Reader, I say this is wrong.
What is wrong with it is that Parolles's cynicism suits Parolles, and Adriana belongs in her play. In other words, these things fit where they are supposed to fit, they belong where they are, and they tell us nothing about the man who wrote them save that he was a good craftsman as well as a good observer of human character. The fact is that if you take the work of a dramatist with such a wide range as Shakespeare then you can find within it items which when extracted could be used to prove anything at all if applied to his biography.
My method in this book is different in kind.
I only use those bits that do not fit.
For example, that shepherd's quite irrelevant personal outburst about the significance of attaining the age of twenty-three.
For example, the land-locked philosophical Jaques suddenly introducing REMAINDER BISCUIT into his account of the fool he has met in the Forest of Arden.
For example, Prince Hamlet on the very great perils of drunkenness.
For example, Juliet's nurse counting the years from the time of an earthquake that killed a mouse and rattled some dove-cotes in Stratford.
For example, the mistaken idea that you can cheat at chess.
These things do not belong where our playwright puts them.
They neither sit well in context, nor can it be claimed that they are alien remnants left over from the sources behind their plays. (You will find no old sea-biscuits in Ralph Holinshed.)
Your author picks up on such items because he believes that because they do not belong in their plays then they must belong to something else.
And the something else they must belong to is the life of the man who wrote those plays, the late Mr William Shakespeare.
Pickleherring is writing the Life of William Shakespeare for you now. So he snaps up all these previously unconsidered trifles that do not fit in the works where they occur, and he seeks to show where they fit in the drama of the life.
Thus, as the well-spurred Aristotle would say, the Poetics of this book that you are reading.
What do you mean, madam - you feel that you will have to take a bath?
Chapter Fifty-Nine What Shakespeare did when first he came to London
There are those who say we do not know what Shakespeare did when he first came to London. But I say we do. Lie back in your bath-tub, madam, and Pickleherring will tell you.
The best information comes always from the enemy. Never trust a man's friends to give you the plain truth about his life. It is those who would deny or decry his way in the world who can invariably be relied upon to provide the clearest notions of what he has been doing.
So - Let us speed forward some five years from the time of Mr Shakespeare's coming to London. It is the night of the 2nd day of September, 1592, and here in this garret in Eastcheap a man is dying. The plague rages through London, but it is not the plague that is killing him. He sits at his table and scribbles. He clutches his guts. He has a long red beard tugged and twisted into a point, and on his head he has crammed two caps, one Oxford, one Cambridge, the only things that remain in his life to remind him that once he had his Master of Arts degree from both those universities. His name is Robert Greene.
He has at his elbow a penny pot of malmsey. The shirt on his back is the shirt of his mistress's husband, borrowed for him to wear while she scrubs out the lice from his own shirt. Tomorrow morning, when she finds him dead, this good kindly woman, Mrs Isam, will crown Greene's poor head with a garland of bays. Then she will sell his sword to pay for his winding sheet (four shillings). The charge for his burial in the new churchyard near Bedlam will be borne by her husband (six shillings and fourpence).
Robert Greene is a writer, a man of letters. But writers live on hope, and he has none left. Once, this unhappy hack was almost famous. His Menaphon, published three years ago, was even reprinted. He called it Greene's Arcadia that second time around. Before that, he wrote a novel called Pandosto, which will one day provide the plot for The Winter's Tale. He has written plays as well, but now no one will put them on, even though he offers each one to two companies at the same time. His Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, once popular, would get laughed off the stage in these more sophisticated days. At thirty-four years old, Greene's considered a has-been, an umquhile man.
Like many in his case, Robert Greene has turned to religion. Now, in this last night of his life, he is at work on a diatribe, cast in the form of a letter to his 'fellow scholars', in which he intends to expose the villainies of the contemporary literary world. He can yark up a pamphlet like this in a day and a night. All it takes is a little self-righteousness and a great deal of alcohol, for Greene is an evangelist. The name of his final evangel is A Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance. (No, not a catchy title, I agree.)
Mr Greene has a good word for actors. He has four good words, in fact, each of them prompted by our reluctance to do his plays. He calls us 'apes' and 'peasants'. He calls us 'painted monsters'. But the main targets for his wrath are his fellow writers, especially those young rival dramatists whose successes he blames for his own failure. Amongst these there are two who fill him up with a particular angry vitriol. The first is Mr Christopher Marlowe, although Greene cannot bring himself to name his name, soundly berated on account of his notorious atheism. The second is another un-named fellow, an even viler villain, who inspires our dying moralist to an apoplectic outburst of disgust.
Pass me that sponge, madam. I will do your back.
What does Greene say? Here is what he says:
'There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.'
He then goes on to call this arch-enemy of all that is good a 'rude groom', after warning his fellow writers not to acquaint him with their intentions lest he should steal them.
Yes, madam, Shake-scene is Shakespeare.
Of course I am sure. That bit about his heart being wrapt in a Player's hide is a parody of a line in the third part of his Henry VI - all Greene has done is substitute the word Player for the word woman. What he is saying is that Shakespeare is an animal disguised as an actor. What he is saying is that Shakespeare is also a thief - in Horace's third epistle, the crow is the symbol of plagiarism. What Greene is saying is that this hated creature has tricked his way into the confidence of the other actors and writers, in order to mimic their styles and appropriate their works.
Some unguents? Mmm, assuredly.
Yes, madam, Greene is saying that Shakespeare is a conceited little upstart. But he's telling us more than that. He's telling us, more or less, exactly what Shakespeare has been doing since he came to London. Unpick each of his insults and it gives you a job.
Take, first, that rude groom ... Well, in the time of Elizabeth, coaches being yet uncommon, and hired coaches not at all in use, those who were too proud, too tender, or too idle to walk, went on horseback to any distant business or diversion. Many came on horseback to the play, and when Shakespeare fled to London from the terror of a criminal prosecution, I have had it from no less an authority than Sir William Davenant, our Poet Laureate, his own godson, that the great man's first expedient was to wait at the door of the playhouse, and hold the horses of those that had no servants, that they might be ready again after the performance. In this office he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness, indeed, that in a short time every man as he alighted called for 'Will Shakespeare!' and scarcely any other waiter was trusted with a horse while Will Shakespeare could be had. This was the first dawn of a better fortune, madam. Because our Will was always his father's son, with an eye to the easier way and the better profits, and in no time at all, finding more horses put into his hand than he could hold, he hired a team of boys to wait outside the theatre under his inspection, who, when 'Will Shakespeare!' was summoned, were taught to present themselves immediately, saying, 'I am Shakespeare's boy, sir!' Thus, our Will was not long a rude groom himself, but doubtless it was in that office that Greene first made his acquaintance. Besides, according to his godson, for as long as the practice of riding to the playhouse continued, the waiters that held the horses retained the appellation of Shakespeare's Boys.