Robert Nye - The Late Mr Shakespeare

So are our heroes somewhat less than gods, though they may carry emblems of divinity in the most unlikely places on their persons.

Chapter Ninety-Three Some sayings of William Shakespeare

I have given Polly my father's kidskin dictionary. This present seemed to please her. She gave me in return for it, fishing beneath her bodice, a locket she once received as a prize at her convent. I expressed tender delight at a gift warmed by her contact and for so long worn by her intimately, i.e. between her breasts.

What have these things to do with my Life of William Shakespeare? Reader, I will tell you. They have everything to do with it, and so does Jane. I confess that I have only learnt this in the writing. When I began, for instance, it was my intention that my late wife would have only a walking-on part in this book. It is, after all, supposed to be not my life, but the Life of William Shakespeare. Yet even at the start I think I knew that the biographer is part of the story in any biography. Otherwise why should I have felt the need to tell you that I am the bastard son of a priest's bastard? But beyond that, even, there is the natural need to confess where one stands (or falls) in love.

It is by suffering in love, erotic suffering, that we all grow. The Greeks knew this. Their novelists were interested in stories of EROTIKA PATHEMATA, and so was Mr S, and so am I. The engrossing experience of love, that is the thing. It is the theme of Parthenius (Virgil's Greek teacher). Later, among the Latin authors, it is the great theme of Petronius in the Satyricon . It is the theme, above all, of that great Metamorphoses of Apuleius - I mean the Asinus Aureus or Golden Ass . These are the works I love, the love-works against which I would match my Life of Shakespeare. But this book is intended also as a kind of Secret History , like that of Procopius.

Talking of love, Anne Shakespeare is of course the living statue of Hermione in The Winter's Tale . There was never a more beautiful or touching embodiment on the stage of re-awakened love, in my opinion. (I am vulgar and bold, mind you; a sentimentalist, sir.) In Greene's Pandosto , whose plot Mr Shakespeare follows up to this point, Queen Hermione dies of grief and King Leontes promptly falls in love with his newly found daughter Perdita, thus making his suicide inevitable. By resurrecting Hermione and giving Perdita the husband of her choice, Shakespeare makes possible Leontes' repentance and his wife's pardon. To this end our dramatist was obliged to invent a means by which Hermione could forgive her husband, and take up life with him again, after some sign that he has shed his former jealousy and that he loves her - some sort of moral rejuvenation put on stage. The problem must have been a difficult one. The Bard's solution is nowise short of brilliant.

Leontes must be compelled to recognise in his wife other qualities than charm and beauty. She is now sixteen years older than when he last saw her, and bears the marks of all that she has been through. Shakespeare hits on the idea of the kissed statue. If you ever want proof of his genius, this is it. Before revealing that Hermione is still alive she must be exhibited to the King as a marble statue placed on a monument - a statue of her not as she was sixteen years ago, but as she would be now had she lived on.

Leontes gazes a long time at the statue. Then overcome by emotion he cries out. No matter how mad he seem, he must kiss her lips.

Then, as we all know, the statue trembles. And Hermione steps down from her pedestal, and herself embraces Leontes.

It is a moment of pure magic. I should know, for I played it.

How so? Why did I not play Perdita? Not, I assure you, because John Spencer Stockfish was considered my superior for any part. It is just that by this time I was in fact too old for the roles of young girls. Consequently I was a natural for the part of Hermione. I believe, in any case, that Mr Shakespeare wrote that character with me in mind, wanting me to represent on stage his own wife Anne. He wished me to embody the way he was declaring he could still love her, and she love him, after their own little interval of sixteen years or more. And doubtless it appealed to his sense of irony, too, to have the once master-mistress of his passion now enacting the part of the forgiving and pacific wife. After our first performance of the Tale , permit me to mention, Mr Shakespeare and I played again at cards for kisses. This time there was this difference from the time when I had been his Rosalind. This time I did not let my master win.

The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that woman's point of view is not necessarily foreign to man's.

The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that words cool more than water, or are perhaps less likely not to.

The late Mr Shakespeare used to say that the void, the good void, the aching void of the good, which was his source and port and target, the wordless bourne of his every fugue, however sudden and eccentric, was the last place anyone would think of looking for him, the well-known long sweet home, the room where music plays itself.

Mr Shakespeare said that he was not here, being there, and having no whereness anyhow.

Mr Shakespeare said that music made his ears bleed.

Mr Shakespeare (as he lay dying) said that he really ought to try not to die, and that the light was badly painted on the wall.

Also, Shakespeare said his body was his grave;

That when it rained he fell;

That his scabby heart was unquiet if full of truth;

That his head was beginning to stink of innocence;

That he had St Catherine's uncouth wheel printed in the roof of his mouth;

And that he was over and above the dark, one of her dateless brood all right, but still serving his apprenticeship down here.

All these things were said by William Shakespeare as he lay dying. I do not know what they mean. I am only a comedian.

Chapter Ninety-Four A word about John Spencer Stockfish

The Tempest , the late Mr Shakespeare's last play, seems to me as perfect in its kind as almost anything we have of his. One may observe that the classical unities are kept here with an exactness uncommon to the liberties of his writing. It is a play about magic, and that magic has in it something very solemn and very poetical. I would draw your attention in particular to the character of Caliban. It is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon grotesques that ever was seen, but what is then remarkable is that it is to this uncouth, wild figure that Shakespeare gives the most delicate poetry in the play - I mean the speech beginning Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises ... Only a writer at the very top of his powers could have dared to do this. It seems to me that Shakespeare not only found out a new character in his Caliban, but also devised and adopted a new manner of language for that character.

The name Caliban is a phonetic anagram of CANNIBAL. Mr Shakespeare pointed that out to me himself, one day when showers had ruined our rehearsal. As for the name Ariel, he took that from his friend Thomas Heywood's rhymed catechism of the occult, the Hierarchy of Blessed Angels . In that work Ariel is named as the spirit who commands the elements and governs tempests. As for Setebos, the god adored by Caliban, that name was printed first in Thevet's Cosmographie , but I think it more likely that WS got it from a popular source, probably Eden's History of Travayle (1577). He only ever needed a few bits and scraps like this to set his mind in motion. And of course once he got going the whole play became profoundly autobiographical. In Prospero we look on Mr Shakespeare's likeness. The magician breaking his wand and retiring to Naples is the poet breaking his pen and retiring to Stratford.