“Thanks a lot.” I made a face. “Derby died four weeks later, almost to the day, on September twenty-ninth.”
“As if Parliament had killed his heart?”
“Tempting to see it that way, isn’t it? But history doesn’t work like that. Chronology is not an argument for cause and effect.” I sat absently running a finger around the rim of my glass.
“So what will you do with this?”
I shook my head. “Athenaide suggested that Wesley North write one more book, this time about the chimerical beast. I told her I’d think about it.”
“She told me that. You’d put this stuff out there under someone else’s name?”
“Seems appropriate, doesn’t it?” He laughed, and I shook my head. “The problem is that it still doesn’t add up to much more than voices heard on the wind. It’s not hard evidence.”
“Doesn’t seem to have stopped people before.”
“It stopped Ophelia. She was happy, after that.”
“So you’re inclined to choose Ophelia’s road, over Delia’s?”
There is a tide in the affairs of men…Roz’s favorite quotation slipped through my mind in the cadence of her voice. “How well did you know Roz?” I asked.
“Well enough to know that she adored you.”
“She liked to see herself playing out the story of the sonnets. She was always the Poet.”
“Of course. And you were the golden youth.”
I stopped laughing. “Sounds conceited as hell, put like that. But Sir Henry about as well told me so, once.”
Ben held my gaze. “She called you her golden girl. Among other things.”
I leaned forward. “Have you ever wondered whether she meant to cast you in her play of the sonnets?”
“I didn’t have to wonder. She offered me the Dark Lady,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “Not meant to be feminine at all, she assured me. The role of the spoiler. The interloper. Perfectly suited to a soldier.”
I laughed. “What did you say?”
He took a sip of champagne. “I told her I wasn’t an actor, and I wouldn’t follow anyone else’s script.”
“And she retorted, ‘Not even Shakespeare’s?’ ”
He did a double take. “She told you?”
I shook my head. “I told her the same thing, once. And that’s how she responded.”
He laughed. “What was your answer?”
“That I’d write my own story. It might be messier, but it would be mine.”
“How’s it turning out?”
“Not sure yet. But if I won’t follow Shakespeare’s road, I sure as hell won’t follow Ophelia’s or Delia’s.”
He nodded and sipped his wine again. “Ever thought about collaboration?” Mischief played at the corners of his mouth. Mischief and hope.
“What kind of story do you have in mind?”
“The oldest story of them all,” he said. “Boy meets girl.”
“How about girl meets boy?” I countered with a smile.
He raised his glass.
After a moment, I raised mine to his. “Here’s to a new story,” I said.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ONE AUTUMN EVENING early in my sojourn in graduate school, I was poking about among the old books in the back room of Child Library, the English Department’s private refuge tucked into a corner of the top floor of Harvard’s Widener Library, when I came upon a four-volume set of books: The Elizabethan Stage, by E. K. Chambers, published in 1923. One by one, I opened them. They were full of information, most of which I had no idea what to do with, such as the note that “many Elizabethan actors were half acrobats, and could no doubt fly upon a wire.” Near the back of the third volume, however, I found a few pages on Shakespeare’s dramatic work, concluding with a brief section titled “Lost Plays.”
I knew that the large majority of drama written in the English Renaissance had not survived, and so I’d suspected—loosely—that some of what Shakespeare wrote must have gone missing. What surprised me was that Chambers knew a thing or two about what had been lost. Staring up at me in black and white were two titles, and, in the case of Cardenio, a basic plot.
I began to wonder what it would be like to find one of these plays. Where might one unearth such a thing? What would the moment of discovery feel like? And what would the finding do to the shape of one’s life—apart from the obvious bestowal of instant wealth and fame?
The obvious places to look for Shakespeare’s missing plays are English libraries and historic houses. But surely, if one was lurking somewhere so predictable, it would already have been found. In the selfish way of daydreams, I began to ponder where one might plausibly find a play of Shakespeare’s outside the U.K., and more specifically, in someplace I might be likely to find it, namely New England (or at least somewhere in the Northeast Corridor between Boston and D.C.) or the desert Southwest. Occasionally, I went so far as to look through boxes of worn books in antique shops in old barns around the back roads I happened to find myself on in New England. But nobody had left a Shakespearean quarto, much less a manuscript, lying about.
Somewhere along the way, I admitted to myself that I was never actually going to find one of Shakespeare’s lost plays—and that it might be more fun, in any case, to make it into a story, since I would then have control over what happened, and to whom. And then I thought—why not fold in the other and even greater Shakespearean mystery? Who was he?
It took me well over a decade just to start, but Interred with Their Bones is the result.
The passage from Chambers that started it all is, with some minor editing, the passage that Kate reads within this book. The major Shakespeare sites in the novel are real places, though I have taken liberties with them here and there, to suit the fiction. The theories about who Shakespeare might have been are all real—at least as theories. Finally, many of the historical characters are fantasias upon fact. The modern characters, however, are all fictional.
An entry into the Stationers’ Register (an early English form of copyright) identifies Shakespeare as the coauthor of Cardenio, along with John Fletcher, his successor as the main playwright of the King’s Men (and his coauthor on several other plays). I chose to “find” Cardenio because of the two lost plays for which we have titles, that’s the one about which we know more details, and also because its source in Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote gives it a hazy link to the Spanish colonial world, and therefore to the American Southwest—a place I love, and where I wanted to let my characters play Shakespearean hide-and-go-seek.
The other play—Love’s Labour’s Won—has vanished, but Cardenio resurfaced in manuscript form in the eighteenth century, when Lewis Theobald “modernized” it for the London stage. The original manuscripts, which most scholars accept as probably authentic, have since disappeared, but the bowdlerization, titled Double Falshood [sic], has survived. Mostly, the adaptation is terrible in the way Kate says it is: full of holes and crisscrossed with Frankenstein-obvious scars and patches. Scattered through it, though, are phrases that sound like they could be the work of Shakespeare or Fletcher—at the level of single phrases, master and disciple can be hard to tell apart, much like the problem of distinguishing between Rembrandt versus “workshop of Rembrandt” at the level of single brushstrokes. Double Falshood is the source of the words that Kate and others identify as Shakespeare’s in this novel.
The only exceptions are the stage direction and single line about Sancho and Don Quixote: I bear the burden of responsibility for those because the bowdlerization records no trace of the mad old don and his earthy squire. Like Kate, though, I like to think that Shakespeare would have seen these two as indispensable for the comedy and narrative intrigue of the tale, and would therefore have included them in some kind of frame narrative.
I have read one scholarly suggestion, by Richard Wilson in Secret Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, 2004), that Cardenio might be somehow connected to the Howards and to Prince Henry’s death.
The Howards were pro-Spanish, crypto-Catholic, and infamously devious, especially the earl of Northampton and his nephew the earl of Suffolk. (For the sake of simplicity, I have referred to both by these titles throughout this novel, though neither received their earldoms until King James took the throne.) Rumor did indeed link Frances Howard amorously with the prince, and the “glove incident” is also rumored to have occurred (though the lady remains unnamed); the lurid tale of Frances poisoning one of her husband’s lovers with doctored tarts is exhaustively recorded in legal documents, as she really did plead guilty to murder before the House of Lords. The details of the Howards’ specific entanglement with Shakespeare and the Globe, however, are my imagining.
While it is simplest to say that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays that bear his name, there are many arguments, ranging from curiously intriguing to outrageous, to suggest that he might not have. The chief problem that all the “somebody else” theories share, however, is the conspiracy of silence they require: If someone else wrote the plays, nobody ever spilled the beans. In such gossipy, backbiting, and professionally witty milieus as the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, that is no minor stumbling point.
Many associations of “anti-Stratfordians” exist today—ranging from academic associations to more cultlike conspiracy-theory groups. Many exult in unearthing coded messages that supposedly uphold various other writers as the actual, deliberately masked author of the works published under the name “William Shakespeare.” The two alternates with by far the most—and the most respectable—followings are the earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon. Other perennial favorites include Christopher Marlowe; Edmund Spenser; Sir Philip Sidney and his sister Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke; Queen Elizabeth; Sir Walter Raleigh; the earls of Southampton, Derby, and Rutland; and a secret committee including all the above, thought to be spearheaded by either Bacon, or Oxford, or both. Inexplicably lunatic are the supporters of Henry Howard, earl of Sussex (beheaded about forty-four years before the first known performance of a Shakespearean play) and Daniel Defoe (born about seventy years after that first performance). The newest addition to get serious attention is the minor courtier Sir Henry Neville.
Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, reigns as the current favorite among anti-Stratfordians. The Oxfordian anagrams and puzzles in this book have all been put forward as evidence that the earl wrote the plays. As Athenaide points out, his family name—Vere—is by time-honored tradition related to the Latin verum, or “truth,” and his family motto—Vero nihil verius, or “nothing truer than truth”—plays upon that connection. So do his real-world partisans: finding “suspicious” or “significant” references to truth all over Shakespeare. The word ever is another favorite. The first serious Oxfordian was J. Thomas Looney (pronounced “Loney”), whose book “Shakespeare” Identified was first published in 1920 and convinced, among others, Sigmund Freud.
It was Francis Bacon, however, who was the earliest alternate author of choice; serious arguments began to be made in his favor in the 1850s, by Delia Bacon and a few others. Baconian supporters have combed through Shakespeare and other Renaissance works with unparalleled fervor, turning up many anagrams, acrostics, numeric codes, and double entendres (often on “hog” and “bacon”) supposedly pointing to their hero as the plays’ author (and often as Queen Elizabeth’s son to boot). A few desperate souls have even resorted to séances and grave-robbing. Not all of Bacon’s supporters are so easily dismissed, however; they have included scholars, authors, lawyers, and judges in both Britain and the United States. By far the most enjoyable Baconian read is Mark Twain’s essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?”
Whatever else he might have been, Bacon was certainly both brilliant and cunning: For a while the Crown’s chief counsel, he was also the deviser of the admirably complex cipher used in this novel by Jem Granville. Bacon published the cipher in 1623, the same year that the First Folio appeared.
The sixth earl of Derby’s great proponent was the eminent French literary historian and professor at the Collège de France, Abel Lefranc, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Despite Derby’s name (William), initials (W. S.), and appropriate lifespan, however, to English speakers his candidacy has remained more shadowy than either those of Bacon or Oxford.
The best nonfictional (and nonpartisan) overview of the authorship controversy is John Michell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Thames & Hudson, 1996). For a partisan view defending Shakespeare of Stratford, see Scott McCrea, The Case for Shakespeare (Praeger, 2005).
The original Globe Theatre burned down on June 29, 1613 (a Tuesday, by the old Julian calendar) during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, then known as All Is True. So far as is known, it was an accident, caused by sparks from special-effects cannon fire landing on the thatched roof. Eyewitnesses report that one man was burned slightly while rescuing a child caught in the blaze; his flaming breeches were doused with ale. The new Globe is indeed the first thatched building allowed in the vicinity of London since the Great Fire of 1666.
The many Shakespeare monuments and theaters in Stratford-upon-Avon are world famous. The Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., holds the richest collection of Shakespeareana on earth.
Wilton House, the earl of Pembroke’s home, is one of the few surviving buildings that Shakespeare certainly visited—his presence there is arguably more certain than his presence in any of the Stratford buildings, save the church where he is buried. The Wilton House copy of Westminster’s Shakespeare monument and its altered and weirdly capitalized inscription are accurate, though I have imagined the painting that highlights the anagram. Likewise, there is a set of Arcadia paintings in the Palladian room known as the Single Cube Room, though I have altered them a bit to suit my story. The compartment hidden behind one is entirely my imagination. The “lost letter” from the countess to her son, saying that “we have the man Shakespeare with us,” was documented in the nineteenth century, but has not been seen by scholars since. The letter from Will to the Sweetest Swan is of my making.
The Royal College of St. Alban in Valladolid was founded by Spain’s King Philip II expressly to train young Englishmen in the Roman Catholic priesthood and (from Queen Elizabeth’s point of view) to foster religious rebellion at home. The college still stands and still trains young British men in the priesthood. Its marvelous library once contained a First Folio, but it was sold off, so I was told, in the early twentieth century. In 1601, eight years after Christopher Marlowe’s murder, a “Christopher Morley”—a spelling Marlowe used during his life—was recorded as studying there. By 1604, Cervantes was also in town, finishing Don Quixote.
Shakespearean mines, towns, and theaters exist in abundance all over the western United States: Mines named after Shakespearean characters and plays dot the Colorado Rockies. (Roz’s scholarship on this subject is mine, conducted for an article I wrote for the Smithsonian called “How the Bard Won the West” [August, 1998].) Cedar City, in Utah’s red rock country, is the home of the Utah Shakespearean Festival, which boasts a modern reconstruction of the Elizabethan Globe Theater—though I have added the Preston Archive in the shape of Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. Jem Granville’s Ham-let bet echoes an actual wager that took place in 1861 in Denver. I have closely modeled my newspaper articles on Rocky Mountain News reports detailing that historical gamble.
The ghost town of Shakespeare lies in western New Mexico, near Lordsburg, on the Arizona border; I have heard the tale of Bean Belly Smith from its owners on several occasions. Athenaide’s palace at the bottom of the town’s lone street, however, is my addition, though Hamlet’s “original” castle on which it is modeled—Kronborg Castle, outside Elsinore (or Helsingør), in Denmark—is a real place, as is the Banqueting Hall of Hedingham Castle, once the earl of Oxford’s seat. The Oxfordian obsession with the play Hamlet is real; the play is read by Oxfordians as a crypto-autobiography by their candidate. As noted by Kate and Athenaide, the pla
y does, indeed, have more than a few weird resemblances to the earl of Oxford’s life.
The American scholar Delia Bacon went mad while writing her 1857 magnum opus The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere [sic] Unfolded. The story of her night vigil before Shakespeare’s grave in Trinity Church, Stratford, is drawn from her own description of the event, as reported in a letter to her friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Trinity’s vicar, Granville J. Granville, seems to have given her permission for this vigil; the Reverend Granville had several children, but Jeremy (Jem) is my addition to his family. Likewise, Dr. George Fayrer was indeed the physician who committed Delia to his private asylum in Henley-in-Arden on November 30, 1857, but his daughter Ophelia is a product of my imagination.
Francis J. Child was Harvard Professor of English from 1876 until his death in 1896; his collection of English and Scottish popular ballads remains one of the great works of scholarship in English literature. He was also a fine Shakespearean scholar. As in the novel, roses were his other great passion in life (and there is, indeed, a famous old Lady Banks rose in the back garden of a boardinghouse—now a museum—in Tombstone, Arizona, though I have backdated its planting there by a few years). I hope his shade will forgive me for endowing him with a love child.
Shakespeare’s sonnets infamously appear to be written to either a diffident golden-haired youth or a dangerous dark-haired lady with whom the poet seems to be caught in some kind of love triangle. Much scholarship has been expended on discovering who the lady and the youth were; neither has been convincingly identified. In the first seventeen sonnets, Shakespeare begs the young man to beget a child. Intriguingly, Theobald’s preface to Double Falshood makes reference to an otherwise unknown illegitimate daughter of Shakespeare’s. Since the poet-narrator of the sonnets burns with jealousy over the youth’s affair with the Dark Lady, giving this daughter to the lady and making the child’s paternity unclear seemed natural—but that connection is mine and otherwise unfounded.
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