The Late Mr Shakespeare

April 26, 1999
The author of Falstaff, Merlin and The Memoirs of Lord Byron takes on WS himself, producing a lively, bawdy gallimaufry of anecdotes, facts and fictions that inevitably will be compared to Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun. The conceit is that "Robert Reynolds alias Pickleherring," a comic actor now an octogenarian, met Shakespeare when the playwright was 32 and Pickleherring 13. Now Pickleherring lives in a London attic, above a whorehouse that itself is above a bakery, and sets out to tell the "country history" of WS. He tucks in all the anecdotes that make gossips and scholars swoon, for example the possibility that Queen Elizabeth I was Shakespeare's mother, that the Vicar of Stratford, not a humble butcher and tanner, was Shakespeare's father. Pickleherring casts his own hand heavily over the proceedings, as any lifelong actor is wont to do; the young Pickleherring played women's roles in Shakespeare's plays at the Globe and had a friendly flirtation with WS. A recurring theme is his unscholarly explanations of Shakespeare's art--for instance, comparing the playwright's use of flower imagery to John Milton's. Milton's flowers always scanned, the actor relates; he picked his bouquets by syllable. Shakespeare's flowers, by contrast, always had personality and resonance. In addition to the Dark Lady, the Earl of Southampton and other Shakespearean tropes, Pickleherring/Nye refers to the fathers/sons themes and the surfeit of forgiving wives and daughters in the later plays. Surely the more a reader already knows about Shakespeare and about Elizabethan life from the dunghills up, the more pleasure Nye's account will produce, braided as it is from whimsy, compassion and research. But even readers limited to having read Julius Caesar in ninth grade will find this novel gladdening.