Lucy Negro appeared before the Queen's Bench, that year I first came to London, charged with keeping a house of ill repute. Her friends in high places kept her out of jail on this occasion. Later she was not so fortunate. In January 1600, she was sentenced to a spell in the Bridewell, though even then strings were pulled and she was spared the usual carting through the streets. Her name appears on the warrant as 'Morgan or Parker'.
She died in 1610 - of the pox, it was said. She was a queen bee that had buzzed herself to death. It was bruited about that she had the pox as early as 1595, and that she had stung others along the way. It is possible that Mr Shakespeare caught the foul disease from her. That would explain some of the vehemence of his expressions in her regard. It is possible also that Lucy Negro gave him, first, blains, and then the Neapolitan bone-ache, or (as some call it) the malady of France. In short - sigh, Phyllis!
Lucy Negro died a Papist, so I have it on good authority. May her strange soul rest in peace. I thought her, sir, a not dishonest woman. Her house was like no other I was ever inside.
There are several epitaphs, of which I quote one by Davies of Hereford as being typicaclass="underline"
Such a beginning, such an end. This I'll not applaud.
For Luce did like a whore begin, but ended like a bawd.
But we can't leave things there, with such hobbling moral comment. Not for one who was in many ways the mistress of her craft. Better to quote Mr Shakespeare's reference to Mrs Overdone in Measure for Measure as 'a bawd of eleven years' continuance'. Was he thinking of Lucy Negro when he wrote that? Measure for Measure was first performed at Court at the Christmas festivities of 1604, and it was then about eleven years since Lucy Negro first set up her house in St John Street.
What more is there to say of such a woman? Like Cybele, her forehead was crowned with the twin towers of the impossible, those strange second thoughts of all the twice-born in the world. Apuleius, the African from Madaura, had his Lucius the Ass blessed with a vision of her. He called her Queen Isis. Others have called her Ceres and Hecate, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Bellona, Proserpine, Juno, Aphrodite. These are all one. In London, for a spell, she was known as Lucy Negro. She revelled in cynical songs and expressions, and in lascivious attitudes and gestures, and she came among her followers with a whip, yet she was in her heart what she said she was, a girl-child who had been carried in a sheet on her mother's back, a KINCHIN-MORT. She would furiously demand coitus, yet she gave herself for love because she loved it. Her desire for sexual gratification seemed unlimited, yet there was that in her which lifted her high above her body threshing on the bed, and crowned her head with stars, and made a poet love her and adore her. Like Messalina she was driven to prostitution perhaps in an attempt to find satisfaction and relief with one man after another, yet she became for William Shakespeare his most demanding Muse.
Sometimes I think that Mr Shakespeare lived a life of allegory, and that his work was a commentary upon it. When I think that I think of Lucy Negro. The women in his plays all flow from her. As for the sonnets, they are full of the conflict of the masculine and the feminine, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and their resolution is the interweaving and fusion of those two great forces. William Shakespeare learnt most of Dionysus in the house of Lucy Negro.
'Not many men amuse me by meaning to,' she said once, when I displeased her.
I think that Mr Shakespeare was one of those exceptions. I hope at the end, at least, she knew his worth.
Let Shakespeare's disciple John Weever have the last rhymed word on the subject of Lucy Negro. Among his epigrams there are verses about a woman he calls Byrrha which I am sure are about the mistress of that house in St John Street, Clerkenwelclass="underline"
Is Byrrha brown? Who doth the question ask?
Her face is pure as ebony, jet-black.
It's hard to know her face from her fair mask;
Beauty in her seems beauty still to lack.
Nay, she's snow-white, but for that russet skin,
Which like a veil doth keep her whiteness in.
Weever was in many respects a weevil, but I always found this moving. He must have followed Mr Shakespeare to the whore-house, and worshipped the Dark Lady from afar.
Chapter Seventy-Eight Of eggs and Richard Burbage
Anne brought me two more eggs. And she told me her name. It is not Anne exactly. It is Polly!
All this has left me too excited to start writing today's chapter of my Life of the late Mr Shakespeare, which should be on the subject of some of the leading actors in our Company, and particularly Mr Richard Burbage. So I'll leave that for a moment. Here is what happened.
Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, the 6th of August. This is a feast day I have always kept. I love the idea of Christ's shiningness passing from his soul to his body, as he stood on Mount Tabor before St Peter, St James, and St John. The way Luke describes it in his Gospel* it must have been like the atmosphere when suddenly lit up passingly by the sun. As such, a miracle of that kind I can most readily venerate - unlike, for example, Christ's walking on the waves of the sea.
I never tasted fish nor flesh since Jane died. I never drank either wine or any beer. My chief food is oatmeal boiled with water, which some call gruel; and in summer, now and then, a salad of some cool choice herbs which I purchase of Pompey Bum. For dainties, or when I would feast myself, upon a high day such as this, I like to eat the yolk of a hen's egg, if I can. And what bread I eat, I cut out the middle part of the loaf, but of the crust I never taste. Now and then, when my stomach serves me, I eat some suckets - dried sugar-plums. But more commonly I have my mulberries.
Knowing my liking for yolks on such a day as this, you can imagine my delight when I opened my door to a gentle knock and found my whore-child standing there with a basket on her arm and a crisp white linen cloth folded over the basket. I knew at a glance what was under that napkin.
'Why do you bring me these gifts?' I made bold to ask her.
'Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow,' the sweet girl replied.
This I found extraordinary. I asked her, had she heard of Rabelais? Of course, she had not. Yet it comes in his third book, the self-same saying: Ad praesens ova, cras pullis sunt meliora. It is when Bridlegoose is going on about the scribes and scriveners. Perhaps it is one of those proverbs you get in several languages.
Anne looked so innocent, standing there with her little wicker basket. She was wearing a kirtle, grass-green, that came down to her ankles. It was almost impossible to associate this visitor with the naked nymph I had watched at Sapphic work on the body of the Countess. All the same, memories of that other sweetness did float into my mind as she flitted about the room.
I gave her a pickled mulberry. Against my window, the sunlight making a black bonfire of her hair, she leant and sucked it prettily, and pronounced it good. Her pleasure surprised me, for I do not think she would lie for the sake of politeness. I had supposed the last mulberry was not to her tender taste.