John XIX only took holy orders to enable him to ascend the papal chair. He spent the whole of his pontificate taking bribes. He died in full possession of his dignities, and was succeeded by his nephew, who was twelve years old.
John XX was only Pope for eight months before the roof of the palace he had built for himself at Viterbo fell down on his head.
John XXI was a magician.
John XXII was a tax collector, and was being tried for heresy when he died.
John XXIII was only antipope, but he was found guilty of enough deeds of immorality, tyranny, ambition, and simony to be deposed even from that pseudo-office. Before becoming antipope this John had been a pirate. His abilities were mainly administrative and military, although he did repent when at last caught out. He died on the 22nd of December 1419, and all visitors to the baptistery at Florence now admire, under its high baldacchino, the sombre figure sculptured by Donatello to the dethroned pontiff, who had at least the merit of bowing his head under his chastisement, and of contributing by his passive resignation to the extinction of the series of Popes which sprang from the council of Pisa, and the extinction at the same time of the series of Popes called John.
After that, Popes got the point of the name's unluckiness, and not a single one has taken it on.
My late wife Jane was once fucked by a fellow named John Pope. She never could resist a papal pizzle.
John Shakespeare used to say that one day there would be a Pope called Jack. Jack was a name he liked. Jack Straw. Jack Sprat. Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack the Giant Killer. That time in London, in the Nag's Head at the corner of Friday Street, he told me England's Christian name was Jack.
As for Pope Jack - Jack Shakespeare would have wagered on the possibility, he said, with his friend Fluellen, only he knew he wouldn't live long enough to collect.
Chapter Thirty-Four What Shakespeare saw when he looked under Clopton Bridge
My friend the player Weston used to say in support of his Polesworth conjecture that Shakespeare never mentions Stratford in any of his writings. But that's not true.
If you stand on the eighteenth arch of Clopton Bridge (the one nearest the point where the road goes off to London), and if you watch the River Avon below when it is in flood, you will see a curious thing that Shakespeare saw.
The force of the current under the adjoining arches, coupled with the curve there is at that strait in the riverbank, produces a very queer and swirling eddy. What happens is that the bounding water is forced back through the arch in an exactly contrary direction.
I have seen sticks and straws, which I have just watched swirling downstream through the arch, brought back again as swiftly against the flood.
The boy Will saw this too. Here's how he describes it:
As through an arch the violent roaring tide
Outruns the eye that doth behold his haste,
Yet in the eddy boundeth in his pride
Back to the strait that forc'd him on so fast,
In rage sent out, recall'd in rage, being past:
Even so his sighs, his sorrows, make a saw,
To push grief on and back the same grief draw.
That's from The Rape of Lucrece, lines 1667-73. How many times must he have watched it, perhaps with tears in his bright eyes?
You can see the river behave like this at Stratford even on a calm day, but if you want to observe the full force of that saw-like eddy then choose a day with a violent roaring tide. At all events, here, my dears, we have something very particular and peculiar and right in the heart of his home town that William Shakespeare noticed.
Chapter Thirty-Five About water
Water and all its ways pleased William Shakespeare. You might almost say he was enchanted by it.
I think the Avon proved his best and sweetest tutor, and that the boy Will learnt more about poetry and the workings of the minds of men from watching that river in its different moods than he was taught by all his schoolmasters put together.
In summer he sauntered by on the river banks, observing the green current gliding with white swans upon it. In winter he watched it rage, and must often afterwards have noticed meadows not yet dry, / With miry slime left on them as he reports in Titus Andronicus.
The Avon knows flooding, in fact, both in winter and summer. Sir Hugh Clopton built his bridge at Stratford, towards the end of the fifteenth century, because before it people were refusing to come to market in town when the river was up, for fear that they might drown, and their cattle with them. Even this solid stone structure could not always hold against the fury of the flood. In July of 1588 - during that wild, wet, and windy summer provided by God to assist England in the defeat of the Spanish Armada - the bridge was broken at both ends by the roaring tide, imprisoning in the middle three men who were in the act of crossing it.
Water in flood is an image you will find all over Shakespeare. Sometimes these images are simple, picturing an irresistible force which will suffer nothing to stop it, but engluts and swallows all in its way, as he says in Othello. At other times he makes of the flooding river an emblem of rebellion, as when Scroop in Richard II (Act III, Scene 2), speaking of the uprising, compares things to
an unseasonable stormy day
Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores,
As if the world were all dissolv'd to tears,
So high above his limits swells the rage
Of Bolingbroke.
I don't think you will find as many river similes in any other of the dramatists, either Elizabethan or modern. But then I never acted much in other men's plays. I did once take the walking-on part of Helen of Troy in Marlowe's Dr Faustus, though, and I heard old Alleyn in Tamburlaine at the Rose, and I can tell you that I doubt if there's a river image in the whole of Marlowe. The sea was more in his line - there's plenty of that. As for Ben Jonson, all his river stuff is most perfunctory and of a general nature; it shows no sign of any direct observation.
I imagine the mills on the Avon were Shakespeare's delight. There is a great mill at Barford, and another at Alveston, and two at Hampton Lucy. All these lie upstream from where he lived. Then there is Stratford mill, just below the church where he was baptised and now lies buried. And downstream there are mills at Luddington and Binton and Welford and Bidford. There are also two mills on the Stour, which runs into the Avon about two miles below Stratford. And on the fast-flowing Alne that runs by Henley-in-Arden there's a mill at every mile, just about. No doubt the boy Will found a fresh mill-pond to bathe in every week of the year. No doubt but he also carved toy boats and floated them down the mill-leats.
There's not a lot to suggest that Mr Shakespeare liked fishing. His references to the sport are all rather ordinary - Claudio saying Bait the hook well; this fish will bite, that sort of thing. I think he preferred to stand and stare at the waters, without disturbing them with his own ambition.
Swimming's a different matter. I know he could swim. As a boy I like to imagine him plunging into the angry waters of the Avon, as did Cassius once with Caesar in the Tiber. Only a practised swimmer could have written, as he does in the second scene of the first Act of the Scottish play: