Shakespeare for Squirrels

Two days later, Drool and I stood at the edge of the city, kitted out for travel, faced down by Nick Bottom and the three fairies.

Bottom shook my hand. “You shall always be our master of the theater. Thank you.”

I slapped his back. “You were a brave player and a good friend,” said I. “I hope Mrs. Bottom forgives you your trespasses.”

“Ah, I don’t mind sleeping out with the animals for a bit. Finding my sense memory, don’t

you know. Her anger is waning. I’ll be back in the house in no time.”

“Good luck, then.”

“Jeff is staying,” said Moth, holding Jeff. “We are in love.”

“But he’s a monkey,” said I.

“Not all the time,” said Moth.

“Yes, all the fucking time.”

“Well, in the daytime we play in the trees together and it’s lovely.”

Jeff, cheeky monkey that he was, nodded and nuzzled into her neck.

“He is his own man,” said I. “Perhaps you could get a hat, to keep his interest when you’re a fairy.”

“She can have mine,” said Cobweb. She removed her bycocket hat and fitted it over Moth’s eggshell-colored hair.

“I bought you these,” I said, pulling a pair of shoes from my satchel and handing them to Cobweb. “I think they’ll fit.”

She took them, turned them around in the air, examined them. “I am ruined now,” she said.

“Yes,” said I.

“And I have these,” said Peaseblossom, holding up her nut-sack full of teeth. “For I am now a tooth fairy.”

“Yes,” said I. “How many do you think you have?”

“Don’t be a twat, Pocket,” said Cobweb. Then, as she eyed her shoes suspiciously, she said, “Where will you go?”

“We have no master but the road, love. We shall wander looking to bring laughter and joy to all we meet.”

“We are fools,” said Drool.

“Fancy a frolic before you go?” said Moth.

“Thank you, lamb, but I think not. We already waited until sundown so we could say goodbye.”

We hugged them each, except Jeff, who is a shit and tried to bite Drool. Cobweb clung to my neck for a long time and, truth be told, I did not want to let her go when I did.

“Farewell then,” said I, and I turned and headed down the road.

“Ta,” said Drool.

I was determined I would not look back, and did not, until Drool said, “Pocket.” He threw a thumb over his shoulder. Cobweb was following along behind us, taking awkward and tentative steps in her new shoes.

“What are you doing?” I called.

“I’m coming with you.”

“We may never come back this way.”

“I know. But I have never been anywhere but here. I would see other places.”

“There probably won’t be other fairies. You won’t be able to frolic.”

“I have frolicked before.”

“But you’re a squirrel.”

“Not all the time.”

“But a great crashing lot of the time. The time when it’s not dark.”

“In the day I shall ride on your shoulder and listen to you tell stories of wonder and adventure. Besides, you fancy me, Pocket of Dog Snogging.”

“Fuckstockings,” said I, defeated. “Come along, then.”

Afterword

A Fool in the Forest

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is my favorite Shakespeare play—it’s the only one I’ve ever made it all the way through without thinking about things I’m going to eat—and you, sir, have besmirched this delightful, spirited sex comedy with murder, goblins, and gratuitous squirrel shagging. You, sir, you cad, you dilettante, you scrofulous scribbler of unscrupulous satire, have made a sow’s ear from a perfectly lovely silk purse. Why? Why, why, why?”

Okay, harsh, but fair.

Why?

I picked A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it’s my favorite too! It’s everybody’s favorite (except for Shakespeare scholars and people who still believe in love). It’s the most performed of all of Shakespeare’s plays, largely, I’d guess, because the plot is so silly and the setting so flexible. Sure, the script says “Athens,” but it’s no Athens anyone has ever seen. There’s no historical period referenced at all, and most of the play is set in the fairy wood, which can be anywhere, really. Once we’re into the wood (and we more or less have to accept that the fairy wood is “but a dream”), the possibilities bloom. I’ve seen productions of MSND where the motif was punk, glitter rock, punk-glitter-rock, Victorian country house, Bollywood London, and even one high school production where the fairy wood was the city dump and the fairies wore bin bags as costumes (clever cost-cutting move for wardrobe). In fact, it was the fungible nature of the fairy wood that made me want to send Pocket there in the first place. I found him in a false medieval Britain (Fool) and moved him to a historical thirteenth-century Venice (The Serpent of Venice), largely because I wanted to tell a story about a water monster in the canals, so I thought, how could I challenge my oh-so-articulate fool? It would be easy enough to get him from the last story to a thirteenth-century Athens, but then what? Since the fairy wood could be anywhere, why not, I thought, make it 1940s San Francisco? Golden Gate Park, to be specific. Have fairies and fools talking tough in the mean streets of Fog City, playing with the language and the extreme discomfort of Pocket dealing with cars and firearms and floozy fairy queens that would as soon stick a shiv in you as take your hat. So I send a rough outline off to my editor, like I do, to make sure we’re all on the same page, and she comes back to my agent with, “Maybe not this next book. We’d like to see a one-off this time.”

This is a first for me. So I call.

“So,” I say, “I hear you guys would like something different?”

“Just right now,” she says. “You can do a Shakespeare book after this if you want. What else do you have?”

Well, what I have is a giant bucket of nothing, but I have been researching the bejeezus out of 1940s San Francisco. So I say, “I could do a kind of noir thing set in San Francisco in the 1940s. Sort of a Maltese Falcony kind of thing. Or another whale book. Or, uh . . .”

“Yes, do that,” she says.

“Do what?”

“The Maltese Falcony kind of thing.”

“Okay,” I say, having absolutely no idea what the hell I’m going to do.

And that is how big-time publishing is done.

I know you hear about screenwriters doing this all the time—pitching a Gothic horror novel set in Empire-era England, and the producer saying, “Great, can you set it in L.A. in the 1970s, and can it be about a dog?” And you go, “Sure thing.” But in the book business, this was new for me. So I said, “Okay.” Then I went off to write a book that I cleverly titled Noir, so you would know that what you were getting was not derived from a Shakespeare play. Which brings me back to a book set in the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now that I’ve used up all my 1940s San Francisco research and tough-guy talk, and I’m left with a deadline and a dream, I think, I’ll just dive into the history of Shakespeare’s source material and see what I can find.

See, of Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays, thirty-three of them are derived from other sources: Italian love stories, or history, or myth, or in some cases, just lifted from someone else’s play (King Lear). Unfortunately for me, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not one of the thirty-three. Sure, Hippolyta is first mentioned in Greek mythology as the daughter of Ares, the god of war, and the queen of the Amazons, and is killed by Heracles for her girdle, killed by Theseus at her wedding, or killed by another Amazon fighting beside Theseus at her wedding, but generally, her role in mythology is to have a magic girdle, become a prisoner of war, and get killed at a wedding.

Theseus, on the other hand, is an epic hero, and appears in the Odyssey, where he slays the Minotaur; jilts Ariadne, who gave him the thread to get out of the Minotaur’s maze; kidnaps Helen of Troy (whom they just called Helen when she was at home in Troy); and generally does a lot of fighting and questing stuff—so, a great backstory, but the Theseus of myth is clearly not the staid and formal character Shakespeare portrays in MSND. So he offers little help in expanding the story, except to serve as another noble from whom Pocket could “take the piss.”

The fairies, I thought, surely they will offer some unexplored gem of myth that I can festoon with knob jokes!

And while Oberon, it turns out, appears first in a thirteenth-century French heroic song, Huon de Bordeaux, as Auberon, a fairy king who helps Huon (the knight who kills Charlemagne’s son) work off his crime with quests, about Oberon’s character we are told almost nothing except he is the son of Julius Caesar and Morgan le Fay. Really? Ancient Britain? So the Oberon of myth is what we in literature call “a frog fart in a wind storm,” and, although interesting, he isn’t as interesting as Shakespeare’s Oberon, who sets up his wife to shag a were-donkey over a little Indian boy with whom he is inexplicably obsessed.

And Titania doesn’t show up in literature at all, it appears, until Shakespeare names her in the play in 1595, although the entire MSND play may have been inspired by the success of Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, which was written for Queen Elizabeth five years before, and which met with great approval by the queen and other dignitaries in court who were mentioned in the poem. It might be noted, however, that while Spenser’s fairy queen, Gloriana, is a chaste and virtuous virgin (the hero of book II, Guyon, is the leader of the Knights of the Maidenhead—I’m not making that up), which is why Elizabeth I loved her, Shakespeare’s Titania is an egregious floozy, which is why audiences love her. So there were possibilities, but nothing quite as fun as what was already in the play. (It should be noted, though, that the first and second moons of the eighth planet are named for Titania and Oberon and even now they are chasing each other around Uranus.)

The other characters are numerous and almost indistinguishable from one another, and the lovers are mostly annoying, although the magic potion Puck puts in the boys’ eyes was a fun device, a version of which I used in Fool, the first of Pocket’s adventures. The lovers are made doubly annoying by a habit of Shakespeare’s that we learn not to do on the very first day of Famous Novelist School, which is giving characters names that start with the same letter. It’s so annoying and often confusing that I even found myself having to look back to the character list at the beginning of the play to keep Helena and Hermia straight. On the stage, where each character is represented by a different actor, not a big deal, but on the page, where they are but names, a huge pain in the ass. So I found no backstory to expand there.