Idle weeds choked the corn in the bad days: hardokes, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers. (And quite what those hardokes were I have no idea. In the Quarto of Lear the word is printed hor-docks. But he always made me say it out as hardokes. Yes, madam, Pickleherring played Cordelia.)
Well, I think that's quite enough pastoral for one night. The truth is I've got little to say about the country. The country doesn't exist, so far as I'm concerned. It is Nothing turned inside-out and painted green in spring and golden in the autumn. It is all illusion. All the same, I like it. I also like the town. Pickleherring is not hard to please, you see.
As for Mr Shakespeare, I once heard him give his opinion of Stratford-upon-Avon in four words. Three of them were Stratford-upon-Avon. The other was a verb he never used in his plays.*
But today I feel scurrile - idle, dull, and dry. Reader, you cannot think worse of me than I do of myself.
What am I? I am an antic actor now turned writer to be thought a polymath and get a paper-kingdom. This book is my common theatre. The subject of my discourse: William Shakespeare.
I remember a night not long after I first came to London in Mr Shakespeare's company. We were eating carp quick cooked in butter. I spilt some of their shitty grease on the front of my shirt. Instantly, seeing my embarrassment, Mr Shakespeare thrust the forefinger of his right hand into the hot dish and smeared the front of his shirt to look like mine. I never dreamt of such courtesy before. I have not seen it very often since.
Mr Shakespeare's face was always full of the vivacity of his mind. His habitual look was that of an aloof but sunny spirit. He was a man alive to his fingertips.
I was a witness to some of Mr Shakespeare's life. I was not much of an actor in any of it. Nor am I exactly his bard, though of course he is mine. He has been my guiding spirit all my days.
He was my master, and my genius. I am a dwarf. He was a giant. Yet a dwarf sitting or standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than the giant himself. So, telling you Shakespeare's story, I tell you at least one story which Shakespeare could not tell.
O my tautologies. O my toys and fopperies.
All that's too bold, though. (Not like the pancake country round about Stratford.)
This chapter has been a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills. The next one should be better. In it I'll have the birth of our hero for my theme.
* Though he does have Sir Hugh Evans allude to it punningly in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where he asks 'What is the focative case, William?' Mr Shakespeare informed me that this character he based on his Welsh master at the Stratford Grammar School.
Chapter Nine About the birth of Mr WS
The Misses Muchmore always used to claim that April was the cruellest month. I don't know why. Meg would speak of memory, and Merry of desire. 'Pinch him!' Meg squeaked. 'And burn him!' squealed Merry. Then they would strip and spank me in their parlour.
It was in April, cruel or not, that Mr WS was born and christened. Here's how it happened.
The first nightingale sings each year in the Forest of Arden on the 23rd of April. It was in the late evening of that day in the year of Our Lord 1564, after a day when all day April had been unpicking the blossoms on the whitethorn, a day when expert April had been unlocking the earliest blossoms on the whitethorn, a day when April with shy smiles had been unclenching the first fists of whitethorn blossom, that William Shakespeare, our hero, son of John, was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the shire of Warwick.
It was a Sunday and St George's Day.
At the coming forth of the babe the town clock stopped. The small hand pointed to heaven, the big hand to hell. It was half an hour before midnight when the bard was born.
The midwife, whose name was Gertrude, and who hailed from the neighbouring village of Snitterfield, cut the birth-cord with a sword she kept close for the purpose.
Then she kissed the caul that covered the baby's head.
'Here's one who will be fortunate,' she noted.
Then she kissed the black spot, no bigger than a sixpence, on the infant's left shoulder.
'And he's of the devil's party too,' she said.
This Gertrude was a small woman, plain and eager, an intense little mouse living in hope that a big tom-cat would one day jump on her. Blissfully shy, tremulously silent except when telling stories, suffering from piles and a need to be loved, she quivered through what passed for life in Warwickshire wearing a gown with a pattern of faint-green moss on it, her hair drawn up and coiled at the back of her head in a shape which suggested a bun, mittens on her paws, the eyes behind her spectacles on sharp look-out for symptoms of insincerity, moral facetiousness, or otherwise offensive brilliance in those she met.
She was serious and fussy, this Gertrude, liking sunsets and waterfalls, the kind of person afflicted with aphorisms in the presence of either - and that is all your author intends to say about her for now.
That's a good word that bun though. Have you noticed it's the simple words, the words we take for granted, that are strangest when you stare at them? Nobody really knows where bun comes from. Bugnets is French for little round loaves - lumps made of fine meal, oil or butter, and raisins. The Frogs eat them during Lent, but then France is a dog-hole. Still, there's an old French word bugne, meaning swelling, and this might have led to a puffed loaf (a bugnet), and thence to our good plain English BUN.
But as I say it's doubtful. One thing I do know for certain: In Scotland buns are sweeter. They put more sugar and spice in them there, the Scotch being sourer to start with.
It was Mr Shakespeare awakened me to language. But I think you won't find a bun in his plays nor in his poems. I like a buttered specimen myself to my breakfast.
Mary Shakespeare's labours had lasted seven days and seven nights. Her women were about her at the birth, but her husband busied himself outside in the shed where he sometimes cobbled slippers from his surplus whitleather. He was always on the make was Mr John Shakespeare. Now as he watched he saw the house catch fire and burn in flames that spired sky-high. He ran to the Avon with a bucket for water. But Gertrude came to the door of the house and cried: 'Be still, the child is born.' The house was not burnt, neither had a single flame harmed the inmates. John Shakespeare was dumbfounded, until he took thought and remembered his Bible, how Moses saw the burning bush - the flames that burnt yet consumed nothing. (Exodus iii. 2-4.)
Gertrude placed salt in the child's cradle and sewed a speck of iron into the seams of his blouse. The child was sained then. Tallow candles were lighted and whirled about the bed in which mother and infant lay. This whirling was done three times, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and in the direction in which the sun moved round the house.
A word about cauls. The old wives used to think they stopped you drowning. They used to sell them to sailors if they could. Haly how, sely how, a lucky cap, a holy hood, which midwives like Gertrude called a howdy or a howdy-wife.
According to some, and not all of them fools, the keeper of a caul would know the health of the person who was born in it. If firm and crisp the caul, then he (or she) alive and well. If wet or loose or slack, then dead or ill. The colour of the caul was important also. Black caul, bad luck. Red caul, all that is good. Diadumenus was born with a caul. He became emperor.
The poet William Shakespeare came veiled into this world, then, for his head, his face, and the foreparts of his body, all were covered with such a thin kell, or skin.