Part 2

The Shakespeare Chronicles

a novel

James Boyle

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It should be attributed as follows.

“James Boyle, The Shakespeare Chronicles: A Novel

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

Published by Lulu Press.

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.

2 Discovery

_One thing which puzzles me about the events of the last month is the increase in sexual urges which has accompanied my.. rebirth. Certainly, Quandary had his sensual side, well hidden under layers of tweed and repression. But there was nothing like this constant goatish-ness. At first sight this point may seem unconnected to the fabulous discoveries that I have made, but on the principle that no aspect of a mysterious phenomenon may be excluded from relevance on the basis of some prudish a priori, I will leave nothing out. "A new Petronius, I conceal nothing." Have I said that before?

Strangely enough, I cannot explain the lust that the Changes brought to Quandary without first describing Immaculata State University to you. The University was founded by an 18th century worthy known simply as ‘The Founder’ who, after a fascinatingly rambunctious and profitable youth, had studied every useful art and science, thereby rendering himself both deadly dull and subject to confusion with Thomas Jefferson, his more interesting contemporary. Apart from leaving the college a set of particularly uninspiring "heirlooms," apparently drawn from the detritus in the bottom of his sock drawer, the Founder’s main use was as a well-spring of spurious tradition. No university dispute is complete without an appeal to ‘the Founder’s intentions’ which are of a sufficiently indeterminate character to make them suitable for this purpose.

As for geography, the university is located in Charlotte Russe, the state capital of Immaculata. Immaculata, of course, is nestled forgettably between Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. A recent survey showed it the state most likely to be omitted in schoolchildren’s attempts to name every state in the union, beating out Rhode Island by a narrow margin In reprisal the state legislature employed a high priced public relations firm which came up with the slogan "Immaculata is for love affairs," a bare-faced copy of neighboring Virginia and a particularly unfortunate slogan for a state which, like Virginia, was named as a hypocritical compliment to the chastity of Elizabeth the First. As a slogan, it sounds rather like "Albania is for capitalists." But then again, nowadays Alabania is for capitalists.

Pah! This account has too much of Quandary in it. In reality there is little to tell. Immaculata State is a shitty university, led by an egomaniacal toupeed president who gets his money from arms dealers and his principles from Newsweek polls. Unable to compete in terms of academic rigor or true learning, Immaculata State found its own little niche by providing an imitation education to the spoiled children whom even expensive private remedial SAT courses cannot raise up. It is known locally as the ‘party-til-you-puke school’ and its students can be identified by their BMW’s with personalized number plates and "Camp Immac" stickers. Any kid driving a Camarro or worse is eligible for financial aid. The young men wear Polo shirts and chunky gold bracelets, or obscure skater T-shirts and stoner buttons. The young women are split between studious pre-law and pre-meds on the one hand, and ex high school Queen Bees. The former wear jeans and hippy tops and share class notes a lot. The latter control the sororities and sleep with the cooler college athletes and a selected group of the bad boys – preferably those with old money, long hair and semi-decent bands. The Queen Bees favor spaghetti strap camisoles, or designer cotton dresses and perfumes with names like "Fixation" and "Sodomy" which smell of saccharine and urea. Both sexes affect sing-song drawls which resemble speech defects. The faculty oscillates between disdain for their students’ intellects and envy of their cars. That’s all there is to it.

After Jean left him, Quandary found the campus to be redolent of sex. Reeking of it. He would walk back from the sandwich shop, clutching his Italian sub with its unwanted onions and stare covertly at the bronzed flesh displayed on all sides. But these cautious glances, snatched during the moments when he was not dodging the frisbees which flitted across the quad, were as far as he would go. For some reason, a group of the Queen Bees had settled on Quandary as a target. Perhaps it was because he was so nice, so normal, so safe, so bland. He was the antithesis of sex. So they would flirt with him. Outrageously. Part of him acknowledged the rightness of the punishment, just as anyone fearing ridicule from a larger group knows in their heart of hearts it will be them who is picked out for it and secretly acquiesces in their selection for shame.

They were merciless. Quandary suspected attacks coordinated by cell phone. They haunted Quandary’s office, practicing their flirting on this safe older man. They would lean across his desk to ask for an extension on their papers in wheedling little girl tones, displaying an amount of cleavage which their mothers had probably reserved for the wedding bed. Another favourite trick was to exhibit to Quandary’s embarrassed but fascinated gaze, bruises on their upper thighs which they had got from banging into tables and chairs in the perpetual distracted and graceful stumble of the young.

Quandary, who among his other disabilities was afflicted by an occasional morality, felt sorry for them. Convinced by parents and advertising and loutish boyfriends that they were most important as objects of display, they laboured with heartbreaking energy to become good objects. They tanned assiduously, skin cancer be damned, turning themselves at precise intervals like a leg of lamb on a spit, basting themselves with imported tanning oils, agonizing over skin blemishes and weight gain. For many of them, their college years would be the only moment of grace. Already they could feel the studious pre-meds pulling away from them. There is not much solace on the tanning bed when one is forty years old and married to a banker. Locked in the eternal present of the teenager, how could they know that they had chosen a self-image which was both trivial and fleeting? The ability to make a balding and tweeded English professor stammer by displaying one’s thigh to advantage might feel like power, but it was an evanescent power, a power built on self-caricature. These were Quandary’s thoughts, so that even as his eyes strayed over their bodies, he was castigating himself and pitying them. As I said, Quandary was afflicted by morality. I have no such disabilities.

But I must not stray ahead of the tale. Beset by guilty lust and lustful sympathy, Quandary dreamed away his last four nights, recording his thoughts like a good little scholar.

***

My first impression is surprise because Edward is a young boy again. There was no reason for me to assume that the dreams would move in chronological order. Nevertheless, I had done so. He is a little older than he had been in the first dream, maybe ten or eleven, I am no expert on children. There are other differences. Edward is dressed more richly and this time he is feeling self-conscious. He is standing in a great hall. In front of him there is a milling crowd of brightly dressed adults, all following some center of excitement that is hidden from my.. view. Edward is hanging back. I can tell that he feels diffident about moving forward, but again I cannot tell how I know these things. I am surprised at his shyness. Even at eight, this boy didn’t seem the kind to be tongue tied at a grown up’s party.

The crowd suddenly parts and there she is. Looking right at Edward. Everyone sees the object of her gaze and stands aside. Clearly she is a person of some authority. She is a red-head of medium height, in her late twenties I would guess, who bears a slight resemblance to the British actress, Glenda Jackson. She is not conventionally beautiful but the strength and liveliness of her gaze gives her a.. force that surpasses prettiness. When she speaks, her voice is low and pleasant. She asks who this handsome young man is. The group laughs, rather too quickly in my opinion. A saturnine middle aged man wearing puffy slashed hose comes out of the crowd and grips Edward by the shoulder. Edward’s father? Something in the gesture tells me that such contact between father and son is a rare occurrence. I can feel Edward come alive with the touch. He radiates pride. The man pauses, and I wait impatiently. Finally I will find out who this "Edward" really is. But the first words of the introduction give me such a shock that I almost miss the crucial part. "Your Majesty" he says and I sense the rest only dimly. This must be Elizabeth! If she is in her late twenties then this must be somewhere around 1560. I struggle to recollect the rest of the introduction – something about heirs... Lord Bulbeck, or was it Bolbrook? She is speaking again, asking the man when the court can hope to expect the pleasure of this fine young man’s attendance. There is more laughter. Again it is too quick and nervous. Elizabeth turns to someone else, the hand drops from Edward’s shoulder and the crowd turns away. Edward continues to stare at her. As the crowd mills about her she looks over her shoulder and sees him staring. She smiles, and this smile no-one sees but him.

***

At the time, Quandary had no idea what was going on. Still, the sight of Elizabeth – Queen Elizabeth – was enough to galvanize even my cautious earlier self into investigation. This was the most (perhaps the only) truly romantic sounding monarch in British history, after all. Besides, there were now only three days to go to my tenure vote. The only thing for Quandary to do was to hang around looking as though he was convinced that the whole thing was merely a formality and being very nice to everyone he met in the corridors. So Quandary whiled away the morning using the books in his office to search for some record of an Edward Bulbeck or Bolbrook. It looked like a dead end. The rest of the day was taken up in a mindless discussion of how we should make up for the days when the university closed because of snowstorms. Quandary, of course, had volunteered to be head of the "snow day committee," and he spent the afternoon presenting its report – weighing the advantages of meeting on Saturdays (and violating the Jewish Sabbath), on the days after term ended (cutting into the reading period) or teaching double classes at night (and having no-one come). After a great deal of discussion the faculty resolved to reschedule the classes on Friday evenings. Of course, no student in the world would dream of coming to a class on a Friday evening, but as one of Quandary’s colleagues put it "It’s the principle of the thing that counts." This elicited massive nodding from all concerned. Quandary’s committee was complimented on "the sensitivity with which they had handled this thorny, multicultural issue" and the meeting dispersed at 6:34pm with Quandary being told that he was a "great institutional player," his tenure apparently safely in the bag.

As Quandary was gathering his papers in his office, getting ready to go home to another night of frozen pizza and strange, historically unsubstantiated dreams, there was a tap on his door. I simply wouldn’t have answered, but Quandary was the type who answers smilingly and then laces his internal monologue with complaints. Quandary opened the door to reveal a pretty young woman in a mini-dress and high heels who was chewing gum as if it were an aerobic activity. Quandary groaned inwardly. It was his nemesis, Europa Johnson or, as this particular daughter of Phoenix and favourite of Zeus preferred to be known, "Bambi."

–– Professor Quandary? It’s Bambi? Bambi Johnson?

Despite the fact that she was actually a forceful and flirtatious young woman, the valley girl drawl made her sound genuinely unsure about her identity. Quandary found the perpetual interrogative unsettling. –– What can I do for you, Bambi?

–– It’s about my paper? For your class?

–– Look Bambi, I was just on my way out. Come back on Monday and we’ll talk about whatever it is. OK?

–– I’ll come back like on Monday?

–– Right. Goodnight, Bambi.

–– Goodnight?

Even though this was nearly five weeks ago, I can remember it as if it were yesterday. Quandary gathered up some more papers, emptied his onion-smelling trash can and made his way out to the parking lot. It was a warm September evening. Bambi was sitting in her white BMW – license plate, "BAMBIS," bumper sticker "I didn’t invent sex, I’m just trying to perfect it" – with the windows down and the air conditioning on, smoking a cigarette and talking on her cell phone. She saw Quandary and waved, her eyes invisible behind shiny sunglasses. He knew that on Monday she would be in to plague him with glimpses of her thighs and requests for supplementary reading she would never look at. When he saw her friends around the campus, they would always tease him about her. "Professor Quandary! Bambi like really enjoys your class!?" Much giggling. Much ungulate chewing of gum. Why should she pick him, out of all the teachers in the school, to flirt with, to humiliate? Why him?

Quandary trudged past the BMW on the way to his Chevette, wondering why she had to have the engine running, the air conditioning on and the windows open, knowing that if he asked her she would say that otherwise the cigarette smoke made her hair smell, or some other explanation that made perfect sense in the world of Bambi Johnson’s. Walking through the campus pub one day, Quandary had seen her order a whole pizza, cut a tiny circle out of the center and discard the rest because the crust was "gross? and fattening?" Shrugging off the day, Quandary putt-putted out of the lot in his Chevette, thinking of Bambi’s perfectly browned, long slim legs and wishing for air conditioning.

That night Quandary lay in bed, belching beer and pizza and feeling disconsolate about the lack of a historical basis for his dreams. I find it very interesting to remember these last few days of Quandary’s existence. My feelings towards him are ambivalent. On the one hand I loathe his weakness, his willingness to conform to other people’s ideas, his cowardice. On the other hand, he was in some sense a necessary antecedent to my emergence. Invoking a blasphemy that would have upset Quandary but only amuses me, I could truthfully say that ‘he died that I might live.’ And because of that, I feel a certain compassion towards him. Strange. "Compassion in a man of knowledge would seem strange. Like gentle hands on a cyclops." (I have been reading a lot of Nietzsche recently. Suddenly it seems.... pertinent.)

So there, alone in his over-large house, lying in unacknowledged weakness on the side of the bed where Jean had always slept, Quandary bemoaned the apparent lack of veracity in his dreams. Now that they had been revealed to be baseless, he was sure that they would come to him no more. But they weren’t over yet. They had barely begun. Let us turn back to Quandary’s notes for that night.

***

Edward is with Elizabeth again. My knowledge that he probably didn’t exist has not stopped the dreams. Surely, anyone important enough to be introduced to Elizabeth by name would have left some kind of record? Real or not, here he is. This time he seems to be about fourteen or fifteen – one moment looking like a little boy, the next like a young man. Elizabeth is in her mid-thirties. She looks better, if anything, than when I last saw her. They are walking amidst a group of gowned men. Could they be academics? They certainly wear the gowns with a more natural air than I have ever managed at our graduations. Elizabeth’s dress is white, with what looks like beads or pearls sewn on to it. It looks strange next to the drab creased gowns around her. Even Edward is wearing a gown. He certainly can’t have taken a degree so perhaps these are not academics after all. The setting looks like a university – dreaming spires and all that, but I don’t know enough about Elizabethan architecture to know if this is typical.

Edward looks almost as awed as he did in the last dream. I can see no trace of the man who I thought was his father, so perhaps I was wrong about that. Although Elizabeth is deep in discussion with the robed men, she turns to Edward from time to time and asks him a question. I am sure that she can see the impression she is having on him. In fact, it almost looks as though she is flirting. I must concentrate more on what is happening, if only to find out whether these dreams really are figments of my imagination, which they surely must be. Elizabeth’s clothes, for example. I don’t really know anything about Elizabethan dress. I certainly couldn’t imagine a complete authentic outfit. First of all, she is wearing a strange little white hat, which looks like the kind the psychopath wore in Clockwork Orange. You know, a British bowler sort of thing. Her dress is white, and beaded as I mentioned before. The sleeves are puffy with little bows attached at intervals. There is stuff that looks like lace at her wrists and throat. The top of the dress is quite tight, coming down to a "v" at the waist and flaring out into a wide skirt .... God, I sound like a fashion designer. This isn’t getting us anywhere. Suddenly the scene winks out. The strangest thing is, there is a lingering sense of disappointment. As though this scene had been shown to me for a purpose and I had missed it. Then, and this has never happened before, we have "cut" to another "scene." Edward and Elizabeth are markedly older. Two or three years must have passed. Is there some intelligence guiding these revelations? Or is it all some monstrously complicated delusion?

In the new scene, Edward and Elizabeth are alone in a room. It is lighter and airier than the one in which Edward killed poor "Cecil" or will kill poor Cecil, I suppose, because he looks to be only seventeen or eighteen in this scene. This is all very confusing. Anyway, the room is large. It has black and white tiles on the floor and a bay window with a window seat. Elizabeth is definitely flirting with him now. She turns away from the window, draws a finger across his cheek, rests a hand on his shoulder. Edward is trembling like a young horse, nerves and suppressed lust I suppose, although he didn’t look very nervous when he was dealing with those pirates. The expression on Elizabeth’s face is fascinating. She is toying with him and yet she isn’t completely in control of herself. She looks about forty in this picture and here she is flirting with a very attractive young man of seventeen. Why would a someone of forty have an affair with a seventeen year old? Something in her expression tells me that the awareness of the age difference makes the whole thing even more delicious for her. Seeing the lust on her face makes me feel, for the first time, like a voyeur.

Obviously, Edward isn’t going to make the first move. This is his queen, after all. At least that is one problem that most adolescents don’t have to deal with nowadays – when to make a pass at the sovereign. With her back to the window seat, Elizabeth takes him playfully by the hands and pulls him toward her. She is still teasing. Doesn’t he have a kiss for his queen? Suddenly Edward’s restraint breaks. He grabs her, kisses her clumsily. Elizabeth laughs, feigns pushing him away. Her hands wander over his chest and his shoulders and then meet at the back of his neck. She kisses him this time. Edward is straining forward, pushing her back against the window seat. Her hands are fumbling at their clothes. I had always wondered how Elizabethans got those cumbersome garments off quickly enough to give in to spontaneous passion. By the volume and intensity of the moaning, there must have been ways. Elizabeth is leaning back on the window seat and Edward is thrusting into her with great adolescent grunts of delight. She is digging her nails into his butt. The puffy folds of her skirt blossom ludicrously around his legs. I see her face looking over his shoulder, her mouth half open, caught between calculation and lust, passion and amusement, and I have the strangest sense that she is looking right at me. Then.. nothing. It is over. I awake puzzled and confused. And horny.

***

The next day was Saturday. Quandary had planned to go into the university, just so that he would be seen in his office by the few faculty members who came in on the weekend to avoid their spouses. Knowing Quandary no longer had a spouse, they would be sure to attribute his presence to scholarly commitment rather than marital discord. It would be yet another item to add to the image Quandary had been cultivating so carefully for the last seven years. In the event, the dream had unsettled him and he went to the undergraduate library instead. For most people this would be an unremarkable change of weekend plans. For Quandary, whose devotion to his assumed persona had probably cost him a perfectly good marriage, it was little short of astounding. In retrospect, I think this decision not to go in to his office was the first hint of the Changes, but then hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Quandary, of course, would have said "the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk." Never use a perfectly good American saying when you can use an obscure one coined by a Prussian autocrat.

The library was officially named the "Immaculata Learning Resources Center," perhaps to reassure the undergraduates that there were things other than books inside. It had little to offer on the subject of Elizabethan history. Elizabeth may have made a journey to Cambridge in 1564 and one to Oxford in 1566. No Lord Bulbeck or Bolbrook appeared in her retinue. In a larger library he could have gone through Burke’s list of the British peerages, but the only "learning resource" that the library catalogue contained under Nobility, British was "Hair to the Throne: a Pictorial Illustration of Hairstyles at the Wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana." That left Quandary without much to go on. I remember vividly how he felt at this moment. The last dream had aroused him more than he would have cared to admit. Despite the fact that there was nothing to worry about, he was worried about his tenure vote. Finally, something was tickling his subconscious – something from one of the dreams. Quandary sat in the library muttering to himself – another habit that, like his occasional bursts of morality, I have managed to jettison.

It was one of those interminable and glaring Fall afternoons where the air hangs waiting for the evening thunderstorm. Quandary sat in a carrel on the ground floor of the Learning Resources Center and tried to remember the details of the dreams. The first had been the young Edward and "Uncle Arthur" in the garden, translating Ovid. The second had been Edward as young man, reproaching the woman he called "mother" and killing poor "Cecil" in a dark room hung with tapestries. In the third, Edward had been attacked by pirates while the fourth.. Wait a minute. Quandary knew he was onto something. Running to the reference shelves, he pulled down the Riverside Shakespeare, much favoured by the undergraduates because it had pictures. Frantically he flipped through the pages until he found it; "’Ere we were two days at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valor, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship, so that I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy, but they knew what they did...." There it was. Act IV, scene vi. Hamlet.

Once he thought of Hamlet, something else dropped into place. He didn’t know how he could have missed it before. In that whole wonderful play full of excuses for doing nothing, Hamlet’s one rash act is to murder a spy listening behind the arras as he confronts his mother. The spy, of course, is Polonius. "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!/ I took thee for thy better." Edward had killed a man behind a tapestry while talking to a woman who he called "mother." Edward had been accosted by pirates who treated him like "thieves of mercy," perhaps because they knew that he was of noble blood and that any harm which befell him would bring trouble down one their heads. In the dark place between sleep and waking Quandary had known this. That is why he had awoken saying "thieves of mercy." Obviously, he was meant to conclude that there was some connection between Edward and Hamlet. The dreams had been sent to him for a purpose. But what was the purpose? In his excitement Quandary nearly crashed the shit-brown Chevette as he took it out of the lot. He rushed home, so eager to receive that night’s installment that he almost took a sleeping pill. Just in time he stopped himself. The last thing that he wanted to do was to interfere with the dreams by adding pharmacopeia to inspiration. Instead, he watched a bad cop show, full of black women judges, sensitive policemen and white inner city gangs. I remember thinking that it was like a photographic negative of society’s prejudices. That was an uncharacteristically cynical thought for Quandary and it didn’t give rise to his habitual little surge of liberal guilt, so perhaps the Changes were really underway.

At 10:30, unable to wait any longer, Quandary went up to bed, taking a large glass of bourbon with him, full of dread that the dreams wouldn’t come tonight. He needn’t have worried.

***

For a moment I think that I have gone back to another era. This is some kind of jousting tourney. There are men in armour, pennants, horses with strange padding strapped around their saddles, even little pavilion tents and ladies reclining on cushions. Is this the middle ages? But the illusion lasts only a moment. Even to my untutored eyes the scene is wildly a-historical. Some of the "men-at-arms" are carrying Elizabethan muskets, the ladies are clothed in a mix of costumes that has more in common with the church bazaar than King Arthur’s court and the jousters are equipped in a motley assembly of undersized and mismatched armour, probably robbed from the baronial hallways. Most of them look extremely uncomfortable and distinctly embarrassed. This is obviously some sort of staged entertainment of the kind the Elizabethans loved so much. But to put on this level of festivities requires a lot of money and, probably, a royal pretext. I.. ‘look’ for Elizabeth and am not surprised to see her in the largest pavilion talking to a middle-aged man with long nose and a strange, forked, ginger beard. His eyes are hazel – bizarre, given his hair colour – and very, very cold.

I concentrate on Elizabeth but their conversation is not.. coming through, so I expand the focus to the scene they are watching. Just at that moment two men, one in white and one in red, are thundering towards each other on horses which look more like cart-horses than military chargers. Given the weight of armour they are carrying, perhaps this is just as well. Each man carries a lance the point of which is wrapped again and again in leather and rags, so that the tip resembles a rather misshapen soccer ball. Strangest of all, they must aim these ungainly lances at each other slantwise across a large privet hedge which divides the jousting field like a white line on a highway. The sides of the horses are slapping into the rough cut privet (no electric hedge trimmers in the fifteenth century) as each rider strains to get closer to his opponent. Suddenly they are upon each other. It looks as though the white knight is on target. The lance of the red knight is still wandering around in the air while white’s is firmly trained on the center of the red knight’s breastplate. But this impression lasts only a moment. The red knight’s lance swings in towards its target, effortlessly sweeping away the other lance’s padded tip and then swinging back just at the right moment to catch the white knight high on the chest. There is a thump, an enormous crash and the white knight lands on his back, making a noise like half a ton of scrap iron. The white knight’s horse wanders off to graze, and a brace of laughing servants run up to help the loser to his feet. By the strength of the cuffs he aims at their ears, there is nothing seriously wrong with him.

Meanwhile the red knight has wheeled his cumbersome horse as prettily as possible and is galloping up to accept the cheers of the crowd. As he gallops past the royal pavilion he pulls off his half helm. It is Edward, now in his late teens or early twenties, his hair plastered to his forehead by sweat, an uncharacteristically big smile on his face. Somehow, God alone knows how, he manages to make his carthorse rear in front of Elizabeth, dipping his lance in a salute which threatens to remove the eyes of a few of the audience. Elizabeth and the ginger-bearded man interrupt their conversation. Elizabeth gives Edward a fond, almost patronising smile. She waves her handkerchief and then lets it flutter to the ground. With a grand gesture Edward attempts to pick it up with his lance, a procedure which requires him to grind the thing into the ground until it is glued on by a layer of mud. Finally, having retrieved the sodden rag, he ties it to his saddle-bow, makes another grand gesture and canters off again. Elizabeth and ginger beard watch him go.

I can feel tension between them. Does ginger-beard know that Elizabeth is having an affair with Edward? Something about the silence convinces me that he does. I wait for him to say something but it is Elizabeth who speaks first. She compliments ginger-beard on his "ward." Is this Edward’s guardian? Ginger-beard certainly doesn’t like him much, I can tell that. He has started a litany of Edward’s wrongs, but as though his mind were not really on the subject. "..running wild, that unfortunate affair with the cook.., keeping lewd company..his players have no restraint.." Elizabeth too, can sense that he has not yet come to the point. Suddenly ginger-beard looks at her. "There are even those who suggest a royal entanglement." Elizabeth starts to speak but ginger-beard presses on. "It must end." "What must end?" says Elizabeth with a warning note in her voice, but ginger-beard betrays no nervousness. "The talk, your majesty." There is a pause. Ginger-beard says reflectively, "Even the greatest of generals could not hold Oxford and Leicester at the same time." What are they talking about? I thought they were discussing Elizabeth’s affair with Edward. Elizabeth is looking very hard at ginger-beard, but he does not flinch. Their interaction suggests familiarity, old habits of anger and debate.

In the distance Edward and another opponent are entering the lists. Edward, lost in some fantasy of his own devising, is still trying to make his carthorse act like a high-spirited charger. For the first time since I have been watching him, he seems to be happy. Elizabeth turns her head to look at him. Ginger-beard clears his throat. "Despite his faults, the young man is of noble birth and I have a daughter.." This time he has her. She looks at him in frank astonishment. "Your majesty, it must end, this, this.. talk. I know the boy has a commendable attachment to his queen, an attachment neither of us wishes to end." He gestures toward a moony-looking adolescent sitting in the next pavilion. "Anne is but fifteen. What young girl could compete with the memory of a queen?" I wait for Elizabeth to blow up at the notion that she would ever compete with anyone, but she seems to like the idea. Ginger beard sees that he has made an impression and pushes on. "Majesty, the boy is wild. He keeps lewd company, his family leans toward papism... One day he could be dangerous. Such a match would tie him to us forever." He pauses again. I have grown to relish these pauses. "..of course, he could scarcely marry a lady unless her family had a barony... or was shortly to receive one.." Elizabeth raises an eyebrow. Somehow I perceive that his ambition reassures her. Why is that? "You are without shame, Cecil." Is ginger-beard also called Cecil? He meets her eyes and then bows low. The bow is not an obeisance but a declaration of victory. "I hope I shall always have those qualities necessary to make me her majesty’s servant."

With another great crash of scrap metal, Edward unseats his final opponent. He wheels his clumsy mount and gallops back to the pavilion. "Your majesty," he says, almost stuttering in his excitement, "I won!" Elizabeth gives him a long look. "Yes, you did. And I shall bestow upon you a rare prize." That’s it. I awake and it is morning.

***

Sunday passed in a haze. Tomorrow would be the tenure vote. Poor little Quandary had waited seven years for this moment, dreaming his monochrome daydreams of the moment when he could at last reveal his heresy. Now that the moment was almost upon him, he couldn’t even keep his mind on it. These dreams were like burrs under his skin. They disturbed him, raised longings that frightened him with their size. Quandary knew what happened to people with large longings. He had read about them. They ended up dead, or dead-drunk, shouting at their spouses in the street. Their lawns were never mowed. If they had lawns at all, that is. They threatened him with their unruliness. They had all the romance of a cliff edge, all the seduction of vertigo. And so did the dreams. He was still obsessed with the puzzle they posed, but they were more than a puzzle. They threatened him. Somehow he didn’t think that Elizabeth would have thought him a good institutional player. He didn’t think ginger-beard could be manipulated by staring at his hairline. Neither of them would have cared about snow days. There was such arrogance to the way they talked, such uncaring confidence in their ability to make things happen. Quandary was fascinated. The academic had been given his first peek into the abyss of power. Like Kissinger before him, he peeked, he leaned. He fell.

In the late afternoon Quandary found himself sitting on the edge of his oversized porch. There was a pile of books in beside him; Cruden’s Concordance, two volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a clutter of back issues from the Shakespeare Quarterly. I remember him looking down at his hand as it rested on the warm wood of the floor. The porch was made of oak, and the thick layers of clear varnish Mr. Macy had put down glowed like old amber above the grain of the wood. Quandary’s hand lay there as if it had been abandoned, the thick hairy fingers with bitten nails incongruous against the smooth glow of the varnish. Then Quandary raised his eyes an inch or so and noticed that the board on the lip of the stairs had been worn against the grain of the wood into a tangle of varnish and raw-edged splinters. A square of afternoon sun illuminated the little patch; hairy fingers, and bitten nails, varnished boards and painful splinters. It didn’t look incongruous any more. I had a sudden and overwhelming sense of the present; the ‘now-ness’ of the moment. It was an actual physical feeling – a pressure in the chest, a fluttery lightness in the stomach. Do you know what I mean? The moment is there for a second, it catches your eye like a leaf thrown up onto the surface of a river, then it is whirled away from your gaze. It wasn’t much but it was enough. I was alive. I was awake

I hadn’t solved the puzzle in that moment, but I had come close to it. Quandary, for all his Elizabethan literary expertise, lacked the broad sweep of imagination, the penetrating eye. Cecil was the key. There were two Cecils in the dreams. The first was the one Edward had stabbed behind the arras. Forget him for a moment. The second was the one standing with Elizabeth at the joust. The first thing to realise – how had Quandary missed it? – was that Cecil was not a namby pamby English first name. It was a last name. Ginger-beard was one of the great Cecil family. Of course, the Elizabethan age was lousy with them. Every intrigue seemed to be started or finished by a Cecil. But the man who towered over all of them, the self-made man who exemplified Elizabethan class-mobility, the spymaster, gardener and amateur philosopher, the man who made Machiavelli and Bismarck look like church wardens, was the founder of the dynasty, Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s greatest minister. Also known by the title he later received, Baron Burghley. Who then was Edward? Who married Burghley’s daughter? And what had this to do with Hamlet?

Unfortunately, I had reached the limit of Quandary’s meagre supply of reference books. It would take tomorrow and a visit to the "learning resources center" to clear those questions up. But I was close. I could feel it. The patch of sun grew fainter, the shadows around my hand lengthened. There was the noise of a lawnmower from next-door and I let my mind wander onto the question of why Mr. Saikewicz never cut the grass. It was exactly the kind of thing that Quandary wasted his time thinking about and it was enough to banish my fragile awareness and bring him back in all of his grasshopper-leap, blue-bottle buzz confusion. In those days my consciousness wasn’t self-sustaining. I needed to concentrate in order to banish Quandary’s quotidian concerns. A second’s lapse and Quandary returned. Think of that moment as a pre-natal memory, a dimly remembered dolphin frolic in swirls of amniotic fluid. No matter. Sunday night now, and the last of those seven constitutive dreams.

***

Another Elizabethan chamber. I am looking at the balding back of a man’s head as he writes in a leather bound journal of blank quarto pages. At first I think he is a scribe. There is a book on front of him on the desk and a handwritten manuscript, loose pages untidily fastened with red ribbon. The man is referring to both of them as he writes, but he is not simply copying. He mutters aloud, groans, shakes his head in apparent frustration, grimace-mouths sentences. The activity is unmistakable. He is writing. And yet he is working from an already printed book. A translator, perhaps? After all, translation requires creative energy, even if of a lower form than original composition. Is the handwritten manuscript an earlier draft? I focus more closely on its carelessly tied pages and find that it is written in a relatively modern italic hand, strange if we are in the Elizabethan age, when the older ‘English’ or ‘scribes’ handwriting still predominated. But when I look back to the journal in which the man is writing I find that he is using the scribal hand. So the ribbon tied pages are someone else’s work. Is he a plagiarist?

The man seems to be almost at the end of the end of his work. By concentrating I can manage to make out the last lines.

Let comme that fateful howre

Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over me no powre

And at his pleasure make an end of myne uncertyne tyme.

Yit shall the better part of mee assured bee too clyme

Aloft above the starry skye. And the world shall never

Be able for too quench my name. For looke how farre so ever

The Romane Empyre by the ryght of conquest shall extend,

So farre shall all folke read this woork. And tyme without all end

(If Poets as by prophesie about the truth may ame)

My lyfe shall everlastingly bee lengthened still by fame.

He takes all of this from the ribbon-tied document, and he is sighing as he copies it down. Perhaps he sympathises with these grandiose hopes for literary immortality. Putting down his pen he turns around. It takes me a moment to recognise him, but then I realise that it is ‘Uncle Arthur’ from the first dream, the man who met young Edward in the garden and set him some translation.. And in that moment I know what book this is. It is Ovid, The Metamorphoses.

As if my understanding were some kind of signal, the scene immediately shifts. I am still unaccustomed to these ‘cutaway’ dreams and find my mind wandering for a moment before I can concentrate on the new scene. A fortyish Edward is standing in a medium sized hall. I look around and realise that it is actually a theatre. The actors, most of whom seem very young, are arrayed on stage and he is lecturing them about their faults. They overact, apparently, mangling the words of the play in order to get a cheap laugh, or rushing through their speeches as though desperate to get to the end. The casting is bad, with the huskiest of the actors assigned to play the women’s parts – and in truth I can see some solid looking hairy legs sticking out from beneath the frilliest of the costumes. Finally, and this seems to be Edward’s biggest complaint, they pay no regard to the author’s intentions. The actors all nod and look appropriately shamefaced, which surprises me. I would not have expected such subservience from actors, even towards a nobleman. Perhaps Edward has some special relationship with this company.

The lecture seems to be over. The company troops off, but Edward calls one of them back. He is a dark-eyed lad of about sixteen with an oval face and a high forehead, not as handsome as some of the others in the company but possessed of a greater presence. Edward throws an arm around his shoulder in a fatherly gesture and they walk out of the theatre together.

***

In the morning Quandary assembled clues as he dressed in his tweeds and flannels, brushing the little hair he had left over as much scalp as it would cover. Since Jean left it had been his custom to drink his coffee in a different room of the house every day. It made the house feel less empty. You could have gone into any room and found a coffee cup sitting somewhere, evaporated coffee glazing the bottom of the cup and the smell of caramel in the air. Today he was wandering around the smallest of the three spare bedrooms with his fly open, tucking his shirt into his trousers and checking points off on his fingers. Jean had decorated the walls with some Daumier reproductions we found at a yard sale and those caricatures of greed and lust from the Second Republic were the only witness to Quandary as he shambled around the room, unshaven, mumbling evidence to himself.

What did he know? He knew that Edward was an accomplished scholar, a precocious translator of Latin for a man called Uncle Arthur, who might even have appropriated Edward’s translation for his own use. Was that the meaning of the last dream? He knew that Edward was a moody drunk, who had been remonstrating with a woman he called "mother" and had then killed a spy behind the tapestry in circumstances strongly reminiscent of Polonius’ death in Hamlet. He knew that Edward had been captured by pirates and had escaped, again in circumstances similar to, but not identical to those in Hamlet. Edward was obviously a nobleman, probably not called Lord Bulbeck because there had been no record of such a person, but a nobleman, nonetheless. And not just any nobleman! His father(?) entertained Queen Elizabeth and Edward was obviously besotted by her, even had an affair with her if that rather disturbing fifth dream could be believed. He knew that the ginger-beard "Cecil" wanted to marry Edward off to his daughter, and thought he would get a baronetcy out of it. Hadn’t Elizabeth also described Edward as "your ward" to Cecil? That was something which could be easily checked. And if Cecil was indeed Burghley (as I had revealed to him yesterday) Quandary knew that Cecil did get his baronetcy and thus that Edward’s life was inextricably tied up with that of the most powerful man in Elizabethan England. Finally, Edward seemed to be connected to the theatre in some way. What did all these things add up to? What did they mean? Why had the dreams been sent to him?

Still unshaven, still mumbling, Quandary putted towards the college in the Chevette. It was a five mile drive past colonial-style tyre repair shops, colonial-style burger restaurants and colonial-style tax preparers. People drove slowly in Charlotte Russe. The roads were filled with pick-up trucks and battered gas guzzlers, burbling through the red lights, pulling leisurely U-turns at the intersections of Charlotte’s only divided highway. Through these shoals of country boys moved the smaller, neater shapes of the European cars belonging to the Immaculata students. And the shit-brown Chevette. Remembering it through Quandary’s eyes is like watching a movie.

When Quandary pulled into the parking lot the first thing he saw was Bambi Johnson’s elegant bottom, displayed to advantage as she fossicked in the trunk of her BMW. The mini dress was turquoise today, as were Bambi’s nails, eye-shadow, earrings – even toenails, Quandary noticed. Her underpants, however, were white. Quietly closing the door of the Chevette, Quandary started to tip-toe away. Bambi straightened up, whacking her head on the trunk lid with a bump audible to Quandary.

–– Professor Quandary? It’s Bambi?

–– Hello Bambi. I didn’t see you there. How are you today?

–– I just hit my head? It’s like really sore? You know?

–– Yes, I do. Well, I hope you feel better soon. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must..

–– Professor Quandary? You said I was to come and see you today?

For a moment Quandary didn’t know what she was talking about. Then he remembered getting rid of her on Friday afternoon by telling her to come and see him on Monday. What else did he have scheduled today? For the first time Quandary remembered that today was his tenure vote. At eleven o’clock. In only two hours time he would either be fired or tenured. Poor, cautious Quandary. He nearly panicked. But being Quandary he did not tell the wretched woman to come back some other day. Once again, I was to benefit from his weakness.

–– Ah, yes, so I did. Um, look, I’m very busy this morning. Can you come back in the afternoon. Late afternoon. Around four?

–– I should come at, like, four?

–– Yes. Right. Well, I’ll see you then..

–– At four? OK? Bye, Professor Quandary? I kind of like your beard? It’s, like, cute?

Bambi teetered off on her backless, frontless high-heeled sandals. Beard? What was she talking about? Quandary put his hand up to his face and was appalled to find himself unshaven. To go in unshaven on the day of his tenure! (This was about as much of a disaster as Quandary could imagine, another area where I have introduced improvements.) However rambling her paper, Bambi should have an ‘A’ for saving him. What could he do? Despite his dithering, Quandary was not altogether an incompetent. There was a drug store right beside the campus. Quandary bought a disposable razor and a can of foam and, for the price of a cup of coffee, was able to shave in the bathrooms of the local greasy spoon. While shaving he discovered that his fly was open. Had Bambi noticed that as well? By the time that he finally reached his office it was twenty past nine. For Quandary, this was the stuff of nightmares, but the Dean did no more than raise an eyebrow and comment that it was probably a good idea to keep out of the way.

So there he was, sitting in his office with an hour and a half to go until his tenure-vote and nothing to do. For the first five minutes Quandary straightened the things on his desk, as though the tenure committee was about to rush in and audit the neatness of his paperwork. It was only gradually that his heart stopped pounding and he recalled his plans to solve the riddle of the dreams. He must go to the library.

Dodging frisbees, staring covertly at legs, Quandary walked across the quad to the Learning Resource Center. The maintenance workers were spreading pine mulch around the oak trees that parents view as the sine qua non of learning. The smell was memorable; sharp and earthy with a hint of decay. The moment had sufficient force that it might have brought me out, but Quandary was too busy avoiding the eyes of the workmen and feeling ashamed about the fact that they were chronically underpaid. As he went into the library he looked back. There was a frisbee against the morning sky. A susurration of starlings erupted from the Economics building to perform some piece of aerial dressage across the Quad. The air was very clear, flavoured with the tang of the pine bark. It was one among the million moments of now which we are granted. Even Quandary stilled his mental chatter for a second. Then the skein of pettiness which bound up his life tugged him once again into forgetfulness. "Had the Dean noticed he was late? Would he get tenure? Were there appointments he was forgetting? What was Bambi Johnson coming to see him about? Had anyone seen him with his fly open?.." I look at him there, bound up with trivia like a hawk by its jesses, and I marvel at the fact that we have shared the same body.

Part 3 will be posted next week. (Note – the sections in this version are slightly different than the chapters in the published book)

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