Part 2 ii

The Shakespeare Chronicles

a novel

James Boyle

for Chapter 1 click here

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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 ii

Discovery

Once in the library, Quandary went straight to the section on Elizabethan history. The first book he picked up told him that Anne Cecil had been married to... her father’s ward, Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Quandary had to sit down for a moment. So it was true! The dreams were sending him reliable information about Elizabethan England. He skimmed through the book desperate to find out more. The process of discovery was a typical Quandary one, each fact with its own egocentric gloss.

Edward was a spendthrift – that figured – ...for some time a favourite of the queen (no kidding). Edward’s father died when he was twelve and Sir William Cecil was made his guardian. Edward despised Cecil as a guardian and, later, as a father in law. Who gets on with their father-in-law? Edward grossly insulted Sir Philip Sidney by calling him a "puppy." Boy, those Elizabethans really packed a stinging insult, didn’t they? The last undergraduate I failed called me a motherfucking, cocksucking old scumbag... Edward was a great patron of the arts and one of the leading court poets. Who would have thought it? His uncle was Arthur Golding, sometime theologian and translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Quandary’s head was reeling. He had known none of this. He was so shocked that it took him quite a while to take in the next sentence. "Golding’s translation has often been called ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid’ because of the considerable evidence that Shakespeare was familiar with this translation and even relied on it quite heavily. Prospero’s "elves of hills, brookes, standing lakes, and groves" have undoubted roots in a similar passage from Golding’s translation and many other correspondences have been found. {See W.H.D. Rouse, Shakespeare’s Ovid (London, 1904).}" And Quandary had the strong suspicion that Golding had used Edward’s childishly brilliant translation as the foundation for his own work. Was that it? Had the dreams been sent to him to reveal a four hundred year old piece of plagiarism? That alone would be fascinating and mysterious enough, but Quandary was sure there was more.

He was hot on the trail now, card catalogues strewn around him, the microfiche reader humming on the desk, call numbers scrawled on pieces of scrap paper. For the first time since he was a graduate student he felt the thrill of scholastic detective work – the chain of references and footnotes which, after intuitive leaps that defy description, leads you eventually to the book you want. His first major discovery was a biography of Edward written by a Captain Bernard Mordaunt Ward. This contained amazing revelations. Edward had indeed been a favourite of the Queen. When he was nineteen court gossip described him as her preferred dancing partner. She called him "her Turk." One of the other biographies of Elizabeth said he "dazzled" her and "absorbed the attention of her leisure moments." If Elizabeth couldn’t keep him to herself, she would certainly want a hand in picking the woman he eventually married. The most shocking thing was the joust. At the age of twenty one Edward had triumphed in a tourney held in front of Elizabeth at Westminster. A contemporary describes him thus, "The Earl of Oxford’s livery was crimson velvet, very costly.. he was the Red Knight" Quandary said "Jesus H. Christ" attracting disapproving glances from the graduate students in communications who were busily dissecting the semiotics of "I Love Lucy." He returned to his reading. A set of Latin verses made on the occasion portrayed Edward as controlling his "foaming steed" with a light rein. If you allowed for a little poetic license, then Edward’s carthorse could be the "foaming steed," but the real clincher was the colour. The Red Knight. In the dream, Edward had been dressed in red. Only two months after the tourney, Edward got engaged to Anne Cecil. Her father, whose ginger beard graced one of the illustrations Quandary was looking at, was made Baron Burghley the same year. It all fitted!

There was more. In 1576 Edward was attacked by pirates but released unharmed. That fitted. Turning to another book he discovered and account of how, at the age of seventeen, Edward had killed a servant in Burghley’s house – one Thomas Brincknell, an under-cook. (Which explained the grease-stained apron the poor spy had been wearing.) A verdict of felo de se, accidental death, was recorded. The cook was supposed to have run onto the end of Edward’s sword. Quandary smiled grimly. Well, you could describe it that way. Burghley later hinted that he had helped to cover up the affair though nothing was said about spying behind an arras. And more. Edward’s youthful title was Lord Bulbeck... And more, and more, but Quandary couldn’t absorb it. He added Edward’s biography to the tottering pile in front of him. Surely this was enough to keep him going. He glanced at his watch. 11:30, the tenure meeting must be half over now and he should really be getting back. But some scholar’s instinct (and Quandary was a very good little scholar, I would be the first to admit that) made him track down the last three references on his scrawled sheets of call numbers. The first two were useless, recapitulations of material Quandary already had. The third and last.. Well, the third and last was the beginning of everything. The third and last book came out, musty and dust-covered from a raggle-taggle half shelf of books labeled "Shakespearean Miscellanea." The title said simply "Shakespeare Identified." Slowly Quandary pulled it out, a dark brown volume with some other library’s imprint on it. A gift from a private collection, perhaps, or simply a long ago accident of inter-library loan. Something about the moment made Quandary carry the book to his desk without looking at it.

It looked strange lying on the desk, archaic amidst the Learning Center’s computers and microfiche readers. Trembling, Quandary opened it. The flyleaf held the usual details – printed in New York in 1920 by the Frederick Stokes Company. But it was the title that froze Quandary in his seat. "Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, by J. Thomas Looney M.A." Edward was Shakespeare. In a flash everything became clear. Looney opened Quandary’s eyes.

The coincidences were simply too great. Will Shakspur, the butcher’s boy from Stratford, could have known little about Latin, French, about foreign travel, sailing, hunting, Italy – the subjects touched on in “Shakespeare’s” plays. Edward knew about all of them. The plays were aristocratic, Will was bourgeois at best. Like "Shakespeare," Edward worried about honour, about mortality, about the meaning of life. Will seemed mainly interested in real estate. Edward’s father died when he was young and impressionable. Much to his disapproval, his mother remarried with some haste. As did Hamlet’s mother. The name Shakespeare had always seemed unusually emblematic. Edward’s coat of arms was a boar shaking a spear. And as for "Shakespeare’s Ovid," it really was Shakespeare’s Ovid. When Edward came to write the plays, he hadn’t fallen so low as to copy another man’s translation. He had merely used his own.

Now, though Quandary still had no idea about where the dreams came from, he knew why they had been sent to him. For seven years he had been a faithful heretic, standing alone – albeit secretly – against the Shakespearean orthodoxy. Even after Jean left him he had kept the faith. Like Job, left with nothing, scratching his sores with a pot-shard amidst the ashes of his life, he had scraped away with his niggling little articles, challenging tiny pieces of the received dogma. Despite all the tests, he had kept the faith. That was the meaning of the dreams. After all these years he had been rewarded.

In another part of his brain, Quandary noticed that the communications students had turned away from Ricky and Lucy and were going out for lunch. Going out for lunch.. Going out for lunch.. And why not? It was 12:30. His tenure vote! It must be over by now! So what? The thought burst over him like a water-balloon. So what if he had tenure? So what if he didn’t? He imagined trying to explain his concern to Edward, to Elizabeth, to Burghley. What would they think, these people who dealt in life and death, in the making and unmaking of kings and queens. What a poor, desiccated excuse for a life they would think he had. And they would be right! Part of Quandary struggled feebly to reassert itself. No, that wasn’t right. He would have security, the respect of his colleagues. Yes. Security to stay doing the same kind of thing for the rest of his life. Most of his colleagues hadn’t used their brains since they got tenure. Anyway, they didn’t respect him. They thought he was a hard-working, ruddy-pated buffoon. ‘Good old Quandary.’ Rubbing his head before he made a point. Chairing a committee on snow days. Snow days. Absently, he got to his feet and made his way down to the checkout desk. He was crossing the quad when they found him, a gaggle of his colleagues, shiny with bonhomie.

–– There he is! Hard at work, even today! OK, Quandary you can give up the act now. You don’t need to fool us any more.

This was the Dean, booming with good-fellowship, reaching up every thirty seconds to make sure his toupee was still secure in the face of a stiff breeze. Quandary looked at him closely, but he hadn’t meant anything by that last remark. The idea that Quandary could have been hiding something this whole time was the farthest thing from his mind. That was the only reason that he could make a joke about it. Quandary must have looked bewildered enough for them to take pity on him. The air was loud with congratulations. People banged him on the back, shook his hand while clutching his forearm (to indicate sincerity) or his shoulder (to indicate deep emotion.)

Everyone was there, all keeping true to type. The Dean smiled. The associate Dean looked vague and talked about office space. Donnelly, the faculty curmudgeon, told him it had been a close thing, and then smiled as though this was supposed to make Quandary feel better. Zeb Geist was there, still pretending to be the faculty intellectual, wanting to talk shop even at a moment like this. Thankfully someone pulled him off. Joanna Russo was the only one not booming out congratulations. She was the sole woman in the department and the only person Quandary really respected. She did careful, beautifully written studies of Jane Austen which no-one read because someone had once called her a deconstructionist and the faculty knew that deconstructionism was unreadable and anyway French. When the hubbub had died down a little she reached through the mob to shake his hand. Her fingers were long and cool. She murmured something that he didn’t catch. There was a general call for the Dean to take them all out for lunch. He looked stern for a moment, playing the part to the hilt.

–– OK then, but it comes out of your salary increases!

This little vulgarity was greeted as though Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde had laboured on it for weeks. Quandary looked around him. Who were these people, these strangers he had worked beside for so many years? They all seemed excited by the prospect of a free hamburger, or chicken breast with tarragon. Their greed was innocent, almost pure, like a child’s at Christmas. Russo was the only one to refuse. She was entreated to change her mind, half-heartedly at first and then with increasing strength as it became obvious that there was no chance of her coming. She made the other faculty members nervous. They suspected her of being an intellectual. They suspected that she was genuinely fulfilled by her work. They suspected her of being a lesbian or, worse still, a heterosexual who had not the remotest interest in them.

Quandary permitted himself to be carried forward by the crowd, still looking around him owlishly, trying uncover the selves that hid beneath these smiling faces, to see whether they could know what lay beneath his smile. There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. These were people who had placed in him an absolute trust and done so for all the wrong reasons. Amusing, no?

The restaurant was full of other faculty members, mainly men – getting a free lunch off some piece of university business or other. The talk ebbed and flowed around Quandary. Committee assignments and building funds, mortgage rates and discount videos – the life of the mind in America. It struck him for the first time that the role of academician was quite a stressful one. Far easier to play some role better scripted in popular culture, like businessman or home owner.

The waitresses were young and wore very short skirts and Quandary found himself watching them as the conversation plunged on. From time to time other diners would look up and stare at a waitress’s legs. For a moment their faces would be open with desire and then they would close again, resume their guarded expressions, their talk of committees and funding, perhaps with slightly more animation than before. Such fear there, such repression.

The Dean was looking at Quandary now, saying something about ‘contribution to the school..,’ ‘valuable institutional player..’ but it was all very far away. Quandary found that if he nodded as the Dean’s voice rose in pitch, everyone seemed to be happy. For a moment the shock of meeting them had driven his discovery out of his mind. To think that they were sitting here congratulating him on getting tenure, thinking that his contribution could be measured in committee meetings and articles, and he had just discovered the real author of "Shakespeare’s" works. Should he tell them now? No, this wasn’t the moment. They would think him unbalanced. Better to wait until the dreams gave him hard, irrefutable, evidence. But oh, how weary, flat, stale and unprofitable this life appeared to him now. Why did these people not wake up? Why did they not come alive? He looked again at the waitresses. To think that, after the dream in which Elizabeth seduced Edward, Quandary had asked himself "Why would someone of forty have an affair with a seventeen year old?" Because she could, that’s why. Because she could!

Hair did not suddenly sprout from Quandary’s palms. He did not lower his face into his hands and moan, raising a terrible new visage to the camera. These are Hollywood’s images. They bear no relation to the reality of the Changes. In fact, Quandary’s main feeling was one of nausea, which he attributed to the soggy "Bleu Cheese Bacon Burger" he had just consumed. It would be silly to expect a lightning transformation. What actually happened was, in its own way, simple. Even ordinary. As the meal progressed and the Dean talked on, Quandary’s thoughts turned to his dreams. He wondered what Elizabeth or Burghley would think of all of this, wondered how Edward, who had wrung such poetry from his moody drunkenness, would think of this crew of scholars – savouring the buzz off their second glass of white jug wine. He thought of Elizabeth’s look of calculating and lustful amusement over Edward’s shoulder as he plunged in adolescent delight. He thought of his own empty bed, his over-large house, his onion-smelling waste basket, Mr. Macy’s condescending smile, the petty tyrannies his timidity imposed. He thought of Edward, facing down the pirates with a pocket pistol, translating Ovid in a walled garden, "Of shapes transformde to bodies strange, I purpose to entreate." And, as these thoughts whirled around faster and faster, hotter and hotter, Quandary was drawn into the centre of them and there, weakened by excitement and tenure and white wine and strengthened by dreams, he suffered his own transformation, his own metamorphosis.

Hello.

***

The group that wandered back onto the quad at three o’clock was more relaxed than the one which had set out. I carried the books Quandary had amassed, cradling the discovery the way Quandary had cradled his heresy. The Dean asked me where I was going to celebrate. I told him I had an appointment with a student. This prompted another round of "even on the day he gets tenure, good old Quandary." Quandary would have blushed and ducked his head. I gave them a cold smile but, buzzed on white wine and chicken tarragon, none of them noticed. In truth, my plans for Bambi were a little different than Quandary’s. "The sensuality of a man of knowledge reaches to the topmost summit of his spirit." For Quandary, who had neither spine nor spirit, this was not very far. I, however, was not Quandary.

By the time Bambi arrived, I had almost forgotten about her. I had the books spread out on my desk, with "Shakespeare Identified" uppermost. By John Thomas Looney. At first, the author’s name had put me off, but now it attracted me. "Looney." It invites ridicule, but it is apposite. The Fool is always the one who utters the unutterable verities. The Fool speaks truth to power because no-one else dares.

When the knock on the door came, I had to think twice in order to remember who it was. By that time Bambi was inside. To her I must have looked exactly the same. After all she had seen poor, timid Quandary just that morning, dressed in the same clothes, inhabiting the same body.

–– Come in Europa, I was expecting you.

I knew her real name from the class list. Zeus came to Europa in the form of a bull, did he not?

–– Professor Quandary! Don’t call me that! It’s gross.

Already I had done something Quandary had never been able to do, which is to get a sentence out of Bambi without a question mark appended to it.

–– Professor Quandary! You’ve shaved off your beard?

It was too good to last.

–– Yes, I have. Why? Did you like it?

She leans across the desk and touches my face with her finger, as if this were a necessary preliminary to decision. Her minidress is cut extremely low. Her bra is white. Europa wore a white robe, as I remember. She traces the line of my cheek with one of her turquoise nails, watching me the whole time, waiting for the blush that Quandary would normally give at such a moment. I do not blush. After a moment, Bambi decides that there is nothing to be gained in this game. Something else must be tried. Abruptly, takes her hand away from my face. The question of the beard is forgotten. She will try something else now. I am content to wait.

–– Professor Quandary? I banged my leg? See?

Ah, so it is this old one. She lifts the tiny skirt of her dress to display a bruise on the inside of her thigh. How did she get a bruise there? Only Quandary would care. I get up and come round the desk. She probably thinks I am about to ask her to get to the point, or even ask her to leave, which would be the biggest reaction yet. She stands, one sandaled foot on a chair, the hem of her dress held in her left hand, waiting for me to mumble and stutter my way out of the situation. Being Bambi, she is unable to let it lie there.

–– My leg’s all swollen where I hit it? Feel the bump?

Before the words are out of her mouth I put my hand out and rest it on her thigh. The flesh is tanned and unnaturally smooth. Only one part of a woman’s leg feels like this. In the dark, sliding his hand up Jean’s leg Quandary would be able to tell how far his hand was, just by the sudden feeling of overwhelming softness. But this was not Jean. Bambi is amazed. If I had taken off my head and revealed a grinning mask of Mickey Mouse she could not have been more surprised. She starts to say something, but I kiss her, pushing her back against the desk. She puts her arms around my neck. To keep her balance? I could not tell you. I stop kissing her long enough to slip my hands underneath her buttocks and lift her bottom onto the desk. She reclines there, leaning back on her elbows which rest, in turn, on a jumble of Elizabethan history books. Her beautiful legs project from the edge of the desk like some surrealist sculpture and her face is a study in bewilderment.

–– Professor Quandary! Professor Quandary?

Another question. Bambi reverts to type. Still, she arches her back politely as I slide her underpants down her legs. They are white and frilly, the underpants that is, and I cannot help thinking, Quandary-like, how kind it is of these young women to participate so whole-heartedly in their conversion to sex objects. It is a little difficult getting her underpants over her sandals, but I pull, there is a tearing sound, and we’re off to the races. The sight of Bambi reclining half-naked on a jumble of books is just as sweet as I imagined it would be. I drop to my knees in front of the desk and bury my face in her, an act which produces a gasp and a moan which are every bit as delectable as the actions which they punctuate. There is some thrashing above me. I hear a book fall to the ground and then a shower of pencils. The moans increase. Finally, when I judge the moment to be ripe, I stand and, unfastening the fly which Quandary forgot this morning to close, I thrust myself into her with a groan loud enough to punctuate forty three years of repression. Between the two of us, we clear the rest of the desk. The scotch tape ends up over by the filing cabinet. The paper clips cover the carpet in a silver snowfall. The end is pure joy. I stand there, a symbol of everything that Quandary is not, I stand there deep inside this beautiful young woman and I say, Zeus-like,

–– Europa, my dear, I am come.

Which I have. And yet the picture which fills my mind is that of Jean.

That afternoon I visited the barber and the ear-piercer as the first – or second – sign of my transformation. But this you already know. Now we are up to date and my journal can begin.

***

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

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