The Shakespeare Chronicles

a novel

James Boyle

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“James Boyle, The Shakespeare Chronicles: A Novel

Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/467168

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ISBN 978-1-4303-0768-6

This is a work of fiction. With the exception of the Elizabethans, all of the characters are fictional. Immaculata State and its university exist only in my imagination. In particular, the university should not be confused with any educational institutions bearing a similar name. Any resemblance to real people, natural or legal, heretic or orthodox, living or dead, is unintended. I have taken some liberties with Elizabethan history, and freely entered into the labyrinth of transposition, revisionism and conspiracy theory which surrounds this subject like a privet maze. The authors to whose work I refer are real and I am indebted to them, particularly to the ideas put forward by the intriguingly named John Thomas Looney in Shakespeare Identified 1920, [Frederick A. Stokes Co]. A more recent and extensive version of the same hypothesis can be found in Charlton Ogburn’s, The Mysterious William Shakespeare 1988, [Cardinal Books]) Finally, a wonderful (and absolutely hilarious) overview of the authorship question is provided by Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives 1993 [Oxford U. Press.] I must stress, however, that substantial fictional modifications have been made and neither Mr. Looney nor any other of the authors I mention are to be held responsible for the story I tell here. My goal is entirely different from theirs.

The Past

Ros: What is your line?

Player: Tragedy, sir. Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive. ... we can do you ghosts and battles, on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers – set pieces in the poetic vein; we can do you rapiers or rape or both, by

all means, faithless wives and ravished virgins – flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Awakening

I am reborn. I am reborn in sin, cleansed in heresy, wrapped in iconoclasm. These are my chronicles. My old self would have found these words too showy, too redolent of religion, would have worried about being laughed at, would have dithered endlessly over nuance and punctuation. Now I simply write. And press Enter.

Thus. There will be a great deal in these pages on the subject of contested authorship. Let me leave you in no doubt as to mine. My name is Stanley Quandary, I am by profession a professor of literature at the Immaculata State University, specializing in Elizabethan drama. I am forty three years old, bald and stockily built. I have been divorced for two years and tenured for one month. The old Quandary would have hastened to reassure you that this is more an historical adventure story than an academic journal. Personally, I couldn’t care less what

you think it is; you are merely a figment of my imagination, after all. As for the time when and the circumstances under which you read these words, let them look after themselves. I write this down because these happenings should not go unrecorded. In these pages I will expose probably the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the world. And, if things proceed as they have been, I will shortly have conclusive historical proof of what I say. This journal will provide a day-to-day record of my investigations, travels and.. adventures. Unlike Quandary, I pretend to be nothing other than what I am. A new Petronius, I conceal nothing as one of my favourite 19th century pornographers put it. An honest tale speeds best by being plainly told. I will tell the truth, let those with faint hearts edit it as they wish.

It all began on the day when I first fornicated with a student. No. I should be careful not to allow this new persona to mistake gratuitous shock for honesty. It all began when I got tenure, the fornication was merely a significant consequence. And my tenure, of course would be of no significance without my heresy. Modern physicists tell us that we must dispose of the terms cause and effect, but I find them to be useful... Enough digressions. Quandary begone.

In these pages, I will tell the tale of the investigations which prove that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. William Shagspur, the illiterate burgher from Stratford on Avon, did not write Shakespeare’s plays. He was a catspaw, a tool for the real author, a man who needed to conceal his own identity, but who is.. known to me. I will say it again. Shagspur did not write Shakespeare. Admittedly, the old Quandary had no idea who did. He had waded through all the stuff about Bacon and Warwick and Queen Elizabeth and been unconvinced by each of them. Finally, dispirited by hysterical Americans with theories and mad Irishmen with cryptograms he had concluded that the only thing we knew about Shakespeare’s plays was that they weren’t written by greedy, grasping illiterate Will, with his shiny head and his incongruous earring.

This has been my hidden truth. To write these words is strange, like stripping in front of strangers, feeling their new eyes on a body familiar from mirror glance. I did not tell my colleagues, my students, my friends or even Jean. It was my secret. My inner core of grinning, covert heresy. But now, after all these years, I am close to the proof. My..force increases with each passing moment because my time is near. Let the orthodox beware. And this is how it started. Listen.

***

A young boy, incongruous in a doublet and slashed hose, sits in a walled garden. Most children would be nervous and ill at ease in fanciful historical costume, but the boy displays only a kind of supercilious boredom. The garden seems strange somehow, but I cannot identify any single thing which gives rise to that impression. It is laid out in a geometrical pattern, with gravel walks and fruit trees growing up against the walls. From time to time the boy looks down at a book on his knee. The cover has been impressed with a coat of arms, a lion rampant brandishing a spear, in a shiny replica of gold leaf. (By its binding and the ragged edge vellum, the book must be intended as part of the costume, although the whiteness of the pages, the undamaged spine and leather binding mark it as a fairly poor reproduction.) His lips move as he reads, a little disappointing in a boy his age, he must be at least eight and could be older. Focusing more closely on the title page, which flutters in the wind as the boy looks up with a start at some sound I cannot hear, I see that he is reading Publius Ovidius Naso – Ovid, to those of you without classical education – and he is reading it in Latin. Unless this is a sham, we should forgive him his lip movements.

A man appears in the... picture. The boy seems to have been waiting for him. Like the boy, the man wears Elizabethan period dress, although of a more sober style and cut. Like the boy he shows no embarrassment or self-consciousness. In fact, I can tell that it goes deeper than this, he feels none of these things. I could not tell you how I know this, but I am sure of it. The man speaks to the boy in somber and reproving tones about his behavior, his lack of application. The boy’s name is Edward, apparently. The boy answers. He is precocious, intelligent. I can tell that he feels nothing but a cool amusement at the whole affair although, again, I could not tell you how. He calls the man Uncle Arthur but his tone is not the wheedling one you might expect from nephew to uncle. In fact, it almost seems as though he is speaking from a position of authority, although I cannot tell what the basis for this authority might be. Which brings me to another strange point. I do not hear their words and yet I know what they are saying. How?

Have you ever seen a movie with subtitles and discovered that, when you thought about it later, you had provided an English soundtrack? Even though the characters didn’t speak, it is as though they did. Of course, one loses accent, verbal nuance, all the regional, personal and historical idiosyncrasies of speech. But the sense is there. And it feels as though you heard it directly from the character’s mouth. This is not exactly the way I perceive these characters’ words, but it the closest I can come to an explanation.

The boy has stopped responding to his uncle’s criticisms. He begins to read aloud from the book on his lap. I can tell that he is reading in Latin, but I understand clearly what is being said. It is the beginning of the Metamorphoses. My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of different kinds.. He reads for while, then starts to translate. Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate.. This is the strangest part of the whole affair, for I now.. experience – on a non-verbal level, this translation of a text I have just received without words. Oh, it is impossible to explain what it was like. In any event, I feel the boy’s translation as a kind of ...shading of the meaning I had picked up directly when he read the Latin. The translation is whimsical, fantastical, occasionally embarrassingly childish, but charming nonetheless, like.. Oh, I don’t know, like an Edward Lear or Hillaire Belloc poem, full of Jumblies and Jabberwockies and Snarks. Not those words, you understand, but that kind of feeling. This is going to be very hard to explain, I can see that.

Anyway. Anyway, I am so caught up in the translation that I forget to look (is look the right word? I don’t have the feeling of looking so much as willing my perception... Quandary Stop it ) that I forget to look at the uncle. When I do, I see that he is entranced, both attracted and repelled at the same time. The feeling is quite clear to me. Though, as I said I don’t know how I can tell these things, it would be idle to deny that I can. There is a strong sense of temptation, almost sexual temptation, in the air. The boy Edward has something that his uncle Arthur wants. Wants and doesn’t want at the same time. The moment seems to go on for a long time. Eventually the uncle offers some half-hearted reproof for whatever offense had brought him into the garden in the first place. I strain, (how?), but I cannot pick up what the offense is. The feeling is not unlike the one where you get a very faint crossed line while talking on the telephone. You can hear voices clearly, but you can’t make out words. The boy looks at the uncle. He’s a cool one, this kid, but with a bit of impish humour still in him. He is offering some kind of penance. The uncle hums and haws and finally assigns him some translation work to be done, every month, a passage from Ovid. The boy smiles. The uncle looks shamefaced. Who has caught whom?

***

As I finished copying this last account into my journal I saw the Dean walk past my office, his hairpiece gleaming under the fluorescent lights. All my life, I have been surrounded by people with bad hairpieces. My father had a toop from EZ,TZ of Dayton, Ohio that looked as though it had been removed from a taxidermist’s reject box. When he ran for the bus it would flap up and down on his head like a saucepan lid on a boiling pot. Once it flipped right over and hung dangling off the back of his head. A lady walking past actually fainted because she thought he had been trepanned by some falling object. She must have been blind.

Whatever its failings, my father’s hairpiece was at least the right colour. My maternal grandfather had one which had probably been quite good when he first bought it – around the time that Woodrow Wilson got long trousers. What he didn’t seem to realize was that his remaining hair had changed color since then. The toop gave him a broad stripe of glossy black hair down the center of his head, flanked by snow white temples. He looked like a photographic negative of a skunk.

When I got out of Dayton, I thought I would meet high class people, and though I wouldn’t have thought about it in those terms then, I would have expected high class hairpieces. Not a bit of it. When I came to work at Immaculata State, I found that the Dean and the University President were both wearing things that looked as if Helen Keller made them in her macramé class. During hot faculty meetings, I would watch the Dean’s hairline. The beads of sweat would slowly trickle out from under their dark, hirsute hiding-place, pause at the edge of toop, as if relishing their freedom, and then hurl themselves out onto the pink slopes of his forehead.

This talk of hairpieces is not mere.. woolgathering. To understand my story you must understand the Changes in me. I will use hairpieces to illustrate. I have been bald since I was twenty five. Give Quandary his due, he never thought of getting a hairpiece. He merely had the remnants of his hair cut short and hoped that the baldness would give him an added look of maturity. For a while, he even smoked a pipe, until Jean, my ex-wife, persuaded him to stop. He was smart enough never to let on that the Dean had a hairpiece. In fact, he once made some rueful remark about how lucky the Dean was to have all his own hair. The Dean lapped it up, of course, showing the kind of self-delusion that only bald men and the backers of Broadway flop musicals seem to command. After that, Quandary made it a point to voice this bogus envy once or twice a year. Sycophantic little climber Still, it worked.

Now for me. When the Changes started, nearly a month ago now, the second thing I did was to cut off the remnants of my hair. I got tenure on a Friday morning. That evening I had my head shaved by the barber. I got a sun lamp and gave myself a light tan, then I got a light car wax and I polished it. My head I mean. Waxed it and polished it till it shone. I got my ear pierced in a little dive near the University. Quandary would have worried about tetanus. I couldn’t have cared less. When the Dean came in on Monday morning, there I was. He was used to seeing me in the morning. In before everyone, boring tweed jacket in the unseasonable Immaculata Autumn heat, silly fringe of salt and pepper hair. A big cup of coffee in a McDonald’s mug. Good old reliable Quandary, writes three plodding articles a year, serves on all the committees he’s asked to and doesn’t tell us that we have to stop the state pension fund from investing in South Africa He might have wondered if, the morning after my tenure, I would still be in before everyone. Well, I was. The dome of my skull shining, an earring dangling from my left ear. Leather jeans. I greeted him as though nothing had happened. He tried to make light of it. This was just Quandary making a joke about the freedom after tenure, right? I looked at him absolutely impassively, my eyes fixed on the eighth of an inch gap between his forehead and the front rim of the hairpiece. He didn’t last long. Childish, but I was still at the stage then of having to prove the Changes to myself. Now I no longer have to prove. I am.

Are these stories working? I am trying to give you some sense of what kind of a man Quandary was. Heisenberg was right. The observer is inseparable from the observation. You cannot understand my discoveries unless you understand the Changes they have caused in me. I have changed, therefore something must have changed me. Call it X. The Changes started at exactly the time that I began to get this new information about Shakespeare, call it S. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that X has something to do with S, with this new information – about which more later. But a reasonable association between the Changes and my information is not enough. I want scientific proof. After Dewey, we tell if something is real by looking at its effects. We do not say that a photon is real and an elf a fantasy because there is a little thing with Photon written on it. It is that by postulating the photon we can explain certain effects in the world. If X produces real effects, X is ‘real.’ Therefore, if I can show that X produces real effects, I will have proved X – the thing that has changed me – is real. But what is X? What has caused these changes in me? If all candidates other than S, my information about Shakespeare, are excluded, then I will have shown that S = X. And since X is real, S must necessarily be real also. Thus, by studying the Changes in myself, I can confirm my observations about Shakespeare. How can I believe myself deranged, when everything is so clear?

So, what kind of a man was Quandary? Quandary was a wimp. Everyone intimidated Quandary. His colleagues, his students, his wife, the Dean. Quandary could be put into a state of terror by the sandwich-maker in the local Deli. He was frightened of speaking too loud or too soft, of asking for an unusual ingredient or failing to specify a usual one. For five years now he had ordered an Italian sub with everything, had come back to his office and painstakingly picked out the onions and thrown them in the trash, rather than deal with the sandwich-maker’s sigh in the face of more complicated instructions. No-one was too lowly or powerless to intimidate Quandary. His timidity was egalitarian. He was even frightened of the large woman who cleaned the English Department. When he had introduced himself to her seven years ago he hadn’t quite heard her name, so now he hid in his office rather than have to ask her again. He suspected that the cleaner hated him for throwing his unwanted onions in the office trash can, so he emptied it himself and then worried that his colleagues could smell the onions on his fingers. His days were full of tangles like this.

Probably the best example I can give you of the sad affair that was Quandary’s life, is Quandary’s relationship with the builders. Everyone at Immaculata State bought houses that were too big for them, so that they could convince themselves they didn’t mind living in the university town, Charlotte Russe, instead of in New York or San Francisco. Reading the prices from the Real Estate section of the Sunday New York Times was a communal act of self-reassurance. Naturally enough, Quandary was intimidated by the artisans who serviced his rambling, over-large house. They always arrived when he was in bed or just getting out of the shower. There they would be, dressed for the day, heavy steel tipped safety shoes and plaid shirts, smelling of tobacco and 7-11 coffee, and there he would be in a Chinese bathrobe embroidered with scarlet dragons. The men gave off a faint air of moral disapproval. What was he doing in bed at this hour of the day? Didn’t he have to work for a living? Quandary, his bare feet feeling vulnerable next to their safety shoes, would find his accent thickening, homey sayings would appear in his speech. “I figger.” “I reckon.” But figuring and reckoning availed him nothing. Finally, defeated, he would retreat upstairs, exiled in his own house, too intimidated to direct the work they were doing, which inevitably meant that they did it wrong, allowing Quandary to grumble about the failure of craftsmanship in the world today.

Quandary’s nemesis was Mr. Macy. Mr. Macy was a mild looking man who peppered his speech with terms of art that Quandary felt guilty admitting he didn’t understand – Ah, we’ll need to use vertical grommets here, giving Quandary a keen look from under his bushy eyebrows, that OK with you? Mr. Macy’s other principal occupation, apart from drinking huge paper containers of coffee that would have shriveled Quandary’s stomach, was pointing out why something Quandary had just suggested was stupid beyond belief. “Well, normally we put the walls up, uh, before we have a go at the ceiling, Mr. Quandary. Is that OK with you.?” The louts, axe murderers and mental defectives on Mr. Macy’s crew would all chortle delightedly at this sally. Macy never laughed at his own jokes, maintaining a dignified silence, as befitted his position.

After Jean left Quandary decided to have a new kitchen put in. A pathetic form of domestic reassurance. Knowing Macy and his crew were to arrive early, he got himself up at 7:30, dressed in jeans and hiking boots and sat around blearily reading the paper and drinking coffee. When they came in he would be able to gesture off-handedly with his mug and point them towards the pot. A casually masculine gesture. He practiced several times to be sure it was sufficiently spontaneous. After ten minutes, Quandary began to feel that this was going a little far in his endorsement of rugged working class culture. Jumping up, he went over the stereo and put on a Best of Baroque CD. Rugged, early-rising man of the people shows the sensitive side to his nature. Let Mr. Macy realize that Western civilization had things other than vertical grommets to offer.

In the end, Macy didn’t actually arrive until eleven, by which time Quandary was gritty-eyed, strung out on coffee and desperate to go back to bed. As usual, Macy preceded his crew of unfortunates from the truck. Thought you might like us to come a bit later, he said cheerily, You not being an early riser and all. Actually, I’ve been up since seven thirty. Macy said nothing but his eyebrows showed his skepticism. The CD started its cycle once again. Macy walked with Quandary into the kitchen and fingered the shiny white surface on Quandary’s new cabinets. “Albinoni” he said. “Is that the name of the cabinet?” said Quandary, determined not to be out-jargoned. Macy gave Quandary one of his mildest looks. “Why no, that’s the name of the composer. That is Albinoni you’re playing, isn’t it? Little sweet for my tastes. A commercial compilation, is it?”

Last week I had Macy round to re-tile and grout the bathroom. No mould will grow under my feet. He told me he would get there at 10 a.m. and arrived instead at 7.30. Quandary would have been on his list of people who could be pushed around, rearranged to fit the more demanding customers in his schedule. But Macy did not know that Quandary was no longer resident. I leaned out of the bedroom window, the morning sun glinting off my head, and told him to come back when he was supposed to, or not at all. He obeyed like a lamb. When he returned, I was sitting in the morning room drinking bourbon. Even my stomach lining has changed. Little early for that, isn’t it, Mr. Quandary? In that case I assume you don’t want some, I said as I poured for the dumbfounded louts and axe-murderers. They thought it was hilarious that their boss had talked himself out of a taste of sipping whisky. I could hear them teasing him about it as I left for work, nicely buzzed on bourbon and triumph. They said nothing about my gleaming head, nothing about my earring. The worm turns, Mr. Macy. Passive-aggressive no more.

***

A young man sits in a room. It has dark wood panels, with occasional full-length hanging tapestries and it is lighted by enormous branched candelabra. The furnishings are ornate, the tapestries rich, but it is dark despite the candles. And smelly, too. It smells of stale sweat and cooking and hot tallow. I do not remember having smelt anything while I was watching the scene in the garden, but perhaps I was not paying attention. The man is also dressed in Elizabethan costume, but his clothes are different from the boy Edward’s. And very different from Uncle Arthur’s. He is dressed extravagantly, almost gaudily, and he is moodily twirling a jewelled letter opener on a table which still bears the remains of a meal. An older woman enters the room without knocking, apparently in haste. She is about forty years old and extremely attractive ... Until she opens her mouth to speak, revealing crooked, yellowing teeth.

The young man has obviously been waiting for her. He stands, revealing a remarkable similarity to Edward, the young boy in the garden. Perhaps they are brothers. He sways a little, and I notice for the first time that there are several empty bottles on the table. He addresses her as ‘Mother’ but I cannot tell if she is really his mother or whether this is merely an honorific, because his tone is sarcastic, hectoring. He is reproaching her with some failure of fidelity but I cannot tell to whom. To him, to his father? When she responds, she calls him ‘Edward.’ Can this be the same boy I saw in the garden, ten years older, now eighteen or nineteen? She is shocked, she stammers, though how I know that, I couldn’t tell you. One of the tapestries against the wall stirs and the young man moves. Christ, he is fast He whirls to the table, scoops up the thing I thought was a letter opener and all in one movement rams it through the tapestry. As he does this he screams, and for the first time, I hear a voice clearly. “Cecil!” he screams.

A man falls out from behind the tapestry. Not slowly, the way they do in the films, but in clumsy agony, clutching himself and swearing. The woman yells something but the young man is remorseless. He pounces again and punches the knife down at the wounded man’s stomach. I have always thought of knife-thrusts as silent, but this one sounds like a pair of scissors being jabbed through taut linen. There is an awful, tearing sound, then another. The man on the ground convulses and then lies still. As he does so, I see his face for the first time. Cecil, if that is his name is young. Perhaps twenty, shabbily dressed, wearing trews with some kind of spattered apron. And dead. That was real He was murdered. What is this?

The young man is wiping his knife. His face is hard, like a hawk’s. Suddenly, I am afraid of him. He shouts at the woman, tells her to leave. There is a noise of feet pounding on stairs and.. Suddenly everything is gone. There is nothing. As if the picture was turned off. It is over. But what was it?

***

To those who think of a university as a place concerned with the truth it may seem strange that I kept my views secret. Be assured; I could never have succeeded in academia if I had revealed my heresy. Despite their claims to be unafraid, original thinkers, academics are the most conformist of people. It’s not that it is impossible to succeed in academia if you believe something bizarre or unlikely. Quite the contrary. Many academics spend their whole careers promoting a single bizarre idea – The entire history of Western thought can be explained by the tension between speech and writing. or The difference between roast and boiled pork is that same as that between live and dead flesh, or fornication and incest – and they generally do so in journals read only by their cronies. But not any bizarre idea will do. It must be an academically popular unlikely idea, which generally means an uninteresting one. Unfortunately, those who doubt the authorship of Shakespeare have been classed with those who claim to have conversed with UFO’s or to have had sexual encounters with Bigfoot. These are interesting bizarre claims, and thus more likely to find a sympathetic hearing in the supermarket tabloids than the marketplace of ideas.

I know this because I have lived it. I have been a heretic for nearly a quarter of a century. My sophomore year, I took a class in Shakespeare’s life and times. This was the first moment that I realized: They know nothing about the man. Nothing. Construe the evidence in its kindest light and they know a rough time for birth and death. They do not know if or where he went to school. He certainly didn’t go to university. We don’t even know how he spelled his name – Shakspere, Shaxberd, Shakspur, Shagsper – mainly because he wasn’t terribly sure how he spelled his name, either. The only evidence that the man could write, and I mean basic literacy not deathless prose, are five, maybe six scrawled signatures on the legal documents of which he was so fond. On the evidence of this palsied, illiterate hand, you wouldn’t trust this man to keep the accounts in a fucking trailer park, let alone transcribe the world’s greatest plays. And as for composing them?? Don’t make me laugh. How could the parsimonious burgher of Stratford be thought to have created this kind of drama, full of angst and contempt for worldly goods? He couldn’t even spell his own name the same way twice And I have proved.. Softly, softly, patience is all.

You may be wondering how I managed to succeed at all, if my ideas are so far from the mainstream. The answer is simple. I never let on. The seven year journey to tenure was one huge piece of dissembling, from beginning to end. I now understand Philby, Burgess, and McLean. Take away their secret, their double life, and you take away everything. At times it was all I could do to stop from giggling aloud, knowing what the fools around me would think if they knew. But then that is a typical Quandary amusement – risk free, deniable, and basically cerebral. Nowadays, I do not limit myself to the pleasures of cabalistic innuendo. As you will shortly hear.

During those seven years of lean pleasure, the difficult thing was to walk the line between revealing my heresy and becoming orthodox by default. I must give Quandary his due, he was very good at it. Remember, he didn’t know who wrote Shakespeare, he only knew that the illiterate William from Stratford had not. Quandary certainly couldn’t give any hint of that, not in his scholarship, not in his teaching, certainly not in conversations to his colleagues. But what he could, and did, do was to poke holes in other people’s biographies of dumb Will. That was perfectly acceptable. And desperately needed. Let me tell you a little about the Shakespeare industry.

The Shakespeare industry isn’t limited to Stratford on Avon and the tourist junk sold in and around the impostor’s house – (owned, not so coincidentally, by Harvard University). There is an academic branch of the Shakespeare industry, the main function of which is to produce crappy biographies which try to render more believable the idea that this unlettered rustic baldy, this bumpkin and son of bumpkins, could possibly have written Shakespeare’s work. And so an endless stream of drivel pours out of our colleges and universities, explaining how Shakespeare could have been apprenticed to a gardener, thus picking up the profound knowledge and love of flowers which the plays reveal. We are also informed that Shakespeare could have sailed with Drake on the Golden Hind (although presumably not as ship’s gardener) acquiring the knowledge of the sea displayed so clearly in The Tempest, and that he could have he rounded out his career by enlisting for service in the Low Countries as a soldier, ultimately rising to sergeant’s rank because a man of his intelligence was not likely to remain for long a private soldier. Hard to beat the logic of that one

I have a pile of these biographies on my desk, the same desk that was the site of first amorous manifestation of the Changes. They are brightly coloured things, fat with lies and bloated with bardolatry. Read them and you would come away with the impression that Shakespeare whiled away his copious, non-gardening-lawyering-sailing-or-soldiering leisure hours with falconry, the study of Latin, Greek and Italian, as well as a little heraldry and the observation of polite society. Photographs and historically accurate sketches of falcons, coats of arms and Court processions prove the point. After all, photographs can’t lie. Now the thing to remember is that there is not one shred of evidence for any of this. Not one shred .... Except, of course, for the knowledge displayed in the plays, the very thing which the Shakespeare industry is being called upon to explain. It is, in other words, perfect nonsense, as circular an argument as one could hope to find.

Convinced by my own incisive criticism, I sweep the whole mendacious pile into the trash can, violating the recycling protocols in the process. My office door is open and the noise must have attracted Zeb Geist because he peered in with his habitual look of owlish surprise. Geist is our resident intellectual. He only appears to be here at Immaculata State. In actuality, he must be teaching at some other university – Stanford, Duke, or some Ivy League place which would more fully appreciate his talents. How do I know? Because everything he does, every word, action, every gesture of his hands, betrays the fact that he believes his present position to be so far beneath him that it could not sensibly be recognised as reality. I glare at him until he retreats, leaving little bubbles of apology in the air behind him like a cartoon character. This is no test of my powers. How hard can it be to intimidate a man who doesn’t even believe in his own life?

So much for the Shakespeare industry. Even as my old self, I could tell that there was a great opportunity here. You see, at first the Shakespeare industry appears to be overwhelming. Millions of people, thousands of books, hundreds of millions of dollars. But they do labour under an enormous disadvantage. They have to keep up the pretense of scholarly rigour. They can dismiss the heretic without responding to his arguments, but what if the person attacking them merely tugs at one thread of their moth-eaten tapestry, leaving the remaining fabric of lies undisturbed? Quandary was a good enough tactician to realize that he could not win a frontal assault on the myth. Just as well, because he never had the stomach for it anyway. Craven little shit, really. But like most of his generation, Quandary had learned something from the Vietcong. If you win all the little firefights, it doesn’t matter if you never fight the big battles. He became a guerilla. He would write regretful little articles in the scholarly journals, saying what a promising hypothesis it was to think that Shakespeare had been soldier, or whatever the latest lunacy was, how much this would explain about Shakespeare’s plays. Then (ever so reluctantly) he would demolish the idea from the ground up. Unfortunately, contemporary sources which for some reason the author failed to mention, completely negated the possibility. Still, it was a very provocative idea, and we should all be grateful to the author for proposing such an interesting, if ultimately unfruitful, line of research.

Of course, being Quandary, he was careful never to criticize the work of anyone on his faculty, or to allow the secret smirk of his heresy to appear in his prose. And as he worked much harder than his colleagues, did the original research which they avoided and yet still deferred to them, they thought him a great guy. He was careful to cultivate tics which would allow them to ridicule him and therefore feel comfortable in his presence. He would rub the top of his head before making a point in the faculty meeting and pretend that he didn’t see the people who mimicked the gesture. He was, in other words, the perfect colleague. Someone who worked harder than you did, but who was deferential and just silly enough to let you feel superior without letting it interfere with his work. And so they voted him tenure, not knowing that the Changes were already underway. Not knowing the things that Quandary was already beginning to discover.

***

We are on board a ship, I can tell that by the way the floor pitches and from the creaks and rope squeals that can be heard through the wall. The young man ‘Edward,’ now in his mid-twenties, is tapping what looks like a biscotti on a table and grimacing to himself. There is a bottle on the table, secured against the ship’s roll by a contraption of leather and wood. The only other furniture is a brass-bound trunk on the floor. Every time I see this man, he is looking moody and there is a bottle on the table. Why am I being shown films (or whatever) of a moody drunk? A murderous moody drunk. And who is showing me?

There is a commotion up above. I hear the sound of running feet directly above Edward’s head and there is the squeal of rope through tackles. There are gunshots, or are these sails flapping like gunshots? Edward gets to his feet swearing. These people seem to swear all the time. I can only pick up a few of the actual words – Whoresons, pox-hounds and a few distinctly modern and less charming ones. He rummages in the trunk beside him and produces a pistol, a strange squat little apparatus, with more hammers and triggers than seems really necessary. On his way out he also grabs something that looks like a very long butcher’s knife. And then we are in a dark passageway and, after a moment, on a wooden ladder. This is the first time the scene has shifted with the character’s movements and I try to identify the mechanism of perception. I am not looking out of a character’s eyes. I can see Edward himself quite clearly, and there is no-one with him. Nor is the point of view from a consistent direction, or angle. But it also isn’t like looking through a camera. I don’t seem to cut from one view to another, but instead to.. encompass(?) the field of view and to direct my perception at one point or another.

We emerge into daylight, a grey foggy day, with grey sea in every direction. The deck is absolute Bedlam. There is another ship alongside of us. The word ship almost dignifies the things we are on, they are both tiny. About the size of a tugboat, maybe. I am no good at nautical things, but the other vessel looks faster – lower in the water, more sails and long and narrow where our ship is fat and.. high-pooped? Is that the right word? Quandary There are men, struggling, cursing, pushing each other, all over the deck of our ship. No-one is stabbing or shooting anyone else. Most of the violence is verbal, accompanied sometimes by a push in the chest. It looks absurdly like a fight in a playground, as the little boys work themselves up for a real scuffle. Suddenly, one of the men on the deck pulls a thing that looks like a miniature blunderbuss out of his belt, jams it against the neck of the man he has been pushing and pulls the trigger. It takes a ridiculously long time to go off, then there is a muffled bang, a stream of sparks and the whole thing no longer looks like a playground fight. I do not wish to describe it. The man is nearly decapitated. Horrible, horrible.

The fight stops. Two other men throw the body overboard. Everyone acts as though nothing unusual had happened. One group of men goes and huddles resentfully by one of the masts, looking for all the world like sullen children. Most of the other group disappear below, reappearing almost immediately with boxes and bales of cloth. These are pirates I look over at the other ship but it is not flying the skull and crossbones. This is not at all like my image of a pirate’s attack. People keep bumping into one another, there seems to be no guard placed on the regular crew, it is all very.. messy, somehow. Still, there is no doubting what is going on. Up to this point, Edward has done nothing, standing inconspicuously by the hatch from which he emerged. But now he steps forward and lodges the point of the big knife against the back of one of the men carrying a box up onto the deck. As the pirates swivel towards him, Edward yells out a command. They are to put the boxes down and go. There is a lot of snarling. These people swear terribly. The man with the knife against his back tries to twist away, Edward digs the point in a little and the man yelps and keeps still. One of the bigger pirates – everyone there is rather small, I notice suddenly -- comes towards Edward, spitting out a stream of threats. Edward pulls the squat little pistol out of his pocket and levels it at the man, without looking. The man stops. There is more muttering. Suddenly, I see a wall-eyed pirate with another of these huge pistols advancing behind Edward, who does not seem to see him. Without thinking, I try to shout a warning and the strangest thing happens. The scene actually shimmers for a moment, like freeze-frame on a video.

My first thought is not whether I have saved Edward, but whether I have lost my chance to see the end of the scene (notice how hard it is to get away from the voyeur’s mentality of the film-goer). But then everything starts up again. The wall-eyed pirate, who I notice bears a distinct resemblance to Jean-Paul Sartre, gets behind Edward and strikes down hard on his neck with the barrel of the pistol. Edward falls to the deck groaning. His pistol and knife are taken away from him. The man at whom he pointed the pistol comes up swearing and makes as if to kick him in the head, but he is stopped by wall-eye. There is some more swearing. As far as I can make out, wall-eye is saying that he has seen Edward before, that he is too important to kill. The big man grumbles and kicks Edward in the ribs rather half-heartedly and then they all decamp with their boxes, leaving Edward sitting on the deck rubbing his neck. The other ship disappears into the fog.

***

Those were the first three. Edward meeting his uncle Arthur in a garden, Edward as a young man stabbing the man behind the tapestry and Edward being robbed, but spared by the pirates. I had the first a week before my tenure vote, when I was finally sure that everything was sewn up. The other two came on successive nights. In fact, for the week before the tenure vote I had one every night, seven in a row, but at the moment I only want to talk about the first three.

What were they? Well, by now you probably think they were dreams. And it is true, I would go to bed, go to sleep and these things would happen. But they weren’t dreams. They couldn’t be. I know what a dream feels like, and this was no dream. This was in color. Quandary was one of those people who dreams in black and white, great monochromatic sweeps of failure; talking to a room full of people, none of whom will listen, flailing with ineffective fists against impossibly large nighttime marauders. These were not his dreams. Of course, I am a sufficiently good logician not to attempt to prove that these things were not dreams. Descartes’ embarrassingly self-confirming hypotheses show the dangers in that line of thought. Are you awake out there? How do you know? Besides, if I try to prove my credibility I will merely undermine it. So, let us say that these things were, in fact, dreams. Or, as I shall refer to them, dreams. What’s in a name, after all? Provided you are willing to concede the possibility that the dreams are, in fact, sources of information about the Elizabethan world, I will continue to maintain the polite fiction that they are merely dreams. Until I can produce external evidence to show otherwise. What could be more reasonable? Does this sound like the approach of a mystic or a careful scholar?

Anyway. The first night Quandary just wrote it off as an aberration. Although I my specialty is Elizabethan literature, I deal more with texts than with people. If you want to know whether or not Hand D in The Book of Sir Thomas More was the hand of a professional scribe, I’m your man. But if you want to know how much money the scribe got paid, what he ate or what he wore, I would have absolutely no idea. Il n’y a pas de hors texte has always meant to me that.. Quandary So, I was surprised to have a dream apparently set in Elizabethan England. It’s not as if I was reading about Elizabeth life on a daily basis. Something about the experience was very disturbing – the colour, the detail, the way he had felt the young boy’s composure, the uncle’s temptation – but at that point Quandary thought it was only a dream, never thinking of the possibility that it could be a dream. Such things were unknown to him, after all. Besides, Quandary was busy that week. The Dean had just tipped him off unofficially that everything was going to be alright, the vote was coming up in a week, he was being pestered by a woman, a student who called herself Bambi, of all things. So, despite the vividness of the dream and the strange feelings that it left him with, Quandary did nothing. The next night he had another one – that strange meeting in the paneled room, the woman Edward called mother, the stabbing of the man in his theatrical hiding place. This generated some faint feelings of familiarity. How could it be otherwise?

I am a specialist in Elizabethan drama and Elizabethan drama is full of people who hide behind tapestries and are stabbed. Look, this kind of tapestry was called an arras, a name which comes from the town in Artois where the fabric was made and... Quandary! I looked up “arras” in the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the second definition. A hanging screen of this material formerly placed around the walls of household apartments, often at such a distance from them as to allow of people being concealed in the space between. That’s the definition If the Watergate plumbers had been Elizabethan, this is what they would have used. So there was a perfectly rational explanation. I could merely be projecting in my dreams, the knowledge I had acquired through reading Elizabethan plays. Having put a tapestry in a dream, it wouldn’t be surprising for me to put a man behind it. Having put a man behind it, the obvious thing to do is to have him stabbed. Even so, there was something about the scene that discomfited me. Quandary, used to being discomfited by things that were out of his control, did nothing. But something within him stirred.

Then came the third dream. Quandary woke up feeling threatened, which was not unusual, and muttering something, which was. He was muttering thieves of mercy.

The recollection makes me pause. If he had gone to a Concordance at that point, the whole thing might have been revealed a little earlier, and subsequent events might have turned out very differently. As it was, Quandary was too worried about his tenure vote to pay attention to the promptings of his subconscious. That task was left for me, still nestled in the bosom of time, lacking but four more dreams and a tenure vote before I was to emerge. So let us not be too hard on Quandary. In the four days left to him, let him worry about whatever he wants to.

Chapter 2 will be posted next week.

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