Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

I was the first Cordelia, of course. (John Spencer Stockfish was well-cast as Goneril.) My part contains only one hundred lines - forty in the first Act, sixty in the last. But my influence is felt throughout the play, and I believe beyond it. Mr Shakespeare played the part of Kent in the early performances - a role which much suited him, and also allowed him to be frequently in the wings directing what we did.

Notice the sound of the words NOTHING and PATIENCE in this play. King Lear rings with them, just as Othello is a kind of fugue on the word HONESTY. I never hear any of these words spoken but I think of Mr Shakespeare.

Reader, have you ever remarked that Cordelia and the Fool are never on the stage at the same time? This cunning of Mr Shakespeare's was quite deliberate. It permitted me to play both parts in the play. He had me cut out for a fool as well as a truth-teller. So that when Lear says And my poor Fool is hang'd he means not only his one honest daughter who truly loved him.

Let me tell you something strange. Just as I sometimes think that William Shakespeare dreamt me up that afternoon in Cambridge, creating me as I jumped down off the wall, so it has also occurred to me that in making me double the parts of Cordelia and the Fool he taught me the voice in which I have written this book you are reading. Did Mr Shakespeare know that I would one day write his Life? Of course not. But he must have heard in me the possibility.

In this my 90th box I have kept a poem of Mr S's that you will not know. It is a ballad sung by Edgar in King Lear . We used it to cover the noise of scene-shifting between the third and fourth scenes of Act II. For some reason it does not appear in the play as printed in the Folio. I suppose WS never wrote it down into his fair copy. He produced this song on the spot when we realised we needed it, saying it followed on naturally from Edgar's declaring Poor Turlygod! Poor Tom! / That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am , and his lines about becoming a Bedlam beggar. When Burbage said it was several verses too long for the time it took to change our scene from the wood to Kent in the stocks before Gloucester's castle, Mr Shakespeare scowled, then grinned, then scrunched up the offending stanzas and kicked them into the pit.

Here is the poem. It has no title, but I call it Tom o' Bedlam's Song:

From the hag and hungry goblin

That into rags would rend ye

All the spirits that stand by the naked man

In the Book of Moons defend ye!

That of your five sound senses

You never be forsaken

Nor wander from yourselves with Tom

Abroad to beg your bacon.

While I do sing 'Any food, any feeding,

Feeding, drink, or clothing'

Come dame or maid, be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing.

Of thirty bare years have I

Twice twenty been enraged,

And of forty been three times fifteen

In durance soundly caged

On the lordly lofts of Bedlam

With stubble soft and dainty,

Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips ding-dong,

With wholesome hunger plenty.

And now I sing, etc.

With a thought I took for Maudlin

And a cruse of cockle pottage

With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all,

I befell into this dotage.

I slept not since the Conquest,

Till then I never waked

Till the roguish boy of love where I lay

Me found and stripped me naked.

And now I sing, etc.

When I short have shorn my sowce face

And swigged my horny barrel

In an oaken inn I pound my skin

As a suit of gilt apparel.

The moon's my constant mistress

And the lonely owl my marrow,

The flaming drake and the night-crow make

Me music to my sorrow.

While I do sing, etc.

The palsy plagues my pulses

When I prig your pigs or pullen,

Your culvers take, or matchless make

Your chanticleer, or sullen.

When I want provant, with Humphrey

I sup, and when benighted

I repose in Paul's with waking souls

Yet never am affrighted.

But I do sing, etc.

I know more than Apollo,

For oft when he lies sleeping

I see the stars at bloody wars

And the wounded welkin weeping;

The moon embrace her shepherd

And the queen of Love her warrior,

While the first doth horn the star of the morn

And the next the heavenly Farrier.

While I do sing, etc.

The Gipsy Snap and Pedro

Are none of Tom's comradoes;

The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn

And the roaring-boys' bravadoes.

The meek, the white, the gentle,

Me handle, touch, and spare not,

But those that cross Tom Rhinoceros

Do what the panther dare not.

Although I sing, etc.

With an host of furious fancies

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear, and a horse of air

To the wilderness I wander.

By a knight of ghosts and shadows

I summoned am to tourney,

Ten leagues beyond the wild world's end -

Methinks it is no journey.

Yet will I sing 'Any food, any feeding,

Feeding, drink, or clothing'

Come dame or maid, be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing.

Reader, does this song trouble your memory? Does it make you feel that you have heard it somewhere before? Mr Shakespeare used to say that poetry is original not because it is new but because it is both new and old, something you seem to remember the first time you hear it. Poetry is original because it deals in origins. Something in poor Tom o' Bedlam's song reminds me of Adam. Something in poor Tom o' Bedlam's song reminds me of us all.

It is easy to clothe imaginary beings with our own thoughts and feelings. But to send ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of beings in circumstances wholly and strangely different from our own, and yet make those beings remind us of us all - hoc labour, hoc opus! Who has achieved it? Only Shakespeare.

Chapter Ninety-One In which William Shakespeare returns to Stratford

Here are Anne Shakespeare and her daughter Judith, sewing. They sit on low stools by the window that looks out into the garden of New Place. Anne has a green shield across her eyes, for the evening sun is bright and the work particular. The sunlight glints on the gold medal between Judith's breasts.

Here is a neighbour come calling - Mrs Judith Sadler, perhaps, wife of the baker Hamnet Sadler, Mrs Shakespeare's lifelong friend. She rallies Mrs Shakespeare on her industry, remarking teasingly that all the wool spun by Penelope 'did but fill Ithaca full of moths'. They talk over various items of gossip: who's dead, who's dying, Anne's beloved granddaughter Elizabeth chasing a golden butterfly, the fruit of the mulberry tree which is too soft to stand touching just now, the price of needles. Meanwhile, the evening makes a glory of all Stratford. There was a shower just before my chapter began, but now it has stopped the rabbits are emerging from their burrows. Tradesmen are singing in their shops. Boys play at bowls on the slippery ground, one of them tumbling past his own throw.