Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  A few of the Baconians (so called because they believed Sir Francis Bacon had written all of Shakespeare’s plays) thought Bacon had written Foolscap as well. Several who were sure the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare were equally sure he was also the Raleigh who’d written Foolscap. The post-Baconians (convinced that Hamlet was Edward de Vere’s autobiography) attempted to demonstrate that Raleigh in Foolscap was none other than that same melancholy Dane de Vere. The Marloweans (who believed that young Christopher Marlowe had not gotten killed in a knife fight after all, but had gone into hiding and written all of Shakespeare’s plays instead of any more of his own) were unanimous in not believing that Marlowe had written Foolscap. The text lacked that je ne sais quoi that was Marlowe (and Marlowe pretending to be Shakespeare). And as for the Raleigheans (who believed that Sir Walter Raleigh had written all of Shakespeare’s plays), they broke into terrible factions over whether or not to claim Foolscap (either for Raleigh as Raleigh, or Raleigh as Shakespeare, or neither); heated remarks were made in haste, not repented at leisure, and finally the society’s annual banquet had to be postponed until a time when enough members were willing to sit down next to each other to make it possible to serve the meal in one building.

  Jane Nash-Gantz was asked her opinion of Foolscap on the Today Show, where she was supposed to be talking, with three other preeminently successful career/family women about “Long-Distance Marriage.” Her opinion was: Who cared which Dead White European Male had written Foolscap? “I mean, do we really care?” She certainly didn’t. Now, if they’d found a new Jacobean play by a woman…

  Two female assistant professors in New Haven, both up for tenure, fell into a shouting match during a conference panel, with one backing Elizabeth Carey, Viscountess of Falkland, as the author of Foolscap, and the other pushing the notion that Lady Raleigh had written it herself after her husband’s execution. Their public fight quickly became so famous that the two young women were offered high-paying full professorships at the same California university; on discovering which, Yale tenured them both.

  Through all this academic hoopla, no announcement of any sort came from Dame Winifred, who spent her days in the Bourne library studying the play, and her nights working with a computer analysis of the vocabulary of Raleigh’s History of the World. But long before the spread of what came to be called, “The Foolscap Question,” indeed by October 10, Horry Stanlow, the ninth Earl of Newbolt, had not only declared the manuscript authentically Raleigh’s, he’d declared it definitely his (and had shown a freshly inked copyright form to prove it). At the same time, he’d announced his intention to have the contents of the play professionally produced on the London stage, while the manuscript itself was to be enshrined in the great Newbolt Collection at Bourne House. The earl said that Foolscap belonged to him because he was a direct descendent of the Francis Stanlow who’d bought it from Sir Walter Raleigh’s son. He cited Dame Winifred’s articles on the subject.

  By October 14, Gordon Dawbney, Marquess of Urswick, had filed an injunction against Horry Stanlow enjoining him from doing anything with either the dramatic contents or the physical artifact of Foolscap. The marquess said Foolscap was his because he was a direct descendant of the Robert Dawbney who’d befriended Raleigh in the Tower and had obviously attempted to preserve Raleigh’s play from Royalist destruction by hiding it in Saint Michael’s, where it had somehow been misplaced, mixed in with some discarded prayer books, and lost for centuries behind the choir stall. He cited Dame Winifred’s essay on Mad Rob Dawbney, the puritan earl.

  A second suit was threatened by the theatrical producers to whom Stanlow had already optioned Foolscap as soon as they heard they couldn’t proceed with production because they’d bought the rights to something from someone who didn’t have the right to sell them.

  The Urswick camp scored heavily when the private Tudor travel chest in which the volume had been found proved to be, in fact, embossed on its latch with the Dawbney imprese, Meo Volente. (This freakish coincidence turned Mole Fontwell an alarming hue of green when he heard it. It was as if, he said—entirely spooked—everything really had happened just as he’d imagined it.)

  The Newbolt camp fought back by producing the very receipt of sale to Francis Stanlow for “books, volumes, & papers that belonged to my late father,” signed by Carew Ralegh.

  The marquess then produced records proving that when Mad Rob Dawbney had died in Saint Michael’s, he’d been hiding out there and had with him a sealskin chest; court records proved that Dawbney had refused to relinquish property taken from Stanlow Lodge, some of which was kept in a sealskin chest and included “gilt jugs, hangings of imagery, a striking clock, and divers books of great value.”

  The earl retaliated with a copy of a letter from Raleigh’s friend, the great scientist Thomas Harriott, to Bess Throckmorton in which “a bundle of plaies belonging to yr. late husban” was mentioned.

  The Earl of Newbolt and the Marquess of Urswick grew so engrossed in their battle they were slow to notice any new foe on the field. Then Newbolt was suddenly served with a warrant for having stolen property belonging to the Church of England. A valuable manuscript, said the warrant, had been illegally removed from Saint Michael’s Church in whose possession it had been for more than three hundred years. No matter (said the Church) who had left the book in the church, no matter what family may have built the church, no matter what other family may have handed out the rectorship to whomever they pleased for a few hundred years. None had any rights now in the church in situ or any otherwise. The book was found in the church, had been in the church a very long time, clearly belonged to the church. And the church claimed it, just as it claimed the 1604 prayer books and the fifteenth-century gold ampulla. When he filed his suit, by “church,” Mr. Brakeshaw meant Saint Michael’s-on-Urswick. When the bishop told Mr. Brakeshaw to step aside and let the church handle this—by “church,” the bishop meant the capital “C” Church. The Church which paid the rector’s salary and owned the house he lived in.

  By the time that capital “C” Church finished skimming its take off the top of the Sotheby’s auction of the altar objects to the British Museum and the books to a private collector, little Saint Michael’s got only 30p on the pound. Mr. Brakeshaw was told by his bishop that the Church was graciously generous to give Saint Michael’s that much, and for that much Mr. Brakeshaw would, of course, offer daily prayers of thanksgiving with a grateful heart.

  It took two months of this wrangling before the three major parties (earl, marquess, and Church), in a protracted conference with their solicitors present, agreed to postpone their disagreement in order to capitalize on the current press attention the play was getting because of “The Foolscap Question,” before the chariot of Fame moved on to stir up the next flurry of dust. They therefore decided to allow the producers to whom Stanlow had optioned the work to move ahead with their production. Any profits would be held in escrow until the question of the ownership of Foolscap could be settled.

  From London, the three forgers followed all of this in the papers. Jonas and Mole were delighted by the great brouhaha. Each new academic battle, each new aristocratic challenge, set them happily pounding with their palms on the breakfast table at Brown’s. “By God, we did it!” said Jonas, and rubbed his face in a joyful frenzy. “Ryan, congratulations!”

  “Well done! Well done!” Mole pumped Theo’s hand with both of his.

  But Theo was still waiting.

  And Dame Winifred was still declining to say anything more than, “It certainly sounds like Walter Raleigh, doesn’t it, Theo?”

  Chapter 32

  They All Enter the Circle

  I have a long journey and must bid the company farewell.

  —Sir Walter Raleigh, on the scaffold

  “Scottie Smith?” Theo gagged. “They’ve hired Scottie Smith to direct Foolscap?”

  “Shh shh shh!” The theatrical agent Josef “Buzzy
” Middendorf, an ebullient, vain, and foppish man of seventy, wiggled his small pink ringed fingers to shush the big American.

  “Buzzy, are you serious?”

  “It’s wonderful,” the agent said in his carefully maintained Bavarian accent. “Scottie izz one of my clients. I flew in on the dead eye from New York to make the deal. My appearance, forgive it. I’m sweating like a dog. To tell you the truth, I’m on death’s bed.” Middendorf coughed into a paisley handkerchief and asked his receptionist, Miss Fitzhugh, if she happened to have any “old Vics.” With a wink at Theo, she reached into a drawer of her black lacquered desk and found her employer some cough drops.

  It was the middle of November. Theo had come to the agency to discuss the Rexford estate, but in the small talk that followed his business meeting with Buzzy, the subject of Foolscap had naturally come up—because, on Theo’s recommendation, the Earl of Newbolt had engaged Middendorf to represent that play. Lord Stanlow—while quite up-to-date on many things, from ballroom dancing to crowd management in Bourne’s new self-serve restaurant—knew so little about the theater that he’d expressed his desire to have either Richard Burton, James Mason, or Laurence Olivier play Sir Walter Raleigh in Foolscap. The sad news that all three of these fine actors had passed away unsettled the earl, and he made his subsequent suggestions with a wistful tentativeness that the play’s producers found too easy to ignore. Thus, on his son Willie’s urging, Lord Stanlow had turned to Theo Ryan for “theatrical advice”; Theo had sent him to Middendorf, and as a result the young American was in on the play’s progress. For example, he met the five British producers of Foolscap soon after they’d optioned it. His first response was relief that none of them had anything to do with “W.F.D.,” the producer to whom Ford had sent “the Raleigh play” last spring—from whom nothing was ever heard, confirming Theo’s hypothesis that the man had never looked at the script. His second response was surprise that every one of these producers was younger than Theo was.

  The five producers, who had been in the Footlights Club at Cambridge together, were a little difficult to distinguish from one another, except that three were male and two were female, and except that the one named Cynthia Lewis-Bristol disagreed with everything and the one named Polo Burr paid for everything, carrying so many hundreds of pounds loose in the pockets of his vicuña Italian overcoat that Jonas Marsh decided he was a yuppie organized crime racketeer. (Mr. Burr was flattered when he heard this.) The five producers were all in their early thirties; they all had rich hair and wore rich clothes, and cared very much about what they ate and where they ate it. Like their American cohorts, they were all very involved with their personal fitness, and discussed issues like binding-fibers, natural endorphins, and their psycho-ecology in a self-confident, talkative manner.

  But that they knew much more about show business than the Earl of Newbolt himself, Theo would have doubted had he not been told that two of them had already been vice-presidents of British film corporations, and the other three had already produced a musical based on the entire forty novels of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, which was soon to open in the West End. These five handsome young people had told the earl they were full of daring ideas and good contacts; and that seemed to clinch their qualifications for producing Foolscap. (Apart, of course, from their being absolutely mad about the play, and one of the women’s being a cousin of “Andie” Stanlow, the Countess of Newbolt. )

  The contacts part proved true; they had the entire play read out by an old Footlights friends of theirs in the Mayfair sitting room of Polo’s great-aunt, and while this ancient creature and friends of hers dozed off occasionally during the reading, they awakened at the conclusion and wrote out checks totaling more than one hundred thousand pounds. As soon as they did so, the relatives (and their friends) of the other producers all wanted to be backers of Foolscap too, and they wrote out more checks, and soon there were plenty of checks with which to put on the play. The producers even announced that there was Hollywood interest in the project, and at that news, even more checks came in. As for the ideas, Polo Burr’s idea of trying to cast Robin Williams as Raleigh and Madonna as Queen Elizabeth was admittedly daring, but to his disappointment, the two stars passed on the project. (Cynthia Lewis-Bristol had told him they would, and should.) Horribly enough, his second idea, to get Scottie Smith to direct the play, worked out. And that was what Theo was just learning from Buzzy Middendorf beneath the Klimt frieze in the opulent fin-de-siècle waiting room of the London agency.

  “Scottie had his show finished at the Barbican, and he meets Mr. Burr, and he likes Mr. Burr—” Middendorf shrugged as if to say this is how the world works, and Theo thought, I bet!, for Polo Burr looked exactly as one might suppose a young man would who was called, “Polo.” The old pink, plump little agent straightened a Kokoschka Kunstschau poster, as he went on to explain, “Scottie didn’t want to be haggled, and these boys and girls didn’t haggle; well, the Lewis-Bristol one haggled some. I gave them a ball-point figure just off the top of my hat. Outrageous, this figure. They don’t blink an eye. Out they wrote the first check, just like that. We ironed it up in one day. Miss Fitzhugh, my darling, help my poor eyes!”

  Theo glared down at the agent, who was now tilted over, squeezing eye drops handed him by his receptionist into his bloodshot eyes. “But do they know how to produce?” the American said.

  “So what is it? Producing is writing checks,” said Middendorf, tears running from his eyes. “When pinch comes to shove.”

  Theo shook his head. “It’s their judgment. I don’t think Scottie Smith’s at all a good choice to direct Foolscap. Not at all.”

  “Theo, excuse me, but there’s not a moment’s element of truth in what you say. He is perfect.” Middendorf finished with the eye drops and took the antihistamine Miss Fitzhugh was holding out. “He loves this play. He’s been at it twenty-four hours a day, twelve days a week. Working with the designers. Casting. Don’t forget, he catapulted to fame doing Shakespeare. And this is close.”

  “Well,” shrugged the author of Foolscap. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You’re kind to take the interest, Theo. But I tell you Smith’s smart as a button. This Foolscap is going to be a hit. Already I can smell the crowd mulling about. Now, tell me—” Middendorf suddenly opened his cerise silk jacket, and patted his stomach “—am I fatter than you saw me last?”

  Miss Fitzhugh grinned again at Theo behind the agent’s back. “Tell him he looks grand,” she advised.

  “Thinner. I would definitely say so.” Theo nodded politely. Buzzy Middendorf had always seemed equally overweight to him.

  “No, I am fat. I’ve gorged myself in America, that’s why I am fat. I should join weight lifters. I was never fat before. But Miss Fitzhugh—” he trotted around the desk and kissed her hand “—will put me on a terrible diet and make me thin again. She winds me around her little clock, Theo.”

  “Come along with you, Mr. Middendorf,” the receptionist laughed, deftly removing her fingers from his clasp. “I never.”

  “Theo, you must tell me!” Middendorf squeezed the young man’s large hand. “Where iz der play of yours?”

  “What play?” But immediately, Theo realized that, of course, Buzzy (and everyone else he’d gone yelling to about Ford’s stealing his play) was wondering where and what that play might be. Well, he asked himself; what might it be? It couldn’t be Foolscap. It couldn’t be Aesthetic Distance. It had to be something new.

  Middendorf wriggled his short fat fingers as if he were going to tickle Theo. “You and Ford were writing a play, you said. He took it away. I want to read that play. You have it back?”

  Theo thought for a moment, then smiled. “Yes, I have it. But it needs a lot of work.”

  “About what is it?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  For now, that was certainly true. But it occurred to Theo that he’d think of something.
Why not? Maybe there was more than one play in him after all.

  Miss Fitzhugh was saying, “I.C.M. on line two, Mr. Middendorf.”

  The agent hurried toward one of the doors off the waiting room. “Hugs to Bernie. My hat goes out to him. All those movie sales for Ford! And such a shame Ford can’t enjoy the money. How he spent money! Like a fish! Theo, I want to see that play. Bye-bye.”

  “About Scottie Smith, Buzzy—”

  But Middendorf slipped away back to his satin-stuffed office without further response to Theo’s concerns about Scottie Smith. After all, as far as the agent knew, Theo had no connection to Foolscap other than the useful one of having recommended his agency to the Earl of Newbolt. But even if he had known that Theo was the author, he would have still slipped away without listening. Authors counted for little in the packages Josef Middendorf was famous for tying together; on Foolscap, for example, he represented the script, the director, five of the actors, two of the designers, and he owned ten percent of the theater in which the play was going to be performed. Knowing how to tie knots, and how to slip out of them, had made him the most successful theatrical agent in town.

  To this theater near Leicester Square, Theo began going to watch Scottie Smith direct Foolscap. He went, as a child might keep riding a Ferris wheel that made him sick every time, but from the top of which, the world was beautiful. First of all, he had trouble getting into the theater. Scottie Smith’s assistant told him the rehearsals were closed to outsiders. Only the intervention of the Earl of Newbolt forced the director to make an exception in Theo’s case. Second, he was as invisible once he did get inside as if he’d stayed out on the sidewalk. While he’d been convinced that he’d long ago done the emotional work necessary to give up Foolscap as his own, he quickly discovered during these early rehearsals that this was by no means entirely the case; he was often in a torment at having to sit there ignored, unable to correct the misinterpretation of his meaning or the misreading of his lines. He would have to bite his lip to avoid calling out things like, “Raleigh’s being ironic there!” or “That line has to be said to seduce the queen, not to whine at her: ‘I am a hawk tied to your glove, but bred for higher flying. Loosen me, and see.’”