'They don't love us, Poll,' said I. 'They don't love us at all.'
Some ridiculous antics followed. I can't remember the sequence. At one point, I know, I had to jump through a hoop while Polly stood on her head in the corner and Pompey Bum inspected her. At last the owners of the brothel professed themselves satisfied. It was to me that Lucy Negro turned, and she took me by the hand. 'You see, little pickerel,' said she, 'we do love you, and you will find out how much just as soon as the contract is signed.'
'To whom should we make payment?' said Pompey Bum. He was tossing a bag of money from hand to hand.
I very much wanted to piss. And I wanted to leave. But Polly was dancing about again on the table. 'Mr Bum and Miss Negro,' she cried, 'we belong to the river.'
'We can't pay the river,' Lucy Negro said. 'The brat must mean Mr Shakespeare.'
Pompey Bum, though, seemed delighted that the two of us should belong to the River Thames. 'River children! River children!' he chanted. 'They are children of the river! Down you come!'
When we came down off the table he wanted to know if we had come upstream or downstream. I said nothing. I just wanted to piss. Then he asked us if we had seen a boat with a white female figurehead and a captain by the name of William Shakespeare. A man without a memory, he said.
Polly put on a serious face. It didn't suit her. 'Yes, sir,' she said. 'I think I met the gentleman.'
'Liar!' I cried. 'You're just saying that to please them.'
But Polly insisted. 'He was at the lock above Alveston,' she went on. 'It was the day that Pickleherring went to the fair. Captain Shakespeare put a kiss in my hand and he asked me if I would stay with him until dark. I said I would. He smelt like trees in a forest. He said, "Tell me a story." So I told him about the swan that was cut open on Thomasina's birthday and they found a mirror inside it. It was a little mirror, with an ivory handle and a silver back. When you looked in it, you saw yourself clearer than you are. He didn't like that story.'
'That's our friend,' said Pompey Bum. 'Did he mention me?'
Polly shook her head. 'He didn't say much about himself,' she explained. 'But he liked me. He made me take all my clothes off and we played a wee game. All about me being a wolf and he was the chickens. I wished that Captain Shakespeare was my father.'
Pompey Bum and Lucy Negro were falling about. They seemed delighted by this story. As for me, I just wanted to have a good piss and the dream to end. You know how it is in some dreams - that you start to wake up in them. I was reaching that stage, being conscious that I wanted it to end. Meanwhile, Pompey Bum was asking Polly what the game was called, and Polly replied that the game was called PILLICOCK HILL.
I had had enough. 'Don't believe it, sir and madam!' I cried out. 'She's wanted to be deflowered for simply ages. Terrible she is. You can have no idea what her brothers have had to put up with. Anyway, you can't have me without her, so make up your minds.'
'Take them,' said Pompey Bum to Lucy Negro. 'What else is there to do when two lives come to join yours?'
'It's an odd story,' Lucy Negro said.
'You can say that for a week,' said Pompey Bum. 'You will still take them.'
But Lucy Negro was shaking her lovely head. 'I do not believe the girl's story,' she announced. 'William Shakespeare would never use a word like PILLICOCK.'
That's where you're wrong, lady, thought I to myself in the dream, for he uses that word in King Lear. But I was not going to tell her. Instead, I woke up and had a good piss in my chamber-pot. As I pissed I reflected that it is Lear's 'Twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters which prompts Edgar (outcast, and posing as the idiot Poor Tom) to chant: Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill.* PILLICOCK means the male generative organs, with pilli as the testicles and cock the penis. As for PILLICOCK HILL it is the Mount of Venus + the pudendum muliebre itself. So Pillicock sitting on Pillicock Hill describes the deed of darkness by which Lear's flesh begot his daughters. No doubt it meant the same in my foolish dream.
When I was finished pissing I heard Polly at work in the room below, but I did not want to look. Don't ask me why, sir. I just didn't feel like it.
That word PILLICOCK comes somewhere in one of John Florio's wordbooks, by the by, which is a source from which Mr Shakespeare drew many choice vocables. It comes also in my mentor Urquhart's translation of Rabelais, but that of course was after Shakespeare's time.
Marston has Post Haste have a word-hoard: Plenty of Old England's mother words. So he did, and only a fraction of it from Florio. Florio, for that matter, might have garnered PILLICOCK from Shakespeare, learning the word from him during the course of a game at tennis on Rizley's second-best court for all I know. It is not (I just looked) in my father's kidskin dictionary.
Since in my last chapter I disparaged Mr Ben Jonson's famous verses about Mr Shakespeare in the First Folio, it is only fair that now I should give you my own verses about Mr Shakespeare which I contributed to the Second Folio. These appeared there amongst the preliminary matter in 1632, but with no name attached at my request. As you will see, the verse turns on the degree to which Shakespeare is to be found rather in his works than in Droeshout's copper-plate engraving for the title-page. Here is my poem:
Upon the Effigies of my worthy Friend,
the Author Master William Shakespeare,
and his Works
Spectator, this life's shadow is. To see
The truer image and a livelier he
Turn reader. But observe his comic vein,
Laugh, and proceed next to a tragic strain,
Then weep. So when thou find'st two contraries,
Two different passions from thy rapt soul rise,
Say (who alone effect such wonders could)
Rare Shakespeare to the life thou dost behold.
* King Lear, Act III, Scene 4, lines 74-5.
Chapter Eighty-Three In which Mr Shakespeare plays a game at tennis
William Shakespeare and John Florio enjoyed a game at tennis. They played in a walled and roofed court belonging to the Earl of Southampton. This court was 110 feet long by 38 feet and 8 inches wide, though the floor measured but 96 feet long by 31 feet and 8 inches wide, the difference being the width of a roofed corridor, the 'penthouse' which runs along the two end walls and one of the side walls of all such arenas.
Across the middle of the court a tasselled rope is stretched, and I will tell you that the first object of the game is to strike the ball over this with a bat called a racquet. The rope is five feet high at the ends, and three feet six inches high in the middle, and divides the floor into two equal parts, the 'service' side and the 'hazard' side.
Sometimes I stood in the 'dedans' to watch them play. The dedans is an opening in the end wall on the service side, under the penthouse, where provision is made for spectators, who are protected by a net.
The game is very fierce. It goes like this.
The players decide who shall serve by spinning a racquet on its head. Mr Shakespeare would spin and Mr Florio would call 'rough' or 'smooth', the 'rough' side of the head of the racquet showing the knots of some of the lower strings. The winner takes the service side, service being an advantage.
The server may serve from any part of the court, and in any way that he thinks best to serve. (Mr Shakespeare would spin the ball high with his fingers and then hit it hard with his racquet as it came down.) The ball must then fly over the rope, and strike the side penthouse, and fall into the service-court. The opponent (or 'striker-out') tries to return the ball over the rope before it has touched the ground a second time. He may volley it if he can, or he may half-volley it. For a stroke to be 'good' it must be made before the second bound of the ball, and the ball must go over the rope (even if it brushes it), and the ball must not strike the wall above the play-line, nor touch the roof or rafters. The first point to be attained is thus to be sure of getting the ball over the rope, and the next to do so in such a way as to defeat your opponent's attempt to make a 'good' stroke in return.