“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 theatri
cal 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.
Consequently, there is no historical counterpart (at least so far as I know) to the character of Black Billy/Sir William Worley. That character is made up entirely of a dash of Errol Flynn, a pinch of Oliver Reed, a measure of Peter O’Toole, and a whole bunch of personal wish fulfillment. It is not, however, entirely out of the realm of possibility that someone like Worley might well have existed in real life, for the modern British Secret Service had its beginnings in the time of Elizabeth I, with Sir Francis Walsingham, her minister and chief hatchet man, so to speak.
The members of the company known as the Queen’s Men, as portrayed here, are fictional with the exceptions of Dick Tarleton (who is only referred to in this novel and does not actually appear), Edward Alleyn, Will Kemp, Richard Burbage, and his father, James, who are all based on real people, with a considerable amount of dramatic license, needless to say. Alleyn did, in fact, quit the Queen’s Men for the Admiral’s Men, probably for reasons very similar to those depicted here, and Kemp eventually left, as well. (Tarleton fell ill about the time of the setting of this novel and died.) It should be noted that while the Queen’s Men really did exist, there is no proof that Shakespeare had ever actually joined that company. He might have, but if he did, he was not with them very long and probably left around 1587 to join Lord Strange’s Men, along with Will Kemp.
Christopher Marlowe, of course, is not a fictional character, but my treatment of him is entirely fictional, based loosely on what is known of his life. He was, to say the least, a flamboyant character, Shakespeare’s only real competition at the time, a sort of Elizabethan Oscar Wilde with a bit of Harlan Ellison thrown in, if one can imagine such a thing. Marlowe, as some of my students might say, was very much “in your face” and probably would have left behind an even more brilliant literary history if he had not been savagely murdered in a bar. It is generally assumed that Marlowe was, indeed, engaged in some sort of espionage activity. Though no hard evidence for this exists, there seems to be some strong circumstantial evidence. It has been suggested that he was murdered in revenge by agents of Spain or else by his own government, to prevent him from testifying before the Privy Council and revealing inconvenient associations when he was accused of heresy and blasphemy. However, it is also entirely possible that he was simply murdered for being what and who he was. That Shakespeare admired Marlowe is a matter of historical record, but it seems doubtful, given their very different personalities, that they hung out together.
Smythe is, of course, entirely my own creation and I hope that you enjoyed him. My treatment of Shakespeare, likewise, is pure conjecture based upon subjective inference. I painted him, to paraphrase Mr. Burgess, the way I would have liked to see him. Most readers will, 1 hope, find it merely harmless fun. As Shakespeare might have said himself, and did:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here