A mother, and a mistress, and a friend,
A phoenix, captain, and an enemy,
A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,
A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear.*
But it was as the mourners passed through the lych-gate that my friend and master signalled his farewell to me. The bier had been set down a moment on the greensward to await the emergence from the church of the vicar, the Reverend John Rogers, and now as it was lifted again aloft Mr Shakespeare's coffin-lid shone and blazed forth in a sudden great bedazzlement of sun. It was like a wave of his hand as he went to his grave inside the church. They buried him close under the north wall, not far away from the altar.
After William Shakespeare's funeral, there was a feast. This went on for three days and three nights, in which length of time as in other respects it far surpassed the common country custom. It was as if all Stratford was unwilling to believe that its greatest son was dead. It was as if the force of life itself wanted to hold on to him.
Among notable Stratford residents in attendance at the funeral and the wake, your author counted as follows: Francis Collins, Thomas Combe, Thomas Lucas, George Quiney, William Replingham, John Robinson, Thomas Russell, Hamlet and Judith Sadler, Julius Shaw, Richard Sturley, Richard Tyler, the Reverend Richard Watts (curate to John Rogers), Robert Whatcott, and Mr Shakespeare's little godson William Walker. Most of the gentlemen had their wives with them, and in several cases their whole families, but I do not know the names of every single one.
From London came Comfort Ballantine, John Black, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, Thomas Dewe, Leonard Digges, Richard and Jacqueline Field, John Heminges, John Jackson, William Johnson (landlord of the Mermaid Tavern), John Lowin, Robert Pallant, John Rice (the best of my rivals in women's parts when a boy, but who gave up the stage to become a cleric), Richard Robinson, William Rowley, Thomas Sackville, James Sands, John Shank, Richard Sharpe, Martin Slaughter, Elliard Swanston (the only actor I know who took the Parliament side in our late Civil Wars), Nicholas Tooley, and Jacky Wilson. Again, many of these brought their families with them, so well was William Shakespeare loved and mourned.
I have inspected the roll of accounts of the expenses of that great funeral feast. Provision was made of thirteen barrels of beer, twenty-seven barrels of ale, and a runlet of red wine of fifteen gallons. Meat, too, was provided in proportion to this liquor. The country round about Stratford-upon-Avon must have been swept clean of geese, chickens, capons, and such small gear, all which, with five hundred eggs, thirty gallons of milk and eight of cream, twelve pigs, thirteen calves, and seven neats, slain and roasted on spits and devoured, contributed to the fearful festivity.
Mrs Anne Shakespeare presided over the feast. There were fiddlers (which thing, I think, her puritanical son-in-law John Hall much abhorred). She sat straight-backed and bright-eyed in a tall black chair at the head of the table, eating little and drinking less, but seeing to it that her guests were well provided for. She wore a black silk calimanco gown, with a head-dress of black tiffany upon her thick black hair that was streaked with silver at the temples. Susanna sat on her right hand, wearing a black camlet kirtle and a gown of fine black silk also. Judith sat on her left hand, again all in black, with that medal between her breasts which she kept showing me when there was no need for me to see it.
The three women looked like three versions of the one face.
At the height of the wake, as the fiddlers sawed at their instruments till the horse-hair frayed, I stole away silently from the feasting and the drinking. I had a singular need that just had to be satisfied. I went like a man in a dream, but I knew where I was going. Unobserved by any, or so I believe, I crept from the hall of New Place, and ventured where my longing was directing me - up the broad oak staircase to the room that held the second-best bed and other secrets.
Many speak of Robin Hood who never shot with his bow. I suppose I was determined that Pickleherring should do otherwise, although my will in the matter was fleshly. I had this thirst which could only be slaked the one way. If I wanted to rationalise it, I could say that I had my own way of mourning Mr Shakespeare, and of asserting and celebrating what all his works are an assertion and celebration of - the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I had a hard on. Funerals have this mandrake effect on me, madam. I do apologise, but my root was up. Remember, I was William Shakespeare's joculator.
That's a good word, that JOCULATOR. It means more than just a jester, or a minstrel, or jongleur. It means a fool who knows the wisdom of foolishness. You get this wisdom in Shakespeare which you do not get in Dante or in Homer. That's why there is nothing in either of those great poets that gets under your skin like Feste's song at the end of Twelfth Night:
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
Never forget that SILLY once meant BLESSED. Nor that the first Christians were proud to be miscalled Chrestians, meaning simpletons. Nor that transvestite boys with phalluses erect led the Greek sacred processions of the Dionysian Oschophoria.
I stripped off all my clothes with the bedroom door shut close behind me. Putting on Anne Shakespeare's things was ever so lovely. She had presses full of the most adorable gowns. Her wardrobe was packed with petticoats and bodices, all scented sweetly of her perfume, with ruffs and cuffs and farthingales and things. I plucked out a stomacher of incarnadine satin, smooth as snow or swansdown, that you had to lace up with two broad silver laces. Standing before her pierglass, I laced this stomacher so tight that it hurt me, quite deliciously. Then I could wait no more, but plunged my engorged and rampant member in a deep cool pool of her petticoats. When I found the drawer that held the lady's most intimate articles of apparel, her shifts and her camisas, her silken drawers and her black and her white silk stockings, soft to my touch as cobweb, I could scarcely contain myself. I hung a pair of her drawers on my pintle while I explored. Among the items of her toilet I found powder-puffs and paints and paint-sticks, false curls and curling irons, lacquers and lip-salves and feathers for applying henna. Mrs Shakespeare had a box of Cordovan gloves, embroidered sheaths that were shaped to the clench of her fingers. I found to my delight that they fitted me. She possessed diamond and cornelian rings, and garnet brooches, and plaits of pearls, and necklaces of sapphires. It was plain that she favoured certain colours - scarlet and black - both for her choicest gowns and her flimsiest undergarments. That she sometimes adopted worsted hose of different hues - sometimes blue, sometimes grass-green - was a small enough matter for me to regret. (Not so much for the colours, but for that one absence of silk.)
I pulled on a pair of Anne Shakespeare's silk stockings, black as night, just like the ones she had worn to the funeral. I selected a sweet pair of garters, rosy rosettes, and smoothed and adjusted the stockings, consulting the pierglass. Lines of my parts as Juliet and as Cleopatra and as Lady Macbeth came coursing through my head and I spoke them softly aloud, my lips kissing my own image in the mirror, so that soon the glass was clouded with my breath. I selected black silken drawers from the tangle of worn garments in her linen basket. I sniffed at the gusset before I put them on. Anne Shakespeare's drawers smelt deliciously of comfrey fritters: her essence.
I was posed and poised at play there, black silk dress and petticoats up, casting sidelong glances at my image in the pierglass, calling the one there sir or madam, depending upon what was permitted to be shown, flirting with my unruly will, having it hide between my silk-clad legs and then prick out, making it throb and dance to the flick of the gloves, I was at work there, merrily, merrily, in the last throes of the hottest and sweetest ecstasy of self-caressing I ever knew in my life, when the door was suddenly flung open and the mistress of the house burst into her own bedroom and upon me.