Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

But what is the point of dwelling upon such things? They contribute nothing to our gratitude, and gratitude is all that we should feel. If you have to be negative, better to try to conceive of a world without Shakespeare. It is only by holding our breath that we begin to understand how necessary breathing is. And the best way of bringing before our minds the true magnitude of our debt to Shakespeare is to imagine for a moment or two that he never existed. His faults then pale into mere significance. He was a necessary man.

Even so, reader, I confess it - that the closer I get to Shakespeare, the more I recoil from him. That villain had all my life. He had my youth in my playing. He had the rest in that the rest followed on from my playing - I mean what Jane did, and what Polly is. And now he has my age which I have spent in writing about him. I have given him my life to write his Life.

That man deceived me. I used to have a trusting nature. No more the spaniel now, sir; my innocent old eyes worship him no longer. I have my Aeolian harp, if I want music.

I had a wife once. I failed her. That's the way of the world.

My mother, though, she is a different story. Her name was Lalage. Her hair was the colour of blazing treacle and her eyes were reticent. Women can see through you when they want, but mothers don't do it. I loved this mother, this Lalage. I had a song about her:

Weeny weedy weeky said Caesar,

Weeny weedy weeky said he.

Weeny weedy weeky said that old Roman geezer

In the year 44 BC.

I love Rome, I love Gaul,

I love politics, but best of all

I love Lalage.

More about her? More about Lalage? Very well, sir. She had a rocking-horse. She sat me on the rocking-horse and she rocked it to and fro, to and fro, the rain falling, the window open, the fire burning, and all the time she sang. Such long, long music. It was the song of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But it came out to the words of O Polly Dear.

You shut me up, sir?

Madam, you are right. In truth the only thing I remember about my mother was the way she used to shave her legs. All the way up. And every day.

And this happy song which she sang to me:

I'm not Hairy Mary, I'm your Ma!

I'm not Hairy Mary, I'm your Ma!

I'm not Hairy Mary,

I'm your father's fairy!

I'm not Hairy Mary, I'm your Ma!

I hope that makes you smile. That would be something.

Today I have practised smiling in new ways. Listening to the breeze on the strings of the harp that Polly gave me, I have practised a smile for death. Listening to the rats in the wainscot, I have practised a smile for ugliness. Listening to nothing in particular, I have practised above all a smile for the next time I see Polly. I shall have also a special smile for the beggar I refuse a penny to. And another smile for the spaces between the stars.

The only trouble is: I have no mirror.

Steady now, Pickleherring. But consider this, old pickpocket. Leonardo made a smile. First he cut up the mouth and looked at the muscles, and maybe he pulled them this way and that to see how they moved. Then he sat this lady down and taught her to pull her mouth up at the edges. The lady was irrelevant, but the smile is immortal and much discussed and it means nothing at all but Smile. It is the record of the muscles of the mouth.

To such experiment I lay my hand. I have a lot to learn in the way of smiling. But I shall become the master of the rictus. And I will not go out of the door of this room of mine again until I am borne hence in a last black box on the shoulders of six men.

Talking of Leonardo, it occurs to me to say in all modesty that if ever I had been good for anything besides play-acting it would have been as a painter. I can fancy a thing so strongly, and have so clear an idea of it. But I've a turnip that bleeds for a heart, so there's an end of that. Without an old gossip like me there would be no remembrance. And if you find fault with Pickleherring for saying this, then I can only agree; yet I'd say that it is my faults that give my work vivacity, and perhaps also vitality, and (I trust) a palpable sincerity.

Here is a question for you: Did Shakespeare write Bacon? I knew a man once on Primrose Hill who affected to believe that it was possible. (I knew another who said that the Bard kept a shed full of monkeys, and that these monkeys wrote Hamlet for him. I have forgotten why they did not succeed in writing the other plays. But that man ended up in the Bridewell.) Anyway, if Shakespeare did write Bacon then it must have been in his Stratford days, I reckon. He would not have been so philosophical in Southwark, nor dared to deceive so much at the house of the Mountjoys under the kindly eye of Comfort Ballantine. A third picture for your inward eye, dear reader: Shakespeare in his retirement from the stage, under his mulberry tree, dashing off Novum Organum in the gathering gloom.

I have also heard it said from time to time that the divine William is not dead. Such pious belief would have it that he went to Iceland. There the poet was trapped suddenly in an iceberg. Mr Shakespeare will remain in that Iceland iceberg for a thousand years. He awaits a virgin who will weep warm tears for him, or a winter of exceptional mildness.

Chapter Ninety-Two Bottoms

Have you ever noticed how poets borrow not just from each other but from themselves? Upstart crows are thieves no less than magpies. But sometimes it's their own shed plumage that they steal.

In this my 92nd box I have a note concerning an interesting item of self-borrowing I once discovered in the works of Mr Shakespeare. BORROWING is perhaps not quite the word for it. Nor is REMEMBERING, though we'd better not forget that Memory was the mother of all the Muses. Anyway, can I please point out that there is something small in Titus Andronicus which might have 'suggested' something big in A Midsummer Night's Dream? I mean that the very name of Bottom and the line

It shall be called Bottom's dream, because it hath no bottom came to Shakespeare because of the line in Titus :

Is not my sorrow deep, having no bottom?

Reader, it is obvious that here we are over the border of biography. I can neither prove nor can you disprove my case. Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus , or much of it. Shakespeare wrote the whole of the Dream , there is no reason to doubt. That is all that a biographer can say. The rest is poetry.

The common reader or playgoer is misled by the fact that such plays as Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night's Dream have apparently nothing in common. But to the poet's mind such differences are irrelevant. What the two works have in common is him .

Sir, poets frequently, if not always, borrow from other poets. Pickleherring is here to remind you, madam, to what extent they do, and must, borrow from themselves.

My wife Jane had a particularly handsome bottom. It was her finest feature. I saw a man in Covent Garden once take off his hat to it as she passed by.

On the other hand, the late Mr Shakespeare's bottom was nothing to write home about. But then I must confess it did not interest me. In fact it was one of those things about him which I think I found boring. There were some few such, as I have admitted.

A thing you may not know is that he once slipped when about to throne himself upon a piss-pot, and marked himself severely on the arse. (Madam, I do apologise for the inclusion of such base matter, but then without it my anatomy of Shakespeare would be incomplete.) The great man thus had this anal stigmata, as it were, in the form of a crucifixion on his bottom.