Reader, I was well endowed. Not only that, but I got my erections at the drop of a hat, or the turn of an ankle, in those days, and I could in no wise prevent myself from getting them at inopportune moments. This proved an increasing embarrassment, though in a perverse way I reckon it added a spice to my performance of certain parts. For instance, Lady Macbeth, when she has to call upon the spirits to unsex her.
Anyway, one evening, when we were doing Hamlet, and I was about to trip on stage for the final scene as Ophelia, scattering rosemary and rue and doing my mad bit, I found to my dismay that unseen I was yet crescive in my faculty. In other words, my cock was sticking up in my gown like a little truncheon. Worse, I had just burnt my hand on one of the stage lamps and the skin on the palm was raw and giving me agony. There was no way I could jerk off in the usual fashion, to ensure the smooth performance of my role.
I was standing there, in misery, in the wings, with my Ophelia dress disfigured at the front by this throbbing erection, which seemed to get worse by the moment as I tried to will it down, wringing my hands together with a damp cloth, when Mr Shakespeare himself appeared beside me, still wearing his costume as the Ghost.
'You can't go on like that, boy,' he said, pointing.
'No, sir! Sorry, sir!' I said.
'So what are you going to do about it?' Mr Shakespeare demanded.
I explained, very quickly, my singular predicament.
Mr Shakespeare's face cracked into a smile through its heavy Ghost make-up. 'I see,' said he. 'Well, in that case there's only one thing for it ...'
He took me in hand, sir. He cherished me. He stirred me up and tickled me. Then he disedged me.
That's right, madam. William Shakespeare proceeded to bring my erection down by his own manual ministrations.
It was after this little incident that he wrote sonnet 20, the one that begins
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the Master-Mistress of my passion ...
In it, he goes on to say that I was first created to be a woman, till nature fell a-doting over me and added to my person 'one thing' (to his purpose nothing); in a word, my prick:
But since she prickt thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
Notice, if you please, that he says my penis is no use to him. And know from this that Mr Shakespeare was no sodomite, though some have said he was. He played with my pintle when I was in female costume, that is all, for the play's sake. He tossed me off quickly before I went on stage.
I must admit that I do not know if it was altogether for the sake of art (or appearance) that he did the same thing to me when I was garbed in that doublet and hose in which I played Rosalind playing the part of a boy. Both my male and my female costumes in that role seemed much to his liking. Quite often, when we were doing As You Like It, he would unpack my prick from my doublet or my petticoats, and tease it and kiss it and fondle it and dandle it. Invariably, he brought me off like this. I never touched him, nor was I required to.
Much of this, as I have explained, was for professional purposes. But some (I must confess) seemed no such thing. He appeared addicted for a while to certain parts of mine - for example, Cleopatra and Juliet, as well as Rosalind. As for the last named, I have even wondered sometimes if that play's title should be seen as a private joke between us. As You Like It. It was certainly as he liked it. But I did too.
O my balls, O my little witnesses, William Shakespeare took you both in hand. He called us to a reckoning.
Ah well, friends, all that was long ago and (as Mr Marlowe would have said) in another country, and besides the wench is dead - or at least defunct.
Meanwhile, back in the world of the sonnets, Rizley was having carnal knowledge of the poet's mistress - the so-called Dark Lady, she whose eyes were nothing like the sun, and who had bad breath. And the tedious Earl was doing this not because he wanted her, but because he knew that Mr Shakespeare wanted her. Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her, as it says in sonnet 42. I doubt if Rizley was even excited by the triangle. Like Angelo in Measure for Measure when he made water his urine was congealed ice.
But who was the Dark Lady?
That is the question I shall answer next.
Chapter Seventy-Three The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 1
Some say the Dark Lady of the sonnets was a woman named Mary Fitton.
This Mary Fitton was one of Queen Elizabeth's maids of honour, a coveted position she first assumed at the age of seventeen, though even by then she had little honour left and was probably not a maid. She owed her advancement to Sir William Knollys, a friend of her father's. Knollys, a married man, was besotted with this girl who was thirty years his junior. He made a laughing-stock of himself by his pursuit of her, even dyeing his beard in a pathetic attempt to look young.
Miss Mary had a mania for men. She was of good ancestry, highly cultured, sweet-natured, very modest-looking, and blushed easily. Yet she was always the terror of her family. It was said that from the age of twelve she had been in the habit of masturbating her brothers. The whole Court knew that she performed the same office for Knollys, since the fool boasted of it. She always wore a fur glove for the act, he said, and silver bracelets which he had given her for her fifteenth birthday. Her bracelets tinkled as she played the harlot with him. Old Knollys adored it.
Mary Fitton was not long at Court before making herself the cause of an even greater scandal. She fell pregnant by William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. It is said that she used to slip out of Elizabeth's chambers to meet her lover in the dead of night, disguised as a man in a long white cloak, with her lady-in-waiting's skirts tucked up. Pembroke had her regularly on a tomb in Westminster churchyard - Will Kempe, that lugubrious flea, once pointed it out to me, though God knows how he knew which one it was. The influence of the tomb could not have been good for her. Her unfortunate infant died soon after birth. Pembroke behaved swinishly throughout, refusing to marry the mother of his child, even though the Queen in her usual fashion took this as a personal insult and packed him off to the Fleet Prison for a spell in an attempt to concentrate his mind upon the matter.
Miss Mary then became the mistress of Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, who took her to sea with him in the garb of a cabin-boy. After he died, worn out with voyaging, in 1605, she found a husband of her own at last, a retired sea captain called Polwhele, with one leg, and the rest of her life was Cornish and respectable.
Mary Fitton's claim to Dark Lady status rests on no more, in reality, than the fame and the scandal of the way men of all ages flocked to her like moths to a candleflame when she was young.
I never heard the late Mr Shakespeare so much as mention her, though he would have known her name, and she may have crossed his mind from time to time when he was not busy.
I saw this lady once myself, at a bear-baiting in the Paris Garden, when the great bear Sackerson was in his prime. She was eating tarts beneath the smoke-dried leaves. She had a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of curls falling on each side of her face under a shepherdess's hat. She had big, bright eyes.
Unfortunately for history, those curls were soft and fair - not at all like the black wires which Shakespeare mentions as growing on the head of his mistress in sonnet 130. As for those eyes: in sonnet 127 the mistress's eyes are described as raven black, but the eyes I saw at the bear-baiting were not only bright, they were grey as squirrels.