This frighted the wits out of the other attendants, but stout John Hayward turned never a hair, but said: 'Lord bless us! Here's somebody in the cart who's not quite dead!'
So one of the others calls out to the piper, and says: 'Who are you?'
'I'm the poor piper,' the fellow answers. 'Where am I?'
'Where are you!' says Hayward. 'Why, you are in the dead-cart, and we are going to bury you.'
'But I ain't dead, though, am I?' says the piper.
It was a question, not a statement, that's the point.
So he played them a tune on his pipe, and John Hayward and his men judged that he was not dead. And they helped the poor fellow down, and he went about his business.
That's what I'm doing, reader. I play my pipe to prove I am not dead.
I began in a week when upwards of ten thousand were reported dead. My Life of Mr Shakespeare was conceived first as an answer to the plague. Yet I was determined that the pestilence should leave my memories unscathed, which is why I never mentioned it when I started opening my boxes and writing up their contents at the height of it.
No doubt the piper played a merry tune. For certain he never piped any dirge on that dead-cart. No more do I. I knew that the late Mr Shakespeare would be my living companion, dancing me out of doomed London. And so it has proved.
The weather began to change when I began writing, and the air became cooled and purified by the equinoctial winds. That's why I praised the snow, of course, in Chapter Seventeen. It has fallen like a blessing on the city. It has cured the great plague that lay upon the streets.
Pompey Bum says (I know not on what authority) that more than a hundred thousand persons have perished by this terrible visitation.
But not Pickleherring, my lily lords and ladies.
At last the bells ring out tonight for a birth and not for burials. Christmas Eve, snow falling, and bells ringing. If I were not so old then I might almost be happy.
Listen, I beg you. Harken to my tales, friends.
When I was young I lived to dream, and now I am old I have to dream to live. This Life of William Shakespeare is my life now. He dreamt me up that afternoon in Cambridge. My life has been a nightmare since he died. Christmas Eve 1665, snow falling, and bells ringing. How much of my long existence has been a dream then? As in the old old story, am I the man dreaming he is a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he is a man?
Chapter Twenty-Five Bretchgirdle's cat
Although the Reverend Bretchgirdle cut off his cat's left ear in the interests of curing the boy Shakespeare's measles, he was still very fond of the creature.
Bretchgirdle never did anything by halves. He baked a cake once in honour of the Virgin's lying-in. His friend Brownsword wouldn't eat it. No such ceremony should be observed, he pointed out, because Mary suffered no pollution, therefore needed no purification.
So these fine scholars passed their days in Stratford.
Bretchgirdle, in all truth, was a sentimentalist. It would not be too much to say that he leant towards Rome. One summer he told two of his choirboys that Lady's Thistle gets its name from the fact that Our Lady, walking near Nazareth with aching breasts, shook or squirted drops of milk upon it, to relieve the tension. The lads were kind not to report this opinion to the Bishop. It's true that the leaves of the plant are diversified with white spots. But I doubt if it ever grew in the Holy Land.
Bretchgirdle was always going on about Jesus's mother. Whether it was her virginity, her sinlessness, or her peculiar closeness to the Godhead, the present writer is not sure, but something about the woman appealed to him greatly. He wouldn't even have it that the brethren of Our Lord were Joseph's children by a former marriage. Their mother was quite another Mary, Bretchgirdle said, Mary the wife of Clopas or Alphaeus, the Virgin's sister.
Brownsword, on the other hand, was a Latinist only in the classical sense. He argued that the colourlessness of Mary's character, not only in the gospels but in the apocrypha too, makes it fatally easy to imagine her and to imagine that one understands that imagination.
Bretchgirdle ignored this thorn.
The parish priest bought a kitten in the Rother Market and christened it Dulia. When the schoolmaster heard him calling it, he said, 'What do you call that cat?'
'Dulia,' said Bretchgirdle.
'After the martyr?' said Brownsword.
'No, not Julia - Dulia,' Bretchgirdle explained.
'I hear you now,' said Brownsword, and added, 'I thought you had a cold.'
When the cat got bigger Bretchgirdle started calling it Hyperdulia.
It was a fat cat, kink-tailed, tabby in colour, forever shaking its head as if it wanted to lick its ear, a nasty sort of creature by all accounts. It had fleas and the fleas gave it worms. The flea-larvae swallow the eggs of the worm along with the organic matter in the bottom of the cat-box. The worm-larvae hatch from these eggs in the midgut of the flea-larvae, penetrate the midgut and arrive in the stomach of the flea-larvae. They stay there during the pupal and adult stages of the flea, growing all the while. An animal becomes infected or re-infected by swallowing such fleas when, for example, licking its coat.
(I learnt all this from Dr Walter Warner, true discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Of course, the facts were not known in the ignorant century gone, when Bretchgirdle and Brownsword busied themselves with aspects of Mariolatry, and suchlike.)
Dulia was always licking her coat, so she was forever eating her own fleas and giving herself worms. According to Warner's Artis Analyticae Praxis (1631), his only book, this would have constituted a vicious circle or at least circumlocution - cat licking, cat chewing, fleas going down, worms breeding in the swallowed fleas, cat having worms, flea-larvae eating the eggs of the worms along with the organic matter in the bottom of the cat-box, cysticeroids hatching in the midgut, and so on, and so on, adult fleas copulating a few hours after their emergence from the cocoon and before having had a blood meal, the females laying a batch of fresh eggs after a day or two, but needing a blood meal before each batch.
Bretchgirdle liked his cat. Perhaps he did not love it, but he liked it.
Chapter Twenty-Six Of the games of William Shakespeare when he was young
In this box there is a top and a ball. The top is many-coloured. The ball won't bounce. But once the ball bounced - when the boy William tossed it against the wall of his father's house on Henley Street, catching it on the tricky spin as it came back.
I have made a list of all the games the poet played when he was young. The ball he gave me himself, not long after we first met. Joan Hart, his sister, made me a gift of the top, when I was in Stratford much later pursuing my researches. The other games I infer from the plays and the poems. Perhaps we should more truly say that our man had knowledge of them all, rather than claim that he played them. But with Mr Shakespeare knowing was nearly always doing.
Many times in his writings there is mention of marbles and bowls. As well as the top-spinning already mentioned, he tells also of hoop-rolling, of hide-and-seek, and of blind-man's-buff.
That he knew how to fence and all the language of fencing and sword-play could be proved from a score of his plays. And he was a toxophilite - well able, like old Double as recalled by Justice Shallow, to draw a bow and clap you an arrow in the clout at twelve score, even if he couldn't on horse-back hit a sparrow flying, any more than could that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas, according to scornful Prince Hal.