by David Taylor
“You seem to know a bit about science,” he said.
“My father was a mathematician and, when I was a kid, he gave me books on Pythagoras and Euclid rather than Black Beauty or Little Women. It paid off, I suppose, in that I now teach public key cryptography.”
Freddie gasped in surprise. “What’s that when it’s at home?”
“It’s a cryptographic system with two separate keys; one encrypts the plaintext while the other decrypts the cipher text. I’m giving a couple of lectures on the subject in London next week. I’m also attending a workshop at the Globe Theatre. So I’ll be in your country for two or three weeks.”
It sounded like a hint. Freddie cleared his throat. “Perhaps we could meet in London while you’re over there?” His voice sounded hesitant and feeble.
“Are you asking me out on a date?”
He knew he was blushing. The colour spread across his cheeks like splashes of paint, and judging by the broad grin on her face, she had noticed this transformation.
“If you l-like, but I get awfully tongue-tied on dates.”
“In saying you are tongue-tied you are quoting Shakespeare. If you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if you refuse to budge an inch, if you are more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare.”
Two can play at this game, he thought. “If your dreams vanish into thin air, if you are hoodwinked or in a pickle or if you suffer from green-eyed jealousy, you are ....”
“They want us to leave, Freddie,” she whispered in his ear. “The party’s over.”
Most of the delegates had already left the reception suite to change for dinner and waiters were hovering, ready to collect the empty plates and glasses.
31 MARCH 2014
An old man leant over the parapet of the Ponte Pietra watching a twig bobbing up and down in the water. Fame is like a river, he muttered to himself, it bears up things light and swollen and drowns things weighty and solid. The simile was age old but it perfectly described the modern cult of instant celebrity, the reality show princesses and tabloid stars on whom so much time and emotional equity was invested. He was living in a shallow, confessional age that glorified the ephemeral.
Yet here in Verona there was a sense of permanence. The bridge he stood on predated Caesar. It had been blown up and bombed but always rebuilt to include its original Roman stones. I am like this bridge, he thought, a thing of shreds and patches. Major George Duncan at your service, tours of duty in Germany and Northern Ireland, shrapnel in one leg, now an antiquarian bookseller of somewhat threadbare appearance.
His civilian uniform consisted of a hand sewn tweed jacket with leather padded elbows, mustard corduroy trousers, shabby chocolate loafers, a Viyella check shirt and a striped public school tie. In contrast to his rather bohemian carapace, the man himself was wearing well: a full head of grey hair and a trim moustache complemented the lined but handsome face women had once found attractive.
As if to test the potency of his appeal the old warrior bestowed a twinkling smile on a pretty girl hurrying across the bridge. She seemed flattered rather than repelled by his attention and smiled back; making him believe, perhaps misguidedly, that there was life in the old dog yet. On a cloudless spring day he could feel the sap rising.
The major’s silver-topped cane beat out a staccato rhythm as he limped across the city’s cobblestones to fulfil his chosen mission. The stick turned out to be a handy weapon in the Via Capello where sightseers crowded around the Casa di Giulietta, a thirteenth-century tower-shaped palazzo. It was, of course, all smoke and mirrors, a way of boosting Verona’s tourist trade by cashing in on the popularity of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet.
Like most medieval Italian cities, Verona had had its fair share of feuding merchant families and romantic youngsters and the palazzo certainly possessed an upstairs balcony, albeit of twentieth-century construction. On cue, a Japanese tourist appeared on the not-so-ancient balcony to be digitally immortalised by his wife while, below in the courtyard, Italian men queued up to grope a bronze statue of Juliet in the belief that rubbing her right breast would make them lucky in love.
Too old for such superstitions, the major allowed himself to be swept towards a graffiti-covered wall where the lovesick had recorded their passions for posterity: so much self-conscious emotion generated by a man who had left so little of himself behind. Remembering a line from Romeo and Juliet, Duncan murmured, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” This gave him an idea. The flower stalls of the Piazza delle Erbe were nearby.
Twenty minutes later, lounging against a marble column in the Hotel Accademia’s elegant foyer, he studied his reflection in a gilt-framed mirror and had second thoughts about his appearance. Those mustard trousers and chocolate loafers! He had overdone the old soldier in relaxed mufti mode. Major Duncan was not fit for purpose.
She, on the other hand, looked the part as she swept out of the lift and strode towards him in a dark blue trouser suit and cream silk shirt. With high cheekbones, flinty eyes and a wide, sensitive mouth, the Regius Professor of English Literature at Oxford University was a striking woman, full of poise and dignity.
“Major Duncan,” she inquired, extending her hand to him. “Julia Walker-Roberts.”
“Enchanted, I’m sure.” The book dealer kissed her fingers theatrically before delving into his satchel and pulling out a bunch of short-stemmed pink roses wrapped in cellophane.
“I trust you will accept these, Dame Julia, as a small token of my appreciation.”
The gift had the desired effect. She was completely taken aback. Judging by the expression on her face she must have thought his battered leather satchel contained stale sandwiches and a hip flask.
“And now, dear lady, perhaps you’ll join me in the lounge. I’ve asked Giuseppe for a quiet table.”
Reeling from his charm offensive she could only reply, “That would be nice.”
He ushered her into a part of the hotel lobby decked out like a gentleman’s club with built-in bookcases, brown leather armchairs and low wooden tables with silver lamps. A waiter appeared carrying a tray. Balanced on it was a bowl of olives and two sparkling red drinks in frosted glasses.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said a smiling Duncan, “I took the liberty of ordering Negronis. The bar here does them awfully well and I imagine you’re having a trying day.”
Without waiting for a reply, he raised his glass to her. “I won’t beat about the bush. I have a favour to ask.”
And Julia was of a mind to grant it. “How can I help?” she asked, sipping her cocktail with obvious relish.
Duncan felt his stomach muscles tighten. “As a leading authority on sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature and a palaeographer of distinction, you are obviously an expert in the handwriting of the period.”
Julia inclined her head but said nothing.
“To get to the point, a document has come into my possession which, if genuine, is a collector’s item. Perhaps you will examine this letter. I’ve brought it with me.”
Duncan rummaged around in his satchel before handing her a buff coloured folder that contained a photocopy of what appeared to be a very old letter written in the italic hand. He watched her skim through its contents, frowning slightly when she noticed how the letter ended with a lengthy sequence of numbers signifying some kind of code or cipher.
Julia’s long fingernails clinked on the cocktail glass. “It is dated 1622 and the signature is that of Viscount St Alban. Are you asking me to confirm that this letter was written by Francis Bacon?”
“Indeed so.” Duncan nodded his head, wondering what she would say next.
“A word of caution, I am familiar with Bacon’s epistolary outpourings but I have never seen this before which raises the possibility that it is a fake. With original letters written by historic figures fetching record sums at auction, sadly, there are forgers at
work.”
“I hope you don’t think I’m one.” Duncan’s raised eyebrow indicated his concern.
“Of course not,” she replied evenly, “but I confess to being intrigued by the encryption. Didn’t its recipient, Duke August of Brunswick-Luneburg, write a book on cryptography under the pseudonym of Gustavus Selenus?”
“I believe that to be the case.” He looked her straight in the eye, keeping his face as neutral as possible.
Dame Julia frowned again. “As I recall it, one of the engravings on Selenus’ title page is of a well-dressed man in a tall hat, Bacon, handing a manuscript to a rustic fellow in actor’s boots who is carrying a spear, Shakespeare. At least that’s what Baconian theorists fondly believe.”
His bushy eyebrows bristled. “Not my field I’m afraid.”
There was something about his dismissive retort that seemed to worry her. He saw her shoulders stiffen as she gave him the kind of withering stare she would normally bestow on uppity undergraduates.
“I do hope you’re not advocating some cranky theory about Bacon writing Shakespeare’s plays,” she snapped. “Like any reputable scholar I am prepared to concede that Francis Bacon was a great essayist, a prophet of the new science and a successful if corrupt politician but he was neither a poet nor a playwright. If you are trying to embroil me in some new fantasy I must thank you for the drink and beg to be excused.”
Duncan rewarded her with his most winning smile. “Rest assured, dear lady, I am an antiquarian bookseller, not a conspiracy theorist. My only interest lies in making money out of this letter.”
“Why come to Verona to seek my assistance? You could have contacted me in Oxford.”
“I was over here already, setting up a book stall in your conference centre.”
Despite her misgivings, Julia gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Quite so, you may leave your photocopied letter with me. I will do the best I can with it.”
“Perhaps you would be so kind as to send your report and invoice to my home.” Major Duncan scribbled his address on a business card and handed it to her.
“You must excuse me now,” she said, rising to her feet. “Today is our last conference day and there’s a meeting I must attend.”
Once she had gone, he heaved a sigh of relief and ordered a large whisky. The fiery spirit acted as a reality check. Authenticating the letter was only a start. Deciphering it would be the real problem. The number code was five hundred years old.
He had seen something similar in an Elizabethan spy’s report but that, too, had never been cracked. Not to worry though, something would turn up. He could feel it in his bones.
On leaving the hotel the major walked briskly to the nearest taxi rank whistling ‘Sussex by the Sea.’ His limp was forgotten.
4 APRIL 2014 • THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Shakespeare's dark twin
Frederick Brett
Caspar Dawkins
SHAKESPEARE: MAN AND ARTIST
442pp I 6317 1226 9 Hampton & Pym £30
Why are there so many Shakespeare biographies? Hardly a week goes by without an addition to this literary mountain. His character, even his appearance, was never meant to have been important. From the very outset, in the First Folio, Ben Jonson advised us to look at the book, not at Droeshout’s picture of the unprepossessing bald man with the dangerous looking ruff. It is a piece of advice that has gone unheeded. Artists, W.H.Auden insisted, should be anonymous. Shakespeare did his best to be anonymous but we could not leave him to it.
We live in an age obsessed with celebrity. The artist has become as important as his art and the literary biography flourishes as never before. It is like a family portrait, in which, as the novelist William Faulkner once remarked, we line up the author with his dark twin, his work, to see how alike they seem. The problem with Shakespeare is he does not look at all like his twin. The gap between the artist and the man could hardly be wider.
Professor Dawkins has realised that the only way to make Shakespeare’s life as interesting as his works is to treat the latter as evidence of the former. The plays become a vehicle for self-expression, full of sly allusions to Shakespeare’s private life. To give his book greater certainty, Dawkins abandons conditional clauses and omits detailed footnotes. Honest scholarship requires a distinction to be drawn between conjecture and confirmed fact and citing sources is a fundamental requirement of good research.
Like so many before him, Dawkins is much taken with Shakespeare’s pre-eminence in two areas of dramatic expertise: his use of language and his unrivalled psychological insight. As he rightly says, ‘you can never overestimate how well the playwright assimilates new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.’ And that is where the emphasis in Shakespeare studies properly belongs, on those characteristics that can be usefully discussed. Even here, Dawkins oversteps the mark by asserting Shakespeare ‘taught us what it was to be human.’ To suggest we learned the pitfalls of love from Cleopatra and how to laugh with Falstaff is to wildly overstate Shakespeare’s cultural contribution. He was a profound observer of human nature; not the inventor of the secular soul.
What is far worse, however, is the way biographers tend to marshal their facts, leaving out things they find unpalatable. For instance, Dawkins ignores the usury charge Robert Greene levels against Shakespeare in his pamphlet Groats-worth of Wit. This attack came a few months after John Clayton, a Bedfordshire yeoman, borrowed seven pounds from a William Shakespeare at Cheapside. Dawkins mentions the transaction but argues it must have been a different Shakespeare. Yet the church of St Mary le Bow in Cheapside was the acknowledged place where borrowers and lenders ratified their financial transactions and it was within walking distance of Shakespeare’s lodgings in Bishopsgate. As Greene also tells us that Shakespeare was a moneylender why cast the Clayton loan aside?
Further proof of the less wholesome side to Shakespeare’s life in London comes in a 1596 writ of attainment in which he and three other individuals were bound over to keep the peace. Dawkins claims Shakespeare’s role in the affair is ‘shrouded in mystery’ and yet we know he was consorting with one of Southwark’s most notorious gangsters, Francis Langley, who while owning the Swan Theatre was also indulging in usury, extortion and various vice rackets, and with Dorothy Soer who rented out slum properties. This does not make ‘gentle Shakespeare’ a bad person, just a real one who kept bad company and may have been involved in organised crime. Yet biographers like Dawkins prefer to cherry-pick the facts to make them fit their preconceived idea of how a great playwright should behave.
More time has gone into researching Shakespeare’s life than that of any other human being and yet we know very little about him. It is all the more important, therefore, that we should acknowledge the evidence that does exist. If we must know the man behind the artist, let it be the right one.
7 APRIL 2014
Winter had returned to Oxford. Hailstones were falling and a cold, blustery wind whipped through the garden quadrangle. Only Matilda, the college tortoise, seemed impervious to the elements as she continued her slow progress across Master’s Field. Inside his study Dr Freddie Brett shivered and snuggled up to the two-bar gas fire that was his only comfort from the draughts coming through the wall cavities. He doubted whether the room had ever been properly heated.
By rights, the scantily clad female sitting opposite should be a mass of goose bumps but Cheryl Stone was made of sterner stuff. Her halter top and tight denim skirt were designed to make a statement, not to match the weather. Freddie hated tutorials with her. He found her absence of self-doubt unnerving.
“You know what I think,” she said, crossing her slender legs in a provocative fashion. “That Miranda is a stuck-up cow, saying like to Caliban, ‘I pitied thee, took pains to make thee speak’ and Caliban goes, OK, you taught me language and ‘my profit on’t is I know how to curse.’ Oh really? That might have been true at my school where ‘fuck’ was the first word kids learned.”
Cheryl neve
r let anyone forget she once attended a Hackney comprehensive where English was a second language for most pupils. The way she emphasised her rough upbringing was a tiresome form of reverse snobbery. In a topsy-turvy world it had become fashionable to have common roots.
Freddie frowned. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“If Caliban had been taught to speak by Miranda he’d have a posh accent and no swear words at all. More to the point, do you think Caliban did it with her?”
“Obviously not, Prospero accuses his slave of seeking ‘to violate the honour of my child’ and Caliban admits he was prevented from doing so.”
“But if he didn’t shag her,” Cheryl persisted, flicking her russet hair out of her eyes and smiling at him, “why tell Caliban he ‘deserved more than a prison’ when attempted rape wasn’t even an offence in those days.”
It was a fair argument. When he conceded this, she wanted to know whether Miranda had been playing sex games with Caliban. Girls do that sort of thing, she told him.
“I was at this party and a guy comes up, I could tell he fancied me, and he goes, want to go upstairs? And I say, no way, the store is closed and ...”
Freddie couldn’t help blushing. “That’s enough, Miss Stone, too much information. What’s the point you’re making?”
Cheryl shook her pre-Raphaelite curls. “Simply this, Dr Freddie Brett, a girl isn’t as innocent as her dad would like to think, even when he can immobilise the phallic sword with magic dust.”
He was beginning to wonder whether there was a pornographic version of the play. “Getting back to the question I raised. Does Prospero use Caliban’s attempted rape as an excuse for enslaving him and colonising the island?”
Cheryl snorted dismissively. “Of course it’s a colonial text. Prospero cosies up to Caliban to learn the secrets of the island before employing magic to subdue and control, just as white settlers used the magic of superior technology to pacify natives in the New World.”