by David Taylor
As she left the lectern Freddie rose to his feet to lead the clapping and, to his relief, other delegates followed suit. He could only hope their motives were purer than his own.
Dr Dilworth’s departure from the stage marked the end of the opening session and, as delegates began to drift out of the conference hall, he caught sight of Dame Julia Walker-Roberts bearing down on him. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, Oxford’s dragon lady had a soft spot for him.
“Ah, there you are, Freddie,” she said. “Professor Cleaver is hosting a cocktail party in the Sanmicheli Suite and I would like you to accompany me.”
It was more of a summons than an invitation.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Dame Julia.” Freddie bowed his head, acting out the unfamiliar role of the gallant.
An hour later he was standing on his own, empty champagne flute in hand, feeling sorry for himself as he watched his distinguished partner networking with the Chinese delegation. He had little small talk at the best of times and none at all in Mandarin.
A tinkling laugh carried across the room and there she was looking tanned, blonde and utterly gorgeous, surrounded by elderly male admirers. Dr Dilworth must have sensed his presence because she quickly excused herself and came towards him. The prospect of actually meeting her made his throat go dry. He had always been awkward around girls, even when they appeared to fancy him.
“Hi, I’m Sam,” she said establishing eye contact. He could smell her perfume: something expensive, he supposed.
“Hello, I’m Freddie Brett.” His breath was high and tight inside his chest.
“Yes, I know who you are.” Beneath her long eyelashes she was already assessing him.
“I suppose you h-heard I shopped my tutor.”
“Sure, did you realise the consequences?”
In truth he hadn’t stopped to think. The similarities had been too extensive. Whole paragraphs had been lifted, give or take a synonym or two, and most of his original ideas paraphrased. It was kill or be killed.
“I had to do it or I wouldn’t have got my doctorate.”
What had caused the trouble was a dissertation in which Freddie claimed that Hamlet was a sensitive thinker caught between two courses of action, murder and suicide, knowing that each led to the sacrifice of his immortal soul. He had shown an early draft to his supervising tutor Professor Cartwright who, eight months later, published a book called The Poisoned Mind advancing exactly the same thesis. When Freddie complained, his college conducted an internal inquiry which led to Cartwright being dismissed to howls of outrage from his many friends in the literary fraternity.
Then the press got wind of it. Seizing his opportunity, Cartwright played on red-top hatred of students by telling reporters about a grave miscarriage of justice in which an ambitious graduate had stolen his professor’s ideas before accusing him of plagiarism. Caring not a jot for the truth, the paparazzi had hounded Freddie, picturing him ‘scurrying off in shame.’ Humiliated by the distorted revelations and punchy headlines of the tabloid coverage, he had blockaded himself in his flat until, suddenly, the scandal went away leaving its protagonists to get on with their lives. Cartwright took a job as a television presenter while Beaufort College awarded Freddie a doctorate and a research fellowship. But this second skirmish with the mass media left its mark on him. Once again he had been stripped bare and misrepresented, making it difficult for him to adjust to other people or, more precisely, to what he believed they saw in him.
It was time to change the subject. “I thought your paper was absolutely first-rate.”
She raised an eyebrow in what seemed like a wary gesture. Then her face relaxed. “You wouldn’t be flirting with me, would you Dr Brett?”
He could feel the heat rushing to his face. “No, honestly, I thought you were t-terrific.”
Dr Dilworth looked pleased. “Tell me about Oxford. What does a British Research Fellow do?”
“Not a lot. It’s a temporary academic post which involves a certain amount of teaching but most of your time is supposed to be spent on research.”
“And what are you working on at the moment?”
“Actually I’m between projects.”
Freddie fell silent. Finding something new to say about Shakespeare was like a coal miner chipping away at a worked out seam. Not that anyone else in the Sanmecheli Suite seemed to share his opinion. The room was positively buzzing with delegates boasting about their achievements.
“Shall we wander around a bit,” she suggested. “Find out what’s going down.”
They moved around the room, eavesdropping on what their colleagues were saying. A Scottish professor was holding forth on Shakespeare and national identity only to have his carefully crafted argument interrupted by someone from Azerbaijan who claimed the Bard’s republicanism transcended state borders. Further off, a gaggle of Latin American academics were debating the principles of proportionality and balance in drama while a bearded man in a black beret raised his voice to whip up support for his internationally acclaimed ‘Shakespeare behind Bars’ programme.
“Is that what I think it is?” Freddie whispered.
“Sure, it’s a Kentucky prison theatre group whose year-long tour with The Tempest was turned into an experimental television documentary in which actual prisoners were allowed to cast themselves in the roles best reflecting their personal history and crimes.”
“I rather like the idea,” he said. “I believe in storytelling.”
“And what kind of stories do you tell?”
“Oh, they are mainly about historical figures. It’s revisionism really. I don’t believe there is any single, lasting truth about past events and their meaning. It’s a question of how you join up the dots.”
Dr Dilworth raised her eyebrows. “I don’t follow that.”
“Historical evidence is fragmentary. In putting the pieces together, professional scholars tend to ignore oral history and concentrate on the written record. Yet the human memory is story-based, not data-based. History is the interaction of people in their social context and, to understand that, you need to know their personal stories, what makes them tick. It’s an observational science.”
“That’s interesting,” she said in response to his tirade, “you used the present tense. Do you turn these powers of observation on the people you meet?”
“Sometimes, but I’m no Sherlock Holmes.”
The beautiful American seemed to be studying him through her champagne flute. “What, I wonder, have you discovered about me.”
It was a challenge he couldn’t ignore. “That you come from New England, probably somewhere near Hartford in Connecticut; that you’ve had many boyfriends but have never got engaged; and you are thinking seriously about laser surgery to correct your short-sightedness.”
There was a stunned silence. Dr Dilworth opened her mouth but said nothing.
“Then there’s your recent skiing accident,” he added, warming to the task.
“How could you possibly know about that?” she asked
“That’s easy. There’s swelling on your right thumb and the ligament between the thumb and the index finger is obviously tender. That’s why you are grasping your glass in your left hand.”
“How do you know I did this skiing,” she persisted.
“I don’t for sure, but such an injury occurs when a skier holds on to the ski pole during a fall. The pole gets caught in the snow and acts as a lever which forces the thumb into an extended position and this puts a lot of stress on the ligament.”
“Spot on,” she said admiringly. “People were stoned to death in the Old Testament for this kind of sorcery.”
Dr Dilworth fingered the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. “What about the rest of your character study? How did you know about the laser treatment?”
“I saw the way you were squinting at your audience when you were on the conference podium and I also noticed that you have big blue eyes and, forgive me for saying thi
s, large eyes may be beautiful but they can also be a weakness. Do you want to know why?”
“I’ve a feeling you are going to tell me anyway.”
“If the eyeball grows too large the light focuses in front of the retina, rather than on it and this causes ...”
“Myopia,” she interjected. “Distant objects appear blurred. I’ve needed spectacles for years but I’m too vain to wear them. I guess you worked out I’d never been engaged from the smooth tan on my ring finger but I don’t understand how you knew where I grew up. For the record, it’s a town called Wethersfield just south of Hartford on the Connecticut River and I didn’t think I’d got much of an accent.”
“It’s quite subtle but in mentioning my research fellowship you dropped the ‘t’ in ‘British’. This is called a glottal stop and it’s a common feature of the slightly flat New England dialect in the Hartford region. But what confirmed my impression was the nutmeg bracelet on your wrist. People from Connecticut are nicknamed ‘Nutmeggers’ although I’ve no idea why.”
“May I interrupt?” They had now been joined by a smiling Milton Cleaver.
“Just wanted a word with my former student,” he said, putting a protective arm around Sam’s shoulder. “And I find her with the notorious Dr Brett.”
Freddie rose to the bait. “Really, so you think what I did was wrong?”
“Seeing you ask, yes. You have no respect for authority and you destroyed a good man’s career.”
The damage done, Cleaver looked to make his exit. “Will you excuse me,” he murmured. “That’s the Chilean ambassador over there. He’s sponsoring the glove puppeteers who are performing this weekend.”
Freddie grabbed hold of Cleaver’s immaculate sleeve. “Fuck the glove puppets,” he snarled. “You and Cartwright had a cosy relationship, didn’t you? He scratched your back and you scratched his, favourably reviewing one another’s books.”
Cleaver’s eyes narrowed. “That’s an outrageous thing to say. You are a real troublemaker Brett. You wouldn’t even be at this cocktail party if I had my way.”
“Well, there’s a first! The mighty Milton Cleaver can’t even control his own guest list.”
By now their raised voices were the only ones in the room as the other guests stopped talking in order to overhear the heated exchange. “You don’t really belong anywhere, do you Brett? You’re only too willing to bite the hand that feeds you.”
“You’ve got that wrong, Cleaver. I revere universities, but not professorial chairs held by people like you. You and your hangers-on are little more than a mutual admiration society.”
“At least we’ve all achieved something in our careers which is more than you’ll ever be able to say, you impertinent English half-wit!”
“That’s enough, Milton!” Dame Julia had joined them, her eyes like gimlets. “Freddie is my guest and if you insult him, you insult me too.”
Milton Cleaver’s jaw tightened. “You’ve got strange friends; that’s all I can say.”
Dame Julia watched his receding back before departing in the opposite direction with a curt nod of her head.
“I’m awfully sorry,” Dr Dilworth said. “I’ve never known him be so rude.”
“No, it was my fault. There’s a knack to keeping quiet but I’ve never mastered it.”
“But you see what I’m up against.” Freddie spoke like a drowning man rejecting rescue. “They will never forgive me for Cartwright.”
There was a long silence which she did not attempt to fill. A waiter appeared carrying a tray of canapés. Grateful for the distraction, they grabbed a plate of mushroom vol au vents.
As they ate, she inquired after his family. He gave her a subdued answer about growing up in the medieval wool town of Lavenham where his father had been the Anglican rector. This reminded her of a piece of trivia. The last son of a Suffolk clergyman to be a whistleblower was the so-called Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins.
“Didn’t Hopkins burn a woman in your market square?” she asked.
“No, that only happened in the Vincent Price movie although Hopkins did devise a new way of torturing women called witch-pricking.”
Sam segued from this barbaric custom into literary celebrity. As soon as heretical ideas appeared in print, she said, the authorities began to clamp down on authors. Unable to punish words or ideas, they chose to rack their creator. Torture was the first form of censorship; a way of concealing the truth.
“That’s the trouble with history, don’t you think,” said Freddie. “It’s like a shipwreck that has sunk out of sight, leaving bits of debris floating on the surface for scholars to misinterpret.”
Here was something else they could agree about. Knowledge of the distant past was based on surviving documents – state papers, birth and death registers, a letter accidentally preserved. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle when most of the pieces were missing or wrongly assembled to protect those in power. He asked her whether she had seen The Devil’s Disciple, George Bernard Shaw’s play about the American War of Independence. In the third act General Burgoyne realises the American Colonies are about to be lost because of a bureaucratic blunder in London. An appalled major wonders what history will make of this and the sardonic general retorts, ‘History, sir, will tell lies as usual.’
Cover-ups in history were to be expected, he allowed, but what was more surprising for the English scholar was the tenuous connection between William Shakespeare and his works. No one had ever been so thoroughly researched and yet how little there was to show for it. Shakespeare married, had children, went to London, became an actor and a playwright, evaded taxes, loaned money, started lawsuits and made a long and detailed will that didn’t mention any books. Books were a valuable commodity and Shakespeare must have read hundreds of them but where were they? Not in his Stratford home in which his daughters grew up unable to do more than make their mark.
Dr Dilworth stared at him for a moment. “I shouldn’t be saying this but the grasping Stratford landowner with the probably illiterate family doesn’t fit the image I’ve got of the genius who wrote the plays and poems.”
Freddie gave her his crooked smile. “You can add to that the fact that Shakespeare’s death went unnoticed, no memorial verses or funereal tributes, nothing to mark his passing.”
“It’s amusing, isn’t it? A whole industry fuelled by an absence of hard evidence.”
He thought how right she was. The Victorians had alchemised Shakespeare into a gold standard as safe and sound as the Bank of England. Disseminated widely through new technologies of reproduction and manufacture, Shakespeare had conquered our education system and achieved a mass-market. A laundry list would cost a fortune at Sotheby’s if it was known to have been written by Shakespeare but no such list had been found, only half a dozen ill-formed signatures that didn’t seem to have been written by the same hand.
“My fellow American Bill Bryson talked about ‘a wealth of text but a poverty of context.’ What we actually know about Shakespeare could be written in a few pages. Yet that doesn’t stop our colleagues from churning out massive doorstoppers almost every month.”
“Too true,” said Freddie, relieved to find a kindred spirit. “It’s an unstoppable bandwagon and you’ve got to climb on board if you want a career in Eng. Lit. If we told the truth we’d have to say ...”
She interrupted him. “I’m critiquing a couple for The New York Review. One is called Warwickshire Will and the other is Shakespeare, Man and Artist or is it Artist and Man, I can’t remember. They are both hot off the press, if warmed-up leftovers can be called hot.”
They had this in common too. “I’m doing Man and Artist for The Times Literary Supplement and I’ve half a mind to say what I really think about Dawkins’ crappy book. I’m really sick of all this cultural piety. As scholars we are trained to evaluate the evidence but where William Shakespeare is concerned it’s largely an act of faith. We are like priests standing at the high altar and ...”
“You want t
o bring the temple crashing down on you like Samson.”
“No, I want a bit of integrity. I’m tired of listening to polished and urbane academics like Professor Cleaver saying what they don’t mean and meaning what they don’t say.”
He was beginning to sound strident. “I’m merely suggesting that we should use our intelligence and intuition. Shakespeare was a country boy trying to make a living in the theatre, not a god.”
“So we’re misleading the younger generation by deifying him.”
“That’s right, as a New Historicist I believe that every expressive action is embedded in a network of material practices, not all of which are clear to us.”
He was talking about the school of literary criticism that had swept through the university world. The pressure on students and dons to enlist in the movement was immense as research grants and academic posts came to depend on adherence to this methodology.
“I’m sorry, I don’t agree. I believe the text is what really matters.”
“And I think context is just as important. How can you exclude social and political factors from the interpretation of literary works?” Freddie could hear his voice rising. “Didn’t you say in your lecture that many of Shakespeare’s plays were an ideological attempt to reconcile Queen Elizabeth’s power with the misogyny of a male court? Wasn’t that a New Historicist argument?”
“No,” she snapped. “It’s a feminist argument. You weren’t listening properly.”
They paused to assess the damage to their relationship.
“There’s another way of looking at this,” he said in a more conciliatory tone. “Sherlock Holmes often praised the ‘scientific imagination’, the ability to go beyond the facts to see what really happened in the past. It’s a kind of inspired storytelling.”
Dr Dilworth looked at him through half-shut eyes. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Scientists have always sought better explanations. If they hadn’t challenged the validity of the received truth we’d still believe in a flat earth and the four humours of the human body.”