Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

How do I know these things? I admit I do not. I have transposed them from a charming scene you will find in Coriolanus . That scene is not in Plutarch. It is pure Stratford.

Mr Shakespeare's mind was at all times possessed with images and recollections of English rural life - but there is more to it than that. I have yet to learn that his fancy could not luxuriate in country images even amid the fogs of Southwark and the Blackfriars, but from about the time of his daughter Susanna's wedding he had no need to feed on memories, for after that happy event he spent more and more time in the town of his birth, where his heart always lay. The masque in The Tempest was used originally in honour of Susanna's wedding, by the by. She was always her father's favourite. Having known her, I can inform you that she flits in and out of all his later works - she is Mariana in Pericles , and Perdita in The Winter's Tale , and Miranda in The Tempest . A woman with a pale, ugly, clever face, she resembled neither of her parents save in her wit.

Mr Shakespeare never thought of taking a great house or a high place in London - he rather kept retired, in modest lodgings, and saved money. He was always a good man of business. By 1589, when he was only twenty-five, he was a minor shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, and of course he was afterwards a leading shareholder in the Globe. As a writer of plays for both these houses, he realised great gains, and from his thirty-third year on he was investing his profits in property in his native town. It was typical of him to return to Stratford, though none of us knew he was doing it until it was done. There was no dramatic exit. Rather, he transformed his residence by degrees. Certainly by the time we did Coriolanus he would have been able to observe at first hand a scene such as his wife and daughter sewing, any day of the week. Such domesticities became much to his liking in his later years. The plays become full of forgiving wives and daughters, critical and original women who yet pardon their men. What part his daughter Judith played in this I could not tell you. She never seemed to me to have forgiven her father for his long years of absence, but then indeed she never seemed much interested in William Shakespeare at all. (She once told me she would prefer to talk of Sir Francis Drake!) She was an altogether enigmatical woman. The poet's widow had her mysteries too, but her silences were of a different order, and I always sensed that she had welcomed her husband's return, and made much of it, and him, and the two of them together. Yet there can be little doubt, I think, that the prime mover in the drama of the playwright's later years in Stratford was his daughter Susanna, by then married to Dr John Hall. We shall notice in due course that she was the principal beneficiary of his will. Her epitaph deserves repeating in this connection:

Witty above her sex, but that's not all,

Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.

Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this

Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss.

In other words, Susanna was a good Christian as well as a good Shakespearean. I like to think of her as the last of her father's heroines, and as open-eyed and original as any of the others.

I like also to think of the late Mr Shakespeare spending the latter part of his life as all men of good sense will wish theirs to be - in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends. Of course it was not exactly like that, but while we are in the mood for idylls let us picture to ourselves, madam, the poet seated one warm evening at that same window where we just spied Judith and Anne. His hand moves on his tablet. He is engaged, no doubt, in the composition of his latest play. Again and again he is distracted, breaking off to watch his daughter Susanna and her little child Elizabeth as they run here and there among the borders of summer flowers. It crosses his mind, maybe, idly to wonder as the sunbeams seek to pierce the shadows of the rose trees and a distant, drowsy humming makes soft music in his ears which thing it is he likes the better - that freshly fashioned Ariel song of his:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip's bell I lie ...

or - the real sound of the bees, and the reality of the child and her mother there among the flowers?

New Place was a very fine house, the embodiment and emblem of Mr Shakespeare's success in the world. He had built it up over the years, entrusting the supervision of these improvements to his cousin Thomas Greene. I measured it once: it was thirty yards long, and thirty feet high. The main facade with its wide bay windows, columned doorway and three ornamented gables stood imposingly on Chapel Street. Walking up to it, you couldn't help thinking it was quite a palace for a butcher's son who had once wielded the sledded pole-axe and spat on his palm himself. The house contained ten rooms and cellars, apart from the large central hall. A staircase of carved oak led to the upper floor. I will tell you soon enough what I found and did there.

In this grand house, with its orchards and gardens, surrounded by his family, William Shakespeare now wrote three new plays in a final style: The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline , and The Tempest . From each is derived an impression of moral serenity. Even Cymbeline , which the author calls a tragedy, ends in reconciliation. I always thought myself, when young, that Posthumus in that play gets forgiven too quick and easy. But Mr S would have it no other way. And now that I am old I complain no longer.

Living mostly in Stratford, eating according to the recipes in Mrs Shakespeare's cook-book, Mr Shakespeare cultivated in his latter days a considerable belly. Anne Shakespeare had a huge manuscript book of recipes. It was the only book I ever saw her keeping company with. Cooking and sewing were her life, I think. Her room at New Place after her husband died was adorned with needlework of various kinds, cut works, spinning, bone-lace, and many pretty devices, with which the cushions, chairs, and stools were strewed and covered.

Mr Shakespeare's corpulence never quite rivalled that of his own Falstaff, but it might have done had he lived long enough. He could well afford to eat, and to eat well. By the time of his retirement to Stratford, he was oozing with gold. You can see from the bust that Dutchman did for his memorial in Trinity Church just how fat the Bard got. He had in addition three false teeth. His first false tooth was made of iron. His second false tooth was made of silver. His third false tooth was made of gold.

The return to Stratford was a confirmation of the roots of Shakespeare's art. It took a poet's imagination to realise the debt owed by humanity to the rude mechanicals of Warwickshire. Had the drama not been deeply rooted in the native soil, it could not have borne such excellent fruit. It was to the village festival and the goat song in honour of Dionysus that Shakespeare returned.

In his native place, I noticed that people tended to favour a short pronunciation of the first syllable of our hero's name: Shax rather than Shakes . This makes me think it possible that the name derives after all from the Anglo-Saxon personal name, SEAXBERHT.

Idylls over, good friends, I think at the end that Mr WS was bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama; that he was bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams. In these last years at Stratford I see him as half-enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half-bored to death.

He also had barns full of grain, at a time when there was a general shortage. But we'll speak no more of that. Sufficient to say that Mr John Shakespeare was not the only one in the family with a Midas touch of the usurer about him. William Shakespeare drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.