Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss.
In other words, Susanna was a good Christian as well as a good Shakespearean. I like to think of her as the last of her father's heroines, and as open-eyed and original as any of the others.
I like also to think of the late Mr Shakespeare spending the latter part of his life as all men of good sense will wish theirs to be - in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends. Of course it was not exactly like that, but while we are in the mood for idylls let us picture to ourselves, madam, the poet seated one warm evening at that same window where we just spied Judith and Anne. His hand moves on his tablet. He is engaged, no doubt, in the composition of his latest play. Again and again he is distracted, breaking off to watch his daughter Susanna and her little child Elizabeth as they run here and there among the borders of summer flowers. It crosses his mind, maybe, idly to wonder as the sunbeams seek to pierce the shadows of the rose trees and a distant, drowsy humming makes soft music in his ears which thing it is he likes the better - that freshly fashioned Ariel song of his:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie ...
or - the real sound of the bees, and the reality of the child and her mother there among the flowers?
New Place was a very fine house, the embodiment and emblem of Mr Shakespeare's success in the world. He had built it up over the years, entrusting the supervision of these improvements to his cousin Thomas Greene. I measured it once: it was thirty yards long, and thirty feet high. The main facade with its wide bay windows, columned doorway and three ornamented gables stood imposingly on Chapel Street. Walking up to it, you couldn't help thinking it was quite a palace for a butcher's son who had once wielded the sledded pole-axe and spat on his palm himself. The house contained ten rooms and cellars, apart from the large central hall. A staircase of carved oak led to the upper floor. I will tell you soon enough what I found and did there.
In this grand house, with its orchards and gardens, surrounded by his family, William Shakespeare now wrote three new plays in a final style: The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline, and The Tempest. From each is derived an impression of moral serenity. Even Cymbeline, which the author calls a tragedy, ends in reconciliation. I always thought myself, when young, that Posthumus in that play gets forgiven too quick and easy. But Mr S would have it no other way. And now that I am old I complain no longer.
Living mostly in Stratford, eating according to the recipes in Mrs Shakespeare's cook-book, Mr Shakespeare cultivated in his latter days a considerable belly. Anne Shakespeare had a huge manuscript book of recipes. It was the only book I ever saw her keeping company with. Cooking and sewing were her life, I think. Her room at New Place after her husband died was adorned with needlework of various kinds, cut works, spinning, bone-lace, and many pretty devices, with which the cushions, chairs, and stools were strewed and covered.
Mr Shakespeare's corpulence never quite rivalled that of his own Falstaff, but it might have done had he lived long enough. He could well afford to eat, and to eat well. By the time of his retirement to Stratford, he was oozing with gold. You can see from the bust that Dutchman did for his memorial in Trinity Church just how fat the Bard got. He had in addition three false teeth. His first false tooth was made of iron. His second false tooth was made of silver. His third false tooth was made of gold.
The return to Stratford was a confirmation of the roots of Shakespeare's art. It took a poet's imagination to realise the debt owed by humanity to the rude mechanicals of Warwickshire. Had the drama not been deeply rooted in the native soil, it could not have borne such excellent fruit. It was to the village festival and the goat song in honour of Dionysus that Shakespeare returned.
In his native place, I noticed that people tended to favour a short pronunciation of the first syllable of our hero's name: Shax rather than Shakes. This makes me think it possible that the name derives after all from the Anglo-Saxon personal name, SEAXBERHT.
Idylls over, good friends, I think at the end that Mr WS was bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama; that he was bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams. In these last years at Stratford I see him as half-enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half-bored to death.
He also had barns full of grain, at a time when there was a general shortage. But we'll speak no more of that. Sufficient to say that Mr John Shakespeare was not the only one in the family with a Midas touch of the usurer about him. William Shakespeare drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.
But what is the point of dwelling upon such things? They contribute nothing to our gratitude, and gratitude is all that we should feel. If you have to be negative, better to try to conceive of a world without Shakespeare. It is only by holding our breath that we begin to understand how necessary breathing is. And the best way of bringing before our minds the true magnitude of our debt to Shakespeare is to imagine for a moment or two that he never existed. His faults then pale into mere significance. He was a necessary man.
Even so, reader, I confess it - that the closer I get to Shakespeare, the more I recoil from him. That villain had all my life. He had my youth in my playing. He had the rest in that the rest followed on from my playing - I mean what Jane did, and what Polly is. And now he has my age which I have spent in writing about him. I have given him my life to write his Life.
That man deceived me. I used to have a trusting nature. No more the spaniel now, sir; my innocent old eyes worship him no longer. I have my Aeolian harp, if I want music.
I had a wife once. I failed her. That's the way of the world.
My mother, though, she is a different story. Her name was Lalage. Her hair was the colour of blazing treacle and her eyes were reticent. Women can see through you when they want, but mothers don't do it. I loved this mother, this Lalage. I had a song about her:
Weeny weedy weeky said Caesar,
Weeny weedy weeky said he.
Weeny weedy weeky said that old Roman geezer
In the year 44 BC.
I love Rome, I love Gaul,
I love politics, but best of all
I love Lalage.
More about her? More about Lalage? Very well, sir. She had a rocking-horse. She sat me on the rocking-horse and she rocked it to and fro, to and fro, the rain falling, the window open, the fire burning, and all the time she sang. Such long, long music. It was the song of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But it came out to the words of O Polly Dear.
You shut me up, sir?
Madam, you are right. In truth the only thing I remember about my mother was the way she used to shave her legs. All the way up. And every day.
And this happy song which she sang to me:
I'm not Hairy Mary, I'm your Ma!
I'm not Hairy Mary, I'm your Ma!
I'm not Hairy Mary,
I'm your father's fairy!
I'm not Hairy Mary, I'm your Ma!
I hope that makes you smile. That would be something.
Today I have practised smiling in new ways. Listening to the breeze on the strings of the harp that Polly gave me, I have practised a smile for death. Listening to the rats in the wainscot, I have practised a smile for ugliness. Listening to nothing in particular, I have practised above all a smile for the next time I see Polly. I shall have also a special smile for the beggar I refuse a penny to. And another smile for the spaces between the stars.