My Name Is Will

by Jess Winfield

  Willie wasn’t quite sure how to answer this. He had sent Robin at least a dozen letters in the past six months. He’d gotten one pained reply.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You want to be with her?”

  “There’s a lot of water under that bridge. But I don’t know if it’s enough to put out the fire. Maybe we’ll forgive and forget . . . or maybe just conclude.”

  Dashka shrugged. “As for you forgiving her, you managed it okay with me just now. And if she needs to forgive you . . .” She flashed her mischievous smile. “Just quote some Shakespeare for her. And if that doesn’t work, you can quote the Bard to me, anytime.”

  “Okay.” Willie laughed. “But just so you know, I’m going to be extremely cautious about getting high with you and your friends again.”

  Willie walked out, but then poked his head back in the door. “Hey, how’s the professor doing?”

  “He’s okay. He’s going to serve three days on weekends over the summer. The university’s being cool. He’ll teach in the fall.”

  “Good,” Willie said. André was free, too, but Todd, despite Willie’s substantial contribution to his legal fund, hadn’t been so lucky. He would be out in two years.

  “Good?” Dashka said. “I can’t believe he went to jail for some pot.”

  “It could be worse,” said Willie, thinking of Edmund Campion. “At least we don’t live in the fucking Middle Ages.”

  Epilogue

  Will sat at a corner table in a seedy bar with the rest of the troupe before the last show of the tour, in Verona. As the others drank and laughed and cursed about the minutiae of the afternoon’s performance, he twiddled his lucky sixpence in one hand and scribbled on a sheet of paper with the other.

  “What’s that?” asked one.

  “Next year’s income, I hope,” said another.

  “Poetry,” said Will.

  “An Ode to My Willy,” said the first again with a snicker.

  Will shook his head. “Not comedy. A sonnet,” he said. Then softly to himself, “For the woman I love.”

  The company laughed and hooted. “Which one?” they said in unison, and then laughed more, that they had said it in unison.

  Will smiled thoughtfully. He finished writing the last line. “You tell me,” he said, and read the poem aloud:

  “Where idle weed and thorny rose do seek

  To suck a common provender of light,

  The creeping weed, unwholesome in his reek,

  Will spread, and stunt the well-trimm’d bush’s height.

  Apothecaries then will physic give:

  Sweet potions urge the rose’s sap to rise,

  Its buds to bloom, and verdancy revive,

  While sudden poison seals the weed’s demise.

  Yet some gard’ners are in nature’s craft so bold

  To fire the weed, increasing rose’s beauty

  By coaxing growth anew from cinders cold.

  I would, for my rose, thus express love’s duty.

  My sorry leaves I’ll burn; the ash of me

  Will feed the soil, that I might grow in thee.”

  Excerpts from Will Greenberg’s “The Making of the Modern Playwright: Social, Political and Personal Influences in Shakespeare’s Works,” first appeared in Journal of Shakespearean Studies, spring 1987.

  Line numbered excerpts from Shakespeare’s works refer to The Riverside Shakespeare (First Edition, G. Blakemore Evans, textual editor), copyright © 1974 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Afterword

  The events I’ve described as having taken place in 1582 are a pastiche of fact, legend, and surmise. My main goal was to tell a ripping yarn, but I also wanted, as much as possible, to make the Bard’s story at least historically plausible in its larger points, and not contradict the historical record. At this I surely failed; like Willie Greenberg, I am no scholar. But there are also a few points where I knowingly tweaked the facts, and I want to confess those here.

  Although Warwickshire legend does tell that young Shakespeare was whipped for poaching deer in Thomas Lucy’s park, there is no suggestion that he was ever racked there. I doubt that Lucy kept a torture chamber in his laundry room, but he was certainly a rabid anti-Catholic who profited from being on the mightier side of the day’s culture wars. Thankfully, Lucys of a gentler variety now reside at Charlecote. One can, for a few quid donated to the National Trust, still visit their laundry room and imagine the weight of Sir Thomas’s great shirt-press applied to one’s very own chest.

  I’ve borrowed a detail or two from Thomas Cottom’s execution and transposed them to the account of Edmund Campion’s. These are minor, having mostly to do with Anthony Munday’s (equally unsavory) roles at the two events.

  William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway applied for their marriage license on Saturday, November 27, not the following Monday as I’ve described.

  Most egregiously, the story anticipates the arrests of John Somerville, Edward Arden, his wife, Mary, and the hidden priest Hugh Hall. These actually took place in late 1583, a year after the marriage of William and Anne. I hope this will be forgiven in a tale that depends upon the bending of time for its effect. Placing the arrest of the Ardens at William’s wedding was a fiction I simply couldn’t resist. The end result, at any rate, was the same: Edward Arden was hanged, drawn, and quartered on December 20, 1583. His nephew John Somerville, scheduled to meet the same fate on the same day, was found the night before, mysteriously hanged in his cell. Father Hugh Hall — who testified against Arden — was set free. So was Mary Arden.

  I should also mention that while the physical world of northern California in the 1980s is real — Willie’s on-campus housing, Robin’s apartment, and the spot (now marked with a monument to free speech) where Willie took in the rally on Sproul Plaza can be found almost as easily as the Shakespeares’ house in Henley Street — the events that take place there, and the characters who inhabit it (even those with recognizable names) are fictional. This is certainly the case with my placing the Renaissance Faire at Black Point so late in the year as October — that happened only once that I recall, due to rain, and it was not in 1986.

  Acknowledgments

  First I must thank Alexandra Sokoloff, Franz Metcalf, and Elaine Sokoloff for helping to nurture this story at every step from conception to completion. Only they know how much of their light illuminates my pages, and I am eternally and humbly grateful.

  I am among the luckiest writers alive to have an agent as exemplary as the delightful Ellen Levine, an editor as smart and dedicated as Cary Goldstein, and a publisher as fresh and focused as Jonathan Karp and Twelve Books. I fancy myself a man of letters, but so many letters herein would have been wrong without the editorial prowess of Mari Okuda and Christine Valentine. I also fancy myself a man of Photoshop; for that, I hope Anne Twomey and Twelve’s art department will forgive me.

  The list of those kind or foolish enough to read parts or all of the early drafts is too long to list here, but some gave advice and / or encouragement above and beyond the call of friendship. For this I especially thank John Wray, as well as Kent Elofson, Dawn Rose, David Rose, Danica Lisiewicz, Nicole Roberts, Claire Martin, Rover, Shannon Wade, Nick Revell, Laura McLean, Douglas Pease, Thomas Scoville, Karen Dionne and backspace.org, Jeff Kleinman, Douglas Purgason, the Weissman family, Ob Askin, Jim Kelly, Nancy Gunn, and Erin Wallen. I’m indebted to my Reduced Shakespeare Company mates Adam Long and Daniel Singer for the spirit if not the details of the fictional Short Sharp Shakespeare; to Claire Asquith for the tantalizing explication of Sonnet 23 in her book Shadowplay; to Dr. Charles Mitchell of Loyola University for information about Elizabethan hangings; to Don Ashman for his assistance with my rusty Latin; and to Roxanne Hamilton, Jennifer Nickerson, Susi Nicholson, and the housing offices and graduate students of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for not having me arrested as I prowled their campus researching locations. Also thanks to Kevin Patterson, Mark Sellin, Dan McLaughlin, and Jon
DeCles for their assistance and contributions regarding various things Renaissance Faire.

  Finally, I thank my wife, Sa. Everything they say about novelists and their obsessive late-night sneakings to the computer, scribblings in bed, and story-problem-related mood swings is true. Enduring them requires almost superhuman resources of love and patience, which she has in spades. Not only that, she read the book, and liked it.

  About the Author

  As a founding member of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, JESS WINFIELD cocreated the full-length show The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987 and became an international sensation, leading to multiple world tours and engagements. After leaving the “other” RSC, Winfield spent ten years writing and producing award-winning cartoons for the Walt Disney Company. He left Disney three years ago to write this, his first novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife.

  ABOUT TWELVE

  TWELVE was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than one book per month. We strive to publish the singular book, by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority. Works that explain our culture, that illuminate, inspire, provoke, and entertain. We seek to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books. Talented authors deserve attention not only from publishers but from readers as well. To sell the book is only the beginning of our mission. To build avid audiences or readers who are enriched by these works—that is our ultimate purpose.

  For more information about forthcoming TWELVE books, please go to www.twelvebooks.com