by Anthology
It is true that my vanity had been pricked; I will admit that much, and even concede the young twit’s claim that as I approached retirement I had become a tenured, potted plant without coming up with a new idea in twenty years. But in my calling, what would otherwise seem intellectual stagnation is merely the recognition of eternal verities, for, century in and century out, Homer is as great as he ever was, and the same can be said for Dante, Cervantes, Milton, and most especially Shakespeare; and if there is nothing new under the sun it is because the winter of our discontent is made glorious summer by the Bard, illuminating all the dark nooks and crannies of the human condition.
But try to tell that to Cranchberger, the one and only Lee Allen Cranchberger, the cock-of-the-walk, twenty-nine or thirty-something, just out of graduate school but already a professor on account of his undeniable brilliance as a flatterer and flimflam artist and fake and razzle-dazzler, who had made himself the darling not only of the Department Head but of the President of the University himself, and now proposed to overturn the life’s work of all of us old potted plants and show us how proper literary scholarship is done.
So much for the thousand injuries—I once thought of specializing in Poe, and admit he has a few good lines—but the insult came when Crancho, as we all called him behind his back, brought out another of his interminable tomes from the most prestigious publisher imaginable and was allowed, nay, ordered by the Powers That Be to invade my Shakespeare class as a guest lecturer to promote The Shakespeare Fraud Unmasked: Final Proof That Edward De Vere Wrote the Plays.
My students found this all very amusing. One of the brighter ones did pipe up with, “Excuse me, Sir, but didn’t De Vere die in 1604, eight years before Shakespeare stopped writing?”
Crancho was ready for that one, of course, and even for the two class wiseasses—I always thought of them as Heckle and Jeckle, but for once I was glad to have them and mentally cheered them on.
“How about Marlowe, then?” said Heckle. “He died early too. He could have stashed away a whole trunkful of stuff he was working on, like Hamlet—”
And Jeckle said, “Well what if Christopher Marlowe didn’t actually die? I mean, maybe he was a vampire or something. He’d need a front-man to pretend to be the author of his later work, and it’s obvious that he was great writer—”
Everybody started tittering, but Crancho, I must admit, had the teacher’s essential skill of calling things back to order with a glare, or a gesture, or just a change in his stance, and you knew that, all kidding aside, we were going to get serious now.
“I can well imagine,” he said, “that, had he lived, the author of Tamburlaine the Great and The Tragickal History of Doctor Faustus would have become a formidable rival to Edward De Vere, but Christopher Marlowe actually was killed by a dagger thrust through the eye in a brawl in at Dame Eleanor Bull’s tavern on Deptford Strand, May 30, 1593, more or less as reported, and such details as are uncertain are of no relevance to the present argument—”
That was when I, I admit, lost it, and broke in to my guest lecturer’s lecture in the rudest possible way, and said, “Damn it, we’ve been over and over this before, and you know goddamn well it’s all crap, and I ask you this, yet again, why doesn’t anybody try to prove that Edward DeVere or Francis Bacon, or Marlowe, or the Fifth Earl of Rutland or Charles Blount or Sir Walter Raleigh or the Queen herself or Attila the Hun actually wrote the works of Thomas Dekker or some other suitably obscure, second-rate playwright of the period—no! No! Don’t answer that! I already know what your mealy-mouthed, stinking, oily, two-faced answer is going to be—”
“I think you’re mixing metaphors—” he broke in.
But my fire was up, my words swept over him like a roaring tide, and never mind the goddamned mixed metaphors. I hadn’t been this passionate since the time I delivered Henry V’s “Once more into the breach, dear friends!” speech in undergraduate drama. “The reason you pick on Shakespeare, why you have to knock down the grandest and most visible edifice rather than just vandalize a dirty window in a back alley, is that if you did less, no one would care. It’s why the science crackpots go after Einstein, instead of someone nobody has ever heard of. Only the biggest targets, so your ego can be sufficiently inflated. To give an honest answer to the young man’s question—” I nodded toward Jeckle, whose deer-in-the-headlights expression made it clear he wasn’t sure what he had started he was beginning to wish he hadn’t—“If Christopher Marlowe had lived, and become the greatest of all Elizabethan playwrights, vermin like you would be trying to prove that De Vere and Bacon wrote his work and you’d leave Shakespeare alone!”
After that maybe my shortness of breath caught up with me, because I was left gasping and stuttering, and one or two students tittered, but most of them just gaped, as Jeckle did, not sure what was going on, and that was when Professor Cranchberger, shaking his head sadly as if he felt sorry for me, put his hand on my shoulder and said softly—but loud enough for everyone to hear—“I’m afraid your Shakespeare is a limp spear. You’ve got to move with the times, Chuck, or you’ll lose it entirely.”
That was it! He called me “Chuck” in front of my students, undermining my authority forever! Such impudence! Such uncalled-for familiarity!
I vowed revenge. A pound of flesh.
But we live in quieter times than the Elizabethans, and I am, in any case, hardly in good enough shape to best a man thirty years my junior in a back-alley duel with swords; but still I fulminated revenge and I would have blood or something fully as satisfying. Poison at the departmental Christmas party? No, it might get the wrong person. A pistol-shot through the head from behind? Messy. Besides, he was six inches taller than me and had reflexes like a cat.
It’s at times like this when I have to either sell my soul to the Devil or go see my brother Francis. I chose the latter because he was closer. He worked at the same university, just across campus, in the Physics Department. I walked into his office and said without any formalities, “I want to borrow your time machine.”
Francis took this in stride. Since we were boys, he had been used to my eccentric moments. He invited me to sit down, fetched some coffee, and suggested we talk about it.
Actually he did most of the talking. He’d been like that since we were boys, too, when he used to prattle on in a monotone, non-stop, about equations and angles and dimensions at the dinner table, while my sisters and I stared at the ceiling or at our plates and our parents beamed with pride at their little genius even though they only understood one word in twenty if they were lucky.
I got some of it.
“You can’t borrow it because it’s not portable. It’s the size of a building. This building. It occupies all the cellars underneath us, and some new corridors and chambers which had to be dug to accommodate it. And it’s not really a time-machine—not like Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine—but a place where the angles of the time-flow are twisted and redirected through a pseudo-gravitational matrix—”
I have to admit he was starting to lose me again.
But when he said, “Perhaps it is best explicable to the layman as a series of doors which lead backward or forward into time—”
I broke in, “Fine, have you got a door to 1593?”
Of course my brother objected that sending a person back in time was as yet untried, and much too dangerous, and worse yet, suitable mechanisms had not been set up to recover all the data from such an experiment, and so on and so on and so on in such a vein until I redirected the word-flow of the conversation and with such a burst of eloquence and persuasion as I hadn’t displayed since my undergraduate days—when, I must admit, my temporary sojourn as a drama major had in fact taught me something—and I argued that we were, after all, brothers, and maybe he owed me something for sitting through all those dinner-table lectures of his which might have so stunted my childhood that I grew up to be a serial killer or worse; but somehow, through saintly forbearance, I had not, and so on and so on in that vein unti
l his eyes started to glaze over—
Now I will spare my reader a recitation of the tedious details, much less any scientific explanation. Suffice it to say I still had friends in the drama department, and was able to borrow, without too far-fetched an explanation, suitable Elizabethan garb, though at my age and girth, I had to accept Falstaff’s costume, which was usually worn by a twenty-year-old with a fake beard and a pillow stuffed into the front of his doublet. From an Army-Navy Store I acquired a not very convincing, but serviceable dagger, just in case, and I practically had to empty out my retirement account to pay certain coin dealers for a handful of genuine Elizabethan gold, sovereigns and what were called “angels,” and I had to hurry them along because I wasn’t at all concerned about condition, much less rare mint-marks.
Then the time-flow was reversed, or twisted, or whatever happened to it in a pseudo-gravitational matrix underneath the physics building, in the middle of the night with my brother Francis at the controls and not even a graduate assistant on hand to do the real work, and I stepped through a metaphorical door (though it was more like a cross between a smoke-filled room and a funhouse mirror) and found myself on Deptford Strand, the last coaching stop before London, across the Thames and downstream a bit, on the morning of May 30th, 1593.
It was fortunate that I had done my research thoroughly, and more fortunate yet that the 16th century street maps I had been able to examine were more or less accurate, so I didn’t have to stop and ask directions, because, despite a lifetime of Bardolotry I found spoken Elizabethan English almost incomprehensible, at least at first, not like the speech of the low characters in the plays, none of this “hey-nonny-nonny” stuff, but somehow gutteral and sputtering and lilting all at the time time, like a drunken Irishman trying to speak frog-German while strangling a Scot. I was able to find Dame Eleanor’s Tavern all by myself, which was just as well. People were staring. I couldn’t figure out precisely why. Maybe it was the spectacle of an unaccompanied gentleman of my age wandering alone in such a place—hence the emergency dagger, because Elizabethan back alleys were not safe—or maybe it was just because I was clean. The stench of the place and the people took more getting used to than I had time for.
I found the tavern and I found the private room that the poet Marlowe and his lowlife companions, Ingram Frizer, Robert Poley, and Nicholas Skeres had taken on that fateful day, which would be, unless circumstances were altered, Marlowe’s last.
The poet himself confronted me at the door, hissing, “Who did bid thee join with us here?” with foul breath.
It was all I could do to prevent myself from breaking out laughing, then explaining at length in my best professorial tone that those were the very words first spoken to the Third Murderer in Macbeth, a play which hadn’t been written yet. Shakespeare, in 1593, was an upstart crow, a nobody.
But I controlled myself. I eased my way into the room.
“I am a friend,” I said, and before I could say anything more the others had twisted my right arm behind my back and an even more malodorous, rat-faced little man whom I later learned to be Frizer snatched my dagger out of my belt and poked it under my chin and whispered, “I think thou liest, and I’ll have thy guts for garters.”
It took my entire repertoire of eloquence and tricks to get out of that one, a shift in stance, in tone, a gesture, to re-establish control, as a teacher does with a restless class. That, and with my free hand I reached into my pocket—one of the things that may have been an anachronism, there was a pocket in my doublet; I’m not sure pockets had been invented in 1593—and produced a gold coin.
“This, for friendship.”
In time, I sat with them, and even got my dagger back, which indicated some degree of trust, though the wariness never left them, for these men were, after all, spies, petty criminals, and very likely, already, murderers. Probably Marlowe himself was more like them than his admirers centuries later would be comfortable to admit.
They were unarmed. They’d left their swords and daggers with their cloaks in the hall outside, except—it was very important to note that my research had been correct on this point—Frizer, who wore his dagger over his behind, so it dangled over the edge of the bench while he sat.
They took me for a foreigner. I drew on what acting skills I had and what research I’d done, to drop hints, and names, and let slip just a little knowledge I shouldn’t otherwise have—just enough to first alarm them, but not too much, then intrigue them, then appeal to their greed as I spun a fragmentary (and probably incoherent and contradictory) web of lies and half-truths and things scholars had figure out three hundred years later, enough to suggest that I was a representative of either the criminal underworld or of world of Elizabethan espionage (On which side? Protestant? Catholic? Both?). I had their attention. What they concluded ultimately didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point.
I spent money freely, calling for a meal, then for more wine, and more wine, until all of us grew considerably tipsy, and once Marlowe said to me, “Thou art not a spy, but the very Devil, come to tempt me,” and I said “No, to save thee,” and he, “Indeed?” raising his right eyebrow. Some while later we walked in the garden, speaking softly. Some while after that, awash in wine, in the hot, stuffy room that swayed like a ship at sea, arms on one another’s shoulders, almost tumbling off the bench, roaring out enough verses of “The Pope is an Ass” to exonerate Marlowe of any hint of the subversive sympathies with which his enemies were at this very moment charging him, I achieved my carefully planned goal.
I got behind Frizer and pulled out his dagger, then broke the point on the stone floor.
He looked back, blearily.
“You dropped this, my friend,” I said, and slid it back into his scabbard before he could see what I had done.
Mission accomplished. After that, all I had to do was somehow extricate myself from this cheery, albeit sinister company and make my way back to my own time.
I was still drunk when I arrived. This should have fascinated Francis, because it was theoretically impossible, he had previously explained at considerable length, for me to actually leave anything physically in the past, or to bring anything forward, which was a kind of temporal failsafe to prevent serious messing with history. But the 16th century alcohol, in my system, had definitely done a bit of time-traveling, and what was I doing but seriously messing with history?
My mind cleared only very slowly. I realized that I was in the basement of the Physics Building all right, and dressed as Falstaff, and drunk as a skunk, but there was no time-corridor. It was just a storeroom, full of boxes. And there was no sign of Francis.
What had I done?
The only answer, at a time like this, is research. I hurried across campus, sticking to the shadows, hoping I would not be spotted. The library was closed, but I had the key to the English Department. I let myself in, sat down in my desk.
The room was still swaying, a little, though the cold night air and the adrenaline rush of getting here had cleared my mind considerably. I paused, gasping for breath, then fingered through my Rolodex for Francis’s number.
He lived in Arizona now, not Pennsylvania anymore.
I called him up. With the time-difference, it wasn’t too late. He sounded puzzled, even a little alarmed, as I rambled on, trying to pump him for information without admitting I was doing so. “Chuck, Are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” He at least was allowed to call me Chuck.
I hung up.
I glanced around at the shelf behind my desk, and saw my familiar Penguin Shakespeare, but, beside it eight fat volumes of The Collected Dramas and Poetry of Christopher Marlowe, and next to those a biography: Marlowe: the One-Eyed Poet by a respected colleague; below that, a whole shelf of issues of Marlowe Studies, and several copies of a book with my own name on it: William Shakespeare, Friend of Marlowe by Charles Henry Tillinghast, Ph.D.
Oh my God . . . I could only sit and tear my hair, and then frantically search the
internet. First, the little things. My brother. Arizona, yes. Lived in Tempe. Taught in the university there. English. I had changed history, all right, and in this new history my brother had given up physics in college and switched his major to English because he was so carried away by . . . a performance he’d seen by the Royal Marlowe Company of Jenghiz Khan, Lord of the Earth.
I web-searched frantically. Yes. Marlowe had survived. Circumstances were mysterious. It was uncertain how many people had been with him at Dame Eleanor’s Tavern on Deptford Strand that day in 1593 when he and his fellows got into a quarrel over the bill—but why, why? I’d left them with a lot of gold, hadn’t I, more than enough to pay for meat and drink . . . unless, unless, my brother in the other reality, the one who became the physicist, had been correct, and you can’t leave something in the past, so the gold I’d brought there vanished when I did—where? I don’t know, scattered along the timestream somewhere. Maybe it materialized on a contemporary London street. The net result, the money disappeared, Marlowe and his pals were suddenly embarrassed for cash, the much-studied brawl ensued. Marlowe, in a drunken rage, snatched Frizer’s dagger from behind and beat him over the head with the pommel, whereupon Frizer twisted around, grabbed Marlowe’s wrist, and shoved the dagger point-first into the poet’s face.
But the point was broken off, almost square, and the dagger took out Marlowe’s right eye, but did not kill him. He lived. He became the legendary One-Eyed Poet of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, who had wrapped the whole of English dramatic poetry of that period around himself, so that Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, John Webster, and the rest of them were remembered as contemporaries of Marlowe.
I was still tearing through websites when I heard keys jangle, the front door open, and someone come in. It was all I could do to rush into the back of the office, change out of the Falstaff costume and make it back to my desk before—who should poke his unwelcome head into my little world, but my nemesis, Professor Lee Allan Cranchberger?