When John Shakespeare had finished, and sat staring into space and breathing heavily, I said (just for something to say, which I used to do in those days): 'All suddenly you saw the Faerie Queen, then?'
But Mr Shakespeare's father didn't know what I was talking about.
'Elizabeth was no fairy,' he said shortly. 'She was warm as toast.'
Not wanting to lose my head, I was glad when he dropped the subject, going off on a long and complicated tale about some people called Lambert and how he had sued them for cheating him. (This story is very boring, and I'll try not to tell it, if I can.) Whether John Shakespeare believed his own drunken fantasy concerning the Queen is difficult to say. Nor does it matter. Interestingly, perhaps all the incident really afforded me was a glimpse of the crude, rude origins of what had become imagination in his son. That there was some link between father and son let A Midsummer Night's Dream testify, for reasons already mentioned. I am sure John Shakespeare never heard of Bottom. But William must have heard some such story from him as I heard.
In short, John Shakespeare was a fantast. And the only people who'll credit his story, and want to believe it, are snobs. That is, the sort who want all Shakespeare's works to be written by Lord Verulam, Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Because those lads were nobles, don't you know, while our hero was only a clod.
At least my listening to John Shakespeare's story helped to keep him out of trouble while his son got his coat of arms for him.
It was the only time I ever saw Mr Shakespeare senior. He was a vast man. I remember his nose like a baby's backside in the middle of his face, and the sweat forming crystal pustules on the crags of his forehead. I remember he had white tufts of hair growing out of his nostrils. I remember he struck the board with the flat of his hand and he said very quietly, almost as if whispering a secret, 'The Lord God Almighty is angry with Elizabeth Tudor.' I remember he said that his bunions were killing him. I remember him farting. He stood on one leg and he farted, and then shook his foot. 'Another Spanish galleon sunk!' he bellowed triumphantly. A second time, when he did the same, he did not shake his foot, but said sweetly, holding up one finger: 'Hark! Hark! The cry of an imprisoned turd!' Despite such grossness, there was something almost delicate about him. He was like a big fat dancer, a ruined sprite. You could see he was proud of his son, but they didn't say much to each other. He spent a long time just stroking the scroll, when William came back with it ratified.
A falcon shaking a spear. I suppose it makes sense.
I never ever saw Mr Shakespeare's mother, not having travelled to Stratford until later days when she was dead. Unless, of course, she was that woman in the flame-red wig for whom John Falstaff made the wives of Windsor merry.
Chapter Twenty-Two Pickleherring's Song
I think it is high time that I gave you that ballad which has now been sung three times in the course of this book - by my mother to me to get me to sleep, by me to Mr William Shakespeare when I was sitting on the wall of the yard of that tavern when I first met him, and again by me in the last chapter to amuse Mr John Shakespeare in his cups.
Here are the words, then, of O Polly Dear:
Oh how I wish that I was there
With my dear Polly at the fair!
O Polly dear
Why aren't you here?
We were so happy at the fair!
About my feet the grass grows green -
Greener grass I've never seen!
O Polly dear
Why aren't you here?
How happy we were at the fair!
Above my head the night is black -
O my lost love, come back! come back!
O Polly dear
Why aren't you here?
How happy we were at the fair!
Oh how I wish that I was there
With my dear Polly at the fair!
O Polly dear
Why aren't you here?
We were so happy at the fair!
This is the saddest song I ever heard. I think it has something to do with the sound of the rhyme changing from there to here and then back to fair, and perhaps also with the little variation of rhythm in the last line of the two middle verses, but I'm a comedian not a poet, and I don't really know.
Here it is with the music:
Chapter Twenty-Three About the childhood ailments of William Shakespeare
I have outlived my own life. So I'm writing Mr Shakespeare's.
The childhood of our immortal bard was not without the usual diseases. It fell to the Reverend Bretchgirdle to cure the little man.
The parish priest was a great believer in natural nostrums, balms, treatments, and remedies. He suffered himself from the ague. He cured it, not by wrapping a spider in a raisin and swallowing it, as you might think, sir, nor by eating sage leaves seven mornings running, madam, as you might hope, but by going out at night alone to the Church Street crossroads and as the Guildhall clock struck midnight turning round on his heels three times and driving a large iron nail into the earth up to the head. Then he walked away backwards from the nail before the clock had completed its twelfth stroke. The ague left him, passing into the tax collector who was the next person to step over the nail.
William Shakespeare caught the measles. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William's measles by cutting off his cat's left ear and persuading the boy to swallow three warm drops of cat's blood in a wineglassful of water.
William Shakespeare caught the jaundice. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William's jaundice by making the boy eat nine fat lice on a piece of bread and butter. The other cure - twelve earth-worms baked on a shovel and reduced to powder to make a philter to drink every morning for a week - had failed to shift it. Ditto the tench tied to William's bare back.
William Shakespeare had a rupture. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured it by going to the ash grove above Shottery and cutting a long sapling longitudinally and getting the lad to climb, naked, in and out of the fissure three times at sunset on St Valentine's Day, after which the fat priest bound up the tree tightly and plastered over the crack with dung and clay. As the hole healed so did William. The other cure - the snail stopped up in the hollow oak - did not work.
William Shakespeare had the whooping cough. The Reverend Bretchgirdle cured William's whoopers by taking a saucerful of brown sugar and encouraging a slug to crawl over it until the sugar was good and slimy. He then got William to eat the sugar. The muslin bag full of spiders, worn round the neck, and the hair from the boy's head stuck between two bits of buttered toast and fed to a dog, had both failed to do the trick.