But I believe my master Shakespeare meant more. That afternoon at the Paris Garden he was making reference to a certain quality or condition of being anonymous which is to be met in much of his writing. He becomes the men and women he writes about. Yet none of them is him. And then the character of his language has the same property. It attains a self-sufficing anonymity, so that no name is needed at the bottom of the page to qualify or identify what it says. It is not William Shakespeare who speaks in these plays and these poems. It is the English language speaking itself.
I say that the true life of William Shakespeare is in his plays and his poems. Yet the man himself, to my fingers, we touch nowhere in the work.
Mr Shakespeare is the hero with a thousand faces, and none.
Even the spelling of his name makes him elusive as a sliver of quicksilver.
Shakespere was my father.
William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare - the day will come when everyone will know the name, I tell you. I knew him well, sir, and I know him not at all. Madam, there was this man, called William Shakespeare, a certain man who was a fine man too, greater than Tubal Cain or Roger Bacon, an upright, downright honest man, subtler than Avicenna, wiser than Paracelsus, knowing at least as much as Cornelius Agrippa himself of the doctrine of sympathy and antipathy in the mineral kingdom, and of the mystery which is fire (whose faithful secretary he was) - I mean, the mystery which is the fire of language - a man who lived in the old days, not so long ago, and who will live again, if you'll hear me out, for as long as this book lasts, at least.
William Shakespeare was the son of a butcher. During his christening feast, when many guests were seated round his father's table to eat a fatted calf, little William, being then but a few days old, was seized by a griffin and carried away. Over land and over sea the griffin flew, until it came to its stinking nest on top of a cliff in the western isles of Scotland, where it deposited the fledgling lad. One of the griffin's brood, wishing to reserve such a delicate poetic morsel for its own delectation, caught up our hero in its talons and flapped away to a neighbouring tree. But the branch on which this junior monster perched was too weak to support a double load. It broke. The startled griffin dropped its Shakespeare in a thicket. Undismayed by thorns, young William crawled from the griffin's reach, taking refuge in a cave. A delicious surprise awaited him there, for he found within the cave three girls who had escaped from the griffins in the same way--
Your author doesn't think that is going to do. Try again, Pickleherring. Writing makes history possible. Least among lies is the lie told in jest (mendacium iocosum). These fictions are jocose, and not officious. These fictions are fantastic, and not pernicious. These fictions are a comedy, and not malicious. These fictions presently form a story of beginnings. There will be middles enough and endings too, to come. Your author tells of the late Mr William Shakespeare. Your author gives an account of his origins and originals, to feed a need for stories, and to supply a Life.
Here are no legends, sagas, myths, or mysteries. Your author tells you stories about Shakespeare, and he is only too willing to explain whenever he can. For instance, Brownsword. Brownsword's love for Bretchgirdle was more Latin than English, and even more Greek than Latin in his heart. We know no less from his verses. But Bretchgirdle's lust for Mary Shakespeare is quite another matter. Bretchgirdle's lust for Mary Shakespeare is mere gossip. A distinction must be drawn. Yet gossip plays its part too in the life of a man.
This book takes account of such gossip, as it takes account of the stage. The late Mr Shakespeare had his exits and his entrances, and he was one man who in his time played many parts. Nor does Pickleherring mean this merely as Jaques meant it in terms of age. Mr Shakespeare was both poet and player. I speak not just of his profession, but of his identity. He was author and actor. In a word, Mr Shakespeare was an AUCTOR.
That's a good word, that AUCTOR. It comes as near defining what WS did as any other single word I know. It's the ancient way to spell the word author. But it is more than that. An auctor is an author and an actor. And I don't just mean that in Mr Shakespeare's case he was a playwright who was also a player in his own plays. (Although he was.) I mean that any man is both the author and the actor of his own life. He is its auctor. Both in the world of the stage and on the world's stage.
It is not just because I am a comedian that I keep coming back to stage business and play-talk.
I act, therefore I am.
We are all players.
What if what we like to call the self is just a series of masks and poses?
An actor's question, and the actor's dilemma, no doubt. But let the audience beware and go home wondering. I mean you, sir. And you, madam. Are you more than your mask? Is there a person to know behind the persona?
Now then, regarding Mr Shakespeare, what we might call the identity question is of course the wildest thing. Which is why some think that someone else wrote his work. (We shall come to this in due process. Also, the portraits.) But if his identity is the wildest question, then a mild thing is the matter of his birth-date, which so far I have taken quite for granted.
The truth is that we can't take it for granted.
The truth is that truth is what we can never take for granted.
What do I mean?
Madam, I mean we all know that Shakespeare was born on the 23rd of April, 1564 - and that he might well not have been.
In other words, that birthday belongs to beauty, not to truth. April 23rd is of course St George's Day. April 23rd is also without doubt or dispute the day on which Shakespeare died in 1616. So we round out our man's little life with a timely coincidence, a chime or rhyme of dates, linked St George's Days. But to say that WS was born on that feast is conjecture. The life of Shakespeare starts with a conjecture. We want him to be born then, so he was.
This is the story of the life of William Shakespeare. It is a story neither cosmogonic, theogonic, anthropogonic, nor eschatological. (Scatological it may be, here and there, but then I did not invent John Shakespeare's dunghill outside his house in Henley Street.)* It is a story inspired neither by hope nor fear, but a desire to come at the truth by telling lies. Mr Shakespeare was my master in this desire.
This book must not be thought of as a fable or an old wives' tale. Nor is it so much a cock and bull story as you might care to think. Being jocose, it could even be said to be not incompatible with a taste or a hunger for truth. It offers you no information about the world as a whole. On the question of the meaning and end of life it has nothing to say. This is the story of William Shakespeare. It is a pack of lies, and my heart's blood.
* Twelve years before our hero was spawned, on the 29th of April, 1552, John Shakespeare paid a fine of one shilling for keeping this sterquinarium by his door.
Chapter Twelve Of WS: his first word & the otters
What was the boy William's first word spoken? This is plainly a matter of some pith and marrow.
His sister Joan insisted it was 'Roses!' - which word she said he learnt to say when sat upon his pot in the rose-arbour in his mother's garden. But Joan was five years younger than her brother, so she most certainly never heard this for herself. It may have been family tradition. It could have been Joan's idea of a joke - I mean, the contrast between the roses and the pot. She was an odd woman, married to a hatter called Hart, her madness always having the oddest frame of sense, as the Duke in Measure for Measure remarks of Isabella (not one of my best parts, though perhaps I should not say so).