Till the roguish boy of love where I lay
Me found and stripped me naked.
And now I sing, etc.
When I short have shorn my sowce face
And swigged my horny barrel
In an oaken inn I pound my skin
As a suit of gilt apparel.
The moon's my constant mistress
And the lonely owl my marrow,
The flaming drake and the night-crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
While I do sing, etc.
The palsy plagues my pulses
When I prig your pigs or pullen,
Your culvers take, or matchless make
Your chanticleer, or sullen.
When I want provant, with Humphrey
I sup, and when benighted
I repose in Paul's with waking souls
Yet never am affrighted.
But I do sing, etc.
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars
And the wounded welkin weeping;
The moon embrace her shepherd
And the queen of Love her warrior,
While the first doth horn the star of the morn
And the next the heavenly Farrier.
While I do sing, etc.
The Gipsy Snap and Pedro
Are none of Tom's comradoes;
The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn
And the roaring-boys' bravadoes.
The meek, the white, the gentle,
Me handle, touch, and spare not,
But those that cross Tom Rhinoceros
Do what the panther dare not.
Although I sing, etc.
With an host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear, and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wild world's end -
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing 'Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing'
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
Reader, does this song trouble your memory? Does it make you feel that you have heard it somewhere before? Mr Shakespeare used to say that poetry is original not because it is new but because it is both new and old, something you seem to remember the first time you hear it. Poetry is original because it deals in origins. Something in poor Tom o' Bedlam's song reminds me of Adam. Something in poor Tom o' Bedlam's song reminds me of us all.
It is easy to clothe imaginary beings with our own thoughts and feelings. But to send ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of beings in circumstances wholly and strangely different from our own, and yet make those beings remind us of us all - hoc labour, hoc opus! Who has achieved it? Only Shakespeare.
Chapter Ninety-One In which William Shakespeare returns to Stratford
Here are Anne Shakespeare and her daughter Judith, sewing. They sit on low stools by the window that looks out into the garden of New Place. Anne has a green shield across her eyes, for the evening sun is bright and the work particular. The sunlight glints on the gold medal between Judith's breasts.
Here is a neighbour come calling - Mrs Judith Sadler, perhaps, wife of the baker Hamnet Sadler, Mrs Shakespeare's lifelong friend. She rallies Mrs Shakespeare on her industry, remarking teasingly that all the wool spun by Penelope 'did but fill Ithaca full of moths'. They talk over various items of gossip: who's dead, who's dying, Anne's beloved granddaughter Elizabeth chasing a golden butterfly, the fruit of the mulberry tree which is too soft to stand touching just now, the price of needles. Meanwhile, the evening makes a glory of all Stratford. There was a shower just before my chapter began, but now it has stopped the rabbits are emerging from their burrows. Tradesmen are singing in their shops. Boys play at bowls on the slippery ground, one of them tumbling past his own throw.
How do I know these things? I admit I do not. I have transposed them from a charming scene you will find in Coriolanus. That scene is not in Plutarch. It is pure Stratford.
Mr Shakespeare's mind was at all times possessed with images and recollections of English rural life - but there is more to it than that. I have yet to learn that his fancy could not luxuriate in country images even amid the fogs of Southwark and the Blackfriars, but from about the time of his daughter Susanna's wedding he had no need to feed on memories, for after that happy event he spent more and more time in the town of his birth, where his heart always lay. The masque in The Tempest was used originally in honour of Susanna's wedding, by the by. She was always her father's favourite. Having known her, I can inform you that she flits in and out of all his later works - she is Mariana in Pericles, and Perdita in The Winter's Tale, and Miranda in The Tempest. A woman with a pale, ugly, clever face, she resembled neither of her parents save in her wit.
Mr Shakespeare never thought of taking a great house or a high place in London - he rather kept retired, in modest lodgings, and saved money. He was always a good man of business. By 1589, when he was only twenty-five, he was a minor shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, and of course he was afterwards a leading shareholder in the Globe. As a writer of plays for both these houses, he realised great gains, and from his thirty-third year on he was investing his profits in property in his native town. It was typical of him to return to Stratford, though none of us knew he was doing it until it was done. There was no dramatic exit. Rather, he transformed his residence by degrees. Certainly by the time we did Coriolanus he would have been able to observe at first hand a scene such as his wife and daughter sewing, any day of the week. Such domesticities became much to his liking in his later years. The plays become full of forgiving wives and daughters, critical and original women who yet pardon their men. What part his daughter Judith played in this I could not tell you. She never seemed to me to have forgiven her father for his long years of absence, but then indeed she never seemed much interested in William Shakespeare at all. (She once told me she would prefer to talk of Sir Francis Drake!) She was an altogether enigmatical woman. The poet's widow had her mysteries too, but her silences were of a different order, and I always sensed that she had welcomed her husband's return, and made much of it, and him, and the two of them together. Yet there can be little doubt, I think, that the prime mover in the drama of the playwright's later years in Stratford was his daughter Susanna, by then married to Dr John Hall. We shall notice in due course that she was the principal beneficiary of his will. Her epitaph deserves repeating in this connection:
Witty above her sex, but that's not all,