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.
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.