“If it is of country matters you wish to speak, of men and women and how they fit together, I have learnt much — ”
“Nay, not that. It is of matters celestial, not bodily, I wish to discourse. I hope I have not waited too long, as I fear by your recent passion at the dinner table. If so, I beg your forgiveness.”
William waited.
Mary took a breath. “You know well that my family is of the Church of Rome.”
William snorted. “Indeed! I may hardly forget, as of a sudden there are many would have me stretched or hanged, burned or cut open for it. Though I marvel to hear it thus spoken of freely in our house, where faith has been like the bastard child in the room, neither speaking nor spoken of.”
“Ay,” said Mary. “Oft we bandy not that which touches us most deeply, nor do we for fear acknowledge the danger that lurks the nearest. We thought to inform you of much upon your coming of age, but now you are come to manhood before your time, ’tis time you knew all.”
“What all?” asked William.
Mary picked up a poker and stoked the fire absently as she began to talk, the embers glowing orange at first then bursting into small blue flame. “The Ardens, you know, have been in Warwickshire since the time of William the Conqueror.”
“Ay, so have I been told.” William’s father liked to brag about his wife’s high lineage when he got drunk.
“And through all those generations, the Church of Rome and the glory of the Blessed Mother Mary, my namesake, and of the Father, and Son, and the Holy Spirit, have been our guides and our sanctuary.” William shifted uncomfortably.
“Mayhap you remember it not,” Mary continued, “but you were baptized in the Old Faith, and ere you could walk, heard Mass in the old rites. The troubles of London seemed far away in those days, and in Stratford we quietly worshipped as we had always done.
“But it was even during the year that John served as bailiff that the seeds of our downfall were sown. For Mary of Scotland allied with the northern Catholic earls, and they, thinking to place her on the throne, revolted. They were defeated, and the Crown’s response was swift. Within that year the Earl of Leicester knighted Thomas Lucy to be his sword and hammer against papists in Warwickshire, and he set to with vigor.”
Mary paused for a moment, and when she resumed her voice was thick.
“Father William Butcher, who baptized you at Holy Trinity, was replaced by a new vicar. The church’s icons and images were defaced and its altar hauled down. Many Catholics who had grown wealthy were suddenly set upon by levies and taxes, fines and enclosures, and other impediments great and small. The unsanctioned trade in wool, in which your father and many others of the true faith prospered, was shut down.
“And then came the most grievous blow, dealt whence we least expected it. A papal bull excommunicated Elizabeth, and deemed her deposed and ripe for murder. O foolish impolitic! Meant to encourage a Catholic uprising, the bull achieved the contrary effect, for it forced every conscience to forsake either Virgin Queen or Holy Father. How should we do so? Why must we do so? Did not our Lord tell us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s? Why would the Pope join, perforce, the church and state that Our Lord would keep asunder?
“The next year, all the Crown’s officers were made to swear an Oath of Supremacy to Elizabeth, as both Sovereign Queen and head of church. Many a proud English Catholic chose England over Rome.”
Mary looked at John.
John leaned forward and there was a look in his eye William had rarely seen before. It was shrewd, and it was sharp.
“No doubt, my son, you think me mad. A dotard, mayhap, or a drunkard, or a fool, or all of these. No one fears fools and drunkards; they are left in peace to tend their families and rankle their friends and breathe their foul odors in the free air. So it has been with me. But . . .”
John Shakespeare looked from side to side mock-conspiratorially, as though there were spies in the very walls of the Shakespeare parlor, then whispered, “I am but mad north northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” And he winked.
William shook his head, confused. “And what, pray you, means that?”
Mary answered, “Your father has played the part of the poor, mad old alderman, fallen on drink and hard times, to escape the swearing of oaths both damned and damning, that we might live in peace. And he plays his part well . . . too well at times,” she said with an arch of her eyebrow toward John, before turning back to William. “But we are neither so poor nor in such hard times as we give out.”
William was angry. “So what, then? Do you fawn and cower here, acting the cleaving of a chicken for eight as though it were a Saturnalia feast, only for the sake of Sir Thomas Lucy? What then of your family, and your faith? A faithless faith indeed, that believes not in itself, nor will stand for the right, but rather watches and weeps in silence while its priests are butchered i’the public square.”
Mary Shakespeare’s eyes flashed. “Fie, William! Are you yet so mean of understanding, despite all your wit!? To be silent when the soul cries out for justice is like a torture. Yet to be silent under torture may be accounted the bravest act of all, for it may protect your loved ones from a worse fate.”
William went quiet, thinking of his own weakness on the rack.
Mary composed herself. “We are at war, William. Beneath the ribbons, the jeweled ruffs and sparkling diadems, and other festoonery of the summer of Elizabeth’s reign, we are at war. A quiet war, of Englishman against Englishman. And we are much i’the minority. As were the very first Christians beneath the Roman yoke in ancient times, we are small and secret; yet also are we strong and true.”
Now it was Mary’s turn to lower her voice, and when she looked from side to side as though the walls held spies, she did it with all seriousness.
“There is resistance, William. Secretly, quietly, while keeping an inky Protestant cloak to the winds of the world, we fight back. Not just the Shakespeares, but my cousins the Ardens both at Wilmcote and Park Hall, and many other families beside — the Sadlers, Throckmortons, Hoghtons and Catesbys, the Barbers, Cawdreys, Cottoms, the Grevilles — too many to name — are of our cause, and together we do what we may to save our consciences and our souls at once.”
“And what do you do?”
“What the oppress’d can do. We spy. We meet. We pull what frayed strings we hold, in this the tattered fabric of our cause.”
“William,” said John, “we know of your ill-treatment at Charlecote.”
William was astonished; he had only been a guest in Sir Thomas Lucy’s laundry for a matter of hours. “You . . . how? Whence?”
“Your maiden friend Rosaline went to the Bear for aid,” his father replied. “A brave girl, that, for her family is of the new faith; for her even to be seen there was a danger.”
William’s stomach sank. Rosaline had saved him, and he had forgotten her.
“Did you not wonder wherefore you were delivered?” asked Mary.
William recovered and said slowly, “Ay, I marveled greatly at it. For I was set free by no less than Leicester himself.”
Mary said, “There is a network of messengers, whereby we may get word back and forth to others of our cause within hours, when it would take a single man days to take the message.”
“Few are there who have the ear of the Earl of Leicester,” John continued, “and fewer still who might sway him to spare the rod to a Catholic. It was your mother’s cousin, Viscountess Montague — a favorite of Elizabeth’s despite her faith — who interceded with Leicester on your behalf.”
William remembered Lady Magdalen, Viscountess Montague, well: the tall, stately woman who had diffused the near-swordplay between Leicester and Edward Arden at Kenilworth Castle in his youth, the day he had seen the Queen.
“I shall honor the Viscountess Montague ever hereafter,” said William, amazed, and then turned his gaze on his mother. “As for my mother, and her family” — he found himself at a loss for
words — “I have honored her ever.”
“If you honor me in sooth,” said Mary Arden Shakespeare, “then I would ask one boon of you.”
“But name it.”
“Be no longer my boy.”
“Pardon?”
“Step forward now, William, and be a man.”
“In what wise?”
“A man is judged by his fealty to family, faith, and country,” said Mary. “Your family you may best serve by first having one. Anne Hathaway you have got with your child. Seek not, despite your father’s counsel, to undo what God has done; seek not to murder your own with your apothecary’s poisons. The child, if you will stay in this Catholic family and in this Catholic house, you will have, and a marriage sanctified.”
William felt the walls of the house closing in on him, but he managed to speak. “Ay, Mum.”
Mary nodded firmly. “Good. Our society, of defenders of the Old Faith, meets at regular intervals. These many years, when I have gone to visit my relations at Wilmcote, this was my true cause: to hear Mass and take both Communion and counsel. We are summoned to meet this Sunday — urgently, else your wedding plans would take precedence — at Park Hall. I shall make report of your mistreatment at Sir Lucy’s hand, and — ”
“I would escort you,” William said.
Mary stopped. “But why?”
“For reasons threefold. One, for purposes of mine own: if there is a meeting of Catholics on the borders of Lancashire, I would seek any Cottoms who may attend, or who know their whereabouts, for I have remembrances of the school which I am bound to deliver unto John, my former master. Two, if I am now to take up the family’s popish mantle, I would hear a Mass of the old rites, and mayhap take Communion. And last but not the least, I would not see my mother journey without her kin to see her kin.”
Mary smiled. “I am usually wont to go with the Sadlers, our neighbors; but yours would be even more welcome company upon the road, and there are other shrines along the way, which I would have you see.”
William stood and bowed deeply.
Mary stood and kissed William on the brow. “I have not been too weighty with you? I fear it; for though by all outward signs you are a man, yet methinks troubled times turn boys to men out of season.”
Mary smiled, touched her son tenderly on the cheek, and rustled quietly up the stairs.
William looked at his father, who sat still upon his stool.
“Does this mean,” said William carefully, “that in all these years, for the purpose of keeping out of church and the civic eye, that all your world was but a stage? That your baseness, your poverty, your love of drink, but a show?”
“Well,” said John Shakespeare, “we are neither base nor poor, praise God and your mother’s dowry. As for love of drink . . .” He shrugged, and began to laugh, low at first, then long and loudly, until William couldn’t help but allow the whisper of a laugh along with him.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat for’t. Knock, knock! Who’s there, in the other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator.
— Porter, Macbeth, II.iii.3
Willie winced as Alan Greenberg’s Audi bottomed out with a metallic crunch in a rut on the dirt road. That was all he needed now, to mess up his dad’s car —
“SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!” barked a voice with too much smoke in it and as ear-rending as a band saw. Willie jumped; a half second later he saw the ghostly apparition of an orange-vested parking lot attendant, with stringy long hair down to his waist, a pocked face, dark sunglasses even at night, and a gleaming walkie-talkie at his belt, float by his window. “FIVE miles an hour!” the voice screamed again as the apparition faded in the darkness of Willie’s rearview mirror. Willie slowed down to five miles an hour. He was barely moving.
One minute I’m going too slow, the next too fast. We as a society have a very narrow window of acceptable behavior.
Willie stopped at a checkpoint and explained to a second, equally inimical and unclean security guard that he had passes waiting for him at the gatehouse. A third guard growled at him to park “over there,” in a long line of cars in a cropped field of hay next to a barbed-wire fence.
Willie got out of the car and stretched his muscles after the long drive. The sky was clear, and it was a warm night. He looked up at the stars, and he thought of Orion’s Schlong. It seemed less funny now. In the distance he heard music, laughter, a drum beating. He took his backpack and the duffel from the trunk, and followed a sign that said PARTICIPANTS.
Approaching the performers’ entrance to the Faire, he began to make out shapes in the darkness: fluttering ribbons on rough pine poles; wood frame fences swathed in burlap and guy-wired with thick rope; a Tudor-style gatehouse with a thatched roof and three windows, one of which was open. In a small courtyard in front of the gatehouse, people milled about in groups of three or four, sitting on hay bales, chatting and smoking. Although the Faire was long since closed for the day, several were in full Elizabethan costume: peasant dresses and bodices; pumpkin pants and flat caps; kilts and sporrans. A few were half costumed in baggy trousers or a skirt with a puffy shirt, an Elizabethan hat, or a cloak. Several were too cool for any of that after hours, and wore jeans and t-shirts, with a sweatshirt and perhaps a black leather motorcycle jacket against the night air. One of the fully costumed peasant girls played a reel on a recorder, while a straggly bearded middle-aged man in a kilt banged a rhythm on an Irish bodhran. A largish woman in wire-rimmed glasses sat alone on a hay bale smoking from a long-stemmed pipe. The whole place smelled not unpleasantly of mud, wet hay, tobacco, marijuana, bay laurel, and an occasional, earthier waft from the burlap-shrouded area marked PRIVIES.
Willie stepped up to the open window of the gatehouse. Inside there was a light, but he couldn’t divine its source. A heavyset woman with thick spectacles regarded Willie warily.
“How might I help thee, good sir?”
“Um, I’m supposed to pick up some passes.”
“Um, I’m s’posedta?” parroted the woman. “Best look to thy language, sirrah, it suiteth not this respectable shire.” She had so many necklaces around her neck, of ivory and ceramic and rustic gold with inset gems, he couldn’t absorb them all at once, not when she was speaking pseudo- Elizabethan at him. “Guild?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What guild are you in? Please tell me you know.”
Willie remembered his instructions from Todd. “Fools Guild.” The woman looked at him like she had just sat on a grapefruit.
“Milady,” Willie added lamely.
The woman shook her head, sighed loudly, opened up a recipe box, and flipped through a series of tabbed index cards. “Fools Guild. Figures. Ye fools should learn the local tongue. Name?”
“Greenberg.”
She shuffled through the passes. “Willie?”
“That’s me.”
“Day pass, night pass, and camping pass. The full package.” She eyed him suspiciously. “Thou knowest someone important, I trow?”
Willie thought of answering with an “i’faith” or an “ay, verily,” but said nothing; speaking Elizabethan to a glorified and clearly power-tripping ticket taker just felt stupid.
“Can I see some ID?” the woman asked.
Willie produced his driver’s license.
She squinted at it through thick glasses. “Santa Cruz.”
“Yeah, UCSC.”
The woman nodded. The answer seemed to satisfy her somehow.
“Who is thy guildmaster?”
“I don’t know his name, I’m supposed to look for him inside. The King of the Fools.”
“And you’ve never been here before?”
>
“Only as a visitor. Why, is there a problem?”
“Our entertainers are meant to be schooled in Elizabethan language, costumes, and customs.”
Willie did a deep bow, leaning back on one foot and sweeping an imaginary hat off his head as he had when he’d played the Fool in a scene from King Lear. He sang along with the tune on the recorder behind him.
“He that hath and a little tiny wit —
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain —
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.”
The woman gave him a grudging nod. “Very well, Fool. Have you a costume?”
“Yes. Ay.”
“Let’s see it.”
Willie rummaged into the duffel bag and pulled out the fool’s costume, jingling and jangling. The woman looked at it distastefully. “Not a thing of beauty, but it’s period.”
She handed him his passes. “There you go.”
“Any idea where I might find the King of Fools?”
The woman looked at him suspiciously once more. “No.”
“Really? I was told everybody knows him.”
“Then ask everybody,” she said, and after one last, suspicious glance, looked away and made herself busy replacing the box of passes and shuffling some paperwork.
“Okay,” said Willie sarcastically, “thanks, milady.”
As Willie stuffed his costume into his bag, a girl in a leather jacket with pink hair, a tangle of earrings in her pierced ears, and smoking a cigarette said, “If you’re looking for the King of the Fools, his name’s Jacob. You might try the coffeehouse. At the entrance to Witches’ Wood. About four hundred yards inside, on the right. Just follow the scent of Turkish coffee.”
“Thanks.”
“No prob.”
Willie headed toward the participants’ entrance, showed his passes to the guard, and stepped through a burlap curtain into another, bizarro, universe.
Chapter Thirty
It is widely surmised that young Shakespeare witnessed performances by the touring theatrical companies that crisscrossed the English provinces. Each of these troupes was in the employ of powerful nobles who were well aware of their potential as propaganda organs, and all but the lightest comedies of the day carried political messages. Given the sociopolitical turmoil in his own life, one can imagine the young poet as both susceptible to and fascinated by the emotional and political power of the theater.
My Name Is Will Page 21