw it on the instant. William Shakespeare is never to be identified by pinning him down as 'like' or 'unlike' any single one of his characters. He was like and unlike them all. He was Iago as well as he was Cordelia. Those crude remembered woodcuts were mirrors of his soul. In short, it was only by representing others that Shakespeare became himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra. But in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter's cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired. In expressing his own thoughts, he was a mechanic. Witness even how from the beginning of his career he found himself in others - for it was only in adapting plays which had been written by other men that he first discovered his own powers. And then even when he was gradually drawn on to write original plays of his own, he nearly always derived his subjects for those plays from histories and their substance from collections of prose tales written by others.