My Name Is Will

by Jess Winfield

  Overwhelmed, he leaned against the ale stand, and looked around the crowd . . . there were many people here, some he recognized, many he didn’t. Of course, the greater part of two villages would be here for the wedding, Shottery and Berkeley, the last weekend of the Faire and free venison courtesy of the Shakespeares.

  Where is Anne?

  On the small stage set for the entertainment of the Inn Yard, the singers finished and the players bounded out on stage, wearing just undershirts and hose of uncanny color and fit. After much shenanigans, they announced, “My lords and ladies, we now intend to perform for you the most mirthful tragedy of Romeus and Juliet!”

  As they launched into a breakneck version of their prologue, Will stood astounded. He knew this story well, and yet didn’t know it at all, and yet he felt he should. He knew the source: it was the very same tale of Romeus and Juliet he admired. There were pieces of the story he didn’t recognize, additions or improvisations on the original; and yet the characters were so human. He knew the players, or some of them: was that Pete, in the dress, or Richard Burbage? The performance was so bold, so presentational, so entirely for the benefit of the groundlings; and yet also there were moments when the players spoke to each other as they might in the street, small and real, their gestures temperate, smooth, and gentle. He felt like all the other plays he had seen might as well have been performed by town criers or teenage drama classes for their amateurism. And yet, though he knew the tale to be a tragedy, it was witty, filled with pratfalls and slapstick.

  There were also brazen jokes at the expense of Lord Burghley, Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester, Walsingham, and Madonna.

  When Romeo, for so he was called, came forth to lament his lost love, his friend and confidant named her “Rosaline.” Rosaline. A Rose by any other name, he thought. Where had he heard that before? He remembered, or thought he remembered, the image of a red and white rose entwined, in the small of a woman’s back. . . .

  Will’s head reeled. Time melted. He was watching, all at once, his past, his present, and his future. And then space began to melt, first the scene on stage, then the crowd around him, laughing and talking, all seemed to dissolve like the wax candle he had seen this morning, into a blur of color. The ground around him began to melt, and then his legs. He staggered away from the ale stand; he had to get out of the crowded Inn Yard, he needed to lie down, or something. He stumbled past a man in a t-shirt, with a hole where his left eye should be and a t-shirt that read I VISITEDTHETOWER OF LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT. He saw a sign marked PRYVAT, and stepped through the flap of burlap beneath it.

  The world was spinning, but what he saw inside was more confusing than anything he’d seen yet; it was a woman.

  She had deep blue eyes and shining, raven-black hair. Anne Hathaway. Or was it Dashka?

  And she was on her knees, deeply kissing, with cloven lips, the naked blade of another man.

  The man with long black hair, a mustache, and eyes that burned like dark fire.

  Immediately on seeing Will, the mustachioed man turned, hiked up his trousers, and called, “He is HERE!”

  The woman saw Will, and put a trembling hand to her forehead.

  Will’s shock and nausea turned to desperation. He turned and sprinted back out into the Inn Yard. On all sides, men in black doublets, some lettered DEA on the back, and bearing matchlocks, swords, and AK-47s appeared, surrounding the assembled party. Within seconds, they quietly apprehended many. The Puritan with the red hair and arrowhead beard took a smiling, bespectacled man by the arm: the priest, or the fool, or both, and an innocent regardless, Will thought as his mind spun. He lunged forward and pulled a light sword from the scabbard of another agent in black, who had half a finger missing from his right hand and his knee in the back of a prostrate vagabond. Will knocked the surprised agent hard on the head with the sword’s hilt and felt a surprising surge of satisfaction as he fell unconscious. Then Will turned and swatted the red-bearded Puritan on the behind with the broad of the blade. Furious, the Puritan let go of the bespectacled priest, who immediately ran off into the forest. The Puritan advanced toward Will, brandishing a weapon. Will might have run him through with his sword, but then he saw a tankard filled with lemonade on the hay bale next to him. He swept up the cup and threw the contents into the Puritan’s face. While the Puritan yelled, momentarily blinded, Will dropped the sword, dove in between the hay bales, and belly-crawled through the audience toward the stage.

  Through the confusion, the theater troupe on stage had kept playing their comedy: the show went on, and no one in the front rows of the audience noticed that anything was going on behind them. Will arrived at the side of the stage and stood stealthily, scanning quickly for the mustachioed man and the Puritan. He saw them both searching the crowd.

  There was no escape he could see: agents in black were at every exit. He looked up on the stage. Romeo and Juliet had just met and fallen in love. Juliet told Romeo as he tried to steal a kiss, “No means no!” Juliet climbed on another man’s shoulders to do the balcony scene. As she did, she farted audibly. A muffled voice came from the human balcony, “Juliet, you farted in my face!” and the hidden actor produced an impossibly tiny tinderbox and lit it with a flick of his thumb and waved it, and the groundlings gasped and laughed. Juliet called out, “Romeo, my Romeo!” and Will knew that in a moment a Romeo would enter and say, “But soft, what wind through yonder lighter breaks?” But in that instant, Will knew there was another scene, a soliloquy, before Romeo entered, and he knew what it was, and he knew that he knew it; he looked down at his clothes. Had he really worn Quiney’s old codpiece today?! He checked his pouch: there was Field’s dented sixpence. He felt his hat: cuckold’s horns. Painfully prophetic, to be sure, but fit to the present need. He knew he’d blow the punch line to the fart joke, but it was a matter of life or death; he hoped they’d forgive him. In the instant before Romeo entered, Will leaped up on the stage and started speaking:

  “Nay, I’ll conjure too.

  Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!

  Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh:

  I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,

  By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,

  By her fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh

  And the domains that there adjacent lie,

  That in thy likeness thou appear to us!”

  He became Mercutio: he quivered his thighs; he jingled the bells on his costume; he accented “domains” with a lewd thrust of his hips; and he threw Romeo his new entrance cue, “appear to us!” Romeo entered with a bemused look. Will crossed past him toward the curtained escape whence he’d come, and as he did he whispered, “I will explain myself anon.” He exited toward the back of the stage, glancing over his shoulder toward the audience. As Romeo soldiered on, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” and Juliet replied “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” he saw the mustachioed man and the Puritan, still scanning the audience, but ignoring the fools capering on the stage. Will pushed through the curtain, and finding himself backstage amid a jumble of props and wigs, he jumped into an empty costume trunk, pulled the lid closed, and stayed there until nightfall.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,

  Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

  Raze out the written troubles of the brain

  And with some sweet oblivious antidote

  Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

  Which weighs upon the heart?

  — Macbeth, V.iii.40

  There is no documented case of a fatal overdose of psilocybin mushrooms. Unlike many fungi, they’re not actually poison; about the worst that’s likely to befall you physically from eating them — assuming you resist any temptation to fly off a tall building or stop a speeding train with your outstretched hand — is an upset tummy. There’s also no documentation of permanent psych
ic damage from psilocybin. You get high; you trip; it could be fun and silly, could be intense and scary, but whatever happens, after four or five hours the high drifts away and you’re yourself again.

  Or, sometimes, an updated, rebooted version of yourself.

  Willie spent five hours in the costume trunk. The sounds of crowd noise, Faire parades, drug busts, and Romeo and Juliet bumping about in their comical death throes turned into colors. The black, musty closeness of the trunk turned into a hum. The hum and the color became one and melted into endless geometric patterns that turned into mandalas on his eyelids. Then his eyelids melted, and then his eyes did, too, and he saw nothing and everything in dazzling light. The hum grew so loud he thought his ears would burst. And then suddenly the light became a single beam that lit a bed. On the bed was a shape . . . a familiar shape . . . his mother’s hair, loose about her face, a starburst. Shades of gold pulsated in an aura around it. Her lips moved.

  She said: “Given the choice to be or not to be, always choose to be.” She took his arm gently, and he could feel the light enveloping him. “Be who you are. Be . . . be . . .” and she was having difficulty speaking, but then she took a last strained breath. “Be my Will Shakespeare.” And then she smiled weakly and died.

  The hum of the light and the darkness burst back upon him at once and exploded into a million million shards. He was simultaneously the hum, the light, the darkness, the destruction, and the birth of it all. He was no longer himself. He was no one. He was everyone.

  He was Shakespeare. Will Shakespeare.

  When the lid to the costume trunk opened, Willie had been coming down for long enough that he was reasonably confident it wasn’t the lid of his own coffin. Short Sharp Shakespeare’s props and costumes mistress shrieked as though it were, but she calmed down surprisingly quickly when Willie said:

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she responded, without missing a beat. “Lemme guess . . . Jack?”

  As Willie looked up out of the box, Pete, the guy in the dress, leaned over and peered in.

  “Oh, hey! We were wondering where you went.” He helped Willie out of the trunk. “You know you kinda fucked up our fart joke, right?”

  Willie winced as his limbs uncurled like Saran wrap. “I know, and I truly apologize. I hope the addition of a few lines of Mercutio to Romeo and Juliet wasn’t too far out of line.”

  “No,” said Pete, “not at all. Actually, we might keep it.” Then, after a short pause, he asked lightly, “Hey, you want to join a comedy Shakespeare troupe?”

  Willie didn’t answer right away. He just nodded for a few moments, thinking. Finally he asked, “Was it but my idle fancy . . . or was there a DEA raid during Romeo and Juliet?”

  Pete nodded in disbelief. “Yeah. There was.”

  Willie thought for another moment. Then he said, “I like the political material in your show. If I joined, could we do even more?”

  Pete nodded back. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

  When Willie came back out into the Faire, it was the end of the day. Everyone was tired and dirty, drunk and happy. A wind had kicked up. The dust of the day blew through the canyon and caught the golden afternoon light filtering through the oak trees. Willie asked a passing girl — dressed inexplicably as a vampire — the time. “Five o’clock,” she said. He went straight to the ale stand, where Anne should just be getting off of work. As he approached, she emerged from the workers’ entrance.

  She smiled at seeing him, and spoke to him in character. “How now, good sir?”

  “God ye good den, Anne Whateley, tap mistress of the Inn Yard Tavern,” Willie responded, and the Faire-speak came easily to him.

  “I thought mayhap I’d ne’er see thee again,” Anne said.

  Willie nodded thoughtfully. “Marry, I feared me the selfsame thing. And yet, here I am.” He bowed to her, sweeping the foolish cuckold’s coxcomb from his head with a jingle.

  They both watched as a woman, obviously a Faire patron, walked by in a pointy, peaked princess hat with silk flowing from the top.

  Anne laughed. “How out of period is that?”

  “Anne,” said Willie. He took a deep breath, and he looked steadily into her eyes. “I want to do the right thing.”

  Anne cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “Only if you want to. Entirely your call. But if you do . . . if you want a father — unworthy me — around in any way . . . I’m saying, we could get married.”

  Anne stood for a moment, stunned. When a sound finally came, it was an involuntary laugh. She quickly covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh, but . . . ohmigod, that’s so sweet. But . . . Willie . . .”

  She put her hand on his arm gently. “I had an abortion last month. This isn’t the fucking Middle Ages, thank God.”

  “Oh,” Willie stammered, “I — I’m sorry. Okay — ”

  “I’m sorry, I would’ve talked about it with you but I didn’t know where to find you — ”

  “I’m sorry, I should have — ”

  Anne stopped him. “No. That’s okay. Thanks. I mean, thank you, Willie.”

  “My name is Will,” Willie said, surprised to hear himself say so. “I’m going by Will, now.”

  “Okay,” she chirped, then nodded up the hill toward actors’ camp. “Hey, I’m filthy. I was going to go grab a shower. You wanna join me, Will?”

  Willie remembered the giggles coming from the shower the night before. He felt the familiar call from his groin.

  “Tempting,” said Willie. “But, no, thanks. I should get back to Berkeley before it gets too late.”

  Anne pouted, mock-miserably. “Boo.”

  “It’s nothing personal,” Willie said. “But as long as we’re not walking down the aisle anytime soon, I believe I have some issues to work out about women. I haven’t dealt with my mother’s death well,” Willie said, and he couldn’t quite believe that he was speaking honestly and openly about it. “So I’ve been trying to be something she said, instead of what she meant.”

  Anne was staring at him blankly. “And more prosaically,” Willie continued — he hadn’t even told this to Robin before — “my stepmom hit on me when I was sixteen.”

  “Wow,” said Anne again, overwhelmed. But then she recovered. “Well, who can blame her? You were probably cute when you were sixteen.”

  They chatted a little more, and hugged and said awkward good-byes, and finally Anne said, “One last thing: if you ever find yourself in this situation again, ‘Are you sure it was me?’ is the exact wrong thing to say.”

  Willie went to where he’d left his backpack and duffel just before the mushroom hit; they sat undisturbed on their hay bale. He found a privy, wet and smelly after a day’s use. To his senses, still heightened and sensitized from the mushrooms, it was almost unbearable. He held his breath, and changed out of his borrowed fool’s costume, trying to keep from getting urine on either it or his jeans and t-shirt. He was tired, but determined to get back to Berkeley that night. He wanted to talk to Robin. He had so much to explain, and to apologize for. There was nasty weekend traffic on US 101 through San Rafael, and an accident on I-80 headed into Berkeley. By the time he found a parking space on Webster Street it had been dark for a couple of hours. He saw faint light flickering in Robin’s second-story window. The security gate was ajar. He ran up the stairs to her apartment. The door was unlocked. He opened it and went in.

  Bill, the president of the Committee to F$¢K Reagan, said, “Oh, shit,” and quickly rolled off of Robin onto the couch.

  Robin pulled a skimpy dress over her naked lap with one hand, and put a trembling hand to her forehead. “Get out. You were supposed to be back yesterday!”

  Willie stood silent as his stomach dropped to the floor. Then, his voice quavering but controlled, he said, “I’m sorry I lied.”

  Robin helplessly shook her head, a look of utter confusion and rage on her face as tears welled in her brown eyes. “Get OUT!!!!”
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  He turned, walked out, and closed the door. As he stumbled down the stairs, the stinging in his own eyes resolved into tears, just as though he had been slapped in the face.

  Chapter Forty-four

  Adherents of literary New Criticism are quick to separate the works of the Bard from the historical Shakespeare and his political, social, and personal context. But Shakespeare’s genius as a storyteller must be at least partly attributable to his very real-life experiences. Why, for example, dissociate the adulterous sexuality, the pain, the longing, and the homoeroticism of “the poet” in the sonnets from Shakespeare’s known or deduced real-life experiences with an older woman, a dark lady, and a fair youth? The examination of the events and emotions that made Shakespeare Shakespeare not only illuminates his work, but it illuminates ourselves; and that, surely, is the ultimate goal of both literature and literary criticism.

  William opened the costume trunk and carefully removed the pieces for his role as the cuckolded husband in The May Girl. The scent of musty fabric brought back the day, six months earlier, when he had hidden in the very same trunk and, with the assistance of the Burbages, escaped Sir Thomas Lucy’s raid on his wedding and left Stratford — he thought forever.

  But now the Earl of Leicester’s men found themselves again in Stratford-upon-Avon. They were engaged to perform at the town’s Whitsunday pageant. And William was with them. It was a stunning spring morning, with the scent of dewy grass, primroses, and daffodils in the air and fluff from the first dandelions floating across an electric blue sky. There was a quiet shuffling in the tiring-house as the players prepared to go on. William listened with half an ear to another group on stage: Davy Jones was mangling his way through the dire and dour arhythms of Anthony Munday’s The Death of Robin Hood. William noted with a smile that at least Arthur Cawdrey’s jolly Friar Tuck seemed to be getting a few good laughs.