A Mystery of Errors (29 page)

"Was that not taking a dreadful chance with Marlowe's life, milord?" asked Shakespeare.

"Aye, indeed," Sir William said, "but when you play this sort of game, and for these sort of stakes, then you cannot afford to have much in the way of caution or scruples. And the truth of the matter is that Marlowe is as much of a liability as he is an asset. The things he says and does make it difficult to overlook his indiscretions. Especially since he brings so much attention to himself. He is a clever young man, and quite resourceful, but he is also very difficult, if not nearly impossible to manage. The Papists came to him while he was pursuing his studies at university and recruited him into their cause. He, in turn, came straight to us and offered to work against the efforts of the Counter-Reformation."

"Us?" said Smythe.

"Her Majesty's Secret Service," said Sir William, "under Sir Francis Walsingham. And now, you realize, you are privy to knowledge that would cost you your heads if you were ever to reveal it."

Elizabeth gasped and her father nodded gravely, to indicate that he understood the severity of this responsibility. "Neither my daughter nor I shall ever tell a soul!" he said, somberly.

"Nor I," said Smythe, uneasily. Shakespeare swallowed nervously and nodded in agreement.

"Had I any doubts upon that score, then I should not have told you any of this," Sir William said. "Besides, I have a feeling that you may all prove useful, should it ever come to pass that Her Majesty has need of you."

"Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" Shakespeare said. "I would make a dreadful spy, milord! I fear I have not the mettle nor the constitution for it!"

Sir William smiled. "Then we shall try neither your mettle nor your constitution, Master Shakespeare. But we shall assay your constancy, methinks. There are many ways that one may serve."

"If the queen should ever require my service, then it goes without saying that I am Her Majesty's to command," said Henry Darcie.

Shakespeare grimaced, wryly. "Aye, as are we all."

Sir William turned to Smythe. "As for you, Tuck Smythe… we already have ample evidence of both your mettle and your constitution. And of your constancy, I have no doubt. Be a player, if such is your desire, though 'twould seem to me that you have little talent for it. I think I may have work more suited to your skills. At the very least, there is still the matter of that sword you promised me."

"I am at your service, milord," said Smythe.

"Good. Then we shall speak again." He stood to leave. "And now, 'tis very late, and I shall leave you to your beds."

"But, milord," said Shakespeare, "what shall we tell the others of this matter on the morrow? They shall be full of questions about the causes behind all these strange events."

"And I have no doubt that you shall have suitable answers for them that will satisfy their craving and yet still mask the truth," Sir William said, putting on his hat and cloak. "After all, as Richard Burbage said, you are 'soon to make your mark as one of England's greatest poets,' Master Shakespeare." He chuckled. "Look to your muse to serve you. And now I bid you all good night."

As Sir William closed the door behind him, Henry Darcie and Elizabeth stood to leave, as well. "I must thank you for your service to my daughter, Mr. Smythe," he said. Elizabeth, standing beside him, met Smythe's gaze. "You believed in her when even her own mother and I did not."

"Well, under the circumstances, sir, who could blame you?"

"I blame myself," said Darcie. "I should have taken more trouble to examine the suitability of the match, to make inquiries, to… to…"

"Consider your daughter's feelings?" Shakespeare suggested.

"Well…" Darcie grunted, clearly feeling that the poet was presumptuous, but not feeling in a position to say so. "That, too, I suppose. Again, my gratitude to you… gentlemen." He gave them a curt bow and left. With a lingering glance back, Elizabeth followed her father.

Shakespeare shook his head, then turned to Smythe and shrugged. "Well… I shall come up with some sort of story to explain all this, I suppose. Though at the moment, Lord only knows what it shall be." He shook his head. "This has all been the most curious and unsettling affair. Odd's blood, I need a drink."

"Here," said Smythe. "Have some more wine. We can take the bottle up with us."

"To think of it," said Shakespeare, as they headed up the stairs to their room, "two brothers, identical in every way, to say nothing of a sister, and then a servant who serves both, innocents caught up in strange misapprehensions… you know, with a few small changes here and there to mask the truth of these events, there may well be a story for a play here."

"Nonsense," Smythe said. " 'Tis all much too fantastic. Who would ever believe it? What audience could be so credulous?"

"Perhaps if 'twere done as a sort of farce, a comedy," said Shakespeare, musing as he paused at the top of the stairs. " 'Tis not really a bad idea, you know."

"I'd leave it alone, if I were you," said Smythe, with a grimace. "You'll get both our heads chopped off if you do not have a care."

"Well, 'twould be just a play, you know… a foolish thing of very little consequence." Shakespeare shrugged. "After all, in a hundred years, who do you suppose would care?"

Smythe snorted as he opened the door and plopped down into bed, fully dressed. "Not me. I am much too tired. Good night, Will."

"Methinks I shall work awhile."

"Well, don't stay up too late. Remember, we have another performance tomorrow. And do not forget to blow the candle out when you are done."

"Good night, Tuck. Sleep well. Flights of angels and all that rot. Hmmm. Now where did I leave my inkwell?"

AFTERWORD

"What I claim here is the right of every Shakespeare-lover who has ever lived to paint his own portrait of the man."

Anthony Burgess

(In the foreword to his biography,
Shakespeare)

IT MAY BE THOUGHT THE height of arrogance to use William Shakespeare as a fictional character in a novel, and I imagine there will probably be those who will curl their lips with disdain at the idea, but at the same time, I have a strong suspicion that Shakespeare would have approved, or at the very least, been rather amused by the whole thing. After all, it is precisely the sort of thing he did himself.

I do not, I should say right up front, make any pretense to being a serious literary scholar or critic on the subject of the Bard. While I have some knowledge and I have done some research, for my own enjoyment and as part of working on this book and teaching Shakespeare in college level English courses, there are numerous authorities whose knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays far exceed my own. My purpose here was really just the same as Shakespeare's, no more, no less—to entertain.

I am by no means the first to use the Bard in such a manner nor, I am sure, shall I be the last. In this regard, I am certainly no less derivative than Shakespeare was himself when he based his works on other sources, such as the
Chronicles
of Holinshead, when he chose to borrow from history, or the works of Greene or Nashe or Marlowe, when he chose to steal outright. What I have tried to teach my students in order to help make Shakespeare more accessible to them is that if he were alive today, William Shakespeare would probably be known unpretentiously as Bill to his friends and there's a good chance he'd be on the writing staff of some prime-time television show like
Melrose Place
or perhaps a soap opera such as
The Days of Our Lives.
I really do believe that. He would doubtless fit right in at a Hollywood power lunch with Steven J. Cannell and David Kelley, with whom he would feel very comfortable talking shop, and he might script for Spielberg or Lucas or whoever hired him to write a screenplay. In short, he would be exactly what he was in his own time, and what Dickens was in his—a working writer, without any literary pretensions, one who simply practiced his craft, as Balzac said, "with clean hands and composure."

This is not to say that I am trying in any way to denigrate Shakespeare by comparing him to Hollywood scriptwriters, which many scholars would probably consider blasphemy, nor necessarily elevate them by a comparison to him. Marshall McLuhan, I think, was wrong. The medium is
not
the message. Genius will always transcend the medium, or else exhalt it, much as Paddy Chayevsky and Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles did. From everything I know of him… and to a large degree, subjectively, from what I feel… I think that Shakespeare would have been amazed beyond belief at the effects he has produced and the impact he has made, at the immortality he has achieved. Certainly, he never sought any such thing.

I know writers today who never throw anything away, who obsessively keep copies of every marked-up draft and every note ever scribbled on a napkin in a bar on the off chance that, someday, these things may be worth something, if not in a material sense, at least in an academic one as papers to be donated to some university for future bibliographical and biographical research. Future doctoral candidates need never worry, for there will be no dearth of manuscripts and notes for them to sift through en route to stultifying dissertations. Shakespeare, on the other hand, never saved a thing. If not for his printers, we would probably have nothing, for immortality was the last thing on his mind, and I doubt that the idea would even have occurred to him. He knew that his medium was an ephemeral one and he regarded it accordingly. He wrote his works to be
performed,
not deconstructed in a college classroom or analyzed with pathological precision for every possible nuance and interpretation. He understood, without a doubt, that his was a collaborative medium, that actors would bring their own contributions to the table, that plays were a dynamic group effort of the entire company, not a showcase for an individual writer's talent and/or ego.

Students who are forced to sit through agonizing lectures by monotonous professors who drone on and on about iambic pentameter and heroic couplets never truly learn to appreciate the Bard, and more's the pity, because Shakespeare himself would have been aghast to learn that his words were putting young captive audiences to sleep. He wanted, more than anything, to make them laugh, or weep, or rage… to make them
feel,
for that was why Elizabethan audiences went to the theatre. They went looking for a bit of escapism, some amusement, a little entertainment. They wanted, simply, a good time. And Shakespeare
became
Shakespeare because he knew just how to give it to them.

The irony of his career is that while he became, indisputably, the best known storyteller in the world, he is one of the least known when it comes to the story of his life. Much has been written and surmised about him, both biographically and fictionally, and it is not my purpose to go into any great detail about that here. I shall not dwell upon the so-called "Authorship Debate," other than to state briefly my own opinion, which is that Shakespeare's plays were written by Will Shakespeare, not Bacon or De Vere or, for that matter, Kilgore Trout. I shall not make any attempt to analyze anything he wrote, other than to comment for the purpose of this afterword where I stretched the truth somewhat (at least so far as it is known or might be justifiably inferred) and where true "congressional rhetoric" begins.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, the exact date is unknown, one of eight children (only one of whom, his sister Joan, was to survive him), in Stratford-upon-Avon, as is well known. His father, John, the son of a Snitterfield farmer, was a tradesman, a glover, and his mother, Mary, came of aristocratic Arden stock. He had the basic grammar school education (there is no record of his ever having attended any university and considerable circumstantial evidence that he was not a "college man") and it is likely that he learned at least something of the glovemaking trade from his father, though there is no evidence that he ever formally entered upon the trade himself.

Much is made of the so-called "Lost Years" (the time in which this novel is set), the period from roughly 1586 to 1592, during which time nothing is known about his life. No record exists from the time his name was mentioned in a legal document in Stratford in 1587 to the time he was mentioned in a book by Robert Greene in 1592, at which point he was apparently already a successful playwright. There has been much conjecture, however, based on inferences and deductions from circumstantial evidence. There have been various proposed scenarios of varying credibility that have had him working as an apprentice glover, a butcher, a law clerk, an ostler, an actor, a tutor, even a poacher. The one thing that is clear is that only a few years after his marriage to Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582 and the birth of three children (a daughter born only six months after the marriage and twins born about two years later), he left his family in Stratford and moved to London, where he "resurfaced" as an actor/playwright and member of the theatrical company of Lord Strange's Men almost a decade later.

Among all the theories about Shakespeare's activities during these "hidden years," I gravitate toward the scenario proposed by Anthony Burgess in his spare and highly readable biography,
Shakespeare.
Burgess suggests, with some good evidence to back up his arguments, that Shakespeare had a "shotgun wedding," that his plans to marry a girl named Anne Whateley, of Temple Grafton, were derailed by his being forced to marry Anne Hathaway, of Shottery, an older woman whom he had obviously impregnated. For a more detailed explication, I refer interested readers to Mr. Burgess, who as a writer is far more lucid and entertaining on the subject than are most scholars and literary critics, some of whom tend to be agenda-driven apologists. But suffice it to say, as far as history and this novel are concerned, that everything that happened to William Shakespeare from the time he left Stratford until he resurfaced as a member of the company known as Lord Strange's Men (eventually to become more famous as The Lord Chamberlain's Men) is pure conjecture.