Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

The second thing I want to say generally about Mr Shakespeare at this point in his life is that it seems to me that with this graver tone he also turned not so much his back on fame and favour, but aside from fame and favour. From now on he was after more difficult and even more fleeting game. I will not say that it was better game, since I am no moralist. But it is surely not irrelevant that from this time forth he began to spend more time in Stratford than he spent in London. Perhaps you are right, sir, and he simply preferred having Anne Shakespeare redding up his papers. But I think there might have been more to the matter than that.

Cleopatra as I have said was the height of my performance as a woman. I confess that I was freakish, and that my piping voice was a long time a-breaking. (And now I am old I squeak again like a boy.) Wigged, singed, perfume-sprayed, with smooth-shaven armpits and gilded eyelids, I was the fleshpot of Egypt. It was out of deference to my being no longer in the first flush of youth that Mr Shakespeare makes Cleopatra thirty-six years old at the opening of the play, with twenty years having passed since she subdued Caesar, and it being now ten years that Antony has been 'caught in her strong toil of grace'. In fact I was twenty-four at the time of our first performance. I have never forgotten the last rehearsal Mr Shakespeare made me do for it.

I had realised from the start, of course, just who I was playing. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies. * Who else could this be but Lucy Negro? It is as if the Dark Lady of the sonnets stepped forth on the public stage. Note some of the other things that are said about Cleopatra - particularly her habit of hopping to fetch her breath short for men's arousal. This is Lucy Negro to the life. Vilest things are said to become themselves in her , and the holy priests to bless her when she is riggish . All this sounds like the tone of the sonnets to me, and the last phrase reminds me especially of a story Mr Shakespeare told me of how Lucy liked to go to confession and excite her confessor with details of her sins of lasciviousness. Since RIGGISH, besides, is the very word that my master always used of the Abbess of Clerkenwell ('Lucy was unslakedly riggish with me last night,' and so on) I had no doubt from the first moment I began to learn my lines who it was that he was wanting me to portray.

So what we have here is a very queer kettle of fish. For Lucy was Shakespeare's Muse, but so now was I. I was Lucy interpreted, Lucy played, Lucy made quick and amenable, the living Lucy perfected by his art and said by me. She had been turned into words and I was their incarnation. It is indeed a complex and a sinister process. Mr Shakespeare was using me to tame and to interpret his vision of the female sex. It is in this sense, best of all, that I was the master-mistress of his passion, and that I had one thing which was to his purpose nothing . He gave Lucy Negro the royal dignity of the Queen of Egypt, and then had me, a bastard boy from the fens, turn the queen back into riggish quotidian life. Never forget why Cleopatra kills herself: because she cannot bear the prospect of being paraded in parody in Caesar's triumph -

I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I' the posture of a whore.

But Lucy was a whore, and I was a boy. I played Cleopatra as myself playing Lucy Negro for the pleasure of the man she had given the pox. And for our final dress rehearsal, Mr Shakespeare had me go with him to the house in St John Street, where poet and Muse dressed me in one of Lucy's best Queen Elizabeth gowns and I was commanded to act out my part under their glittering, critical eyes. My performance seemed to satisfy them. That is, she sat on his lap to watch me, and kept wriggling her haunches, and I was dismissed from their presence long before it came to asp-time.

Consider, all you who are either true or fair, could play go further?

What the Abbess of Clerkenwell made of my impersonation of her I cannot tell you. I do know that Mr Shakespeare added two words to Antony and Cleopatra on our return to the Globe. They come where the lady Charmian follows her mistress in death, her last words as she applies an asp to her own breast: Ah, soldier! That simple phrase marks the height of Shakespeare's genius. Dante would never have thought of it, nor Homer neither.

My dear Polly is back! Last night I looked through the hole, without hope, and there was my love!

Polly was lying on her back below me, with her candles burning. She was naked save for a pair of black silk stockings. Her sweet face was most curiously made up, as though beginning with the eyes she had not had time to finish, for the rims of her eyes were dark, the rims only, and not the lids, no, not the lids at all. This effect is achieved, and achieved exclusively, by applying mascara under the lids alone. This I know well.

My heart leapt to my lips when I beheld her. They framed her name, although I did not speak.

For her part, Polly looked up at me, and she was smiling. Then she waved her hand to me, a circle in the gloom. It was a regal wave. Like Queen Elizabeth. My poor waif, my child of shame, my bride of darkness, daughter of the night, and yet for me the fairest of erth kinne - she knew I watched her, and she smiled at me; she knew I saw her, and she waved to me.

On yonder hill there stands a creature.

My lemmon she shal be.

O Polly dear.

Naked, on her back, and in her white bed, Polly saluted me gaily and gravely. My heart bowed down.

* Measure for Measure , Act IV, Scene 1, lines 1-8. Fletcher's plagiarism occurs in his play The Bloody Brother .

* Antony and Cleopatra , Act II, Scene 2, lines 235-8.

Chapter Ninety Tom o' Bedlam's Song

Where Polly has been I don't know, but she brought me back a present.

It is a curious thing - an Aeolian harp. I never saw anything like it before.

Aeolus in Roman mythology was the god of the winds. This wind-harp is a box on which strings are stretched. You do not play it, but you let it play. Polly showed me how. You hang the harp in the window, or stand it up on the windowsill. The breeze passing freely over the taut gut strings produces a haunting, long-drawn chord, rising and falling. This music is for all the world like the cry of some coy young maid half-yielding to her lover.

Hark! The wind kindles the strings again. This simplest lute placed length-wise in the casement is now my constant companion. It is as if Dame Nature told her secrets on the strings of the human heart.

Life is other than what one writes. When I thanked Polly for her gift, and made bold to kiss her hand in token of my gratitude, she spun three times round like a sweet little dervish, and then asked would I like to know what it is about me that touches her. Remembering that the night before last I am certain she knew that I spied on her naked in her bed, I hesitated. But the dear child took my hesitation for compliance, and so whispered her approbation in my ear. It is - in the way I think and speak, in my whole manner, apparently (and this is one of the compliments which has moved me most in my whole life) - my simplicity .

A harp, though a world in itself, is but a narrow world in comparison with the world of a human heart. And tonight the music of my wind-harp is not all I hear. It is raining. The rain drips and gathers in the eaves. The sound of the rain in the eaves is like Jane's laughing.

I have a note in this box about Cordelia Annesley. Her story is soon told. She was the daughter of Sir Brian Annesley, a Kentish landowner who had been a Gentleman Pensioner to Queen Elizabeth. In the autumn of 1603 this poor fellow's two older daughters tried to have their father certified insane so as to get their hands on his estate. Their names were Lady Sandys and Lady Wildgoose. Cordelia, his youngest daughter, protested against this proposal, in a letter to Secretary of State Cecil. She urged, as an alternative, that a guardian should be appointed for her father. On Sir Brian's death the Wildgooses contested his will, but they failed in their attempt to stop Cordelia inheriting what was rightly hers. This woman became in 1608 the second wife of Mr W. H. - Sir William Hervey, widower of the dowager Countess of Southampton, Rizley's mother. I think Cordelia Annesley's story gave Mr Shakespeare some of his plot for King Lear .