Soap of Alicante? Yes! Yes! Yes!
Now then, once he got a foot inside the theatre, Shakespeare lost no time in becoming an actor, even though he was a rude, untutored country boy in the estimation of a university wit like Mr Robert Greene. That, surely, is one of the things Greene means by calling him an upstart Crow? Never forget, madam, that as I think I may have told you, your Mr Shakespeare was a handsome, well-shaped man, and of a smooth and ready wit, and as you might readily imagine (lying there in your spindrift of frothy oils) he made a very tolerable player, though he rarely appeared in the main parts in his own plays - Prospero being the exception which proves my rule. However, able as he was at bombasting out a blank verse in this next profession of actor, it was not long again before our Shakespeare managed to convince Mr James Burbage that he would be even better employed as a play-patcher, a reviser and refurbisher of old plays, Mr Greene's no doubt among them. Just picture it for yourself: The young actor protesting, 'I can't say this stuff! How about if I said this instead?' and going on to transmute Greene's verbal base metal into pure Shakespearean gold as he stood on the spot. Imagine the great Mr Robert Greene, M.A. of two universities, having to submit to the indignity of finding his plays improved and his scansion corrected by this upstart he had first but half-noticed as he chucked him the reins when he found time to pay a visit to the playhouse! No wonder he calls Shakespeare an absolute Johannes fac totum, a horrible Jack-of-all-trades, groom turned actor, actor turned play-patcher, play-patcher turned play-maker, play-maker who in his own conceit is now reckoned the only Shake-scene in the country - which is to say, by this summer of '92, as Greene sits a-dying, the top playwright, the new man, the one who has stolen everyone else's thunder, and replaced Mr Greene and his friends in the favour of the audiences. Perhaps the most bitter pill is that Greene knows in his guts that it is true, and that this Shake-scene is his better-in every way?
Well, yes, madam, I agree that Robert Greene's prose is turgid stuff. I did not mean to spoil your lovely bath. Some fellows used words like soap in those far-off days. Euphuism, they called it. You employ a lot of rhetorical devices, such as antithesis and homoeoteleuton and paranomasia. You make elaborate comparisons and stir it all up with far-fetched metaphors without regard to any canon of verisimilitude. It is a highly analytical style, madam, which ceaselessly dissects and catalogues, compares and contrasts. It aspires thereby to represent the polite discourse of urbane and elegant persons.
Urbane, madam, and elegant, that is what I said. It was what we would call 'all the rage', then. It made thin thought seem of substance, so its writers believed. Even Mr Shakespeare tried it briefly, in his early days, though by the time of Love's Labour's Lost he is satirising such affectations. He soon pared himself of any tendency in that direction, and spared us all. The more you have to say the plainer you say it.
Right. From Greene's Groatsworth we learn that when Shakespeare first came to London he was first a groom, and then an actor, and then a Jack-of-all-trades about the theatre, and that by the summer of 1592, when he was twenty-eight years old, he was already popular enough to be considered an enviable rival by at least one other dramatist. Greene died, and his pamphlet was published. Evidently Shakespeare and his friends complained, for Henry Chettle, who had prepared the Groatsworth for the press, then offered a handsome sort of apology, saying that he had now met Shakespeare, and found him not like Greene's libels, but an amiable gentleman altogether, and--
No, madam, I did not say I had murdered Robert Greene.
I do assure you, madam, I claimed no such thing!
Look again at that conclusion to Chapter Forty-Nine, then. You will see that what I say--There, you have it! Pickle herring killed Mr Greene. A great surfeit of the buggers.
A week or so previous, do you see, he had sat down with his friend Thomas Nashe and their acquaintance William Monox to a terrible banquet of my little namesakes, washed down with tankards of strong Rhenish wine. At once Greene fell sick. That was too rich a diet for his diseased kidneys, all poisoned as they were by his jealousy of Shakespeare. (A thing which Dr Walter Warner deemed well possible - that men have been rotted away within by their own hates.)
Greene never recovered from those pickle herring. I claim no credit for the poor hack's death. I was but nine lamb-like years of age when all this happened, and still in the tender care of the Misses Muchmore, living as you may remember by a far fen.
Now, with your permission, madam, let me rub your breasts dry with this nice big fleecy white towel--
Chapter Sixty In which Pickleherring eats an egg in honour of Mr Shakespeare
Today was St George's Day, which day I always keep. This particular St George's Day I had especial cause to honour. It was fifty years ago today - 23rd April, 1616 - that the poet William Shakespeare breathed his last.
Anne brought me another egg, and she dressed my chamber! She fetched also a pitcher of cold fresh water, plus a little bowl of suckets. When I asked her if this was in honour of St George or Mr Shakespeare, she simply shook her head and stamped her foot. Our English patron saint, I fear, means nothing to this sweet witch. And I do not think she had heard of Mr Shakespeare.
For once, I nothing cared, to encounter such ignorance. I pinned a clean napkin before me, and I put on a pair of white Holland sleeves, which reached to my elbows. I ate my egg with relish, even the white part, and offered my guest a spoon of it, but she would not.
She had seated herself on a stack of my used boxes by the window. She showed not the least curiousness concerning their contents, nor in anything else in this room, for all that I could see. Yet how strange it must all seem to my whore-child's eyes! They are big and blue, by the by, with long dark lashes which she flutters prettily. Her ankles, when she sate herself, I perceived very neat and slender in her white silk stockings. (But your author knew that already, and so do you.)