Conscious of a possible application to my own celibate state, I left John Gower and drew Mrs. D.'s attention to the tomb of John Trehearn, gentleman servant to Queen Elizabeth and James I. On a table is recorded the king's testimony to the worth of his servant:—
Had kings power to lend their subjects breath,
Trehearn, thou shoulds't not be cast down by death.
John's wife stands by his side, her head reaching but to his shoulder. John has an apprehensive expression, and his little wife's prim pursed mouth argues badly for John's happiness and peace of mind. Mrs. Darling, who, as you will have discovered by this time, is a good judge of character, said that perhaps, after all, there were worse things than bachelorhood. I was not in a position to argue the point, and we walked on into the retro-choir, where lies a curious skeleton effigy, which represents the ferryman, father of St. Mary Overie, the patron saint of the church.
The ferryman, it seems, was a penurious old rascal who feigned death for twenty-four hours, expecting his servants to fast till his funeral and thus save him the cost of a day's food. The servants, however, who were half starved, seized the opportunity to break open the larder and feast instead of fast, and the old ferryman rose in his winding sheet, a candle in each hand, bent on chastising the miscreants. One of them, imagining it was the devil himself, picked up the butt end of an oar and aimed with it a blow which brought the death his master had feigned. His daughter, whose lover was killed in an accident following the homicide of her father, entered a convent, and gave the money her father had amassed to build a house of sisters on the ground where part of the present church now stands.
There are two windows in the retro-choir of sinister significance. They represent six clergy of the sixteenth century, and at the base of one of the windows are the names of Laurence Saunders, Rector of All Hallows, Bread Street; Robert Ferrier, Bishop of St. David's; Robert Taylor, Rector of Hadley, Suffolk; and after each name is the awful and laconic statement, "Burnt". On the other windows the names and dates are almost indecipherable, but below the central figure stands out one word of awful import, "Smithfield". The windows have no artistic merit, and there is nothing arresting in the presentment of those six men who endured the tortures of the damned for their faith, yet somehow they seemed from their dark corner at the east end of the retro-choir to dominate the place. One saw those windows directly one entered—far-off bits of colour at the base of long tunnels framed by the sharply-pointed Gothic arches, and the remembrance of them remained, mingling strangely with thoughts of poets and playwrights. Edmund, brother of William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger are buried in the choir. Of the two last named one doesn't know which had the more tragic end. Fletcher, the friend of William Shakespeare, who, according to an old record, had during the great plague been invited by a knight of Norfolk or Suffolk into the country, and who "stayed in London but to make himself a suit of clothes, and when it was making, fell sick and died. This," continues John Aubrey, the writer of the record, "I heard from the tailor, who is now a very old man, and clerk of St. Marie Overie."
Massinger, the poet and playwright, died in 1639. The register of that year records, "Buried, Philip Massinger, a stranger". Poor Philip Massinger, who, after writing forty popular plays, was buried, a pauper, at the expense of the parish. Apparently he had been preaching that which he had been unable to practise when he wrote his play entitled "A New Way to Pay Old Debts".
Edmund Shakespeare, described as "A Player," died before his brother William, and perhaps Edmund was in William's thoughts when he wrote:—
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.
Whoever before, whoever again, will express with such heart-searching simplicity the secret fear which besets us all, that "dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns"?
I have strange and uncanny suspicions about Shakespeare. One knows so little about the man himself, and at times I have wondered if he were some supernatural being sent, perhaps, from another and more enlightened world, to be the mouthpiece of poor dumb humanity in this.