The fire seems at present confined to the north side of the river. It seems to have broken out somewhere close to the Tower, some say in Pudding Lane, but others in Fish Street. The worst of it is that the wind is high, and that this wind veers about with unaccountable caprice, blowing now east, now north, so that the flames roar before it like the devouring tongue of some marauding dragon. The weather has been hot and dry for weeks now, and the very air seems ready to ignite. The old houses catch the fire and they burn like tinder-boxes. In the middle of the night, last night, I was woken by the sound of the conflagration. The sky was full of forks and spears of flame. How Shakespeare would have liked it! I was reminded as I stood there in my nightcap of the days when he peddled his squibs in Warwick market.
But this morning through the triangle of my window I can see nothing that could give any man or woman pleasure, save perhaps a Guy Fawkes. What I behold is a very dismal spectacle indeed - the whole City in dreadful, towering flames right down to the waterfront. All the houses and other buildings from the Three Cranes down to Cheapside, all Thames Street, and right on down to the Bridge itself are being steadily consumed in this flagrant and mortifying fire.
Unknown friends, shall I tell you the strangest thing of all? It occurs to me that what I write comes true! It had been my intention to write of Shakespeare and fire, and here is London straight caught fire in the night before I wrote it! So it seems to me that what I have in mind to write may already be the truth, but I make it true by my writing of it. And this has been my task right from the beginning: to make truth come true. Mr Shakespeare did no less in his plays and his poems. Much of what he put on the stage proved strangely prophetic. Macbeth says much about Cromwell, and King Lear prefigures poor King Charles I - the king hunted, like an animal, through his own land. The late Civil Wars are everywhere foreshadowed in Shakespeare's imaginings.
But these are fancies compared with the fact of the fire. With the wind like this, and the weather like this, what can save us? The whole of London north of the Thames is already a raging inferno.
Wormwood is the name of the star that spells destruction in the Book of Revelation,* and there I set it down (with only Hamlet in mind, and Juliet's nurse remembering the day of the earthquake) at the end of my list of things despaired of. Can a word set the world on fire? If I write of a thing, must it follow?
I have now to write of the death of William Shakespeare. I think my own death won't be far behind.
* The Revelation of St John the Divine, Chapter 8, verse 11.
Chapter Ninety-Eight The day Shakespeare died (with his last words, etc.)
Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.
Who killed Cock Shakespeare?
I, said Ben Jonson, with slow-acting poison ...
Well, ladies and gentlemen, what if his great rival did murder him? It is a possibility I have considered. Some slow-acting poison (fly-agaric, say, or colocynth) could have been slipped into Shakespeare's cup by the bricklayer's hand at that merry meeting. (Slow acting would suit Mr Jonson right down to the ground.) Of course we shall never know now if this is what happened. But I wouldn't put such a stroke past the author of Sejanus. The fellow was when all is said and done a proven assassin. In fact old upright Alleyn always called him so. Bricklayer and assassin, I mean, rather than poet and playwright. With reference to Jonson's early trade as a builder's labourer, and then to his killing that actor Gabriel Spencer with a long foil. And Alleyn, note, was a sober man, and a pious, a man in the habit of writing JESUS at the top of each page of his account books at the playhouse.
But perhaps William Shakespeare died of a broken heart? That Quiney business must have got him down. I mean the discovery that his son-in-law had knocked up another woman while engaged to marry Judith. It might not break your heart, but it would make you dispirited and sick. And then you might drink too much, not long after the wedding, and with the funeral of your sister's husband* to remind you of your own mortality, face to face with despair that your daughter was now married to a scoundrel, and if you had no brains or guts for drinking it could make you sick to death.
The poet's health had not been of the best for some time. He could not eat but little meat; his stomach was not good. He had this lump I noticed, by his left eyelid. It came up after he pricked his eyeball on the thorn of a sick rose. This might have been the true cause of his death. It is just the sort of accident that people do die of. After all, as he had me say as Rosalind, men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
For love or not, the death of William Shakespeare took place in another cruel and rainy April, on another St George's Day, 23rd April 1616. So if the poet was really born on that day, I think we should applaud him for his neatness. Unfortunately the only other notable I can think of who performed this feat of dying on his own birthday was the late and unlamented Oliver Cromwell. The coincidence is worth remark. It provides your humble servant with an opportunity to say that Cromwell and Shakespeare had nothing else in common.
Forgive me, reader, but I suppose we have to consider the vulgar matter of Mr S's last words. What were they? Some say that he said, 'I have had enough.' Others again report that he called out 'More light!' - at which the casement window was opened for him, only for those in attendance at his death-bed to realise that their beloved Will was speaking of spiritual illumination. Then there are those who claim that the poet's last words were those of his own Hamlet: 'The rest is silence.' This last, in my opinion, is less than likely. WS was not much in the habit of quoting his own works, and I feel sure that a man of such fluency would have found new words for what was after all a unique occasion. On the other hand, there are those who assert that the Bard's eloquence deserted him at the end, and that with his final breath what he really said was a laconic, 'Now what?'
One strange report has it that as Shakespeare lay dying he kept shouting 'Reynolds! Reynolds!' all through the night. I cannot say I would care to believe this either. But others more credibly claim that his final earthly utterance was a whispered, 'Lord, help my poor soul!' This, I think, is my favourite from amongst his reputed Last Words. Though, at the other extreme, there is something to commend Mrs Shakespeare's claim that on returning from his 'merry meeting' her husband declared: 'I've had eighteen straight brandy-wines. I think that's the record!' (Those who credit this would also say that WS thus died of 'an insult to the brain'.) After this boast, Mrs Shakespeare said, she cradled her husband's head in her arms, and he said, 'I love you, but I am alone.' Too touching, perhaps, to be true.
Then again, some lovers of taciturnity claim that at the end William Shakespeare said nothing at all, but just smiled.
I say I hope the man laughed.
Anyway, it is not true that he called out for two meat pies as he lay dying.
Reader, he died a Papist. Nor should this surprise you. It was the faith of his mother and his father, and who could deny that you find in the plays what I would call a catholicity of images? That is to say, it is a catholic view of things which WS most readily employs and inhabits in his works, a habit of thinking through images, and while there are no strong personal expressions of belief there, and indeed there is as I have said a cast of mind at work in them which is neither Protestant nor Papist, it should not surprise us that at the end the poet chose to return to his own beginnings.