New Wave Fabulists Read online

  He paused a moment, waiting for us to join him in marveling at this. Then he wiped his face again. There is nowhere hotter than Indiana on a July afternoon.

  “There is one name, though,” he said, “that has been consistently proposed by students for nearly a hundred years as the most likely. He was an educated man, a man who was familiar with the courts and the nobility, trained as a lawyer, a major character in the political realm who may well have had reasons for keeping his playwriting a secret. He may have left his signature in the writings, because he was interested in codes and ciphers, and made up his own. He was certainly paiderastes; that’s well attested. His name was Francis Bacon.”

  There was a sort of movement among us then, as the name went around, some nodding or crossing their arms or grinning, perhaps because they agreed, or because it was the name they expected to hear, or not the one they expected to hear, or simply in acknowledgment that the little speech had reached a climax.

  He went on to lay out, I’m sure, the Baconian case that day, and I could recreate it as I’ve recreated his speech to us; I don’t remember it in detail. But I remember what he said at the end.

  “I haven’t come here to make a convert of anyone,” he said. “I’m just fortunate to’ve been able to help get this wonderful project under way, and these plays produced here, no matter whose name is attached to them. Or why they’re here rather than someplace else.”

  He reached behind him, groping to find the canes in the grass where he had dropped them, and Robin quickly got them and handed them to him. He stood, and we watched him accomplish it.

  “Please remember this, though,” he said. “Remember that nothing needs to be the way you’ve always thought it has to be. Even if everyone with the power to say so insists it must. Francis Bacon said The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power. Well I think that in his case it’s true. The monuments of his wit have survived under another’s name, where he hid them himself from the machinations of power. I believe that’s so. I don’t ask you to do so. I just want to wish you all the very best of luck in this coming season.”

  He seemed to have moved himself; we were all very quiet, sensing that, and maybe he sensed our stillness. Anyway he laughed, and put out his left hand to Robin, who took it with his right, and we all applauded, rather wildly actually, the whole thing had been so startling and unexpected, and here was the end of it; and then we dispersed.

  I knew that this controversy existed, of course; it was the kind of thing I would read about in my mother’s Saturday Review or see on Odyssey on Sunday morning television. I thought Bacon was the old-fashioned choice, and had been passed over in favor of some more convincing others. I didn’t really care. I was as interested in these theories as I was in flying saucers, or the guilt of the Rosenbergs, or the miracles at Lourdes. I thought the world was one way, and it was obvious what that way was, and people who struggled to alter it had reasons particular to them, a kind of sublime dissatisfaction that had nothing to do with what is in fact the case. I still think so, most of the time. Between the enthusiasts and the hardheads who dismiss them, I love the enthusiasts and stand with the hardheads. I don’t think Harriet likes this about me, all in all. She thinks that nothing needs to be the way that power insists it is. It’s part of being a free spirit.

  The next day we found screwed into the wood of the Stratford Oak a small and elegant brass plaque.

  Placed in Memory of the British Polymath and Genius

  Francis Bacon

  And in honor of his deathless contributions to our literature & language

  July 10,1959

  The Monuments of Wit Survive the Monuments of Power

  “But it’s ridiculous,” Harriet said to me. We walked together from the oak to the theater. “You can’t go around talking about bacon. ‘I’ve got to study my bacon. So much wisdom can be found in bacon. We can all get smarter by reading bacon. Oops I’ve misplaced my bacon.’ I mean come on.”

  “‘Shakespeare’ is a kind of odd name,” I said. “It’s just that we’re used to it.”

  Harriet looked at me in contempt. “It’s a beautiful name,” she said. “Maybe the best name ever. The best.”

  We trudged along, raising dust. In my crowded family the way to go on from here would be to insist on opposition, take a position, tease and deride, all to keep up the connection, maybe even win a victory, of wit or force if not of reason. I knew better not to now. But not what I might do instead, or otherwise.

  “What are you doing today?” I asked at last.

  “Making armor,” she said.

  Maybe it was because the company was just beginning, was mostly young and fleet but not so impressive in stature, or maybe it was just that all the available money was going into the theater and the road out to it and the parking lots and offices: but the first production of the Indiana Shakespeare Festival was minimal, radically minimal for the times, and was meant to appear so: that was Robin’s conception.

  The play was Henry V. The company, divided into French and English, were to be dressed only in jeans and sweatshirts, rehearsal clothes; but those of the French were white, and the English dark blue. Their banners were too, just plain rectangles on poles. The play would begin with the Chorus, alone, sitting on the apron of the stage, also in rehearsal clothes of black, with the script in his hands. He was, in effect, the director of the play, and his anxiety about its effectiveness was the director’s.

  But pardon, gentles all,

  The flat unraiséd spirits that have dared

  On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

  So great an object …

  There would be a big wooden box on stage, and from it the actors would take out the “four or five most vile and ragged foils,” a mismatched collection of prop sabers and swords, as well as pieces of buckram armor for the nobles. There were four kids recruited from the high school band, two trumpets, a French horn and a kettledrum, who stayed just off the open stage and visible the whole time, playing the alarums and flourishes. Robin himself played the Chorus. I’d wondered why this play had been chosen, certainly not one of the top ten, a patriotic pageant for a country not ours: but in Robin’s version it was about theater itself, and making do, and four boards and a passion. In all my grandiose thinking about theater I couldn’t have come up with such a gimmick. I think now that he was good; I wonder what became of him.

  There were more women in the company than you’d think would be needed, since there are only four female characters in the play (though one gets the best speech). We found out how two older women would be used when they came to rehearsals one day with hair cut short, almost cut off: they were to be the priests who begin the play, who justify Henry’s war. And do no fighting themselves.

  “That would be hard,” Harriet said to me; we watched the women self-consciously touch their gray hair with their hands.

  But that wasn’t all.

  Robin called us all together to see something he’d been working on.

  All the plainness, he said, and the bareness, it was all fine, he loved it and it was working, working really well he thought, but it wasn’t completely satisfying, was it? Did we think so? I thought whatever he thought, of course, but I nodded with the others and assented that maybe it wasn’t enough. Robin said that in Elizabethan theaters they made up for the plain bare stage with brilliant costumes—most of them the cast-off clothes of noble patrons—but we didn’t have them here. So he’d developed another idea, and he wanted to show us.

  I don’t know now if Robin had worked out the new idea long before, if he only wanted to produce in us the same surprise he aimed to achieve in audiences by saying he’d just thought of it. I know it made him seem all the more a magician to me.

  He said: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them, printing their proud hooves i’ the receiving earth.” Harriet, next to me, glanced at me for just the briefest second as though it were all the time she could spare me from her attention to w
hat was happening. And Robin lifted his arm and brought forth a horse: from the rear draped chamber it, she, stepped forth.

  It was Sandy. She was the horse. She was in a leotard, I suppose, though I probably didn’t know that word then; her feet shod in some kind of high shoe, a tall long-nosed mask on her head that seemed to lift her almost to a horse’s height. She took slow steps and pawed delicately: printed her proud hoof in the receiving earth. Looked around herself with haughty animal unconcern; tossed her high head as though tugging at her reins.

  I felt Harriet stir beside me.

  Robin came close to Sandy as though to take her reins, or put his hand on her. “I will not change my horse for any that treads on four pasterns,” he said. “When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk. He trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it.”

  They were the Dauphin’s lines, from the night before the battle of Agincourt. Sandy tossed her head as though the steed heard these compliments.

  “It is a beast for Perseus,” Robin said. “He is pure air and fire, and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him but in patient stillness as his rider mounts him.”

  He took her shoulder. She was still, obedient. We were all still and silent, witnessing what it almost seemed we shouldn’t. Then suddenly he dropped the character, laughed, turned Sandy to face us, who lifted off her mask; Robin lifted his hands to say, well that’s all.

  We applauded.

  “There won’t be many,” Robin said, coming downstage. “Six or eight. If any of you have experience in dance or gymnastics—I know some of you do—I hope you’ll come see me and make a time to try out for these parts.” He laughed. “Parts. Well. I promise you’ll be on stage more than some parts with lines.”

  “Maybe you should,” I said to Harriet, and she turned her head my way as though she had heard a small, unintelligible noise of no interest; then slowly back to the stage, where Sandy was slipping off the high shoes and holding out the mask to the costume people to take away.

  Of course she tried out, and was selected. She would be the Duke of Bedford’s horse, caparisoned in his arms; the actor playing the Duke was a thick hirsute man with wrestler’s wrists and a low, winning voice he seemed to have invented. Steeds and riders practiced together, extra rehearsals with Sandy and the fight captain, as he was called. I could watch, if I wanted.

  There’s a lot about horses in the play, enough to account for a lot of action. Harriet was one of the exhausted starving English horses the French make fun of:

  … Their poor jades

  Lob down their heads, dropping the hides and hips,

  The gum down-roping from their pale-dead eyes

  And in their pale dull mouths the gimmal bit

  Lies foul with chewed grass, still and motionless.

  The Duke rose, weary, sword heavy in his hand; and Harriet his mount arose, in brute pain, her head lobbed down, her shanks trembling, but still willing, still proud, lifting and shaking her high head when the dresser cast her colors over her.

  “I learned some more about Bacon,” I said to Harriet. She’d come off the stage glistening with sweat, a huge pair of dungarees and a white shirt pulled on over her dance leotard. She laughed that laugh, and I saw what I’d said, and I laughed too. “No. Listen. At the library. I learned a lot.”

  “Well where else? No, what.”

  “Do you know who first thought that Bacon might have written Shakespeare?”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “It was a woman. Her name was Delia Bacon.”

  “Oh no.”

  “She was no relation though. She said so herself.”

  “Yeah sure.”

  “I can show you her book,” I said. “If you want. There’s a lot of books about this.”

  “Okay.” And her smile of frank complicity.

  When the bus came by the theater on its endless round we took it into town, which seemed stunned into motionless silence in the noonday heat, drooping like the grieving Union soldier on his plinth.

  “She came from near here,” I said. “Western Ohio. A hundred years ago. Her father was a missionary, and they came from Connecticut. She made a living as a teacher, then she wrote books, then she became a public lecturer. She never married.”

  “Hm.”

  “She did have an affair, though, or a romance, with this guy in New Haven. She came back to Connecticut to do this lecturing. He was a minister.”

  “Weren’t they all.”

  “He lived in this hotel where she lived. She sent him a note saying to come visit her, and he told his friends. But he started seeing her.”

  “Did she tell him about Shakespeare?”

  “Yes. He thought she was right.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “It’s in a book.” Going into the dim library I shivered dramatically, and Harriet looked at me with interest. Maybe it was the sudden cool air; or a kind of intimacy, as startling as a touch, to take her here.

  “There was a scandal,” I said. “Delia’s family claimed that this guy—his name was McWhorter—had asked Delia to marry him, and now was breaking his promise; but he said it was Delia who’d asked him.”

  “Ha,” said Harriet. “She asked him.”

  “She said.”

  “Maybe,” Harriet said, “she was a free spirit.”

  I led her down the stacks. “What’s that? I mean how do you mean?”

  “A free spirit. Is somebody who does what they want. Like a Victorian lady who asks a man to marry her. Or just be lovers.”

  The stacks were on two levels, green-painted iron, the second level reached by a circular stair. We climbed up.

  “My mother says what I want to be is a free spirit,” Harriet said. “She says she was one too. So I get it from her.”

  “Can you want to be one?” I asked. I didn’t know what I was talking about. “Isn’t wanting to be one the same as being one?”

  “No,” Harriet said.

  The Shakespeare section was three or four shelves, plays in old editions, commentaries, lives, and a dozen books on who else might have been Shakespeare.

  “Here,” I said. It was The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, by Delia Bacon. There was a photograph of her inside: a bonneted dark lady of indeterminate age, smiling a knowing smile, a smile of frankness and good humor.

  “I like her.” She riffled the pages but read nothing.

  “Look at this one,” I said. “It’s crazy.”

  A huge volume in moldering leather called The Great Cryptogram by Ignatius Donnelly. Thousands of pages of methods for finding the secret words planted in the texts of the plays to reveal the true author. Who was Francis Bacon.

  “He liked Delia. He thought she got a bad deal.”

  We were squatting close together to get at the books on the bottom shelf. I could smell Harriet’s perfume and sweat. She drew out a small blue volume from the shelf.

  “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” she read, and sat to open it, slipping off her laceless sneakers. I pulled out other books: Bacon Is Shake-speare. Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown. “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Shake-speare: The Mystery.

  “Look,” I said. “Here’s the one that says Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays. Listen: ‘The psychic urge that made Elizabeth place Portia, Rosalind, and Viola in men’s clothing might explain her disguising her own authorship in masculine raiment. For every strong and mature Shakespeare heroine we have a weak, vacillating, impetuous hero.’”

  “Well sure.” She was involved in the small book she’d found.

  “What is it?”

  “It is,” she said, “a book about the girlhoods of Shakespeare’s heroines. Just as though they were real people who had girlhoods you could tell about.” She glanced at the front of the book. “Eighteen ninety-one. Here’s one about Beatrice.”

  “Which one is she?” I hadn’t read many of the comedies.

&
nbsp; “Much Ado About Nothing,” she said, shooting me a school-marmish glance. “You know, dear boy. Beatrice and Benedick.”

  “Oh right. She’s a free spirit.”

  The floor of the level we sat on was of glass: a milky glass that let the light, I guess, fall down to the darker level below. I’d never been anywhere like this cast-iron structure, on this glass floor.

  “I want to take this out,” Harriet said. “Do you think they’d let me?”

  “Sure. I bet.”

  I don’t know how long we sat. Harriet probably looked at her little wristwatch on a gold band and made us leave. I remember that I went down the ringing spiral stair before her, and that she held her hand out to me to be helped: and that afterward I smelled her perfume on that hand. For years after I would catch whiffs of that scent on the street, at parties, and finally I somehow learned its name: Ambush.

  Delia Bacon didn’t, in fact, at least at first, decide who the real author of the Shakespeare plays was. Her original insight, and it wasn’t entirely original with her, though maybe she thought it was, was simply that the lowly mummer from Stratford could never have created so lofty, so vast, so moral a work as the plays seemed to her to be. And she did see them as a single work, growing over time as the Author matured, but enfolding a single unified philosophy, humane, radical, even subversive—a philosophy that she, Delia Bacon, was the first to articulate.

  One writer has pointed out that Delia’s obsessive denigration of the actor fellow, which appears in her thinking rather suddenly, might be a displacement of her anger at the despicable McWhorter and his falsity, and her replacement of him by a more suitable love object, who had her own name (and her stern beloved father’s) to boot: a neat piece of psychologizing, though it doesn’t fit with the free spirit conception. A free spirit would never take someone like him so much to heart, or allow herself to be so caught and mishandled. Never.