“Richard,” William said, “I should strip thee and whip thee for thy stones, wert thou not already naked.”
The other boys laughed with nervous confusion; young Richard was obviously fully clothed.
After a tense pause, William raised an eyebrow high on his high brow.
“I see on you no breeches, yet despite thy dick of a name, I suspect a breach — a vertical one — in thy lap. Gloves, I note you have none, but that of Venus. No ruff, but that which circles thy perfect maidenhead. Ay, I should whip thee, but the gentle whipping of maids is, sadly, frowned upon amongst the better classes. So will I let thy case rest.”
William looked stern as he sat back down on his desk, but he smiled to himself. Only half the boys, he knew, got only half the puns, but they all got the gist: their teacher had just told the class wit that he was a pussy in five different ways.
William moved on. “Continue reading aloud, after ‘Cases of Nouns.’ ”
“Nouns be declined,” went the singsong, “with six cases, singularly and plurally. The nominative, the genitive, the dative, the accusative, the vocative, and the ablative.”
“Richard, what be the cases of nouns?”
“Nouns be declined with six cases, the nominative, the dative, the accusative, and the ablative,” Richard responded.
“Two hast thou forgotten.”
“Nay, I forget not, but speak not for fear of whipping, magister.”
“Why should I whip thee for naming the cases?” asked William, puzzled.
“Two be oaths, magister.”
“Oaths?”
“Ay. The genital and the vocative.” He pronounced the v in “vocative” like an f.
All the boys got that one. The laughter cascaded through the open timbers of the roof like angels in flight.
William looked angry for a moment, then broke his mask and laughed along. “Veritas! The master teaches and the pupil learns, all too well.”
“WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE!”
The booming voice from the doorway stopped the laughter midpeal. All heads in the room turned as one to see a black-robed figure in the doorway, holding a Bible under his arm, his face reddening.
“Did I hear thee professing profanity and vulgarity to my charges?”
William leapt up from the desk with the instinctive fear of a schoolboy for his master. He gave a deep reverence. “Merely teaching Lyly as writ, magister.”
“I do not recall Lyly teaching declensions thus. I would speak with thee. Outside, sirrah. Nunc.”
Snickers from the class; a barely audible fart.
William followed the schoolmaster of the King’s New School out of the class and into the street.
He’d been dreading this.
When William was himself a breechless little moppet, Stratford was an openly Catholic town, and so were the New School’s headmasters. But in the year when William was eleven, public officials were forced to take the Oath of Supremacy, acknowledging the Protestant Church of England as their religion and Elizabeth as its head. Rather than take the oath, William’s schoolmaster, Simon Hunt, left to study for the priesthood at Rheims, a Catholic seminary on the Continent. More than one of his Stratford students went with him.
But Stratford was still a Catholic town, so it hired yet another Catholic schoolmaster, John Cottom. He was William’s teacher for three years, and allowed William to stay in school even when the Shakespeare family could no longer pay his tuition. And when William, despite all aptitude, couldn’t afford to go to Oxford or Cambridge, John Cottom had given William a position as his assistant, teaching Latin to the younger students.
But during the past summer, word arrived in Stratford that John’s brother, Thomas Cottom — yet another who had gone to Rheims to study for the priesthood, and had returned to preach in secret amongst faithful English Catholics — had been arrested and taken to the Tower of London for imprisonment and torture. Then, in the short break before the current term, William heard that John Cottom had vanished from Stratford in the middle of the night. Rumors flew through Stratford like spooked ravens. Some said Cottom had gone to London to plead for his brother’s life; some that he had gone to Rheims; some that he had fled to his family’s lands in Lancashire; some that he himself had been taken to the Tower; some that he was already dead.
Three days before classes resumed, William received a brief letter from the new schoolmaster, Alexander Aspinall: William was to return for the new term as expected. It was the second day of class, and Aspinall had yet to make an appearance . . . until now.
The smell of roasting meat, fresh-cut hay, and human waste walloped William in the face as he emerged into the late morning air. It was coolish for autumn in Stratford — which is to say, bitterly cold. The puddles in the muddy street were turning toward slush. Fog hung nearly as low as the top of the Guild Hall Chapel next door, where the school had begun its day in the dark, with morning services. A fishmonger walked past missing all but one visible tooth, proffering “eelsh, bash, and shalmon.” William couldn’t help but note that the fishmonger — twenty-one or twenty-two, Irish, he guessed, with large pale green eyes and black hair — aside from being near toothless, was exceedingly attractive. In fact, he ruminated, there must be certain advantages —
“So: you are Will,” rasped an impatient, rheumy voice.
William turned to face Alexander Aspinall.
“No Will I, magister. I am small of purse and stature, and therefore make amends with a rich and lofty name. So: my name is William.”
Aspinall closed his black cassock over a staid white shirt, sheltering from an icy blade of cold wind from the north. He looked William over.
“William, then,” he said at last. “John Cottom spoke well of you.”
“I knew not that you were acquainted,” William replied.
“He left a letter to his replacement. Most eloquent.”
“He was an excellent schoolmaster,” William said warily, but with some relief. If John had found the time to leave such a letter, he at least hadn’t been suddenly snatched away to the Tower.
“But he was a papist, they say,” Aspinall ventured.
“I know not.”
“Do you not?” asked Aspinall with a flash in his eyes. “His brother was, ’tis certain, along with many students and masters of the King’s School past.” Aspinall opened the cover of his Bible and referred to papers tucked inside. “Simon Hunt, Thomas Jenkins, Robert Debdale . . .”
William was beginning to calm down. He answered coolly, “A man may be many things that his brother — or his schoolmaster — is not.”
“Yet Thomas’s faith was wicked. And his brother John, ’twould seem by his sudden absence, shares in his guilt.”
“Of the righteousness of Thomas Cottom’s faith, or John’s, or indeed the faith of any man, only God might know of a certainty.”
Aspinall frowned. His gaze bored into William like a thumbscrew. Then he drew in a breath, still regarding William curiously. “Indeed. Well spoken, William. The soul of a man finds purchase with God only by private piety, not by the baubles of priests, nor by the gold of St. Peter’s coffers, nor by the display of the bloody Roman crucifix. So the new faith teaches our princes; so our sovereign Queen teaches us; and so shall we teach our pupils. I neither know nor care what philosophy my predecessors loosed in this our school that brought the Crown’s displeasure upon Stratford, but no lasciviousness nor other popery will abide here while I am master. Neither would I have even the suspicion of recusancy fall upon my new usher, lest it fall thence on me.”
William fought back his rising spleen and said, “Ay, magister.”
“Therefore, thou shalt cease thy instruction in stones and cases, the genital, the fuckative, and all other such privy parts of speech in my school; or thou shalt find thyself pondering, at thy soon-arrived last, how best to distribute the four parts of thy personal estate unto the dismembers of thy family. Comprehendisne?”
“Ay, magister.”
&
nbsp; Alexander Aspinall harrumphed, then opened the door leading back into the schoolhouse. William entered and Aspinall followed. Clothing rustled as pupils turned to watch William return from his censure. As he strode to the master’s desk, he felt the eyes of both students and master heating his back from the inside like peat fire. From the desk, he picked up the open copy of Lyly’s grammar. With a glance at Aspinall, who stood watching from the doorway, William closed the book and set it gingerly on the desk.
“Satis Linguae Latinae hodie. Enough of that. Let us move on to matters of less controversy.” He quickly took up another, much larger book from the desk, and opened it to the marked page.
“Where stood we in the Gospels yesterday? Ah, Matthew, chapter one, verse eighteen.” He cleared his throat and read in Latin: “Christi autem generatio sic erat cum esset desponsata mater eius Maria Ioseph antequam convenirent inventa est in utero habens de Spiritu Sancto.” (Which two decades later would be translated for the King James version thus: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: when as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.”)
He dropped the book onto the desk; it landed with a thump like Anne Boleyn’s head into the basket.
“Disputate,” William barked. “Discuss.”
Several hands shot up. William acknowledged one.
“How came Mary with the child of the Holy Ghost?” asked an older boy who understood the Latin well.
“And what means convenirent, ‘they came together’?” asked a younger boy who did not.
William cast a studiously blank look toward the door, but it was already closing with a slam; Alexander Aspinall was gone.
Chapter Three
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!
— Edmund, King Lear, I.ii.118
Todd Deuter knelt on all fours, his face glowing in the moonlight, his nose two inches from a large cow pie. Springing forth from the mound of bovine poop was a mushroom. Todd plucked it from the patty to examine it more closely.
“Panaeolus sphinctrinus,” Todd called to Willie. “Shakespeare, you’re the Latin scholar, you know what it means?”
“Something about a sphincter,” Willie responded.
“Correct!” said Todd, holding up the toadstool like a puppet. “It means, I no get you high, but I maybe kill you, ASSHOLE!” He laughed and tossed it aside.
The University of California at Santa Cruz is nestled in the treeline where the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains rise up to meet the ancient redwood forest. The school’s small residential colleges are scattered among clearings in the trees, connected by long wooden footbridges that span the forest ravines. The urban legend is that the school, built in the 1960s, was decentralized by design, with no focal point for Berkeley-style student protests. As a result, the campus itself is shady, moody, mysterious, solitary. But between the campus on the hill and the sleepy town of Santa Cruz below lay the rolling pastures of the Cowell Ranch. At night, the pastures are wide open to the sky, quiet, starlit, and empty but for the occasional group of drunk, stoned, or tripping students and the cow patties and confused cows that are their prey.
Ultraprogressive UCSC had no fraternities, no sororities, no athletic programs, no grades, for that matter. Students took classes exclusively on a pass / no pass basis. With so few attractions for jarheads and jocks, it was therefore a tiny — though not null — subset of UCSC students who engaged in the rural-campus, drunken-frat-boy pastime of cow tipping. The activity, for those not familiar, involves sneaking up on a sleeping, standing cow, running at it full speed, and knocking it over onto its side before it wakes up. Good times.
The cow pastures of UCSC were more popular for activity of another sort. “Cow tripping,” Todd called it. Go out under the moonlight, hunt for magic mushrooms, and if found, consume immediately. Guitars, dumbeks, and Hacky Sacks optional, female companionship preferred.
That had been Willie’s plan for the night, cow tripping with Todd and a few other friends. Willie had invited Dashka to come along, and to his shock, she’d agreed. Dashka had studying to do, so they had gotten a late start; Willie guessed it was already two a.m.
Todd moved away down the hill, scanning the ground for mushrooms, while Willie and Dashka sprawled on a Mexican blanket in the grass. No one had brought a flashlight, but even on this moonless night it wasn’t necessary. There were stars galore glimmering in a cloudless sky and illuminating the small depression where they sat. The light from the town below and from the occasional car coming to or from the campus was blocked out by rises in the rolling pastures.
Willie pulled his green backpack toward him and took out his pipe and a small bundle of tinfoil, which he opened carefully to reveal a small cube of hashish the size of the tip of his little finger and the color of raw honey.
Dashka watched silently as Willie took the cube and waved a lighter under it to soften it, then broke off a small corner and crumbled it into the pipe. Dashka took the pipe and lighter, and smoked; then coughed as she tried to hold in the hit.
“Shit,” she said in the comically held-breath voice of all practicing stoners, “that’s strong shit.”
“Nice vocabulary. They don’t teach us that in the lowly master’s program.”
“ ‘Shit,’ ” Dashka said, blowing out a cloud of smoke, “is one of the oldest words in the English language. Along with ‘dick,’ ‘fuck,’ and ‘cunt,’ by the way. All perfectly good, concise, four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. If you were doctoral material you’d know that.”
As she passed the pipe back to Willie, his eyes lingered on her lips in the starlight. Full. Sensuous. Willie took the pipe, and took a hit.
“So do some Shakespeare for me, Shakespeare,” Dashka said, rolling onto her stomach, her chin in her hand.
“Like what?”
“What do you know?”
Willie knew a lot. In addition to his daily forays into the Riverside Shakespeare, he’d been a theater major as an undergrad; he’d played Lysimachus in a student production of Pericles, and Rosencrantz in Hamlet at Berkeley’s Greek Theater. He was quick at memorization. Words tended to fall into his mind and stay there in bunches, like strands of DNA, whole double helixes of poetry, prose, scraps of movie and TV dialogue. He sometimes wondered if he would eventually run out of brain cells to store it all.
Several passages sprang to mind. He ran a quick calculation: which one would be most likely to get him laid? “I know a bit about a lovers’ kiss,” he said.
“‘Now let me say “Good night,” and so say you;
If you will say so, you shall have a kiss.’
‘Good night,’ quoth she, and, ere he says ‘Adieu,’
The honey fee of parting tender’d is:
Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace;
Incorporate then they seem; face grows to face.
Till, breathless, he disjoin’d, and backward drew
The heavenly moisture, that sweet coral mouth,
Whose precious taste her thirsty lips well knew,
Whereon they surfeit, yet complain on drouth:
He with her plenty press’d, she faint with dearth
Their lips together glued, fall to the earth.”
He stopped.
He wasn’t sure whether he had bored her or not. She hadn’t moved. Her chin was still in her hand.
“The Rape of Lucrece?” she asked.
“Venus and Adonis.”
Dashka looked at him intently. “Nobody studies the long
poems, much less memorizes them. I read it once, but . . . how does it end?”
“For Adonis? Not well. It’s actually very female-empowering. She comes on to him pretty hard.”
She shifted position just a little bit. “Really?” Looked at him a certain way. Open.
Willie leaned over and kissed her. From the first millisecond, it was a great kiss. He could taste the sweetness of the hashish on her tongue as she ran it lightly across his. Her lower lip melted under gentle pressure from his teeth, like a ripe apricot just before it bursts forth with juice. The kiss didn’t last long. She leaned away and said, “Mmm.” Then, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five. You?”
“Twenty-six.”
They were nearly the same age, yet Dashka was probably four years ahead of him academically.
“Did you take time off between undergrad and grad school?” she asked.
“No.” Willie shifted. “No. I finished my coursework fall of eighty-four. I’ve just been, you know, working on that thesis topic, researching — ”
“For two years? And you’re only now submitting a topic? You should either be done or kicked out of the program by now. Welsh must like you. What’s holding you back?”
Willie felt himself tense, and wondered if she noticed. He took a hit and felt the smoke course straight through him, making his limbs go simultaneously light and heavy. He closed his eyes, and as the chemical hit his brain, a series of pulsing, abstract shapes flashed across his retinas. Abstract, yet almost recognizable, like last night’s first dream. That shape . . . in blue and green, like the shape of a footprint in the sand . . . or was it the handle of the refrigerator door from his childhood? And that one, a blazing gold swirl of concentric rings against the blackness . . . what was it? Something to do with his mother. Her hair . . .
My Name Is Will Page 2