John Shakespeare, seeing this, and being as I have told you a man much given over to jealous fantasies, convinced himself that the local vicar, the Reverend John Bretchgirdle, must be the real father of Mary Shakespeare's son. It was so like the clergyman's cowl, that caul on baby William.
So on the Monday morning up jumps John Shakespeare bright and early hammering on the vicar's door and threatening to kill him with his little cleaver.
'Warlock!' he shouts. 'Fat villain! Whoreson upright rabbit! I'll caul you! I'll puncture your testicles!'
'God's mercy!' protests the priest. 'But I am an innocent man, Mr Shagspierre. Sit down upon this hassock, sir. I will pray for you while you wait.'
John Bretchgirdle, oh yes, the Reverend John Bretchgirdle, for the best grin through a horse collar, John Bretchgirdle always won first prize at the Stratford Fair. His eyes were the colour you see otherwise only in a mountain lake, an intelligent, clear colour. His complexion was perfect gallows. He was given to winking, not blinking, strong on charity, hard on heresy. His hair was very dark brown, so dark as to appear almost black. In his youth this same Bretchgirdle had been anxious to distinguish himself by committing new sins. He had sat brooding at Christ Church, Oxford, trying to work out exactly what the sin against the Holy Ghost might be, so that he could commit it, never be forgiven, and become immortal in the memory of men as a saint-in-reverse. (Unless the sin against the Holy Ghost is writing blank verse and concealing it in prose, then your author doubts if even he has committed it.)
On the occasion of his first visit to the house in Henley Street this venial vicar did not address a single word to Mary Shakespeare, and when at John's request he dined there two days later the only notice he took of the lady of the house was to command her to sit at the same table.
Bretchgirdle's condescension in allowing her to share the dinner she had cooked for him did not go unremarked by Mary, although his habit of rejecting his meal from his stomach and chewing it over again, as a cow the cud, some twenty minutes after its original ingestion, caused her no little wonder.
It was Bretchgirdle's pleasure to continue this second chewing for no more than an hour, after which he would always counsel against both Puritans and the tyranny of the Pope.
It fell to the Rev. John Bretchgirdle to christen William Shakespeare. This act he performed in his parish church at Stratford, with John Shakespeare watching his every move with a beady eye.
After the christening feast had come to an end, and the godfathers and godmothers of the child had eaten and drunken lustily (as was the country custom in those days), all set forth on their way homeward. But the night was wet, and they were weary, and they minded not all their steps to be careful of them. And so it came to pass that one of the godmothers carrying the child (it was the wife of WS's uncle Harry) caught her foot upon a stone and fell into the ditch with little William in her arms. She and the baby came out all covered with mud. But as weeds cannot so easily come to harm, the child was not hurt, though he looked like a soot-black imp.
When they got home, Mary washed her child clean in good hot water.
Thus was William Shakespeare in one day three times christened. First, according to the prayer book. Then in the mud of the ditch. And at last in sweet warm water.
So it is always with poets, I have heard. Even in their infancy, strange and wonderful things foreshow their future greatness.
Chapter Ten What if Bretchgirdle was Shakespeare's father?
But what if the Reverend John Bretchgirdle really was our poet's father? Could that be possible? Let us consider the facts.
Bretchgirdle became vicar at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, in January 1561, three years and three months before the poet's birth. He was a portly man, and a comfortable one, and a man of parts, made B.A. at Oxford in 1545 and M.A. some two years after. Before he came to Stratford this shrewd prelate was curate at Witton in Cheshire, serving also as master of the school there. Bretchgirdle never taught in the Grammar School at Stratford, but one of his brightest pupils at Witton, John Brownsword, loved him so well that he followed him like a little dog to Stratford to schoolmaster there. More of that in a minute.
Visitations by Bretchgirdle to the house in Henley Street followed regularly upon each other after the occasion already chronicled - when he ate his dinner twice, and condemned both Pope and Puritans. Truth to tell, hospitality was offered him more in duty than through any liking, and neither John nor Mary Shakespeare warmed to their vicar until one Sunday post-Communion afternoon when the butcher and whittawer, in the act of handing a cup of sherris sack to his guest, regretted that his latest apprentice had run away.
'Then I will help you,' the Reverend Bretchgirdle said, with every assumption of impulsiveness. 'I know nothing of butchery, but cobbling comes naturally to me,' he added, 'and at the least I can do as well as one of your adolescent labourers.'
John Shakespeare thought that the fat ecclesiastic might be joking. So he did not reply. But later when he witnessed his guest trotting out to the shed and attaching insoles to the bottom of a pair of wooden lasts and fastening the whitleather down with lasting tacks, he had no choice in the matter - speech proved beyond him.
John stood watching goggle-eyed as Rev. Bretchgirdle pierced round the insoles with a bent awl, and it was only when he realised that this was not play-acting and that the priest was hard at it, that he ran to him, and begged him to desist.
'It's not right that your reverence should so demean himself,' he protested, forgetting in his admiration the correct churchly mode of address.
'There's nothing demeaning about it, Mr Chackosper,' purred Bretchgirdle, placing the uppers on the lasts and drawing their edges tightly round the edges of the insoles. 'Cobbling is the only secular work in which a parish priest may profitably interest himself,' he lied. He fastened the uppers in position with lasting tacks. 'Without prejudice to his immortal soul,' he added.
Lasting is a crucial operation, as John Shakespeare knew too well, for unless the upper is drawn neat and tight upon the last, without a crease, without a frown or wrinkle, the shape of the shoe will be spoilt.
The Reverend Bretchgirdle did not falter. He inseamed as if he had been born with an awl in his fist. Then he pared off the rough edges and levelled the bottoms with a piece of tarred felt.
'It was the hobby of many of the patriarchs,' he explained. 'And of Cranmer himself, in his spare moments.'
That night their rector shared the supper of the Shakespeares yet again, and for many a night thereafter, so that soon it was common knowledge in Stratford-upon-Avon that the ecclesiastical eccentric was in some sort of partnership with John Shakespeare, the butcher and whittawer who cobbled as well when he could. It was not so commonly known, however, that the priest had also taken the education of the Shakespeares in hand - slipping frogs, toads, and mice into the marital bed, teaching John and Mary to play with slow-worms and grass-snakes, measures to ensure that they developed an attitude of honest indifference to those things which might otherwise engender wasteful impulses of fastidiousness or fear.
But did the Reverend Bretchgirdle share in John Shakespeare's bed? Had that great whited sepulchre known Mary?
There is a Latin poem by John Brownsword which is a key document here. Brownsword was reckoned a good Latinist. He was schoolmaster in Stratford from 1565 to 1567, having taught in Macclesfield School before that. When Bretchgirdle died (some say of exhaustion) a few years after christening William Shakespeare, Brownsword returned to Macclesfield, and taught there for many years until his own death in 1589. He wrote three poems addressed to Bretchgirdle, which are of no interest whatsoever to our purpose, save that we might register their tone of sycophantic amatory tenderness. A fourth, which is probably also addressed to Bretchgirdle, or which is at the least about matters which concerned him, may be only a fragment. A cryptic and broken-backed acrostic, it runs as follows: