Not that everyone in the Mountjoy household considered him respectable. The Mountjoys kept a cook called Comfort Ballantine, a formidable woman, originally from the north country, who in addition to providing for the Mountjoys' stomachs also took a keen interest in the welfare of their souls. For Comfort Ballantine was a Puritan. While not so extreme in her views as some of her brothers and sisters in that tendency, she still rated players as masters of vice and playwrights as teachers of wantonness. When the critical cook heard that William Shakespeare was taking two rooms in the house she gave it as her opinion to the Mountjoys that this was decidedly 'poor policy'. POOR POLICY was one of Comfort Ballantine's favourite phrases. She was forever telling Mrs Mountjoy that she thought it would be Poor Policy to do thus and such. Taking in as lodger a player/playwright with as facile and likeable a reputation as William Shakespeare's was perhaps the Poorest Policy she had ever heard of.
It is a measure of Mr Shakespeare's charm that he won Comfort over. She very nearly quit when he first came to Silver Street. But before long she was tidying his papers whenever he left the house. This tidying she called REDDING UP.
'What are you doing, Mrs Ballantine?' I heard our hero ask her, the first time it happened, him fearing no doubt that she was about to consign his blossoms of sin to the flames of her kitchen stove.
'I am redding up for you, Mr Shakespeare,' the cook replied, beaming.
And from that day forth, so he told me, he never had a moment's fear but that when he returned from his daily stroll down Wood Street and through Cheapside to get a wherry across to the Globe, and back again, he would find all his scattered papers neatly assembled on his table by the window at the Mountjoys. Not that Comfort Ballantine read them. She could not read.
Consequently, of course, the papers were often in the wrong order. But William Shakespeare knew better than to complain because of that.
It was not the theatre that Comfort Ballantine changed her mind about, only Mr Shakespeare. 'Players live by making fools laugh at sin and wickedness,' she said to me once. I did not argue with her. Who am I to disagree?
As for Mr Shakespeare's success in winning the respect of this worthy woman, that was just the lively face of something I find at the heart of his art. William Shakespeare was the least of an egotist that it is possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and every feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had a mind reflecting ages past and ages present - all the people that have ever lived are there. He had only to think of anything in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. Thus he was capable even of being Comfort Ballantine, who considered all rhymers plain rogues. He treated her with dignity, accordingly, and the cook adored him for it in return.
Comfort Ballantine was a great frequenter of the public sermons of those times, of course, which sermons were called 'prophecyings'. Because she could not read it was her practice to commit the substance of all that she heard at a prophecying to memory, so that she might regurgitate it later, and dwell upon its sapience in her mind. For the help of her memory she had invented and framed a girdle of leather, long and large, which went twice about her waist when she went to the conventicle. This girdle she had divided into several parts, allotting each book in the Bible, in its order, to one of these divisions. Then, for the chapters, she had affixed points or thongs of leather to the several divisions, and made knots by fives and tens thereupon to distinguish the chapters of each book. And by other points she had divided the chapters into their particular contents and verses. This girdle she used, because she could not use pen and ink, to take notes of all the sermons which she heard; and she made such good use of it that when she came home to the Mountjoys from the conventicle just by fingering her girdle she could repeat the sermon through its several heads, and quote the various texts mentioned in it, to her own great comfort, and to the benefit of Mr Shakespeare.
This girdle of Comfort Ballantine's was kept by William Shakespeare, after the cook's decease, and he would often merrily call it his Girdle of Verity.
* See sonnet 125. The procession went from the Tower through the City, passing under seven triumphal arches. At every halt a speech or song by Thomas Dekker greeted the King and Queen, to their eventual less than delight. The great canopy over their heads was carried by eight senior members of our Company. I can't remember which, but certainly Burbage and Heminges took part, as well as Mr S. They all wore red and black livery, with scarlet cloaks, and walked bare-headed.
Chapter Eighty-Nine In which Pickleherring plays Cleopatra at the house in St John Street
I have often regretted my failure in the part of Isabella. My heart could do with a measure of divine love. The dignity of Portia, the energy of Beatrice, the radiant high spirits of Rosalind, the sweetness of Viola - I was shaped by the female parts I had to play, and I am missing some hunger for heaven in my make up. Had I been able to make a success of Isabella's character I would have less of that wretched Petrarchan worship of the unattainable female in my soul. It is not really worship. It is lust.
But Isabella, I found, has impossible things to say. I mean, things that your humble servant finds impossible. Of course, madam, you are right - no one in real life ever spoke like any of William Shakespeare's characters. His language hovers on the threshold of a dream. Yet I say that he possessed an implicit wisdom deeper even than consciousness. There is another comfort than this world ... Had I been able to say such things with conviction doubtless I would have been a better player and a better man. I would certainly have been one less obsessed with the divinity of breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, or for that matter with hell heard in the shriek of a night-wandering weasel.
But without more ado about nothing, permit me to tell you that Mr John Fletcher mutilated that song Take, O take those lips away* when he dropped the echo of 'Bring again' and 'Seal'd in vain', thus achieving the remarkable feat of turning a nightingale's song into a sparrow's. I never had much time for Mr Fletcher, and not just because he called me mediocre. The man was an opportunist. The blossoms of his imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand. He had a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them. Nothing shows this better than that terrible thing he did to the song sung by the boy servant to the forsaken Mariana.
To this period of Mr Shakespeare's sojourn at the Mountjoys, with his soul and his papers under the watchful eye of the cook Comfort Ballantine, belong some of his greatest writings. I mean: Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. There are odd links between them, not always noticed. You may not know, for instance, that on the twenty-seventh page of the first volume of Holinshed's Chronicles (which was always at Shakespeare's elbow when he was composing) there is a rough woodcut of a fellow with a villainous look and underneath it no story but a title in capital letters
IAGO
and that opposite this woodcut, on the facing page, there is a picture of Cordelia, named as daughter of King Lear. These images sank deep in our poet's imagination, coming up in separate plays, yet beginning together. The sound of the name Iago must have seemed especially evil to Mr Shakespeare, since later in Cymbeline he rang the changes on it, and adopted for his new villain, whose character was almost as atrocious as the cunning Venetian's, the name of Iachimo. As for the name Othello, it came (so he told me) from Moghrib: Hawth Allah. We performed the play for the first time on November 1st, 1604, in the presence of King James, Anne of Denmark and her brother Prince Frederik of Wurtemberg. It became a very popular and profitable piece. Within months Burbage reported that someone in his parish of St Leonard in Shoreditch had christened their newly-born daughter with the name of Desdemona, hitherto unknown in England. I was much flattered. Mr Shakespeare, however, quickly brought me back down to earth by telling me of another man who had called his pet rat Desdemona in honour of my performance.