Shakespeare never forgot the scene. Among the references to it in his plays I have noted the following:
What a Herod of Jewry is this! (Merry Wives, II, 1, 20.)
It out-herods Herod! (Hamlet, III, 2, 16.)
To whom Herod of Jewry may do homage (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 2, 28.)
Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you / But when you are well pleased (Ibid., Ill, 3, 3.)
Another scene in the same play that must have deeply affected the boy William is the slaughter of the children by Herod's soldiers, when the women fight with pot-ladles to repulse them. He refers to it in Henry V: As did the wives of Jewry at Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen (III, 3, 41.)
Was John Shakespeare sober when he summoned real actors to Stratford? Perhaps, madam. But we may doubt if he was sober when they left. Performances took place in the yard of one of the inns - either the Bear, or the Swan, or the Falcon. I have seen from the corporation records that it was during John Shakespeare's time as high bailiff that companies of London actors came to town for the first time - the Queen's Players, the best in the kingdom, and the Earl of Worcester's Players, not quite so good. (The first got nine shillings from Stratford by way of reward, the second only one shilling.)
Then, in 1577, the Earl of Leicester's Players came, under the direction of Mr James Burbage, complete with anchor on his thigh and other accoutrements. Don't get me wrong, gentle reader. Old Burbage was a perfectly sufficient actor in his day, though not a patch on his son Richard. The plays were all piss and wind in those early times, of course, compared with what was to come in the Nineties, and a lot of the early players won their reputations merely from an ability to strut and shout and point their codpieces in the general direction of the audience.
Still, no doubt little Willy was impressed. He may even have thought that his dreams were coming to town. Dressed in satin and lace, the players would enter Stratford by Clopton Bridge, advancing up Bridge Street. You can be sure there was a trumpeter. (In those days there were always trumpeters.) Picture that trumpeter, then, as the boy Shakespeare must have seen him: all in scarlet embroidered with gold, wheeling his horse about where Wood Street and Mere Street converge, whilst the drummer beside him beat his drum at the run.
The play was an anti-climax after that.
Sober or drunk, or somewhere in between, we can be sure that John Shakespeare showed the actors such courtesies as he could. And that both he and his son found their performances preferable to what otherwise passed for public entertainment in Stratford-upon-Avon - namely, the royal proclamations read and the sermons sometimes preached at the High Cross which stands at the north end of Bridge Street. (Stocks, pillory, and whipping-post are set near by so that the ears of those undergoing punishment might also be edified.)
I say that the play was an anti-climax after the drama of the procession, but that leaves out of account the fact that the least and crudest play has words in it, that plays indeed are made of words all through, and that language must already have been food and drink to the boy Shakespeare. Turn up the prologue to The Taming of the Shrew and you will see instantly how excited he would have been at the arrival of a troupe of travelling players. To read it is to be transported back to Stratford at the point where Leicester's servants must have turned his mind towards the theatre in its infancy. (Madam, I mean his infancy and the theatre's, for they shared a common period of nurture.) That prologue, by the by, brings us straight into the very neighbourhood where Shakespeare's mother was brought up. The characters are local men and women he knew well, and who are still remembered in Warwickshire: Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, her servant Cicely, and the famous village drunkard, Christopher Sly. Sly describes himself as 'Old Sly's son of Burton Heath'. In fact, Burton Heath is Barton-on-the-Heath, the home of William's aunt Joan (one of those Lamberts I want to keep out of the story). For all I know, Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell were real people too. They sound as if they might have been. John Naps certainly was. You'll meet him in my next chapter.
I wonder what age William Shakespeare was when bored by bombast he conceived the great idea of one day there being a play that has a man in it who simply wanders on stage with his dog, and sits down on the ground, and takes off his shoes, and scratches his feet, and starts to tell us stories about the dog and his shoes and his troubles? 'This shoe is my father,' he says. 'No, this left shoe is my father,' he says. 'No, no, this left shoe is my mother,' he says. And it's all about as far away from out-herodding Herod as anyone could imagine.
Friends, no one before the late Mr Shakespeare put real true things like Launce and his dog on the stage. Forgive an old man his whimsey. Pickleherring likes to think that WS first entertained such dreams of the waking world with his father warm beside him in the press, perhaps at Coventry, perhaps at Stratford, but in whichever place with John Shakespeare sober.
Chapter Forty Jack Naps of Greece: his story
It was in the early summer of 1578 that Martin Frobisher, that great mariner, set sail on his third quest for the North-West Passage. Life must have seemed fair and full of promise for Shakespeare then, too. He was fourteen years old, and the star of the grammar school. He might well have expected to benefit by being awarded one of the scholarships which bridge-building Clopton had established for the students of his town. The gates of the University of Oxford would then have been open to Will. But now something happened which dashed such hopes on the rocks. John Shakespeare fell.
The fall of Mr John Shakespeare is no laughing matter. All the same, here are two stories his daughter told me, with a wild laugh. (She was an odd woman, Mrs Haft, but yet there is no reason to disbelieve her testimony, and there was as I've said a wild streak in all the Shakespeares.) These stories demonstrate more vividly than the fines I could otherwise cite from the municipal accounts just how addiction to strong drink brought about the father's downfall.
John Shakespeare falls asleep outside the ale-house. He's drunk and his little mate is hanging out. Two of Heicroft's choirboys come by and tie a red ribbon on it. When John Shakespeare wakes up and sees the ribbon he says to his prick: 'God knows where you've been or what you've been up to, but I'm glad you won first prize!'
Second story. John Shakespeare's drunk, as usual, and passing by Holy Trinity Church, when who should he meet but Emma Careless. Quick as a flash, he's got his John Thomas out, and he's showing it to her. 'Half-a-crown,' he says, 'if you rub this for me.' 'Rub it yourself,' says the vicar's wife, 'for nothing.' John Shakespeare thinks this over, and concludes that it sounds reasonable. So he performs the bargain while she watches.
After these, and other misadventures, it is no wonder the butcher's business collapsed. He no longer paid his tax for the poor of the parish. 'I am one of the poor of the parish,' he said, and withdrew his son from school. Will would have been asked to leave anyway, when Mrs Heicroft told her husband.