New Wave Fabulists Read online

  But there’s no doubt she’s different from all those who follow her, different in what mattered to her. They all regard the plays with a standard sort of awe, works of genius and so on, couldn’t have been written by any lowborn player, but beyond that they have little to say about them: they only search them for clues and codes and secret messages.

  Delia’s argument was different. The reason she suspected that the true author of the plays—or authors, for she thought it likely that there were several—had hidden behind the Shakespeare name was that the philosophy they enunciated would have been dangerous, even fatal, to espouse. The plays of Shakespeare, she thought, promote a thoroughgoing antiroyalist republicanism, a view of all men as created equal in their needs and desires and sufferings. From the endless, repellent broils of York and Lancaster down to the awful compassion of Lear, the plays show kings as mere men—flawed, sinful, guilty, overreaching, without claim to divine right or men’s allegiance.

  And who, she then asked, would have conceived such a philosophy; who would scheme to hide it in a series of popular entertainments, whose secret goal was to educate and uplift and even incite the people who stood to listen, or sat to read? Who would then need to hide his own identity behind the globous face of the faker from Stratford? Bacon, father of science and the new learning, court official, intimate of monarchs, himself ennobled, makes perfect sense to be this person, this fair mind bent on an unimaginable future, the end of kings and nobles and the beginning of equality and a common humanity; of “pity, like a naked new-born babe”; free men and women freely choosing one another in love and fraternity.

  What would the queen his mistress have said to that?

  Actually Delia conceived an entire cabal within the queen’s court, aristocrats risking their heads to reach England’s people with their message—which maybe they heard too, since the Englishmen who began in those years to come to America (though admittedly most of them, at least at first, were theater-hating Puritans) eventually did found a nation with those ideals; and then the secret of their transmission was uncovered at length by a woman born in that republic, even named for the transmitter, and a free spirit maybe too, certainly with a mind and heart of her own.

  Which is why—this just occurs to me—it was right and proper that in the United States we should have sat before his plays, by limelight and lamplight, so persistently; and why it makes perfect sense that in the state of Indiana just a hundred years after Delia Bacon enunciated her, or Shakespeare’s, philosophy we democrats should have gathered in a Utopian’s barn to read and study and perform his plays. In fact, Henry V was one of Delia’s examples of Shakespeare (considered collectively) working on the people’s souls to show what kings are, and what their wars amount to:

  I think the king is but a man as I am, the violet smells to him as it does to me; all his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness, he appears but a man. …

  Of course that’s Harry himself speaking, while disguised as a commoner, so the irony is multiple, nearly impenetrable, but Delia knew that; she’s actually most sorry for the king—unfitted, as any mere man must be, for the vast responsibilities placed on him; a man who needs as much or more than anyone to be freed.

  There was a party at the camp for the actors, the crew, the apprentices, end of a work week, or dress rehearsal, I don’t remember. They liked to have parties, they brought in cases of beer and everybody got some: impossible to imagine now.

  Harriet in the big dining hall was reading aloud to some kids out of The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. June bugs banged against the screens. I talked to Robin.

  “It just can’t be true,” I said. “You should read some of this stuff I found. These people are nuts.”

  “Well what’s truth?” he said, as though he’d just thought of this big question. “Maybe truth is multiple. I mean how can we ever know? How can we know anything for sure? We don’t even know for sure that you and I are here talking, and not just figments.”

  Considered as a profession, theater people aren’t much given to analysis and logic. In the theater somebody who seems to be Lear is Lear; maybe it’s the same with thought, and to the average actor something that seems like a reasoned argument doesn’t differ importantly from an actual one.

  Robin looked down at the unopened bottle of Drewry’s beer in his lap. He had what we called a church key in his hand. “You know,” he said, “I’ve never been exactly sure he believes this theory.” He apparently meant the Bacon advocate who’d talked to us. “He may not be completely convinced the plays were written by Francis Bacon.”

  He was an actor too in how he “telegraphed”—let you know when a stunner was coming, bad practice in a boxer, skillful in a raconteur.

  “Oh?” I said my line.

  “No,” Robin said. “He thinks maybe it’s more likely to have been his smarter brother, Anthony.”

  He popped off the cap of the bottle, his own rim shot.

  “So here little Beatrice gets captured by outlaws,” I heard Harriet say. “She’s so sharp. ‘Corpo di Bellona! A spirited young devil she is! I’ll drink your health, young lady!’ That’s the robber chief. He wants to marry her. Fill me a cup, and I’ll pledge you all, good gentlemen,’ says Beatrice. ‘But I have no ambition to be your queen. I should soon be an unpopular monarch among you, for I should begin my rule by reforming your ways.’ Oh God.”

  “I’ve known him a long time,” Robin said. “I know him to be a completely sweet, completely sincere, and very smart man. And. He’s nowhere near as mad as his mother.”

  “‘A little gray-eyed red-lipped thing, that looks too bright and fearless to know what tears mean’” Harriet read. “‘She speaks up so open, and looks so straight into your face, that you feel as if she must be right, and you wrong. …’”

  “His mother,” Robin said, with vast seriousness, “has discovered that within the plays of Shakespeare there is a code, or a cipher. There’s a difference, but I can’t remember what it is. And the code, when you break it, tells a story.”

  I held my tongue.

  “A long story.”

  I waited.

  “It turns out,” he said, “that hidden in the plays is the story of how Francis Bacon is actually the son of Queen Elizabeth and Robert of Leicester, her lover.”

  I started to laugh, that nervous laughter: in too deep, resisting.

  “They made a secret marriage,” Robin said. Still deadpan. “So Francis Bacon was in fact rightfully heir to the throne. Francis I. But if he ever let that be known—” And here Robin drew his hand suddenly across his throat, executing himself. “So he hid the story for this amazing woman to discover, three hundred, three hundred …”

  Then at last he laughed.

  “But,” I said, in trouble.

  “Listen.” He had lost all urgency, dropped the part he’d been playing. I saw that Harriet had come near and stood listening. “It doesn’t matter. The fact is that the son has spent most of his life not thinking about Bacon, ha ha, or his mother, but in making money. Quite a lot of it, as I understand. In the commodities market. And whatever else he may have been or is, he is a good son and a generous man. And we wouldn’t be here without him. And that’s enough. And that’s that.”

  He looked from me to Harriet to me. Harriet, hands behind her back and her finger in the book’s pages, looked like an illustration for something. She was smiling with sweet acceptance, and her smile moved from Robin to me. They were both looking at me, both smiling. I felt very odd.

  Others came and claimed Robin’s attention.

  “He’s right, dear boy,” Harriet said to me.

  “But.”

  “Come on,” she said. “I’d like to walk.”

  Night came on with such solemn slowness those summers, the birds falling silent and the frogs and bugs awaking, the sky turning green and yellow, the trees and low poplars black. Talking nonsense and making dance spins, she led me as though by chance up t
he way that led from the camp buildings to a knoll where low shrubs grew, and tall grasses; from the little fastness or hideaway they made you could glimpse the road back down to the camp, and look outward over the meadows to the river, an onyx meander in the darkening green.

  “You like this?” she said, and she sat, floated with practiced dancer’s grace to the soft ground.

  Harriet had chosen me. It was as simple as that. Try as I might I can’t remember how she let me know this. Maybe she didn’t. I only remember being there in the growing dark, already knowing.

  “Clipping,” she said, and took off her pink-framed glasses. “That’s what Shakespeare says. I like that word. Clipping and kissing.”

  I said nothing.

  I was profoundly alarmed. This thing that I had thought so constantly about was before me and I’m sure I looked like an apprehended criminal, like a shy wild thing transfixed by the explorer who’s first discovered it. I didn’t say anything or do anything of all the many things I could have done, that I knew could and ought now to be done; and Harriet stopped and looked at me cautiously.

  “Okay?” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You aren’t whatchamacallit, are you?”

  “What?”

  “That thing Francis Bacon was. Philorumpties.”

  “Paiderastes. No. No no.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay then.” The only obstacle out of the way. We began. Grass and fields were at any rate my medium; all the little clipping I’d done had been outdoors, like a swain, or a rabbit, though I’d never got even this far anywhere else.

  Her peasant blouse was easy to get off, seemed made to come off easily, and then there were the underpinnings, like grappling with a time bomb in the dark, decoupling the wires; she helped out frankly.

  “They’re liddlies,” she said.

  Almost all I knew about the act that was to follow, all of it theoretical, I had learned from a book called Ideal Marriage, which said that it involves all of the senses, taste, touch, smell, sight, but not hearing, which should, the book said, be notable by its absence. No talking. Harriet talked. It was the strangest thing of all.

  There were other features of the act that with delicate care Ideal Marriage had described. Those we did or had. One’s Shakespearean name I had thought about and said over often to myself, like a charm, or a promise, sometimes with an actual shiver, anticipation mixed with some apprehensive revulsion: the velvet clasp.

  “Oops you weren’t supposed to,” she panted in my ear.

  As well remind the deer not to start away. Not supposed to: I hardly knew I had.

  “I think it’s all right,” she said. “I think.”

  It turned out it was all right. God knows what we would have done: I think of that sometimes. And the next time I didn’t, nor the next.

  I was awed, bewildered, filled with weird guilt—not guilt for any religious reason, I’ve never had any of that, but because I wasn’t in love with Harriet, or she with me; what she had invited me to obviously wasn’t the commencement of always-ever-after in my life; I felt like a Shakespearean virgin who’s been played the Bed Trick. I couldn’t have said any of this then, only felt it. Dint know whether to shit or go blind they said then in Indiana. It was part of the free spirit effect, but I didn’t know that then either.

  I finally got less tongue-tied. My strangulated silence ought to have been outrageously insulting to Harriet, but in fact she didn’t change her attitude toward me through the days, only her voice sometimes had a throaty kind of quality when we talked about nothing or about Shakespeare or the work, as though she might start laughing any second from some kind of warmth or pleasure, at my discomfiture only maybe.

  “You know something?” she said to me, this time in a counselor’s cabin we’d found a way into, a bedstead, a stained mattress. “You know something? You have a nice penis.”

  Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping. In this world into which I had come this happened, this too; everything. Of course I didn’t know it happened also in the world I came from, at summer theaters and summer conferences and summer gatherings all over, that it was for this that they foregathered (not entirely or always, no, but still). I sensed, smelled as it were, the hot life all around me, as I never could have done before I became part of it, the clippings and couplings, the satyr-play in the buggy woods and weeds. Paiderastes too among them certainly. And she and I. And she and at least one other. She told me later, but I suspected it even then, though “suspected” sounds too cunning; I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel or do about that, and so I felt nothing about it in particular, nothing but more.

  Henry V opened on the July Fourth weekend. It began just as it had the first day of rehearsals, with Robin in jeans and a sweater dragging the big wooden box of swords and armor out to the middle of the stage. The house lights weren’t down, and the audience of course thought he was a stagehand or a stage manager, which he was, and would be. And then the stage lights started to come up, but only a little, and the house darkened, and Robin came and sat on the apron with his script, as he had on the day he began rehearsing. And almost before anyone knew it, he’d begun to speak—not orate, just speak, wistfully almost, about how only a muse of fire and princes to act could bring forth Harry. As he talked the actors playing Harry and the Dauphin and the rest came out of the shadows in their jeans and sweatshirts and chose weapons from the box, and Harry put on his crown. And when he said Think when we talk of horses that you see them, printing their proud hooves i’ the receiving earth, then a light lit one of the horses, center stage, Henry’s, in its bright caparison; she printed her proud hoof, and another horse—Harriet—appeared behind, and another. There was a little gasp or sound from the audience, a titter here and there too, and I felt a sharp deep shudder as though I’d been seized, and tears filled my eyes.

  It’s good, so good that the play was produced, that she was able to be in it, and that its short run was up.

  It was a Sunday. A lot of the actors had gone home, some of them not to return, others to arrive to be in the second play of the year, The Tempest. Some of the apprentices too, gone home with bags of dirty laundry and blisters on their hands, to return next week.

  I stayed. Harriet stayed too.

  That little camp where we’d been put surrounded a small lake, a green torpid body of water reverting to swamp. Some of us swam there sometimes, urging one another in, rowing a foul-bottomed boat to the middle and diving into the duckweed. Harriet wouldn’t go in, and neither would I.

  But it was hot, insufferably hot. And not far from the town of Avon, along the little river, was a public beach, a crowded place but clean and sandy. And on Saturday one of the few of us who’d come in his own car took Harriet and me and a couple of others out there.

  It too was still, its water brownish and thick. There were crowds of small children, diapers dangling, chased by their mothers; and children older than that, and dogs. No one understands to this day what it was about places like this, public beaches in the summer, if there really was anything about them, or if that was only a kind of leftover medieval fear of plague or cholera. I don’t know. We’d been warned so much, every year, threat hanging like the heat over the days.

  I see that beach still, I swear, in dreams, every detail the same, only darkened, as though seen through dark glasses, or with sunblind eyes. Soundless. Dreadful. It might not be that place at all I see, of course; and the place itself might be wholly innocent, harmless. I wake up in a sweat.

  Next day was Sunday.

  The library was open that day. Why open Sunday? Maybe I have something wrong about the days. The library was open. I know it was.

  In the library I went to the Shakespeare section, climbed the spiral stair again. I was going to do research. I was going to take some notes, and show them they were wrong, make them admit it. Get this s
nake out of Paradise: no I didn’t think that, surely. But if they had to admit it, then—then what? They’d stop, I suppose. No longer soil the best name in the world.

  I don’t know what I thought. I was beginning to feel very odd, to feel cluster around me a being, a soma, that wasn’t my own but that I recognized. I got Ignatius Donnelly and the others in my arms and came down the stairs to sit.

  There was a photograph of Donnelly—Senator Donnelly—in the front of his book. I realized, looking at it, how old this thing was, how long ago.

  If the reader will turn to page 76 of the fac-similes, being page 76 of the original Folio, and the third page of the second part of King Henry IV., and commence to count at the bottom of the scene, to-wit, the scene second, and count upward, he will find that there are just 448 words (exclusive of the bracketed words, and counting the hyphenated words as single words) in that fragment of scene second in that column. Now then, if we deduct 448 from 505, the remainder is 57, and if he will count down the next column, forward (second of page 76) the reader will find that the 57th word is the word her.

  Folded up inside the book was a copy of one of Donnelly’s worksheets, showing his method. I unfolded it. A page of Henry IV, the Folio, with red and blue pencil lines, line numbers, arrows drawn to other lines and words, lists of words from other places in black, blue, and red.

  Now let us go a step farther.

  My hand was shaking: I lifted it before my eyes and watched the tremors.

  There’s a sensation that all my life I have hated profoundly, dreaded, even though it hasn’t happened to me often (multiplied, though, by my memories of those few times). It’s as though all intentionality and will is being drained from the world, all consciousness, a conviction that there is nothing in earthly activity but malign blind indifference; that even the willed behavior of persons, speaking, thinking, doing, is only mechanical ticks and tocks. Finally that they cannot even be heard or seen, because all eyes are blind, all ears are stopped. My own consciousness the only one existent to know this.