My Name Is Will

by Jess Winfield

  And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels

  From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels:

  Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,

  The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry,

  I must up-fill this osier cage of ours

  With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.

  The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;

  What is her burying grave that is her womb,

  And from her womb children of divers kind

  We sucking on her natural bosom find.

  — Friar Lawrence, Romeo and Juliet, II.iii.1

  There were no Ophelias in the dream this time.

  “My lord, the Queen would speak with you, and presently.”

  I move slowly toward the woman lying on the illuminated bed.

  It must be Mizti.

  “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.”

  It isn’t Mizti.

  Her hair is loose around her head, and lovely, a blazing nebula of stars against the dark sheets, a Van Gogh nightscape.

  I sit on the bed beside her.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “William . . .” she says, laying a hand on my arm. “Given the choice, to be or not to be . . . always choose to be.”

  I know what she is going to say next: it is everything. It echoes in my head every day of my life.

  “Be who you are,” she begins, but she is having difficulty speaking, “Be . . . be . . .” and now she’s drowned out by horns that blare from above, blending with the spotlight from the stars: the hunting horn of Orion in the heavens. The light grows blindingly bright. . . .

  And Willie awoke. The blaring horns came from the valley below along with pipes, drums, the sounds of a booming orator, and a cheering crowd punctuated by tambourines and bells. Sir Francis Drake was entertaining the crowd waiting for the Faire’s front gates to open. Willie was the last one left in the tent. He panicked as he tore into his duffel bag, certain he’d been duped and ripped off . . . but no, the money and the coffee can holding the giant mushroom were undisturbed.

  He crawled blearily out of the tent. Jacob was now in a full fool’s costume, battening down the empty camp for the day. “Good morning, Willie the Shakes! I’m late, it’s been a pleasure, there’s still some coffee in the pot.” Willie poured it gladly into a ceramic mug on the table.

  As Jacob hefted a large leather bag, Willie said, “I need to find the guy they call Friar Lawrence. You have any idea where he might be?”

  “In fact, I do, I do!” Jacob took off his spectacles and cleaned them. “He says Mass every morning at the End of the World. You can still catch him there, if you hurry. Faire thee well, fool!” As Jacob disappeared into the forest and down the hill, he called over his shoulder, “And be on guard for spies! Spies of the enemy!”

  Willie downed his coffee, wondering what the Mass at the End of the World must be like, then rinsed out the cup. He ducked back into the tent, changed into his own fool’s costume, and went jingling away down the hill, with the duffel bag and the precious mushroom slung over his shoulder.

  Willie presented his passes at the gate. The guard looked dubiously at his wrinkled fool’s getup, but let him pass. The Faire was a bustle of activity: vendors putting out their wares, rumbling watering trucks spraying down the dirt in the main roadway to keep the dust down, haggard actors, jugglers, and musicians slumped on hay bales, sipping coffee and eating eggs and home fries to dull their collective hangover. Willie caught a whiff of bacon from the booth serving breakfast, and stopped. He was starving; he’d had no food since last night’s slice of pizza. But he had to find Friar Lawrence. As he hesitated, a small parade went by: a dozen or so youngsters ringing bells and waving banners and staffs led by yet another bespectacled, chubby woman, and singing in time to a drumbeat:

  “Awake, awake!

  the day doth break,

  Good craftsmen open your stalls.

  Come greet the light,

  Shake off the night,

  The Faire is open to all.”

  No time for breakfast. Willie asked a young passing fishmonger, who was missing a front tooth, where the End of the World was.

  “Marry, the very end of the Faire, my lord,” she said in the curious accent that all Faire-speakers seemed to have learned. “In yonder vale,” and she pointed out the direction.

  Willie trotted through the Faire toward its far end, scanning back and forth for anyone dressed in friar’s robes. He couldn’t believe how far back the Faire wound into the oak-lined canyon. He passed one stage, then a second and a third, and dozens of booths selling dragons and candles and boots and blank books and earrings and a thousand other blurred items that didn’t quite register as he ran by.

  When he got to the “End of the World” — a small stage in a clearing where the Faire ended in a cul-de-sac of shady, overhanging oaks — he learned from a nearby jeweler that the Mass had just ended, and Friar Lawrence had gone off down a secret backstage path — “the freeway” — that wound along the side of the canyon behind the booths for the length of the Faire. For the moment, the stage at the End of the World was empty. There was no audience on the two dozen or so hay bales; no customers had made it back this far yet. Willie sat under the tree in his fool’s costume. It was a beautiful morning, crisp and clear. Oak branches waved gently over his head. He took out his pipe, which he had reclaimed from the Audi’s glove box and still had a pinch of Lebanese in it, and stealthily took a single hit.

  Pleasantly buzzed, he decided to walk slowly back along the main road toward the front of the Faire, certain he’d spot Friar Lawrence. But thanks to the hash, he got easily distracted along the way. He stopped at a numismatist’s booth; there was a complete set of Elizabethan coinage, and he asked to see the sixpence. It was dated 1578. Shakespeare was alive that year. He would have been fourteen. It was possible, Willie thought, that Shakespeare himself once held this coin. ELIZABETH REGINA it said on it, and other Latin he couldn’t make out. The obverse had a dent across it . . . the remnant, perhaps of some barroom brawl. He looked at the price tag. It was cheaper than he expected. On an impulse, he bought it and put it in his pocket.

  He browsed jewelry, looking idly for something for Robin, but nothing seemed her style; it was all dragons and crystals and fairies. He browsed the stall filled with nothing but blank books, but they made him think of all the work he hadn’t done on his thesis. He tripped out on the melting colors at a booth filled with grotesquely dripping candles of enormous size and uncertain shape. He was trying to decide whether what he was looking at was a clipper ship or a spider’s web, when he heard a female voice behind him.

  “Willie?”

  Willie tensed. Who would know him here? He thought of the gigantic mushroom still in his bag. Even without the pound of pot and the smaller stash of shrooms, it was still enough to be a felony. He turned, and for a second he didn’t recognize the girl.

  Shit . . . could this be an undercover agent? If so, she’s the opposite of inconspicuous, she is just, yow! Some sort of Asian blend —

  She had been smiling in a peculiar way, but suddenly she looked pissed off. “Don’t tell me you don’t know who I am?”

  And then he recognized her. From the Faire near L.A. He remembered her kiss, her skirts hiked up, the caelestissime strictus cunnus caelorum, but her name . . .

  “Hi. Hey! HEY!”

  “It’s Anne,” she said with a withering look.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She looked like she didn’t believe him.

  “How’s it going?” Willie added quickly.

  “Fine,” she said, “fine.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first. You look a little different. Did you change your hair?”

  She looked like she was about to storm off, but then she took a deep breath and forced a smile, making an effort. “Yeah. Yeah, I changed my hair. Nice costume. Looks like you’re here to party.”

  “Oh,
yeah, a little bit. Actually, I’m looking for someone. Do you know Friar Lawrence?”

  She looked at him funny. “Um . . . yeah. He’s right there.” She gestured toward the next booth down the road. In front of it was a tubby man dressed in brown monk’s robes, holding a meat pie aloft, and calling in a practiced, rich, resonant hawker’s voice, “Get your savory meeaat pii — iieess! The most heavenly filling in heaven, hell, or on eaaaarrrrth! . . .”

  Willie recognized the friar’s voice, but couldn’t place it. A cowl hid his face.

  Willie turned back to Anne. He didn’t want to be rude to her, but he was suddenly dying to get the deal done and get out. “Duh! Thanks, Anne, thanks. I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta go talk to him. It was good seeing you again — ”

  “Hang on, wait,” Anne snapped, stopping Willie. Then she hesitated. “Look, I — I was going to try to find you, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t change my hair. I gained some weight. I got pregnant.”

  Willie was already stoned. Now he went numb. “Yeeaaahhh . . . ?”

  “I got pregnant with you.”

  Willie was stunned to silence for a moment. Then, regretting it even as he said it: “Are you sure it was me?”

  If her earlier look was withering, this one was positively infernal. “Yes. I’m sure.”

  A voice pierced through the general noise and Willie’s haze, coming from the ale stand.

  “Mistress Anne Whateley, we have need of thy tapping arm!”

  Anne turned and looked back at her, yelling, “I come anon, milady!” then turned back to Willie.

  “I have to go back to work. I’m in a parade a little later, but otherwise, if you want to talk, I’ll be at this ale stand ’til five.”

  Willie still didn’t know what to say. He just nodded.

  Anne shook her head, short, sharp movements of utter annoyance. “Okay, bye.”

  Willie watched her go. He was so flummoxed that when he looked away, vaguely in the direction of Friar Lawrence, he barely registered that the face of the pasty-hawking priest who now turned toward him, wrapped in the monk’s cowl, was one he knew.

  Friar Lawrence saw Willie instantly. “Willie Greenberg! Hail and well met!”

  “Friar Lawrence” was Dr. Clarence Welsh, professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz — the very man who held Willie’s academic career in his hand like a slowly congealing meat pie.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  It’s a truism that nothing changes one quite so much as the sudden responsibility of marriage and parenthood. That Shakespeare faced both in 1582 — that he would now be expected to be a provider of food for the table and moral guidance for the family — would surely have marked a turning point in the young poet’s life.

  The week following the secret Mass at Park Hall was taken up entirely with preparations for the wedding. William came home from the school one day to find that John, Gilbert, and Joan — with assistance from Ralph and George Cawdrey, Richard Field, and Richard Tyler — had cleaned up the backyard in preparation for his bride’s arrival. Mary spent the last several days with cousins at Temple Grafton, overseeing preparations for the postwedding feast at the local inn yard.

  Two nights before the wedding, William hitched up Lucy (the ass) to the family cart. On the way out of town he picked up Ralph Cawdrey, and together they rode to Charlecote. William had a bow and arrow, and this time, with a single shot, he really and truly did poach a deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park. He and Ralph loaded it onto the cart and took it back to Stratford: it would be the main course at William’s wedding feast.

  When he got home late that night, William expertly skinned the deer and left the hide to dry in the now neatly arranged backyard. He went quietly upstairs — and heard sobbing coming from behind Joanie’s door. It was nearly midnight.

  He found her sitting miserably on her bed, tears streaming down her face. William sat down next to her.

  “How now, Joan?” he whispered, so as not to wake Gilbert asleep across the small room. “What grief so hoary could come to one so tender and young?”

  “So young,” she said, “and yet so whorey indeed. William . . .”

  She broke into great heaving sobs, between which she choked out, “I am . . . quick . . . quick with . . . with child.”

  William was so stunned, he said nothing for a minute while Joan cried. When he recovered himself, he stammered, “Joanie . . . you are but thirteen. Who . . . ?” She gave him the most miserable of looks, and William understood and asked no more, because he knew with a brother’s intuition the answer: bonny young Spencer Lucy.

  “Wish you then to be with child, and to marry?”

  Joan shook her head, sobbing.

  Of course she wouldn’t. More than anything in the world, more even than her brother whom she idolized, she loved her father. We’ll have no talk of a union of Shakespeares and Lucys at my table. A plague on their house!

  And yet it wasn’t merely that.

  “He was so cruel to me, when I told him. He berated me, and I fear would have beaten me, but I ran — ” She broke down sobbing again. “I would not, I would NOT marry him, nor have his child!”

  “Fear not, nor weep no more,” William said, and he went to the boys’ room and the trunk where he had hidden the potion from Goody Hall. He returned and showed it to Joan. “This distilled liquor drink thou off, and by God’s grace presently shall your affliction melt as snow beneath a summer’s sun.”

  Joan snatched the bottle and would have drunk it right away. But William stayed her hand and led her quietly outside the house. The moon was just short of full. Close enough, thought William, for neither is she waxed full. He made her take off her blouse, and then drink the potion, and finally run three times around the house, as Goody Hall had instructed. When they returned to the bedroom, William put a blanket around her.

  “We need never speak of this, but let it be a lesson to us both,” William said, “hereafter not to dally unless we would our dalliance last a lifetime.”

  Joan nodded silently. William embraced her, and she continued sobbing until finally she fell asleep. When both woke in the morning, there was blood in Joan’s bed.

  William washed the bedding in one of the vats of solution in the tanning yard.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I will, as ’twere a brother of your order,

  Visit both prince and people: therefore, I prithee,

  Supply me with the habit and instruct me

  How I may formally in person bear me

  Like a true friar. More reasons for this action

  At our more leisure shall I render you.

  — Duke Vincentio, Measure for Measure, I.iii.44

  A troupe performed commedia dell’arte on a small stage in front of a curtained gypsy wagon that acted as both backstage and dressing room. A lovelorn Isabella with long blonde braids sang a song about a large prop fish.

  “He’s got little fishy eyes,

  and little fishy lips!

  He’s got little fishy fins

  On his little fishy hips!”

  In the back row of hay bales in the theater — only half full, as it was still early in the day — Willie and Clarence Welsh sat, unnoticed.

  “So, Mr. Greenberg,” said Welsh, “how goes your thesis? Will we have the pleasure of reading it this year?”

  “Yes, sir. I hope so.”

  “As do I. As does the provost, and apparently, your esteemed father. Do we have a topic?”

  “Yeah,” said Willie evasively. “Dashka signed off on it. I have it written down, but I’m not ready to describe it verbally — ”

  “Try,” said Welsh. “It’s an excellent exercise, and perhaps I could help focus it.”

  Willie hesitated. “I don’t think — ”

  “I insist,” Welsh said firmly.

  Hopelessly, Willie took a deep breath and said, “Well . . . it’s based on the idea that Shakespeare was Catholic.” He gave Professor Welsh the pitch, and his explication of Sonnet 23.
Welsh listened carefully, urging Willie on, while at the same time he pulled from his pouch rolling papers and a small baggie of pot and deftly rolled a joint.

  When Willie had finished, Clarence Welsh asked, “You haven’t done too much research on this yet, have you?” And to Willie’s amazement, he lit the joint.

  Willie looked around nervously. It seemed everyone else nearby was fixed on the stage, laughing at the story of the girl and her fish. “I’ve done some. I mean, I still have more to do.” Clarence Welsh passed the joint to Willie. Willie felt odd, getting high so casually with his professor, but he took a hit, just to be polite, and passed it back. Wow. That is good. And strong. Really strong. Sledgehammer strong.

  “Because you know,” Welsh continued, “the theory that Shakespeare was Catholic has been around quite a while.”

  Willie felt his heart sink. The smoke had expanded in his lungs, and he tried to hold it but failed, coughing. “Really?” he managed to choke out.

  “Davies, in the seventeenth century, famously said Shakespeare died a papist. And it seems that you haven’t yet stumbled across a book published just last year: Shakespeare: The Lost Years, by E. A. J. Honigmann. Or an older work entitled The Shakespeares and the Old Faith. Both make the same case.”

  “Um . . . no.” The pot was creeping into Willie’s brain. Really strong.

  “Professor Honigmann posits the theory that Shakespeare was part of a very large Catholic network in Warwickshire and Lancashire that included his mother, Mary Arden.”

  “Really?” said Willie miserably.

  “He further posits,” said Welsh, “that Shakespeare’s schoolmaster, John Cottom, likely secured young Shakespeare a post as an assistant schoolmaster in the home of a prominent Catholic family in Lancashire. This seems to me unlikely, as Shakespeare must have been in Stratford to impregnate Anne Hathaway at the time Honigmann cites, but he nevertheless presents some quite compelling arguments. If the subject interests you, you might wish to read it.”

  “Dashka,” said Willie, the word and thoughts coming with more difficulty now, “said that every biography she’d read said he was Protestant.”