‘Lady Beatrice,’ he said, addressing me directly for the first time. ‘You always did take the point so admirably. Don Pedro must leave Sicily today and with it all hopes of preferment. I have told him that if he ever sets foot on this island again, I will kill him.’
I believed him. ‘So now he will never be viceroy,’ I murmured.
‘No – he has chosen quite a different path. He is to go for a pilgrim, and walk to Compostela.’
I looked at Benedick. Santiago de Compostela, back in Don Pedro’s native Spain, was the spiritual home of his saint, James the Great. Matamoros – the Moor-slayer.
‘What?’ My husband’s eyes flew wide.
‘It was his idea. I think he wants to go. But he wishes to speak to you,’ Michelangelo also looked at Benedick, ‘before he takes his leave. And now,’ he sheathed his dagger again, ‘I must take mine, before the overzealous hounds of the Watch catch my scent.’
‘Where will you go?’ I asked.
‘England, if I make it so far, to join my father. He has a house in London, by the riverbank.’
He rose, and I felt a sudden pang. I was leaving for Villafranca later in the day to return to my father and introduce him to the reason why I could not now be married to whomever he chose. It was unlikely that I would ever see Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza again. It had been a sudden reunion, and as sudden a leave-taking – and though we were no longer friends, we had been once. I wanted to say something in valediction, somewhat about his mother, or the sonnet that we’d written together, but I could think of nothing sensible. So I asked him, ‘Will you write again?’
He smiled, quite like the old Michelangelo. ‘Now my blood feud is done, I may yet exchange my dagger for a pen.’
‘Will you write of your … mother?’ It was almost a whisper.
His face was grave again. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘One day. I will begin not with a tragedy, but a comedy. Your own story, perhaps.’
I thought of our story; the heartache, the loss, the separation. The death, the despair; the nameless secrets Benedick was keeping in the name of honour. ‘Are our antics comic, then?’
‘You are wed, are you not?’ Now his expression tended upwards. His eyes, his mouth, his brows; the tragic mask turned comic again. ‘You loved one summer, quarrelled, parted and then wed the next. You travelled hundreds, thousands of miles in between. You girdled the earth; you circumnavigated a great round O and came back where you started. Tanto traffico per niente.’
It was a Sicilian tag, but I understood it well enough. Much ado about nothing. Put like that, it did seem a nonsense – I smiled at Benedick and he smiled at me; the waste of a year seemed easier to bear with a comic slant upon it. And we were together now; all had ended well.
‘The prince stays for you at the gate,’ said Michelangelo. ‘I will see you anon.’ He bowed to us like an actor making an exit, vaulted neatly over the balcony and was gone.
Act V scene x
Leonato’s gardens
Benedick: We dressed as swiftly as we might and walked hand in hand through the gardens to the gatehouse.
The sun was only just rising, sleepily, and the flowers were beginning to wake and give off their scent. The dew rimed the lawn with crystals, the grasses were spears of emerald. Beyond the walls the sea was sapphire and foam sat upon the waves like a net of pearl. Everything was bejewelled.
And then we got to the gatehouse, and saw, among the glory of my first morning as Benedick the Married Man, a man of ash.
A pilgrim stood there, leaning on a crooked staff taller than himself. He wore robes the colour of sand, and a broad-brimmed hat with a silver scallop badge pinned upon the front. His rope belt was knotted thrice for the Trinity. He wore simple pattens on his feet, and over the whole he wore a rough cream cloak with the hood drawn up over the hat. I peered into the cowl; it was Don Pedro.
He greeted us with a wave of his staff, but wore no smile. Beatrice, with an instinct I loved her for, hung back as I met him beneath the postern. For the second time that day no greetings were exchanged. We had sailed beyond such shallow waters.
‘I hear them, Benedick,’ he said to me, low voiced, with no preamble. ‘I hear the woman in the flames, I hear the sailors groaning with hunger. My sins call for me in my dreams. All’s gone awry, but in Compostela I’ll begin to heal.’
‘I pray that you do.’ And I meant it. I could not absolve him; that was God’s business. I could only hope that he would find some peace from those voices. But I did have one more thing to ask him; a notion that had rolled around my head like distant thunder since the fruitless wedding day.
‘Did you ever tell Don John, your brother, of the trick you played upon me? When you led me to the beach, to see my lady in the arms of another?’
I had been struck, many times, by the similarity in the way in which Claudio and I were gulled, a year apart, by a pair of brothers.
He furrowed his forehead and I saw then that he wore a smudge of penitent’s ash between his brows. ‘Yes. I may have told him in an idle hour along the road, as a jest.’
I knew then how it had been – Don Pedro had boasted of his wiles to his brother, and Don John had served Claudio in like kind, bringing him to note an innocent embrace. I looked to the heavens. A jest. I’d sailed on a ship of fools from Spain to Scotland and back, and lost a year of my life with Beatrice. As the poet had said, we’d circumnavigated a great round O, and come back to where we’d started. But, looking at the prince now, grey as the ash, I could forgive him. He had so little, and I had everything.
‘Commend me to your wife,’ he said, as if his thoughts marched with mine, nodding gardenwards to where Beatrice stood in the shade, smelling a nosegay of roses. ‘You may tell her now,’ he said, ‘it no longer matters.’
I took his meaning, and did not know what to say.
He smiled sadly. ‘My ship waits.’ He held out his hand to me. In it was a medal on a ribbon. Next to his subfusc garb the gold and scarlet sang, and winked knowingly in the sun. ‘You gave this back to me twice in your life. Might I ask that you keep it this time, as a remembrance of me?’
A treacherous lump rose to my throat. ‘It would be my honour.’
He raised his chin a little to look his last upon me. I do not think I had ever seen him look so noble. ‘Once a knight of Saint James, always a knight of Saint James.’
He clasped my shoulder briefly, bowed to my wife where she stood in the shadow of the arch, and walked through the gatehouse.
I put the ribbon round my neck and dropped the medal beneath my clothes. The disc was still warm from the prince’s hand. I returned to Beatrice and we walked back, sober now.
The friar was sweeping the steps of the chapel where we’d wed the previous day, and stopped to lean upon his broom and wish us joy.
‘We have just taken leave of a pilgrim, who takes the silver road,’ I told him.
‘Aye; Don Pedro,’ said the friar, with less surprise than I’d expected. ‘I blessed his sandals at matins, for he leaves tomorrow.’
‘Today,’ my wife corrected, ‘we said our farewells even now.’
The friar’s sandy brows drew together in a frown. ‘There are no ships today. It is God’s day; they do not sail.’
He was right; we had wed the day before on a Saturday, and on Sundays, ships did not sail. I felt a sudden chill, as if the sun had hidden behind a cloud.
I took Beatrice’s hand, pulling her urgently.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Somewhere you know well.’
Act V scene xi
The dunes at Messina
Beatrice: Benedick was right, I knew the place well.
Here I’d seen a Moor couple with his white wife. Here I’d sat with a poet and written a sonnet. Here I’d lain below Benedick as he’d pressed my form into the sand. Here I’d seen a dark lady burn her husband’s seditious pamphlets. Here I’d embraced her son, and been spied upon by a prince.
We came to
the dunes short of breath, for Benedick seemed anxious, hurried. The sun glittered upon the waves, and found the powdered crystals in the sand. In the bejewelled landscape, there was only one dull patch – a heap of dun garments where the waves met the shore. A body?
Benedick ran forward so swiftly that my hand broke from his. I followed him, heart thumping. But all was well – it was only a pile of clothes. Benedick sorted them with a shaking hand – a sand-coloured robe and cloak, plain pattens. And a broad-brimmed pilgrim’s hat, pinned with a silver badge of St James. I took his hand again. ‘All is well,’ I said, ‘all is well.’ A foolish litany. For then I saw the footprints. They were the perfect impressions of naked feet, and they led into the sea, then … nowhere.
Benedick rushed into the waves, wading as far as he could. I stood, one foot in the sea and one on shore, shielding my eyes and looking beyond him, desperately seeking in that gilded path of sunlight the telltale dot of a bobbing head. But there was nothing but a reverent staff, dipping on the surf like driftwood. ‘Come back,’ I cried, terrified for that moment that the sea would take Benedick too.
And he did. He waded back to me, his face stricken with grief, and smashed his hand with frustration upon the water. I pulled him from the surf and we sank down, sodden, upon the sand. For once in his company, I had no words. We sat in a stunned silence. The sun beat down and warmed us, the tramontana blew his hair about, drying the curls. Only his eyes were still wet. And then he began to talk.
Of a prince who was not a prince, but a coward. A prince who cut an anchor and sent a shipful of men to their deaths, and then hid, craven, in his cabin. A prince who made his fellows swear to be secret, so his reputation would stand untouched.
‘His sins weighed him down in the end,’ he concluded. ‘They pulled him down into the deeps.’
I remembered more sins, farther back; of the business of Guglielma Crollalanza. I thought of Michelangelo; had he known Don Pedro would take this path – not the silver road to Compostela, but the golden path into the sea? Either way, the blood feud was paid, and Don Pedro had met his end.
Suddenly, I knew what to say. ‘The prince did redeem himself,’ I said. ‘He told me of your misprision, and of the Scopa cards. If he had not, I would always have doubted you.’ I took his face in my hands, turned him to me. ‘I think he loved you in his way; and now, I shall love you in mine.’ I kissed him, tasting the salt on his lips, the salt of the sea, the salt of his tears. He put his sodden arms about me and held me so tight to his chest I could barely breathe; but I did not care. Then I exclaimed, as I felt something sharp pressing upon my chest. I loosened my grip and felt in my bodice. I took the settebello, sodden and crumpled, from my gown, and held it out to him.
We looked at the card; purchased in the north and first bestowed in Sicily, it had passed from me to him and back a dozen times. It had been to Spain, to Scotland and now it had returned to Sicily. It had been the symbol of our merry war; but who was the victor? Who would keep the spoils, this saturated, sad piece of coloured card?
Then we looked at each other and began to smile. Hand to hand, complicit, we tore the card neatly in half; three and a half coins each.
And put each half in our bosoms, next to our hearts.
APPENDIX
Beatrice’s Sonnet
O! never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify,
As easy might I from my self depart
As from my soul which in thy breast doth lie:
That is my home of love: if I have ranged,
Like him that travels, I return again;
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe though in my nature reigned,
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stained,
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all.
Benedick’s Sonnet
Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;
And yet methinks I have Astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In the course of research for this novel I visited a bustling little market town. The town itself is unremarkable except for a few historical buildings in its very centre. The thing that marks this town out from all others is its most famous son. The citizens talk of him as if they know him, with affection and palpable pride. ‘Oh yes,’ said an elderly man to me on the street, ‘Shakespeare was from here.’
But this was not Stratford-upon-Avon, far from it.
This was Messina, Italy.
The actor Mark Rylance, Shakespearean extraordinaire and first artistic director of the Globe Theatre, says: ‘Anyone who claims to have written the plays of Shakespeare needs to show some Italian travel documents.’ I myself am in absolutely no doubt that in his ‘lost years’ Shakespeare, whoever he was, spent at least some of his time in Italy.
But what if we go a step farther? What if Shakespeare was Italian? This is the controversial theory put forth by Professor Martino Iuvara.
In his book Shakespeare era Italiano (2002), retired Sicilian professor Iuvara claims that Shakespeare was, in fact, not English at all, but Sicilian. His conclusion is drawn from research carried out from 1925 to 1950 by two professors at Palermo University. Iuvara posits that Shakespeare was born not in Stratford in April 1564, as is commonly believed, but in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza. His parents were not John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, but were Dr Giovanni Florio, and Guglielma Crollalanza, a Sicilian noblewoman.
Crollalanza, literally Crolla (Shake) lancia (spear) according to Iuvara, studied abroad and was educated by Franciscan monks who taught him Latin, Greek and history.
Because of their Calvinist beliefs, Michelangelo Florio’s family was persecuted by the Inquisition in Messina (then under the Spanish yoke) for alleged Calvinist propaganda. It seems that Giovanni Florio had published some sort of invective against Rome and the Church. The family supposedly departed Italy during the Holy Inquisition and moved to London. It was in London that Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza decided to change his surname to its English equivalent, and for his first name he ‘Englished’ his mother’s name Guglielma, to make William.
Iuvara’s evidence includes a play written by Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza in Sicilian dialect. The play’s name is Tanto traffico per niente, which can be translated as Much Ado about Nothing. He also mentions a book of sayings written by a writer, one Michelangelo Crollalanza, in sixteenth-century Calvinist northern Italy. Some of the sayings correspond to lines in Hamlet. Michelangelo’s father, Giovanni Florio, once owned a home called ‘Casa Otello’, built by a retired Venetian admiral known as Otello who, in a jealous rage, murdered his wife.
Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza decided to flee Italy because the Inquisitors had already pursued his father, and ended up in England. Contemporary Londoners even reported that Shakespeare ‘had an accent’, and portraits of him show a dark man with Mediterranean appearance.
In 2008 the mayor of Sicily petitioned Prime Minister Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II of England to recognise Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.<
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You might think all this an interesting idea or you might not believe a word of it. You might think both things. Maybe the story of Michelangelo Crollalanza is true. Or maybe it is just that; a story, to add to the authorship debate, to deepen the mystery surrounding the identity of Shakespeare.
And of that, I feel sure, the real William Shakespeare, whoever he was, would have approved.
Marina Fiorato
London, 2014
Beatrice and
Benedick
A READING GROUP GUIDE
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Beatrice & Benedick could be described as a prequel to William Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing. If you were already familiar with the play, how did knowing the ending affect your enjoyment of the book? Have you read other books which are prequels or sequels to classic works?
2. How important is it that much of the book is set in Sicily? Does the island have a character of its own?
3. What part do Moorish characters play in the book? How does their presence define those who come into contact with them?
4. What does the book say about the concept of Nobility? Which characters are truly noble, and which are not?
5. How does Benedick’s sea voyage change him?
6. Beatrice is an unconventional woman. How does she use her independent spirit to get what she wants? How does her conduct compare to that of Guglielma Crollalanza?
7. What is the significance of the religious characters in the book? How would you contrast the characters of Friar Francis and the Archbishop of Monreale?
8. What does the book tell us about father figures? What are the qualities or failings of Leonato Leonatus, Giovanni Florio Crollalanza, and Bartolomeo della Scala?
9. How does Michelangelo Crollalanza change through the course of the story?
10. Drama and public spectacle play a significant role in the book. How do the puppet show, the fencing match, the Naumachia and the Vara procession feed into the plot? Can you think of other instances in the book when the characters are playing a part?
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