Chapter 11
The Telltale Spelling
Always prudent where time was concerned, Caitlin arrived at the Calhoun Humanities Complex twenty-two minutes early. Three minutes later she stood in the corridor outside the KHCR studios studying the notices on the station’s bulletin board.
A hand lightly tapped her shoulder. “Hi there,” said a familiar voice.
She spun around. “Hey, Phil. What are you doing here?”
“I work here.”
“At KHCR? You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I just got hired this morning—as a volunteer. The station’s run by student volunteers. I’m going to be the board operator for the live panel on Shakespeare at one o’clock.”
“Really? I’m here to cover it for the Herald.”
“Hey, that’s great. You got an assignment already.”
“Yeah, my interview this morning went well. So how did you manage to finagle a job here so fast, Phil?”
“After we got back to the dorm last night, Chris and I were listening to KHCR and talking about what music we liked. Chris said he knew Nancy Kenneally, the station manager, because she went to his high school and had gone out with his brother for a while. He said he was going to ask her for a job as a DJ, and I said I’d be interested in working as an audio engineer.
“So this morning we came over to check things out and Nancy was here. She said there was plenty to do if we wanted to get involved. She told Chris she’d apprentice him to one of the senior DJs, and she asked me to fill in today because the scheduled board operator was sick. So here I am: Mr. College Radio Audio Engineer. Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad at all. But do you know what you’re doing?”
“Oh, sure. A friend of mine on my high school soccer team—his older brother was a junior at the University of California in San Diego and worked Saturday nights at the radio station there. We used to go up and hang out with him, help him out. Sometimes he’d let us arrange and even announce a few sets. I started bugging him to teach me how to set up the equipment and run the board, and eventually he did. So I know the rudiments, anyway.”
Phil looked at the clock. “We’d better get going. The panelists will be here in a couple of minutes. Come on. I’ll show you the studio.”
At the end of the corridor Phil pushed open a swinging door. “This is the reception area and lounge,” he said ironically. “Not bad for lounging, I guess—if you’re a serious couch potato—but not much of a place for a reception, is it?”
Caitlin looked around. A haphazard assortment of battered furniture cluttered the room. Bare cement was visible through several spots in the threadbare shag carpeting.
Caitlin laughed. “It’s an interior decorator’s nightmare.”
They crossed the room and turned left into a narrow hallway. From a speaker in the ceiling came a smooth tenor voice.
“A couple more tunes and I’m outta here, guys. But don’t go away, ’cause we’ve got a totally awesome segment coming up at two o’clock—a live panel on Bad Billy Shakespeare, featuring hair-raising rhetoric, heretical hypotheses, and totally outrageous oratory from some of Holyfield’s most popular pundits. That’s right here at two on your standing ovation station, KHCR!”
Phil chuckled. “That’s Randy ‘The Maniac’ Malone, assistant station manager and DJ extraordinaire. He’s intense. You’ll meet him in a minute.”
They turned right into another narrow hallway with doors on both sides.
“Here’s Nancy’s office,” Phil said, pointing to the first room on the left, “and this is a kitchenette that makes the lounge look like something out of Good Housekeeping magazine.” He pointed to the right. “Over here are the production rooms. They put together news spots and music tracks in there.”
Above one of the doors the “on-air” light was illuminated.
“Take a look,” Phil said.
Caitlin peered through a small square of heavy glass reinforced with chicken wire and saw a young woman in a Grateful Dead T-shirt bending over a recording machine, deftly splicing a section of tape.
They walked to the end of the hall to a heavy door marked “Authorized Access Only.”
“This is the main studio,” Phil said. “We’ll be doing the panel in here.”
Suddenly the door burst open and a wiry young man with curly red hair emerged.
“Hey, man. You’re on in ten,” he said. “You all set?”
“Sure, Randy. Don’t sweat it,” Phil said. “Nancy showed me where everything is.”
“What about the panelists?”
“They should be here any minute, I guess.”
“Okay. As soon as they get here, get ’em in the studio and get some levels on ’em. I’ve left some notes on the board to help you through the segues.”
“Thanks, Randy.” Phil turned to Caitlin. “Why don’t you get settled while I see if the panelists are here.” He started to leave but stopped when he heard voices coming toward them.
Caitlin looked down the hall and saw Carmen Torres and three other professors rounding the corner—a slender woman with straight, shoulder-length hair and glasses, a casually dressed man with long gray hair and sideburns, and a bald, portly man wearing a bow tie and carrying a briefcase and a cane.
“Oh, no,” Randy whispered. “If it isn’t the redoubtable misanthrope himself.”
“Who’s that?” Caitlin whispered back.
“The pompous baboon with the bow tie and cane—Professor Theophilus Bibb. He gave me a D last year because I got my final paper in one lousy day late. Hey, Phil. You got it under control, right?”
Phil nodded.
“Good, ’cause I’d better get out of here before the Bibb-ster bites off my lips or something.”
With that, Randy “The Maniac” Malone shielded his face with his hands, bolted past the four professors, and disappeared around the corner, heading for the safety of the lounge.
Harold Hargrave’s office was all dark woods and Persian rugs and soft, scholarly light. An antique maple desk and an ornate credenza occupied one end of the room. Three walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. On the fourth wall a delicate Japanese textile print hung between stained-glass lancet windows.
The first thing Leo noticed was the room’s distinctive smell. From his many hours working in Professor Prospero’s personal library, he had grown to love the musty aroma of old books. He also was struck by how orderly the room appeared. Everything spoke of elegance and grace and the fastidious taste of the connoisseur. In the kingdom of books that was Tillinghast Library, Hargrave clearly had set himself up as monarch.
As Leo entered, the chief curator and Reginald Burton-Jones rose from wing chairs positioned at each end of an oxblood leather couch.
“Hello, Leo,” Hargrave said. He gestured toward the couch. “Please have a seat.”
“Thank you, sir.” Leo crossed the large room, shook hands with Hargrave, then turned to Burton-Jones. “I didn’t expect to find you here, Reggie.”
The Englishman gave Leo’s hand a friendly, vigorous shake and the three men sat down.
“After the executors’ meeting,” Burton-Jones explained, “Harold invited me out to the faculty club for a bite to eat, and I wasn’t about to forgo an opportunity to enjoy their sumptuous Sunday brunch. The bill of fare is absolutely superlative.” He chuckled and patted his firm belly. “At any rate, Harold was just expounding on this distressing business of Teddy’s lawsuit. Did you come to offer your suggestions on how to deal with that haughty, avaricious young malcontent?”
Leo smiled and shook his head. “Sorry, Reggie, but Teddy’s machinations are a mystery to me.”
“Perhaps you’re wondering what to do with that valuable Edgar Allan Poe book the old man gave you,” Hargrave said. “We could keep it for you here in special collections, if you like.”
“Thank you. I’ll consider that, sir,” Leo said. “Actually, I came about something else.”
“And what might that be?�
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“I wanted to discuss the letter.”
“The letter?”
“The letter that accompanied my gift from Prospero.”
“I see,” Hargrave said, clearing his throat. “And what did you want to discuss about it?”
“There’s something wrong with it, I think.”
“Something wrong?”
“Yes. I’m not sure what, exactly. But my intuition tells me it wasn’t written by Professor Prospero.”
Burton-Jones raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”
“Yes. Something about it doesn’t seem right.”
“And what is that?” Hargrave asked, frowning.
Leo reached into the pocket of his sports jacket and removed the letter. He unfolded it carefully and looked at it for a moment. “The handwriting looks like Prospero’s, but right here, in the third-to-last line, the word theater is spelled t-h-e-a-t-r-e, the British way, with -re at the end instead of -er.”
Leo shifted position on the couch and showed the letter to Hargrave, pointing to the line in question.
The librarian glanced at it, then shrugged. “That spelling’s common enough, Leo. What’s troubling you about it?”
“What’s troubling me is that Professor Prospero never would have used it. He was adamant, perhaps even fanatical, in his preference for American spellings and idioms. He often told me that he felt it was our duty, as citizens of a republic that had won its independence from Great Britain, to safeguard our linguistic freedom as well. He loved Shakespeare and the other great British writers, but he was always a zealous defender of what he called ‘the American language.’”
“That’s right, Leo,” said Burton-Jones. “The professor used to badger me mercilessly about my Briticisms—saying ‘call box’ for ‘telephone booth,’ ‘to hand’ for ‘at hand,’ ‘lift’ for ‘elevator,’ and the like. It was all in good fun, of course, but he did love to harass me about it. In fact, I think for a while he was working on a manuscript about British versus American English. I wonder what became of it.”
Hargrave cleared his throat. “So what are we getting at here, then?”
Burton-Jones looked at Leo. “May I see the letter?”
“Of course,” Leo said, handing it over.
Burton-Jones removed a pair of glasses from his inside breast pocket and slipped them on. When he finished reading, he passed the letter back to Leo.
“Well, what do you think, Reggie?” Hargrave asked.
A muscle twitched in the stalwart Englishman’s jaw. “Leo’s right, Harold. The professor couldn’t have written this. I’m certain of it.”
After Leo and Burton-Jones left his office, Harold Hargrave went to his bookshelf and removed a ponderous tome on wills, trusts, and estate law. Then he took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and settled down in a wing chair to study the book. After a few minutes, however, he grew tired and found he couldn’t concentrate. There was so much to do, he thought. Managing the Prospero collection would be formidable enough without the added inconvenience of Teddy’s impending lawsuit. And now the surfacing of Leo’s apocryphal letter presented a new impediment.
Hargrave yawned and set the heavy book on his lap. Suddenly the office door burst open.
“Harry, you old bookworm! I knew I’d find you hiding in here—even on Sunday. Don’t you ever take a lousy break?”
Hargrave looked up and saw a slender, fashionably dressed young man leaning nonchalantly in the doorway, an insolent smirk on his face.
The librarian scowled and rose stiffly from his chair. “What the devil—”
“No, not the devil, Harry,” Teddy Prospero said, sauntering into the room, “but the devil’s grandson, perhaps.”
Chapter 12
To Be or Not to Be Shakespeare
At precisely five seconds before two o’clock, Phil flicked on the station ID tape. He glanced at Caitlin, who was seated comfortably in the corner of the small control room, notebook at the ready, and then back at the panelists in the studio. At fifteen seconds after one, he shut off the tape, adjusted the knobs for the panelists’ microphones to the appropriate level, and signaled through the double-glass window.
Inside the studio, the professor at the head of the table leaned toward her microphone. “Good afternoon,” she said in a mellow voice. “This is Professor Enid Davies, your moderator for this week’s KHCR round table. Our topic for today’s panel discussion is ‘Shakespeare: A Question of Identity.’ It has been specially scheduled to coincide with Holyfield’s ongoing Elizabethan Festival.
“As you may know, many details about William Shakespeare’s life and work are still an enigma to us, and for generations a debate has raged over what constitutes the truth about this remarkable—and remarkably obscure—English playwright and poet. In the next hour we will explore several theories about who Shakespeare really was, or may have been, and why.
“I am joined by three of my esteemed colleagues on the Holyfield College faculty: Professor Bartholomew Martext, artistic director of the Fincke Theater; Associate Professor Carmen Torres of the English Department; and Professor Theophilus Bibb of the Renaissance Studies Department. We will each give a presentation, after which time will be allotted for discussion, questions, or rebuttal. Professor Martext, would you care to initiate the colloquy?”
“Thank you, Professor Davies,” Martext said. “Before I begin, I would like to ask our listeners to abandon for a moment the tedious insistence on objective fact and impartial analysis that tyrannizes so much scholarship and to indulge instead their powers of speculation. For today, by way of Shakespeare, I would like to call into question one of our culture’s most rudimentary and enduring assumptions, and such an endeavor requires that we cast off all intellectual inhibitions and engage in a free interplay of the imagination and the possible.”
In the control room, Phil looked at Caitlin. “Geez, will you listen to the way this guy talks? He’s totally verbose.”
“He seems brilliant to me. He directed Romeo and Juliet, you know.”
Phil raised his eyebrows. “Oh, so that explains it.”
Caitlin looked up. “Explains what?”
“Why he sounds so pretentious.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s an artiste. Therefore, he has a license to bore.”
Caitlin made a face. “Oh, stuff it, Phil, will you? I’m trying to take notes for an article here, all right?”
Phil chuckled and leaned back in his chair, getting set for the long haul. As Martext launched into the body of his discourse, however, Phil found himself gradually being drawn in, and he leaned forward and listened more carefully. The director’s thesis, although delivered in a convoluted and circumlocutory manner, was as simple as it was radical, in a nutshell, Martext was arguing that the creator of the plays attributed to Shakespeare was not an individual but a collective.
“No one person could have single-handedly written so many plays of such high quality in such a short period of time,” Martext said. “It is far more plausible that they were produced through a collaborative process in which the writer, the director, and the actors worked together on an impromptu basis to amend or abridge scenes and improvise new ones.
“Also, I am sure you all are well aware that many scholars agree that a number of the plays, specifically Henry IV: Part I, Timon of Athens, and Pericles, were the result of collaboration. Others believe that John Fletcher was the coauthor of Henry VIII, and some speculate that Philip Massinger assisted the elderly Shakespeare in writing The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Indeed, collaboration was so prevalent in the Elizabethan theater that today it is impossible, in many cases, to determine precisely who wrote what.
“Thus, there is a good deal of evidence to corroborate the view that Shakespeare, like many playwrights of his day, was in fact a so-called stage editor or play doctor, adept at revising and polishing existing material and adapting old plays and poems by obscure authors for the audiences of his day.
; “In Hamlet, for example, arguably his greatest play, we are given a portrait of this collaborative process: The traveling tragedians, to please their host, insert a scene into the play at the last minute. Thus, we see that a script was not immutable, something carved in stone by a lone authority and meant to be followed scrupulously by servile, subordinate players. In other words, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the Elizabethan theater, the conventional division of labor between writer, director, and actor was less binding than it is today.
“Moreover,” Martext continued, “the diversity of versions in which many of the plays survive underscores the notion of a Shakespeare who was flexible and willing to integrate others’ suggestions and revisions. Thus, the petty academic squabbles over which version is most authentic are beside the point because Shakespeare clearly did not work in isolation. Instead, as a member of various tight-knit theatrical troupes, he was stimulated by and able to thrive in the company of his fellow professionals.
“And so,” Martext concluded in his most histrionic voice, “it might be said that Shakespeare’s work demonstrates that the essence of theater is collaboration, that in a comprehensive sense all playwrights function not as autonomous artists who stand aloof and create, like God, out of chaos, but as conduits facilitating the divergent flow of communal forces of which they are only a part.”
A moment of silence followed this earnest peroration. Then Enid Davies spoke.
“Thank you, Professor Martext,” she said. “Are there any comments or questions from the other panelists?”
Throughout Martext’s presentation. Bibb had rolled his eyes and fidgeted in his seat, impatient for the opportunity to express his disagreement. “I have only one question,” he said, his bass voice booming into the microphone.
Phil quickly adjusted the level to prevent feedback.
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