Finally Dashka’s sex was too hot to handle and Willie finished inside her — though he pretended he hadn’t so as not to seem selfish. He managed to stay hard, but by the time he found himself inside Kate, Dashka had gone to the bathroom, and Kate was asleep or pretending to be asleep; so he faked a second orgasm and then he, too, passed out.
I’m surrounded by five angry Ophelias. I summon up all the earnestness my acting skills can yield.
“I did love you once,” I say. It sounds utterly hollow.
As one, the five Ophelias smile coquettishly back.
Then as one they begin to ululate wildly like witches, eyes blazing demonically. The sound swells, the pitch and volume so intense my head will surely split open, but they suddenly stop, turn to each other, and begin making out, grotesquely long tongues licking and probing until they melt into each other and finally dissolve into nothingness.
I’m left facing the bed illuminated by the spotlight from above.
Polonius taps me on the shoulder. “The Queen would speak with you, and presently.”
This time, I know who is there. I’m Hamlet, and my next scene is with the Queen, my wanton mother. I step to the bedside, and the form beneath the dark sheets sits up.
It is not my mother.
It’s Heather Locklear in a short, silk robe. She turns to me with a Mona Lisa smile, and silently raises her middle finger.
Willie woke with a splitting headache. He stumbled out of the beer bottle–strewn bedroom into the kitchen, where Dashka and Kate were having coffee and cigarettes. They looked ragged, too, and they weren’t looking at him or at each other.
Kate was announcing plans for them to see a band that night, and pointedly didn’t include Willie. Dashka responded monosyllabically: “Sure.”
“Good morning,” Willie said.
“There’s breakfast,” Dashka replied, with a nod toward the kitchen.
There was a pan filled with congealing grease on the stove, and on the counter, a half piece of shriveled, cold bacon on a plate between two stained paper towels: cold, used meat. He considered eating it, but the thought made him queasy.
He had a vision of the breakfast he had passed up: Robin sitting in the small of his back, handing him a cup of coffee, brunch at the Buttercup. He picked up the coffeepot. Dregs. Perfect. He poured himself a cup and drank it, black and bitter. He pulled a beer from the refrigerator and guzzled it to wash away the coffee and the headache. He gathered up his clothes, and with a mumbled promise to see Dashka back in Santa Cruz, he left.
Kate hadn’t said a word to him, and Dashka hadn’t said a word to Kate, her former “best friend from high school.”
As he closed the door behind him, Willie caught one last glimpse of Kate giving Dashka an utterly hopeless glance.
In the elevator, lines from Sonnet 129 sprang into his mind, about lust:
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
A hell of his own creation.
Outside the apartment building there was a pay phone. He looked at his watch: 11:37. Robin would be waiting for him. He dialed her number. To his surprise, the answering machine clicked on. In the shower, he thought, relieved. He left a message: profuse apologies and something about his aunt needing a ride and help with her car that didn’t make sense even to him. He promised that he would be back Sunday morning without fail. He would take her to Doidge’s in San Francisco, the fussiest, most romantic brunch he could think of. More apologies; a lame, smoochy good-bye.
When Willie got back in the car he didn’t start it but sat, staring straight ahead.
What the fuck, exactly, do you think you’re doing?
He’d betrayed Robin three times in twenty-four hours. He’d been arrested. He was running drugs for the individual who, despite his immense likability, was arguably the biggest loser on the Santa Cruz campus. Arguably, as there was also the case of a certain would-be Shakespeare scholar, the son of a respected Berkeley film professor, who’d been putting off writing his master’s thesis while doing little besides getting stoned and occasionally cheating on his girlfriend — who, incidentally, was funny, smart, sexy, and hadn’t yet dumped him or, as far as he knew, slept with anyone else, despite their don’t-ask-don’t-tell understanding.
Willie put his head on the steering wheel and felt sorry for his sorry self. He sat up, and took a deep breath.
He would go back to Robin’s. Take her out for brunch now. With what money? No, he had to deliver the drugs. He couldn’t go back to Robin’s as he was: no cash, no direction, no thesis, and no fucking clue of who or what William Shakespeare Greenberg was, let alone William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.
He looked at his watch again. He would do it all. Right now. Today. Figure out his thesis before the library closed; deliver the mushroom tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest; be back tomorrow.
Right.
He started the car, got back on the freeway, and headed back into Berkeley.
He found a parking space on a dead-end street on the north side of campus, took a single notebook from his backpack, then locked both it and the duffel in the trunk. He strode onto the campus and straight to the Doe Library in the shadow of the monolithic Campanile tower.
A quick consultation of the S drawer in the card catalog indicated that the works of Shakespeare and criticism thereof would be in Mr. Dewey Decimal’s eight hundreds. He consulted a map, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and wandered through the stacks until he found a shelf marked 822.
Willie had never been much for libraries. He owned a well-worn hardcover set of the plays from 1913 — his last birthday gift from his mother — and the Riverside Shakespeare that had been required reading for one of his undergraduate classes. The Department of Dramatic Art was bigger on lighting plots and scene shop than research, so every paper he’d written about Shakespeare as an undergrad had been done with no more secondary reading than the meager introductions in the dusty hardcover set and the Riverside’s voluminous footnotes, glosses, and appendixes. Even in the master’s program at UCSC he’d gotten by more on style than substance. His whole “thesis,” as it stood, and the whole of the “research” he’d done for it, consisted of getting very stoned late one night and flipping through the Riverside’s introduction, where, in the brief biography of Shakespeare, he had come upon the line, “Like all Elizabethans, he was — at least nominally — an Anglican whose forebears had been brought up in the Catholic confession.”
Willie had been struck by the casual aside: “at least nominally.” What did that mean? Willie had then flipped randomly to a spot in the book, and found the peculiar Sonnet 23.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
He and Robin had just spent a late night watching A Man for All Seasons, the story of Sir Thomas More, on TV, and the line made sudden, stoned sense to him.
It was on the strength of that, and that alone, that he had pitched the thesis to Dashka Demitra two days later. That was his research: one sentence in an undergraduate text, one line in a poem, and the late movie on Channel 5.
But now he was here in the library, in the Shakespeare section, and he felt certain that with all these books he could prove that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic, a dissident, perhaps sending coded messages hidden in the speeches of his kings and courtiers. He browsed the books in the stacks.
This section seemed to be all compilations of the Works. Dozens of them. He walked down the aisle, continuing to scan. Not dozens . . . hundreds. He walked around the corner, to the next set of shelves. Here were biographies of Shakespeare by the dozens. There were also biographies written by the snobs who believed no commoner could write such exalted works: biographies of Franci
s Bacon as Shakespeare, Edward de Vere as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe as Shakespeare. There were biographies of the biographers. There were explications of the Histories as fiction, the Tragedies as fact, the Comedies as autobiography. He walked to the next stack . . . Shakespeare on stage, Shakespeare on film, Shakespeare on radio, Shakespeare in art. There were tomes on Shakespeare and feminism, Shakespeare and Jung, Shakespeare and Freud, Shakespeare and the melodrama of the Old West. There was, seemingly, no end to the takes on Shakespeare.
Willie felt panic rising in his chest. He had to come up with something new. Something brilliant. Something true. What if there was a book in here called Shakespeare Was a Closet Catholic? He’d be starting over.
Willie turned away from the criticism section. He hadn’t seen any books about Shakespeare as a Catholic yet; if he didn’t see it, he couldn’t be accused of plagiarizing it. And Mizti was right: if Shakespeare was a Catholic, and Catholics were being executed left and right in his youth, it must have come out in the works themselves, right? In the text. Dashka had said it herself: “text, text, text.” If there were references to Sir Thomas More, surely there would be other references to — Willie didn’t really know much about Catholicism, but he was pretty sure he’d recognize them if he saw them. The Mass. Purgatory, that was a strictly Catholic thing. Rosaries. Crucifixes. The Trinity. Transubstantiation of bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ.
He went back to the section containing the works and stared at it blankly for a minute. He found himself gravitating to the smallest book on the shelf: Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He figured he’d start where he’d begun. The sonnets were so personal. If faith and religion were driving Shakespeare the man, that’s where they’d show up.
He pulled out the little book and stood in the stacks as he flipped through it, looking for references to God, or religion, or priests.
With increasing concern, he realized that there was very little God in these verses. There was love and beauty; there was passion, longing, betrayal, death, decay. There was a lot of sex. With “Will” a slang term for both “dick” and “cunt” in Shakespeare’s day, Willie lingered over these lines:
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
and these:
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me, for my name is “Will.”
Willie smiled at both the sexual punning and the idiocy of those who insisted the writer of Shakespeare’s works was named Edward, Francis, or Christopher.
But there was precious little of God, or faith, or religion. He scanned the poems and made a rough count: the word “god” appeared three times . . . once in the phrase “little Love-god,” i.e., Cupid; once in a colloquial “god forbid,” and once in regard to the fair youth — clearly male — whom he calls “a god in love.” In all instances, the word was uncapitalized. As he flipped through the pages, he saw “faith” a half-dozen times, all either in the colloquial “in faith,” meaning “truly,” or in reference to the faith — or the lack thereof — between two lovers.
In fact, the words that seemed to appear most often were “love” — probably hundreds of times — and, oddly, “Time.” Time, almost always capitalized, as though it, not God, were something holy, to be feared and worshipped. Devouring Time, Swift-footed Time, bloody tyrant Time, sluttish Time, never-resting Time, wasteful Time. Five sonnets at least were based on the conceit that the poet’s verse was the one weapon that could defeat Time.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
What was it, Willie wondered, that had given the Bard such an obsession with Time . . . and such certainty that his poetry would outlast it?
But that wasn’t his thesis.
Shakespeare and Catholicism . . .
He closed the book and put it back. Perhaps the sonnets weren’t the best place to start after all. He scanned along the shelves, and his eyes lit on a large, musty tome: The First Folio of Shakespeare. His heart foolishly skipped a beat. It couldn’t be an actual First Folio — then he looked atop the spine: The Norton Facsimile.
He pulled it out and opened it. It was a photographic facsimile of the First Folio, dated 1968.
Cool.
He’d seen pages of the First Folio reproduced before — usually the table of contents listing all thirty-six of the plays attributed to Shakespeare at its publication — but this was different. The whole book, complete, typos and all, with the funny elongated s’s that look like f’s and the Elizabethan spellings of “kisse,” “dreame,” “doo.”
He took the book and found an empty cubicle. He opened it to the play he knew best, The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke.
If he could find Catholic sympathies anywhere, he thought, he could find them in Hamlet. He scanned to the ghost scene . . . he remembered something about hell in there. He found it.
Gho. I am thy Fathers Spirit,
Doom’d for a certaine terme to walke the night;
And for the day confin’d to fast in Fiers,
Till the foule crimes done in my dayes of Nature
Are burnt and purg’d away.
Purgatory! There it is, Willie thought, as clear an indication of Shakespeare’s theology as you could ask for. He took out his notebook and scribbled down the act and scene number of the speech. He flipped through the rest of the play, looking for more. What about the To Be or Not to Be soliloquy? All manner of meditation on the hereafter, there. He found it, Act Three, Scene One. Hamlet characterizes death:
To dye, to sleepe
No more.
Hm, thought Willie. That doesn’t sound Catholic. Or religious at all. But in contemplating suicide, Hamlet develops further:
Who would Fardles beare
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Countrey, from whose Borne
No Traveller returnes, puzels the will,
And makes us rather beare those illes we have,
Then Flye to others we know not of.
Willie could never remember what a fardel was, but no matter. Death was something from which “No Traveller returnes.” What happened to the Rapture? The resurrection of the physical body? This was clearly not Catholicism; if anything it was a tremulous agnosticism.
He flipped to his favorite speech, where he was certain there was something about angels in heaven.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custome of exercise; and indeed, it goes so heaverly with my disposition that this goodly frame the Earth, seemes to me a sterrill Promontory; this most excellent Canopy the Ayre, look you, this brave ore-hanging, this Maiesticall Roofe, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeares no other thing to mee, then a foule and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in Reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and moving how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angel? in apprehension, how like a God? the beauty of the world, the Parragon of Animals; and yet to me, what is this Quintessence of Dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seeme to say so.
Willie closed the book and put his head down on the desk.
This is no Catholic! He praises Man. MAN. He compares Man to a god. Not to God, mind you, but “a god.” Shakespeare was a pagan? No, that was just poetry. He’s a humanist and a cynical one at that. Man is the summit of creation, and yet dust. It’s nihilism. He sounds more like some confused, faithless, agnostic motherfucker like me than someone with a religious / political axe to grind.
Willie felt, at that precise moment, exactly like Hamlet: he had a fucked-up family life like Hamlet; like Hamlet, he was charged with a task that he seemingly lacked the emotional equipment to complete; and he carried a packet of goods which, like Hamlet’s death-sentence letter to the King o
f England, was surely meant to deliver him to a rude ending.
Maybe it’s just Hamlet. He’s only one character, in a particular state of mind; maybe the nihilism is just a symptom of his depression, his melancholy. Of course.
He opened the book and flipped around looking for plays and speeches that he recalled dealt with faith.
He spent all day sifting through the plays, and though he found Puritans played as fools, he also found friars played as feeble; he found Shylock the Jew at once base and profound. He found kingly but cocksure Catholics like Henry V, and godly heathens like Pericles.
He came upon The Life of King Henry the Eight. Of course! Elizabeth’s father, Henry Tudor, had launched the Reformation in England. Surely there . . .
He tore through the play. Henry VIII, the first Protestant King of England, came across as more Machiavellian than monstrous: determined to keep England strong and his newborn dynasty healthy. Of Henry’s two wives in the play, the Catholic Catherine was noble and pious, forgiving Henry even as he forsakes her. The Protestant Anne Boleyn was fickle at first, but later exalted as “the goodliest woman that ever lay by man.” Both, to Willie’s dismay, were portrayed with humanity. Henry’s dispute with the Pope, his divorce from Catherine, and his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn were portrayed as evils necessary to produce that flower of English royalty . . .
Elizabeth I.
If Shakespeare was a rebel, railing against an oppressive regime, he had an odd way of showing it.
He read the text all the way through; an entire Shakespeare play exactly about the moment that the Catholic / Protestant schism opened in England, and he found poetry and pathos, great pomp and small truths, but no codes, no hidden nods to the Pope, just, as in all his plays, human characters drawn with understanding and compassion.
My Name Is Will Page 18