I am citing all this, besides, because otherwise such information might be lost for ever, along with the whole play of More. The other plays, early and late, you can read for yourself in the Folio. Pickleherring seeks always to give you what you cannot get from any other source.
The lines being the draft of Mr Shakespeare's contribution as it stood before the whole went to the copyist, they tell us even more about his methods. It is plain, for example, that he was a careless contributor to the work in hand - he shows no respect for the play as a whole, distributing his speeches among the rioters with such titles as Other, instead of the name of a character. In one passage, where his usual fluency dries up, he leaves two and a half lines so tangled and confused that the book-keeper (Mr Burbage?) has struck them out and substituted a half-line of his own.
I mean that passage where Shakespeare first writes:
to kneel to be forgiven
Is safer war than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot; why even your war
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
Then (perhaps observing that he has used the word WAR in two successive lines) he strikes out the second 'war' and substitutes the word HURLY, a favourite synonym of his to cover all forms of contention, which he uses in at least three other plays.* The lines now read:
to kneel to be forgiven
Is safer war than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot; why even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
That seems perfectly put to your author, but still it did not satisfy Mr Shakespeare, because he then inserts after the word RIOT, the phrase 'In, in to your obedience', perhaps wanting More to be more vigorous and direct. However, it is obvious that this pleases him no better, for he did not relate it to what followed, but instead gives up, leaving the passage a jumble as it stands. It is this that Mr Burbage, unable to solve the difficulty, has drawn his pen through, for there in quite another hand we see the tame and unShakespearean:
Tell me but this.
Now because these manuscript pages reveal much of Mr Shakespeare's method of composing, and the better to preserve them in context for a possible posterity, I intend to paste one of them into my book. Thus, if the two in the box are lost then this one may survive, and vice versa.
I will offer two general observations about them.
First, by their very carelessness (sometimes he even scribbles Oth and O to indicate successive speakers whose names he can't be bothered with) they suggest that Shakespeare already at the time of their writing held such a high place among his fellows that they recognised his superior talent by indulging him. They may have been so grateful that he deigned to contribute to the More play that they did not even complain when he scrawled Moo as a cipher for Sir Thomas More.
Second, with the one exception examined above, there are few alterations. You can see where he sometimes struck out a word, or the start of a word, almost as soon as he had written it, following on at once with his second thought. All this is evidence of Mr Shakespeare's quick hand and quicker brain, his fertility and his facility. You will see that sometimes his hand stumbled, but less often his thought - as when he starts to write the word NUMBER with mu, and then writes in instead of NO. As to actual corrections, all of them involve the substitution of better words within the lines: watery is changed to sorry, help to advantage, god to he, only to solely.
All this evidence of speed and ease in composition bears out, of course, what Mr Heminges and Mr Condell said in their address 'To the Great Variety of Readers' in the Folio - that Mr Shakespeare's mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with such easiness that 'we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.' Pickleherring can confirm this. When my master's mind was white-hot it was a wonder that the page did not catch fire beneath his hand, so fast his pen ran. He wrote the first two acts of Macbeth in a single day. (All the same, he went on writing Hamlet all his life.) Here, then, is the page from the More for you to see these things, dear reader, with your own eyes:
* Act I, Scene 3, lines 75-137.
* Taming of the Shrew, King John - and I forget the other.
Chapter Sixty-Five A look at William Shakespeare
Imagine William Shakespeare in his prime. It is the April of 1594, say, and he is thirty years old today. He might be at his lodgings in London, though if he is there will be little enough for him to do here, the theatres having been shut down for over a year on account of the worst outbreak of the plague in living memory. (Fifteen thousand persons died of it in the last twelve months.) More likely, then, that he is in the provinces with his Company; or perhaps staying at Titchfield, the country house of his patron the Earl of Southampton; or he might even be at home with his wife and their three children ...
The place is not important. Where he is does not matter.
It is the face of William Shakespeare that I want you to look at.
It is a frank face, though it keeps many secrets. Fair-skinned, fresh-cheeked, it is a face that blushes easily to reveal its owner's heart. It is a good-looking face, with firm, delicate features, and a gaze both calm and observant under brows set low.
It is a worldly face: sensual, sceptical, alert. The eyes are blue, and they dance with bright amusement most of the time. When they do not, the look they give you is straight and unwavering. He has a somewhat drooping lower lip.
That foolish hanging of his nether lip - I think he said he got it from his mother. His forehead, though, is splendid. Like the dome of an observatory.
The most singular feature, no doubt, is the poet's nose. It is broader at the nostrils than down the straight, solid bridge. It is tip-tilted (slightly), and those nostrils arch quickly at the least unpleasant smell. All Mr Shakespeare's senses are acute, but you can see his sense of smell at work, thanks to that singular nose. He is most sensitive to dirt and evil odours. Put him in a room with a spaniel and a tainted bone and watch the way his eyes water and his nose twitches. His senses revolt from the way dogs are fed at table. But if he is your guest, he will say nothing. He is very polite. He is very 'After you'.
There is a small mole high on his left cheek.
I said his brow was splendid, and so it is. His hair, though, soft and brown, is receding from the forehead. Cheeks and chin are firmly moulded. He has downy moustaches and a small brown tuft of beard. Although the lower lip is more prominent than the upper, both are finely shaped. Their most characteristic expression is a faint ironic smile.
I only ever saw two portraits that came near doing this face justice. The first, the frontispiece of the Folio, that immortal piece of inferior engraving by Martin Droeshout. It is inferior, but it catches the man I knew. The other's that Stratford bust created by Gerard Jannsen, which (again) is no great work of art, but a pretty good likeness to how Mr Shakespeare looked in his later years. Note that both the Droeshout engraving and the Jannsen bust won the approval of those who knew him best - in the first instance, his fellow players; in the second, his widow and his daughters, and his sister. Two images of the Shakespeare I knew and loved.