EVERYONE AND NO ONE: A Story
At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody . . . .
-- Jorge Luis
Borges, “Everything and Nothing”
The town was an ocean of faces and noise. He stood in the
He translated himself, at first to a player named Shakspere. Yet soon
enough he found the stage no sufficient platform for his imagination. Grounded on its boards, scuffing the hard, splintery wood with his boots, he felt cribbed and confined to a sameness, despite the variety of roles he was given to play. He yelled and waved a wooden sword as an English soldier, hobbled as a doddering, cane-clutching senex, raised his eyes prayerfully heavenward as a wimpled nun. Always, disappointed, he sensed his own body under his costume, and cursed it for betraying, in its singleness, the multitudinous vagaries of his fancy. In his most-preferred roles, he sat as a king, his limbs briefly at rest and unassertive, his mind unfolding in rich, regal speech, his head at ease under its crown of tin. A ruler, godlike, able through words to make, unmake, and remake. Yet even at such times, much as he inwardly begged his audience to grant authenticity to his King Cambises -- to him, King Cambises -- he could sense that they held something back. They saw not just the part but the actor who played it. He was a king and no king.
Of course, all this time he continued to write as Shake-spear. From Shake-spear’s sharp quill leapt, like fire, the humpbacked monster Richard the Third, the furious wordsmith Kate the Curst, and the tragic alien moneylender, Shylock. And one night, borne by some nameless wind of inspiration, Shake-spear fashioned two star-crossed lovers named Romeo and Juliet. Then he gave them an accessory, a character named Mercutio, a youth driven to the brink of madness by poetry. A sword-wielding wit.
And from this Mercutio, he took an idea. Until the day audiences granted that the things they saw on the stage were no more false than anything in the world outside the playhouse walls, until that day, he might gain the drug of their utter credulity by playing in the street those authorial roles he had fashioned in fancy. Thus, merging his dreamed author and dreamed character, combining his Marlowe with his Mercutio, he ventured, disguised, now and again into taverns and alehouses as a witty and scandalous imp, uttering blasphemies, declaring a vaunting and boundless ambition. When he tired of the role, he enacted his own death in a tavern brawl, seeming in front of several shocked spectators to drive into his eye a dagger that was actually retractable and stolen from the Rose theater.
Who
next, then, now that “Marlowe” was dead? Who else to play besides "Shake-spear"?
Having a taste for complementarities, he refashioned himself now as a satirist
with the solid, socially rooted name of “Jonson.” In this identity he penned
comedies in which Marlovian aspirants to power and glory were made the laughingstocks
of playhouse audiences; indeed, were made the more humorous by being played by
adolescents of the newly popular boys’ companies. He went further, and made
sure to mock in these satirical comedies specific lines of verse which he
himself, writing as Marlowe, had authored some years earlier. At the same time,
writing as Shake-spear, he completed As
You Like It, planting in its fictive forest the melancholy Jaques, a
character parodically based on “Jonson,” and for that play supplied dialogue
which made sport of his previously invented confrontation between Jonson and
the dead Marlowe.
Now
he could not stop. Busy and animated in his cell of a room in Southwark, he
laughed aloud, brandished his quill, and created ex nihilo several new authorial identities. He penned plays from
“new playwrights,” wherein the new ones themselves ridiculed the plays of his
older fictive authors. With an energy that came from nowhere, he invented a
detailed and purely stage-bound, wholly enacted rivalry between Jonson and a
new playwright he called “Marston,” a name-pun suggestive of this alleged new
playwright’s threat creatively to “mar” the poetically virile Jonson’s creative
testicles, or his “stones.” To his vexation, even those Londoners most
entertained by this contrived playwrights’ war seemed not to apprehend this
pun, though Shake-spear took special care many times meaningfully to pronounce
his second invented satirist’s name “MAR-stone” when drinking with theater folk
at occasional suppers.
Of
course, the author-roles he had fashioned demanded at least a few corporeal
appearances in London. Marston was furtive, and often out of town (according to
stories put out by Shake-spear). But Jonson (he added) was usually about.
Shake-spear enjoyed parading as Jonson, whom he made a prideful philosopher,
blustering loudly about the depravity of women and the stupidity of audiences
and the absurdity of poetasters, and quoting Horace (in Latin) in stentorian
voice. He would spend an hour prior to each such performance patting putty on
his face and dotting his cheeks with a pen to make a bulbous nose and a few
pockmarks, then would don heeled boots and a low-brimmed hat and march forward,
out into the streets, in search of the fast-growing cult of friends of brave
“Ben Jonson.” The ruse grew complex when Shake-spear’s acting
company began purchasing comedies from “Jonson” at meetings of business which
Shake-spear, as a company sharer, was required to attend. Pleading weak kidneys
and the need to “pluck a rose” in the alley, he would rush from the taverns
where such business was conducted, exiting sometimes through the scullery, and
re-enter a few minutes later by means of the front door, in a new cape and hat,
as Jonson. He would then repeat the operation in reverse, minutes later, when
Shake-spear’s signature was required on a document, below Jonson’s. These exits
and re-entrances, with their hasty costume changes, were to him of a piece with
his departures through a stage trapdoor as Hamlet’s father’s ghost and his
re-entries above, minutes later, as Claudius. All the world was his stage.
None
of his fellow actors were fooled by him, naturally. They were complicitous, and
indulgent. His boundless need to create and perform matched their insatiate
desire for the work he produced, as Shake-spear, as Chapman, as Jonson, as
Marston. And so they winked and stayed mum about all of it. They were the
secret sharers.
All
this role-play was innocent enough until Shake-spear’s inescapable compounding
of the real with the fanciful world led him to imagine that a particular
play-loving lord, for whom the players were performing, one night, at the lord's
Oxford estate, might be killed in his sleep (fit punishment for some lines of
bad verse uttered at a manorial supper) and then rise, none the worse, to
resume the role of poetaster at breakfast the next morning. The tide of blood
that leaked from the bed and onto the floor of the lord’s rich chamber was
unexpected in its volume, and difficult to clean up, though Shake-spear managed
it, and managed also the secret burial of the body, with the assistance of a
bribed chambermaid (all the while taking from these lively experiences some
ideas for a new play). After this he himself was forced for the ensuing year to
pretend to be the lord Edward De Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. As De Vere
he would ride in a plumed hat and a coat with gold buttons (“borrowed,” again,
from the playhouse stores) through the streets of London and, sometimes, of
Oxford, at a time when the demands of his fellows that he produce the work of
four, nay six, nay ten playwrights was most intense. Sometimes he himself wondered
how he found the time to be so many. Nonetheless, his resourcefulness and
energy were limitless, and he would have continued as Oxford, but was taken the
next year by the whimsical desire to stage his own death once again -- which he
did, in a ghastly fashion, before a group of horrified household retainers at the same Oxford estate, spilling even more fake blood than had issued in
real form from the actual earl’s body the year before. The spectacle was
managed with the help of that same earlier-bribed chambermaid (who worked gratis on this occasion, never having
liked the De Veres), and was followed by the grand ceremony of the lord’s
funeral. Fewer than twenty people knew that the body in the coffin was a suit
of armor stuffed with straw.
Perhaps
what had forever blurred for him the line between real and enacted death, and
made possible his shameless murder of De Vere and that subsequent mockery of a
funeral, had been a corrupting event which took place a year before the real De
Vere perished in his bath of blood. In early 1603, as the faltering old queen
of England lay senseless in her embroidered sheets of lawn, and all London
buzzed with worried speculation regarding her successor, Shake-spear was drawn
into a private conversation in a lord’s box at the Globe by a highly placed
official, one of the queen’s most intimate counselors. This man hinted at the
likelihood of royal patronage for Shakespeare’s acting company should James of
Scotland – a man with whom this particular official had been in frequent
contact in recent weeks, and from whom he'd received certain promises – be granted the
succession. “The queen herself is past choosing,” the official said sadly.
“Alas. And yet . . . in the dim light (for her ladies will not have
bright candles about her) . . . with powder . . . and bewigged . . . .
something could be done.”
Shake-spear
sat silent, his eyes fixed on the man’s face, his heart beating quickly, waiting. The official became nervous. His voice turned vaguely
threatening, like a knife sheathed in velvet. “Preferment at court is not a
natural occurrence, but the work of many hands behind a curtain. Do you think
you, in yourself, can command
recognition from our next ruler, whoever that ruler may be?”
Shake-spear’s
eyes glittered, but he still said nothing.
The
man shrugged with an indifference that the playwright(s) could see was feigned. “I think otherwise. Your old style of
play grows musty and stale. Brooding heroes and bloody endings!” His face was a
mask. He hinted darkly. “There are
other players. And are there no other playwrights? Think of Ben Jonson. Think
of the younger men, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher. Your stage grows
crowded. In view of this fact, you might think yourself fortunate to be asked
to perform what I do ask you to
perform. If you will not do it . . . .” For an instant, his mask fell, and he looked
at Shake-spear with naked curiosity. “Are there not other playwrights?”
Of
course, his threat did not compel Shake-spear, because Shake-spear knew the
answer to his question was “No.” There were no other playwrights. There was
only he. Chapman, Marston, Jonson, Beaumont (“beautiful mountain,” yes, a
perfect name for an author of pastoral comedy): these were himself. And
Fletcher, meaning “maker of arrows”: a
fit title for one who wrote romances rich with love, in which Cupid’s dart
figured prominently. Though, sadly, to audiences “Fletcher” had proved as
impenetrable a jest as “Mar-stone.” Playgoers could be blockheads. Perhaps
“Jonson” was right about them. At any rate, “Fletcher” was also he, Shakespeare (and Jonson). So no king’s
privy counselor could frighten him with images of banishment and rejection.
Always, Shake-spear could re-enter the scene as someone else.
Yet
in the end he did what was asked of him, not out of fear, but because of the
yearning that never had left him: the will to flee into roles of power, to
perform stage-play in the world, and thus to earn the genuine, whole faith of
all who regarded him. He craved death and rebirth, but rebirth only as someone
more powerful, most powerful. He wanted to be reborn as a god. And here was a
chance to come close to godhead, by playing the most powerful of all human
selves: a true monarch, one who was not only aged but dying, and thus bound for
resurrection in her successor. The queen is dead! Long live the king! He panted
for his part.
So
he did it. The real queen’s breath having been stopped with a pillow, her poor
corpse being cleaned and dressed by a suborned surgeon in a secret room adjoining her closet, he, the actor, shrouded in near-darkness, plastered with ointment and
crowned with a nightcap, dying-queened it before a knot of hushed, gathered
noblemen. He had only to make a gesture and say a few words. But these were
words of ultimate power, words which engendered what they described. Words that
made a king.
Years
after this triumph, after the grand funeral of Elizabeth, the sumptuous
coronation of James of Scotland, and the swiftly ensuing murder of Oxford, the
privy councilman who had offered him the great role, and who was Francis Bacon
– or rather, who was Jack Pepper, an itinerant player who’d chosen a false name
and lineage in keeping with his courtly ambitions, and who therefore understood
the playwright well – quietly left court to become, once more, a player. Pepper
could see that money and an infinite variety of possible identities lay in, and
perhaps only in, the theatrical occupation. He left his court name to
Shake-spear, who then added “Francis Bacon” to his repertory of parts. As
Bacon, Shake-spear had access to rooms at King James’s palace of Whitehall, and
there, in his new guise of statesman and courtier, he penned (posing as Bacon
posing as Shake-spear) his last great characters: a wizard-mage on a desert
island, a live statue named Hermione, and a queen, ever-dying and
deathless like the Nile, who, like a torch, burned brightest at the point of her
expiration, calling for a robe, a crown, and immortality.
I agree completely with the idea that the Bard wrote the works of others, in fact I have a book on Kindle on this very subject. Who Wrote Marlowe?
ReplyDeleteYou know this is fiction, right? :)
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