Did Mary apply her red lips to it?
Don't be disgusting, sir. We are speaking of his mother!
But you say that she played with it?
Madam, let's change the subject--
Chapter Fifteen
What this book is doing
Was there really a sign over John Shakespeare's shop saying BUTCHER & WHITTAWER?
Of course not. Well, it's highly unlikely, to say the least.
But it's made you think, hasn't it? I made you remember it.
That's what Pickleherring is about. That's what this book is doing.
I make you remember certain things I tell you about the late great Mr William Shakespeare and those round about him. I want you to think for yourself about all of them.
For instance, take that matter of Shakespeare's mother and what she may have done to him. Perhaps she did awaken her son's first passions. Perhaps she did not, perhaps she did no such thing. What is certain is that Shakespeare was precocious in what he has Hamlet call 'country matters', and someone must have taken him in hand. He was only eighteen years old when he came to marry. His bride was eight years his senior. And their first child, Susanna, was born less than six months after the date of the marriage.
I have heard it said that WS married an older woman. But the truth is that Anne Hathaway married a younger man. The average age of marriage for women in parishes in the Forest of Arden in the period from 1575 to 1599 was 26.3 years old. The average age for men was 29.7. So while Anne was exactly punctual to the nuptial pattern, Will was eleven years early. Think it out for yourself. Then read Venus and Adonis over again.
It's wonderful what you can prove with the facts in parish registers.
Besides which, BUTCHER & WHITTAWER is only philosophically true.
Though I believe myself that John Shakespeare was more likely a glover. Or a dealer in skins, and in wool perhaps. And in timber and in barley and in leather.
And, later, without question, more than a bit of a usurer. (I'll be coming to that.)
Chapter Sixteen Shakespeare breeches
When our little William Shakespeare came of sufficient age, his father John bestirred himself and determined that the boy should have a pair of breeches.
Shakespeare breeches were no ordinary breeks. They were, in fact, a kind of galligaskins, very wide and flopping in the leg, like shipmen's hose but tight into the arse, fashioned of thick, stiff whitleather to withstand the winter's fury, without points to truss them up but with the vest growing as it were spontaneously out of them, a sort of natural over-all, like branches and leaves that have sprung from the rotundity of some great oak tree.
Furthermore, to ensure goodness, these breeches had to be made in a church, upon consecrated ground.
Now this could not be done by day in Stratford, for the Reverend Bretchgirdle did not approve of tailoring on God's premises. So John Shakespeare called on Martin Jimp the tailor in his shop in Sanctity Street, and promised him that if he would consent to make the breeches by night in Holy Trinity Church he would pay him treble wages.
Jimp agreed. He was a very able tailor, as swift and deft a needle-jerker as any in Warwick.
Some three years previous, so it is said, Mr John Shakespeare had won a considerable wager as a result of this Jimp's alacrity. What happened was that the glover (and/or butcher) bet an acquaintance of his, the same George Bardolfe already mentioned, that by eight o'clock on a particular evening he would sit down to dine in a well-woven, well-dyed, well-made suit of apparel, the wool of which had formed the fleece on sheep's backs in the Shottery meadows at five o'clock on that same day's morning. It is no wonder that among the class of persons accustomed to betting such a wager should eagerly be accepted, seeing that the achievement of the challenged result appeared all but impossible. Martin Jimp was entrusted with the work.
At five in the morning of one fine June day he caused two South Down sheep to be shorn. The wool was washed, carded, stubbed, roved, spun, and woven. The cloth was scoured, fulled, tented, raised, sheared, dyed, and dressed. The tailor was at hand, and made up the finished cloth into garments. And at a quarter past six in the evening Mr John Shakespeare sat down to dinner at the head of his guests, in a complete damson-coloured suit that had been thus made - winning the wager, with an hour and three quarters to spare. Of course, every possible preparation was made beforehand; but still the achievement was sufficiently remarkable, and was long talked of with astonishment in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Jimp liked a challenge. So in the matter of the Shakespeare breeches it was not so much the glamour of the triple money that attracted him, but the knowledge that the Stratford church was haunted, and the imputation - which he resented - that a tailor might not be brave enough to spend a night there. For Martin Jimp was well acquainted with what is said of tailors: that it takes nine of them to make a man, that a tailor's sword is only a needle, that a tailor's wound is a stab in the back, and so on.
Jimp was a spruce little fellow with a mop of white hair. He walked with a stoop and wore a black patch made of velvet over one eye, but he was not without honour.
So night comes, and Martin Jimp comes to Holy Trinity Church. He approaches it from the north, passing down the avenue of lime trees that smell sweet from a sudden shower of rain, entering the building by picking the lock in the door in the porch with his clever tailor's needle, and crossing himself with the same sharp blade in hand as he slips in.
It's cold and dark inside. The air is dewy from recent burials in the crypt. The stonework seethes with damps that creep in with the fog from the nearby Avon. You can hear mice rustling among the smooth pews. Those pews gleam in sudden shafts of moonlight falling through high, pointy windows as the moon rides fast. There's a smell like rotting quinces from the charnel-house.
I should tell you that Trinity Church is cruciform in plan, consisting of a nave with aisles, a chancel (where the wearer of the breeches now lies buried), transepts, and a central tower with a spire made of wood. The charnel-house stands just beyond the chancel. It's a place of horror. The sexton digs up bones and throws them there, to make room for new graves in the church and the churchyard as more people die. I think this place loomed large in the boy Shakespeare's nightmares. In Romeo and Juliet he writes:
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'ercover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks, and yellow chapless skulls.
And then there's all that Yorick stuff in Hamlet. I think that the closeness of the charnel to the chancel in the Stratford church is one reason for the curse Shakespeare put on his grave. But I run on too fast, sir. All things in order, Pickleherring. No hasty puddings, thank you.
Jimp sits down cross-legged on the tomb of a knight and his lady just beside the choir stalls. The tomb is comfortable enough, the effigy of the lady having been removed by Bretchgirdle, with a result that there is plenty of room for a tailor on that side of the bed.
Jimp lights his candle with a spark from his tinder-box. He puts on his thimble. He threads the stout thread in his silver needle. Then he sets to work, making the breeches.
Jimp worked hard and well. The seams grew. The stitches flew. Loop, double chain, tambour, lock - he's throwing in the lot for luck, and to celebrate the extreme dexterity of his fingers, his mastery of his trade, for this Jimp's no bodger, he's the finest gentleman-tailor in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is why Shakespeare's father has employed him for such important business.