The Vavasour Macbeth

by Bart Casey

  “That’s it,” Margaret finished. “Oh, and it’s here courtesy of Dulwich College. And also it says there are many more speeches for his part here on the scroll than in the printed texts of the play in 1593–94 and 1599. Those cut scenes, speeches, and dialogue—and listen to this, ‘added rough clownage and horseplay to suit the tastes of a lower-class audience.’ Wow.”

  “I can’t wait to see if yours is the same sort of thing,” said Stephen, “but I bet it is. I never really did scrutinize it because I had no idea what it was. It was just a mystery.”

  “Well, I know where it is at the vicarage,” said Margaret. “I put it in a drawer of the sideboard in the dining room. It didn’t seem to go with all of the papers piled up on the tabletop.”

  “It’s probably from that masque they put on for the Queen at Ditchley,” said Stephen, shaking his head and looking down at the scroll. “What luck we were going out by this exhibit.”

  Just blind luck.

  Back home in the village that evening, Margaret was helping Stephen scrutinize the scroll from the tomb. Now that they knew it might be a prompting tool, it didn’t take long before they could decode it. After a few mysterious pages, they were astonished to arrive at familiar lines spoken by the character of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Scottish play.

  “These first pages of the scroll aren’t in the play as we know it today,” said Stephen. “It starts off here with Lady Macbeth saying goodbye to her husband as he goes off to battle for his cousin, King Duncan. In today’s version, her first speech is reading a letter her husband has written her after that battle.”

  “So the battle scene was cut?” asked Margaret.

  “I guess so,” answered Stephen. “And then the scroll goes on to lines from another scene where Lady Macbeth is lamenting over a child she’s just lost. I don’t think that’s in today’s play either.”

  Margaret stood up and said, “Let me see if I’ve got a copy of the play in my old room.” She ran upstairs and found her Penguin paperback on the shelf by her desk in her childhood bedroom.

  As she hurried back into the dining room, Stephen said, “Look, here’s something else. On page four of the scroll, there’s the speech the kids worked on in the workshop, ‘unsex me here,’ and so on. But she hasn’t been reading a letter before it. She’s just declaring her thoughts that her husband was ‘too full o’ the milk of human kindness.’ And those familiar speeches are written in an italic hand and pasted over some previous words underneath.”

  Pulling out one of the dining room chairs, Margaret said, “I’m going to count out Lady Macbeth’s speeches in my old book. Why don’t you do the same for the scroll?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Good idea.”

  A few minutes later, Margaret announced, “Fifty-five speeches. And most of them very short, like ‘Woe, alas! What, in our house?’ What have you got?”

  “Well, she has eighty-five speeches on this—although more than a few of them seemed to be crossed out, especially at the beginning. That’s thirty more speeches than in your paperback,” said Stephen, “and a few are quite long.”

  “Really?” said Margaret. “Well, I think the school version I had was a proper one—you know, the real thing. I mean, I don’t think they would have dumbed it down for young teenagers.”

  “No, I think you’d be right about that. It’s probably an exact copy of the First Folio version, perhaps with a little modernization, but otherwise the same,” he said. “You know all of the sources and versions of Shakespeare’s plays are well documented. We’ve got a set of ‘variorum editions’ over at the school that detail any changes made version to version. I’ll go over and get the one for Macbeth and bring it back here to look at. But I do know Macbeth is one of the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays—almost ninety minutes shorter than Hamlet, for example. And the acting companies did adapt their master scripts to fit the time allowed and type of audience.”

  “Like Mister Alleyn and his scroll in Stratford,” said Margaret.

  “Exactly,” said Stephen. “So I’ll be back with our library’s book in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  ~

  Stephen was excited when he returned. “It looks like Macbeth is a special case,” he explained. “Many of the other plays collected in the First Folio were printed up earlier in rough editions called quartos—but not Macbeth. The first time it ever showed up was when they put it into the First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare died. It was a later work. They know it was written after Queen Elizabeth died because it features some of King James’s interests, like witchcraft, plus it was an epic of Scotland. And scholars have always thought the text of the play printed in the First Folio was cobbled together.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Margaret.

  “Well, two songs were lobbed in that also appear in a play called The Witches by Thomas Middleton—the words weren’t even written out. In act four, the second song is just is a stage direction saying something like ‘Music and a Song. Blacke Spirits, et cetera’—using quick shorthand, as if they were too pressed for time to write it all out. And before that, in act two, the variorum notes say that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others thought the whole scene with the drunken porter was added in by someone other than the author for comic relief—the one where the man’s mumbling around at the gate complaining about strange knocking. So it looks like they typeset Macbeth for the First Folio directly from a promptbook cut down and tinkered with quickly for a specific performance.”

  “How would they know that?” asked Margaret.

  “For most of the other plays, a meticulous copyist like Anthony Munday or Ralph Crane would write out everything for the typesetters, making changes and giving a consistent formatting for the stage directions and so on. But that wasn’t done

  for Macbeth.”

  “And so the scroll has newly discovered parts of Macbeth,” said Margaret. “That sounds amazing.”

  “It would be more than just amazing. There are still literally thousands of books and papers published about Shakespeare every year—I mean, he usually has his own section at any good bookstore. I think the academics would go mad for this. They would finally have something new to talk about. It would really drive up a bidding war at an auction, I would think.”

  “My god,” said Margaret.

  “I also found some more information on the scroll we saw up in Stratford. We just got in this new book on the Elizabethan stage by Andrew Gurr, from Cambridge University Press. It says Alleyn actually owned the play: it was dear to his heart and he always played the main role. Indeed, he took the play with him when he moved from one acting company to another. The scroll was his personal aide-mémoire for all his lines. It shows that the quarto version was seriously abridged, and there was much more to the full play, as shown by all the extra speeches on Alleyn’s scroll. So that seems to be what’s going on here with your scroll for Lady Macbeth.”

  ~

  Later, Margaret was in the kitchen, looking for something that could be thrown together for a light evening meal, while Stephen remained in the dining room with the scroll. He had been happy to hear that Margaret had planned a dinner meeting with Soames on Saturday. He had asked Rowe for a similar meeting, hopefully on Saturday as well, so they could complete the stage of getting their friends’ input before engaging with Maggs and Company, the booksellers they had finally selected to appraise the collection, and bringing Scotland Yard into the picture.

  Looking down at the scroll, Stephen noticed that several of the most important speeches made by Lady Macbeth were pasted over by bits of paper with lines written out in the same neat

  italic hand.

  He remembered the story of italic writing infiltrating England. It started showing up from Italy around 1550 and one of its biggest fans had been Princess Elizabeth’s own tutor, Roger Ascham. He was an outstanding practitioner of the form at Cambridge and also personally taught it to his royal pupil. Part of its attraction was its simplicity along with the sp
eed with which it could be written without becoming illegible. It was also graceful and beautiful, and soon was being used for special words—like book titles or verse quotes—even when the rest of a document might still be written in the secretary hand.

  Of course, the very nature of italics removed many individual eccentricities from handwriting, so all the examples of it from the sixteenth century looked very similar. But it did seem the italics on the speeches pasted over on the scroll were particularly delicate and familiar to Stephen. Or perhaps it was just the wine that he had opened a half hour before for himself and Margaret to share before dinner, which would start very soon. He was already just about through his first glass and hadn’t had much to eat that day, so he could sense a light buzz.

  He stood up from his place at the dining room table and walked around to the other side, where some of the Vavasour papers were piled up in a stack. He grabbed Anne’s commonplace book—the earliest one, from her schooldays—brought it back over to where he had been sitting with the scroll, and opened it up.

  There was Anne’s excerpt from the Aeneid of Virgil, “Forstan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit”—”Perhaps one day it will help to remember these things.” That’s what Aeneas had said to console and rally his men after they had been thrashed by the Cyclops and shipwrecked. Anne had written the Latin out beautifully in a most prim and perfect italic hand.

  His eyes drifted from the commonplace book over to the scroll, and he felt himself stop breathing. It seemed his heart even skipped a beat.

  “Holy fuck,” he wheezed out. “Margaret, can you come in here?” he said, almost sounding in distress.

  “What is it, Stephen? Are you all right?” she asked, craning her head around the corner from the butler’s corridor connecting the kitchen to the dining room.

  “Just look at this,” Stephen said.

  Margaret came over behind his shoulder. Stephen pointed to the commonplace book quote and the pastedown on the scroll.

  “Goodness,” said Margaret. “The handwriting seems to be identical.”

  She moved her eyes from one page to the other.

  “Stephen,” she said. “What does that mean?”

  “I think it means that Anne was involved with editing the play somehow,” he said.

  The two of them stood motionless, looking down at the writing on the table, realizing that everything had just changed.

  ~

  Ultimately, their appetites reemerged about an hour later, but not their will to cook. Margaret called in a takeaway order from the Indian restaurant just down the street. And then the two of them took a break to walk down to get it.

  “Well, do you have any ideas about why Anne would be writing on that scroll?” asked Margaret.

  “I’m not sure. I’m still mulling it over. One thought was maybe they put on their own performance at Sir Henry’s house. Remember how Professor Rowe said they might have made singing sheets for the servants and so forth. Maybe something like that?”

  “Hmmm,” said Margaret. “Seems like a stretch, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. It’s a mystery,” replied Stephen. “Part of me wants to peel up the pastedowns and see if I can make out what’s written underneath, but I don’t want to mangle the manuscript. We’ll have to wait until it’s in a conservator’s hands to do that sort of thing. But meanwhile, I really want to dig in and scan everything I haven’t read yet in the whole collection. This scroll and the Heminge letter are so far the only things connected to anything Shakespearean. It would be incredible if I could find something else—and that’s my first priority. I certainly need to have that done before we turn over anything to Maggs, and we need to see them soon to know the value.”

  On Thursday morning, a much more quarrelsome couple were meeting thirty miles away in Gloucestershire. Soames Bliforth had beaten a retreat from his spacious mews house and charming bookshop in London to the refuge of his Grade II listed farmhouse in the picture-postcard Cotswold village of Upper Slaughter. Dating from about 1700, the honey-colored limestone main house and outbuildings had been lovingly maintained—mostly by the previous owners, who had doted on them for their thirty years of stewardship, and who sold it all on to Soames a few years earlier, glad to fund their retirement from their proceeds of another Cotwolds property boom. It was sheltered by lush gardens in the warmer weather and was only a short walk to the meandering banks of the River Eye or the welcoming bar of the Lords of the Manor hotel. Today, however, the house’s best feature was the radiant heat rising from the floor to fend off the chill of a damp gray damp afternoon.

  For this visit, Soames had not invited his iridescently hot girlfriend Mandy—although she had been several times before. She couldn’t stand being so far away from the bright lights of the city for very long, and now Soames’s full attention was needed for coming up with some new way to stay afloat in the sea of debts and promises that had been bankrolling his high-flying lifestyle the last few years. Selling old books and manuscripts could help address the problem, but now that his family inheritance was blown, he was, quite frankly, coming up a bit short: about half a million pounds short, in terms of his current accounts, and his creditors were turning somewhat nasty.

  As it happened, Mandy did not have the exclusive rights to Soames’s affections, and on this occasion Soames brought an even more unlikely lover for his planning session: the distinguished professor Hugh Rowe of Horton-cum-Studley, Oxfordshire. No doubt both Mandy and Rowe would have been shocked to learn exactly what they had in common, because neither had an inkling of the other, nor did they know the variety of their shared boyfriend’s sexual tastes. But Soames was most comfortable with his choices: Mandy for outrageousness and sex; and Rowe for elite access and thefts.

  His dalliance with Professor Rowe had begun right at the beginning of his university career when a few quick sex acts each week improved Soames’s university grades substantially. Since he’d had already solved the problem of low grades in boarding school by warming up the beds of his resident public school masters, it had not been too much of a burden to tolerate old Rowe. However, by now, the professor was getting a bit old for sexual adoration.

  But the old boy had other delights. As perhaps the nation’s premier Elizabethan and Shakespearean scholar, Rowe had unquestioned access to the rarest books and manuscripts in the land—whether they were safely housed in secure premises like the British Museum, or held more tenuously in the uncatalogued libraries of decaying stately homes. In the latter premises, the owners were usually flattered to give the old boy access to their family treasures—after all, they didn’t really know even vaguely what they had on all those shelves, and perhaps the great man could help enlighten them?

  Most were content to welcome Rowe into their mansions midmorning and settle him down comfortably in their libraries. They usually wouldn’t disturb him until lunchtime, and perhaps again for tea, when he might be able to tell them more about their own treasures. That sequence might continue for a day or two, and then the old boy would be gone, happily pursuing his research for some new bestselling book. It was usually very useful for these owners too, because Rowe would have left them with two very valuable things: first, a short list of treasures they should consider selling, in the highly unlikely event they ever needed to raise money; and second, an introduction to a trusted London book dealer named Soames Bliforth, who could be counted on to give them top prices.

  Of course, what they didn’t know was that several unlisted treasures from their collection also left along with Professor Rowe. In the early days, stealing them was simple as burying items in the lower regions of his briefcase, but after one or two embarrassments of near discovery, Rowe adopted another clever plan.

  Sometime before, Soames directed his Saville Row tailor to add what he called manuscript pockets to several of his own jackets and coats. For the jackets, this meant the addition of a flap across the inside back panel just below the shoulders. The flap could be lifted up to reveal a
zippered seam which could open a huge pocket across the full width of the back of the jacket, extending down to the lowest seam at the bottom, measuring about thirteen inches wide and twenty inches deep. Soames told the tailor these pockets would avoid the stigma of carrying clumsy portfolio bags when traveling with manuscripts for clients. He didn’t mention they were also great for concealing large papers to spirit away from unsuspecting owners. The pockets in his finer suits were best when only a few leaves of papers were carried, but his nice sporting tweed jackets could conceal quite a bit more without becoming too lumpy. Similar pockets in custom-tailored raincoats were bigger and very useful.

  In fact, he wanted to have several similar items made for a friend as well, and Professor Rowe was only too happy to present himself at the shop on Saville Row to have his own manuscript-pocketed garments made. Anything to please his dear boy, Soames.

  About 80 percent of the owners Rowe made his appraisals for ended up introducing themselves to Soames. Most sold their complete lists to him. Only a few held on to a family treasure or two, usually for a future sale in a year or so. None of these grandees wanted their names attached to the items going forward, because they didn’t want their fellow club members to know they were flogging the family treasures to pay the bills. Therefore, if Soames later put things up for sale at the major auction houses, the documents were always listed as “Property of a Gentleman.” Over time, Soames listed so many properties of so many gentlemen, that the specific provenance of any one item would have been conveniently obscured, and even the original owners would have no clue the auction lot had originally belonged to them.

  This modus operandi worked a charm for manuscripts, which by their very nature are one of a kind and of varied sizes and conditions, each of which can be further modified by discreet trimming to a new size, or by a strategic tea stain or simulated wormhole making them appear different than they were when they were stolen. Printed books were more difficult to mask because they usually have easily recorded bibliographical details such as publisher, date, bookplates, and bindings. But over time Soames and Rowe extended their activities into these more exposable areas as well. They needed to ramp up the flow of treasures to sell as more and more of Soames’s family inheritance disappeared.