Part 3 i.)

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.

Read Part 1 | 2 i.) | 2 ii.) |

The Present

“The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”

Michel Foucault

Transformation

August 24th

People have begun to notice the Changes in me. My newly shiny head, my earring, my recent preference for black leather and silks rather than tweeds and flannels, all of these are obvious signs to the world that something is going on. Perhaps for exactly that reason, they do not seem to worry my neighbours or colleagues. Most of the people around me are baby boomers; increasingly aged, flabby and conventional members of a generation whose defining features were youth, slimness and daring. My neighbours are used to balding men who suddenly dump wife, station-wagon and four kids and reappear two months later with girlfriend, hairpiece, wolfhound and convertible. The mid-life crisis is a daily occurrence in our neighbourhood, something to discuss over beers and the reassuring background noises of barbecue-sizzle and sprinkler hiss. But the essential feature of these changes is their shallowness. The girlfriend looks like the wife’s younger sister. The convertible is sensible and roomy. The wolfhound is more trouble than the kids. The hairpiece is worn until summer and then discarded. These are the accoutrements of daily fantasy. Like flags of convenience, they signal a transformation that is more aspirational than real, more formal than actual. Perhaps this is why those around me have greeted my change of clothes and hairstyle with such equanimity.

It is something else that is worrying them. They sense a new resolution in me, a strength unknown to Quandary, a fixity of purpose at odds with their soggy relativism. Today one of my most pusillanimous colleagues – Professor Geist – actually dared to ask what has happened to me. He was not the first to do so. In another culture I could have explained the Changes in the local language of inspiration and rebirth. "A vision," I could say, "a calling." "I have reached a new level of enlightenment." "I have a message sent by God." The secular intolerance around me permits none of these responses. I tell Geist that I have been "working out." The answer seems to satisfy him. And why not? It is the greatest personal transformation he can imagine.

Bambi came into my office again today. "Such embarrassment of gesture, such difficulty of motion: eyes kept nervously lowered, so large and so weary. The little round face all grave and serious. Nothing was ever so amusing." She is surprised by my earring, my shining hairless pate, but not as surprised as she was the last time she came to see me. Her visit, it seems, is a serious one. She mumbles something to the effect that I shouldn’t worry, she is ‘protected.’ (I think of amulets, dispensations from the Pope, garlic and crucifixes but Bambi, it seems, means birth control.) She says she has a boyfriend so ‘this’ can’t go on. It is all inexpressibly sweet and clumsy. I give her a fine, avuncular, Dionysian blessing and she departs looking both relieved and puzzled.

Today I was in something of a... quandary over the question of whether I should read more of the literature about Edward. I want no-one to be able to accuse me of merely playing out in my dreams a set of ideas which I have gleaned from books. On the other hand, the books could add new significance to the dreams I have already had. What is to be done? True to his name, Quandary would have agonised for hours over this issue. It took me five minutes to decide. I will read no more for a week, and see what information that time brings. After the week is up, I will turn to the books. No dream last night.

***

August 25th

No dream again, but I have plenty to go on already. Several things have occurred to me about Quandary’s dreams. First, it seems clear that Hamlet is the play most closely replicating Edward’s experiences. Even conventional Shakespeareans seem willing to concede that "Shakespeare" identified strongly with Hamlet. We know that Edward’s mother remarried shortly after his father’s death. Edward’s father must have been an impressive man, possessed of one of the most famous lineages in English history, yet humane and down to earth. The Dictionary of National Biography says he was "a good landlord and a keen sportsman." To Edward, as an impressionable 12 year old, it must have seemed that his father embodied all the cardinal virtues. "See what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, an eye like Mars to threaten and command." In contrast, Charles Tyrell, the man his mother married with such unseemly haste, was a comparative nonentity for whom Edward had nothing but disdain. I look at the affecting, almost obsessive speech in which Hamlet reproaches his mother for her remarriage.

This was your husband. Look you now what follows:

Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear,

Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,

And batten on this moor? ha, have you eyes?

Like most adolescents he would have been unwilling to admit that his mother could have felt passion for anyone, let alone for this new "father."

You cannot call it love, for at your age

The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble,

And waits upon the judgment. And what judgment

Would step from this to this?

But like the sensitive child he was, he must have forced himself to imagine his mother coupling with this impostor, in sheets hardly cold after his father’s death. Yes, this must have been the cause of confrontation I dreamt. Edward had called his mother there to discuss something with her, and then lapsed once again into one of his bitter denunciations of her faithlessness. Edward’s mother, like Hamlet’s mother, was upset by his wild reproaches. And who wouldn’t have been?

Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty...

Strong stuff, full of disgust and prurience. In the dream, I remember that I saw her arguing with him. No doubt she told him that he was mad, that his brain was overheated. But Edward would have none of it.

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,

That your trespass but my madness speaks;

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,

Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,

Infects unseen.

Something in me both exalts and cringes at these words. I cannot imagine being provided with stronger confirmation. Edward was Shakespeare and Hamlet was the play he wrote to describe his own feelings about his mother’s "desertion." Of course, there I have no reason to believe that Tyrrel actually murdered Edward’s father. Still, one does not have to be much of a Freudian to realise that remarriage must seem like patricide to a prepubescent, father-fixated child who, like every healthy twelve year old boy, thinks only of murdering the old man himself so that he can marry his own mother. All of Edward’s own guilt must have gone into his reproaches to his mother. How else to explain the Ghost’s slip of the tongue – describing Claudius as "that incestuous, that adulterate beast." Or his command to Hamlet, "Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest." "Incest with whom?" we may well ask. Wish fulfillment indeed! No wonder Edward was railing at his mother so bitterly in that dark paneled chamber! No wonder he killed the man who overheard and – the thought only occurs to me as I write these words – no wonder he shouted "Cecil."

Cecil was not the name of the hapless spy, as I had so stupidly assumed. When Edward stabbed the man behind the arras, he thought it was his hated guardian who stood there – William Cecil, later to be Baron Burghley, the man in whose house he was forced to live, the man who (undoubtedly) spied on Edward the way he spied on everyone else. Hamlet’s words now take on a new significance for me. Close-closeted with his mother, Hamlet hears a noise behind the arras. Drawing his sword, he rams it though the tapestry only to discover that he has killed Polonius and not the king. "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! I took thee for thy better." And Edward had done the same thing. Drunkenly reproaching his mother with her behavior, he had heard a sound and behind the tapestry and thinking it was his guardian, Cecil, had stabbed in a fury, punching his dagger into the man’s stomach with a noise that made Quandary’s blood run cold. The history books record that Edward killed a cook in Sir William Cecil’s house under mysterious circumstances, but was not prosecuted. Now we know why. Put on the stand, Edward would have told all and Cecil could hardly have admitted spying on his own ward. Everything fits, everything confirms everything else, wrapping around itself in recursive loops and arabesques like Elizabeth’s signature, like a galleon’s scrollwork, like a Spanish plot, like the times themselves. The only truth that has ever seemed so clear to me was my love of Jean. And even there, I had doubts.

***

August 26th

Once again, I did not dream. Since the tenure vote my nights have been blank, the absence of consciousness, unrelieved by dreams or dreams. Surely the dreams have not ended, just because I have worked out their significance? Without more, I cannot prove them to be true. I will be "just another loonie," just another Looney. No. I cannot believe all of this would happen to no purpose. Quandary would dither, trying to fathom what he could not change. I shall wait.

Classes began today. This semester I teach a large class in Elizabethan literature and a smaller seminar in Shakespearean biography. The large class is the first one to meet. I stare from the lectern at the eighty or ninety faces arrayed before me. For the most part, their countenances are unspoiled by visible blemish or intelligence. There are titters and giggles at my leathers, shaved head and earring. I have prepared nothing, of course, knowing that the words will be there when needed. Nothing comes at first, so I am content to stand and wait, watching the giggles subside into a silence which itself provokes a few more nervous giggles. Those, in turn, die away and the silence is complete. I wait for a minute longer, watching first puzzlement and then fear blossom on the faces of my students. A word presents itself.

–– Elizabethan..

This is a promising start, given the title of the course. I watch with interest as the rest of the sentence arrives.

–– ..literature is the richest literature of any period in the history of any country in the world.

This is fine stuff, dogmatic, professorial, meticulous in its overbreadth, full of high sentence. The very thing.

–– and when we look at Elizabethan literature – at its plots, its tropes, its popular appeal, its metaphoric analysis of consciousness – we find just one key element.

They wait, still nervous from the memory of my silence. I wait too, interested to see what I will say.

–– Sex.

So profound is my hold on them that there are no more than a few giggles at the word. I point to a young woman in the first row, dressed in green and pink.

–– You there, yes, you in the fluorescent green. What was the last book you read?

She is flummoxed. The unspoken compact is that they will let me drone on, and in return I agree not to interrupt their train of thought.

–– Come on! I presume you have read a book? Well, what was the last one? Goodnight Moon? The Flopsy Bunnies? Doctor Seuss? Kidnapped? Catcher in the Rye? Ulysses? A la recherche..

She mumbles something sullenly.

–– What? Speak up!

–– mumble, Thorn Birds, I, mumble, think.

–– "Thorn Birds." That’s a fine title. And what is this "Thorn Birds" about?

The recitation of plot proves to much for her, but her neighbour, a plump and bubbly brunette, is bursting to enlighten us. I beckon and the motion of my finger is encouragement enough.

–– Well, there’s like this woman who – I sort of like her – who, anyway, she’s a young girl and she’s living in the country and then she grows up and she meets this (giggle) priest..

The class also giggle at the mention of this word. Do they all know this book, or is it just the subliminal knowledge that priests are never introduced except for immoral or iconoclastic purposes?

–– .. who’s really cute – Richard Chamberlain played him in the old TV show. I saw it on cable – the Oxygen network...

There are more giggles at the mention of the name and even some sighs.

–– and.. did I say they were in Australia? Not just to visit, I mean, they live there.

The class seems to approve of her adroit handling of the tricky tourist/ resident distinction.

–– and, so anyway, they (giggle) fall in love and they meet on this beach and there’s this really dreamy scene and, you know, one thing leads to another..

The class laughs in approval of this masterly circumlocution. The narrator laughs too. Her account is not without deliberate self-parody. Clearly, she is one of those people who like to be embarrassed. An early form of exhibitionism, perhaps?

–– ... and she gets pregnant and I forget what happens but she lives to be really old and has kids and everything but he was the only man she ever loved and it was (sigh) dreamy.

There is actual applause when she finishes. I look around and find that the class is more animated than they have ever been in the seven years that Quandary taught them. For a moment, a fragment of Quandary surfaces, full of earnest thoughts about ‘pedagogical implications’ and ‘curricular development.’ I repress him sternly.

–– So the main theme was the affair between the priest and the heroine?

–– Well yes, but it wasn’t, you know, dirty. Not like something like the last book I read. Now in that....

A complicated plot summary follows. Four women, one of them the mother of.. someone, I am not paying much attention, but I don’t think that it matters. From my student’s account, it seems one is given frequent breaks from what little plot there is in order to get detailed descriptions of the life-styles and sex lives of the rich and famous. "She’s very good at this because she used to write furniture catalogues." Can this be right? A man is tied up and food is smeared on him by his lover... or was that another book? Other students, mainly women, have started to volunteer information. The men look on with manly disdain admixed with a certain proprietary interest. The question does concern sex, after all, a subject which they consider wholly theirs. In the excitement of this shared experience, the class has lost whatever fear of me they might have had. I interrupt the conversation, shaking my head at their enthusiasm.

–– "Lechery, lechery: still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion." That’s Troilus and Cressida one of the plays we shall not be reading. Now, get out your books. We must leave behind these masterpieces of modern cliterature and return to the poor offerings the Elizabethans have left us.

The giggles are more confident now. They have decided that I am going to be amusing. About half the students have actually managed to buy the required books. I pick one up from the desk of a hairy young man who is festooned with gold chains like a Christmas tree. All eyes are on me. I flip through the book, thrust it at him.

–– Read.

He tries to flex his muscles, this being his normal response to external threat. Being seated, the effect is less than impressive. Caught, he glances at the book and then, looking shamefaced, bends beneath the desk and fishes in his backpack. The gold chains sway. I am mystified as to what is going on. When he finally sits up again he is wearing a little pair of reading glasses, granny glasses, they call them. The class titters but I am touched. I clap him on the shoulder.

–– Never mind these philistines. Just read.

–– "The wren goes to it, and the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight/ Let copulation thrive."

The class, already primed by the appearance of his reading glasses, dissolve at this. In truth, the sight of is an amusing one – this muscle bound and gilded young man, spectacles perched on the edge of his nose, urging copulation in the formal reading voice one reserves for reading Shakespeare and the Gettysburg Address. He probably thinks copulation is an Elizabethan fiscal policy.

***

August 29th

Today, as I got out of my car in the school parking lot, I saw two of the undergraduates sniggering at this stocky balding figure, dressed in black leather, pulling himself out of a shit brown Chevette. For a moment I contemplated going after them with a tire iron, then I realised that they were right. It is absurd for me to have undergone such Changes, yet still to be driving this symbol of Quandary’s mediocrity. I’d be better off with an Edsel, for God’s sake. At least it is determinedly bad. Levering myself back into the Chevette, I chugged and spluttered my way out onto Charlotte Russe’s main drag. For once, the complete absence of architecture worked to my advantage. The parking lots of the second hand car dealers are distributed in a checker board pattern, hugger-mugger with the tire shops and muffler repair places which they keep in business. All are visible from the road, so I was able to cruise up and down, surveying the merchandise without setting foot on the sidewalk.

I was undecided as to what kind of car I should buy. Something impractical and fast, that much was obvious. For a while, I found myself tending towards a twelve year old red Corvette – symbol of the American post adolescent dream. It was certainly loud and dangerous enough, this particular model having a steering column that extended almost to the very front of the car, so that in the case of any impact the steering wheel would be flung like a spear through the vitals of the hapless driver. All this commended it to me, but the name sounded too much like Chevette and the enormous, unwieldy engine seemed to me to represent a profound mistake about the nature of power. Power comes from intensity, from courage screwed to the sticking place, not from mere overwhelming force.

Eventually, right at the back of the last lot, I found my answer. It was an old Jaguar E-type in British racing green, with its distinctive long slim hood and bubble passenger compartment, brought by some unimaginable chain of circumstances to languish in this backwater. Somehow, the fact that this was a British car seemed a good omen to me. The dealer approached at a canter when he saw me walking round and round it, kicking its tires meditatively in the ritual mating dance of driver with vehicle. He was a weasel-faced man with a three piece suit and a cast in one eye and he looked so much like a dealer – seller of spavined mules and cars with blown gaskets – that for a moment I doubted his genuineness. His first price was $15,000. I said nothing at all, merely got my tire iron from the trunk of the Chevette and started scraping the ground under the E-type to see if the marks of an oil leak had been covered up with sand. They had. I bounced on the fenders with the full weight of my one hundred and ninety pounds and the dealer watched nervously, obviously expecting the car’s rusting McPherson struts to come tearing up through the hood at any moment. I rubbed my finger around the tail pipe like a proctologist, holding up the sooty evidence of burning oil without comment. When I started to lever myself under the car to examine the crank-case it was the dealer who cracked. His speech was so palpably false it lacked not only conviction but punctuation.

–– I can see you are a man who knows cars the boss’ll kill me but I’ll say $12,000 and that’s only because I’d hate to see this go to someone who didn’t appreciate it.

Ah, these homicidal bosses of soft-hearted car dealers. What unsuccessful murderers they seem to be. I pulled thoughtfully at the driver’s mirror. It came away in my hand, surprising the dealer but not me. I had loosened it before he approached. I handed it to him and he held it awkwardly in his left hand as he circled around me, his more expansive gestures of honest dealing hampered by this mute testimonial of defect and decay.

–– Of course a mirror’s nothing it doesn’t go to the structure of the car particularly a Jag-war built to last these are we could fit you a new mirror in five minutes I’ll tell you what $11,000 and that means I’m hardly covering my expenses.

His expenses? A promotion? Perhaps the homicidal boss forced him into profit sharing. But I was tiring of this game. It was getting too much like thriftiness, a Quandary virtue, something of which I wanted no part.

–– How much will you give me for this?

I gestured to the Chevette with the tire iron. These were the first words I had spoken and they seemed to bring the dealer some measure of relief. He made an off-hand gesture of regret, remembering too late that he still held the mirror.

–– Well of course there’s not much call for these around here nowadays good runabouts I know but just don’t appeal to your prestige car buyer which is what we see more of here I could offer you three hundred but that’s as high as I could go still that’s $10,700 for the Jag-war and I’ll tell you what I’ll throw in a new wing mirror and paper floor mats

I looked around the lot as though searching for the shoals of prestige car buyers, finding only men in jeans and rusting gas-guzzlers.

–– I want a thousand.

–– Oh no I couldn’t even begin to

I interrupted his speech by walking up to the Chevette and striking the left headlight smartly with my tire iron. The glass popped with a satisfying sound. The salesman’s good eye bulged.

–– Of course, it’s a piece of shit...

I crunched through the broken glass and began tapping lightly on the glass of the other headlight with the end of the tire iron. The salesman jumped with each ‘ting.’

–– .. but I still want a thousand for it. I’d rather smash it up..

I illustrated the words with a sharp blow that put a dent in the chrome of the front grill, and returned to my tapping of the headlight.

–– ...than take less. Know what I mean?

The deal was transacted quickly and when I returned to the Immaculata parking lot, it was in the Jaguar. The salesman kept the mirror.

***

September 8th

No dream. I have been broadening Quandary’s horizons. I have started listening to New Wave – not to be confused with New Age, which is merely elevator music for the upwardly mobile. I frequent Charlotte Russe’s only record store, rubbing leather shoulders easily with punks and New Romantics, Goths and casuals. Dressed in fashions that disappeared years ago, we pick through CD’s by bands who broke up before their music ever appeared in Charlotte Russe. It was the names of the bands that first intrigued me. Dead Kennedy’s. Primal Scream. The Vaselines. Ten Thousand Maniacs. Wet Wet Wet. The Slits. Butthole Surfers. (Who, in truth, have little apart from their name to distinguish them.) This led on naturally to the Petshop Boys and Beastie Boys and the countless deliberate shocks of the lesbian rock scene. Names have come a long way since Quandary’s youth, when Gerry and the Pacemakers or Herman and the Hermits were the dernier cri. Despite the attractive iconoclasm, I must admit that it is the more lyrical and reflective music from the 90's that attracts me – The Blue Nile, Everything But The Girl – songs of irrevocable harsh words and obsessions with past lovers. The more pain the better. I can suck melancholy from a song as a weasel sucks eggs. At first this lyrical tendency worried me, but it would be a mistake to expect everything in my life to be dark and forceful. Nevertheless, I make it a point to play only the Sex Pistols, Veronique Diabolique and the Dead Kennedy’s when I am in my office. And loudly.

Fragments of songs run through my head as I stride through the halls, my leathers creaking like a man o’ war under full sail. "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." "All of our thoughts go into words protecting power." "We shall teach our twisted speech to the young believers." These are the new aphorists, abandoning genre and coherence, instinctively post-modern, their symbol the television remote control. Blip! Switch the channel. Blip! Switch the channel. "I fancy that mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation and connection and all those arts by which a big book is made." That was that fat old fart Johnson, always lickspittle pious for his pension, letting his true thoughts out for once. Imagine, rock stars with aphorisms. In the old days aphorists needed to be mad, corpulent or syphilitic. Or all three.

I am sad to see how conservative my generation has grown. Even Russo, who is probably the only person on the faculty who has taken drugs or been to a rock concert, disappointed me. She wandered into my office (something she would never have done in my Quandary days), sat on the edge of my desk and leafed through the CD’s I had bought with a moue of disapproval. "How can you listen to this stuff?" she asked, never having listened to it, put off by the names of the bands in exactly the way that she was supposed to be. When we were younger, we knew that the hair and the flowers would only insult those who felt outside of our group – parents, the straight, the boring. These names were the same. To the outsiders they are an assault, to the insiders, a delicious joke, and to convert oneself from outsider to insider requires only an act of Will. But the will, like the body, becomes flabby with disuse. I am surprised to find myself feeling compassion for my peers. Perhaps it is unsurprising. I have had certain advantages, after all.

***

September 20th

No dream. What is this nonsense? Quoting Doctor Johnson. "The new aphorists" indeed! "I have had certain advantages, after all." Quandary recidivus. What insufferable complacence! Never mind the bollocks, as the Sex Pistols would have said. I have been letting myself stagnate, forgetting my quest because the dreams are temporarily absent, turning into Quandary in leathers. "Under conditions of peace, the warlike man attacks himself." I must banish peace and rediscover my mission.

I had ordered an enlargement of the Welbeck Abbey painting of Edward which Looney features as his frontispiece. It arrived this morning. He stands, arms akimbo, casting a cold eye on the viewer while a painted inscription just above his left shoulder proclaims his ranks and titles for us. "Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, Lord High Chamberlain of England... etcetera, etcetera." The biographical information which accompanies the portrait says that he was twenty-five. That would be about the age that he was attacked by the pirates on his return from Italy. The portrait is not that good. Edward’s nose is wrong, the nostrils ridiculously elongated in an attempt to capture the hawkishness of his features which succeeds only in making him look like a thoroughbred horse. The mouth is smaller than I remember and the eyebrows are painted as fine black lines, so that he looks almost effeminate. The body is a caricature, the chest puffed out like a pouter pigeon, though that may be a convention of painting at the time. Despite all of these faults, the painter has managed to capture a certain haughty coldness, but he has also given Edward a little slash of a mouth, which suggests that the haughtiness is a cover for a weak and vain personality. In fact, now that I look at the portrait again, it seems likely that the painter did not like his subject and was trying – within the conventions patron-dependent form of art – to send a message down the ages about the defects of Edward’s personality. What a game that must have been! Concealing your message by using your subject’s particular vanities against him. "Perhaps a bit more aristocratic in the nose, my lord?" Like a kind of judo, really.

About Edward himself I have learned only a little more than I discovered the day of Quandary’s tenure. (He was the one who earned it after all.) I shall set down here the facts I know.

Edward was born in 1550. His father, the 16th Earl of Oxford, had no other sons. Edward was the child of a second marriage, and no doubt doubly welcome because of that. He must have seen Queen Elizabeth when she visited Castle Hedringham in 1561, only a year before his father died. Perhaps he came to associate her with the rare moment of affection I saw his father offer in the dream. It would be only natural.

As for the boy himself, he was surrounded by learning – matriculated in Cambridge by age eight(!) as an impubes, he had as uncles the Earl of Surrey (inventor of the Shakespearean sonnet-form) and Arthur Golding. (Good old Uncle Arthur,the plagiarist.) The Earls of Oxford had traditionally been the patrons of a theatre company – a tradition Edward was to continue and expand upon, as I saw in the last dream. Even as I set this down, I am reminded of Hamlet’s speech to the players – telling them not to overact, but to hold "the mirror up to nature." "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines." How stupid of Quandary not to realise before that this is exactly the kind of advice that might be given to actors by a noble patron.

When his father died, Edward was only twelve years old (how strange that I have had no dreams of the funeral) and the Queen packed him off (like Bertram in As You Like It) to live as a royal ward with Cecil, a man whose functions today would combine the heads of the CIA and FBI, the Secretary of State, National Security Advisor and the President’s private secretary. I must remember this. This boy can have been no stranger to courts, kings and intrigue. What a life! Over-educated, left to his own devices, with an absent mother who had betrayed him by marrying again, surrounded by intrigue and authority but not love, who is to wonder that he turned to fantasy, turned into a misogynist, turned into the greatest chronicler of power and its effects that the world has ever seen?....

I weary of this biography. It smacks too much of academia. This is the task for someone like Geist, someone who wouldn’t believe the end of the world unless it came with footnotes. Every idea, no matter how revolutionary, must be killed, dried, wrapped in the winding sheets of academe. Ah, these scholars and their concept-mummies... I may continue Edward’s story later if the mood takes me. If not, some worthy soul will doubtless provide a capsule biography of the real Shakespeare (and his champion) when my discoveries are finished, proved and the whole thing made public. For the moment, I am overcome with sadness for twelve year old Edward, abandoned in that evil man’s house. No wonder the plays are sometimes marked by bitterness and detachment. They say youth is resilient. Perhaps. But I am convinced that Edward bore the marks of these experiences like stretch-marks on the soul.

Enough. I will take the portrait home and hang it above the bed. Who knows, it may spark some element of the dreams. Their absence worries me. Without them I am nothing, whatever my material successes. Ah, but with them.. I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it only that I had my dreams.

***

Read Part 1 | 2 i.) | 2 ii.) |

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