'But tell me about your plays, Master Shakespeare,' said Jane. 'I mean, I know he wants me to calm you down and soften you up so that you'll let out more information than you want to Shakespeare's eyes opened even wider. Well, thought Gresham, there's nothing like a dose of the truth to make things work. He had tried the tough way and lost. Let Jane do her worst. 'But I really, really do like your plays. And so, by the way, does he. More than that, in fact. He loves what you write almost as much as he hates the man who writes them.'
Why was this line of conversation seeming to make the man panic again? Gresham thought. i think you must be an amazing person, to write those comedies and then move on to histories and tragedies. If it was anyone else, they'd have stayed with one style, like Jonson has, and made it their speciality. Your plays — you seem to do each style better than anyone else and then move on! It's extraordinary.'
'Yes, isn't it?' said Shakespeare distractedly, as if he was trying to pass a large and sharp stone from his bottom. 'Actually, I prefer to talk about my poems, you know. The plays are how I earn my keep. The poems are where 1 feel I can write…' He wanted to talk about his Rape ofLucrece.
He babbled on, genuinely happier now he was off the subject of plays.
Gresham moved around the table. Shakespeare had only been renting these rooms for a month or so, Mannion had said. An old Dominican Priory, withmore bolt holes and secret passages than a Catholic household, Gresham guessed. The water was only a few paces away, down St Andrew's Hill to Puddle Wharf. Had he moved here so he could run when danger threatened? If you looked carefully you could see where the door in the panelling opened up, but the carpentry was superb and it could only be seen as a door if one knew where to examine. There were no bookcases, Gresham saw with surprise, no sign of a library. Not even copies of his own plays, those that had been published. Only three books. Venus and Adonis. The Rape of Lucrece. His poems. And there were his sonnets, of course. Brilliant. Gresham, who had published his own sonnets under a false name, had felt the sharp sting of envy when he had read Shakespeare's work, always the sign of real power in another writer. It was a pirate edition, with the famous acknowledgement to 'Mr W.H.' as the 'only begetter' of the sonnets. In any event, the book was there, stuffed carelessly along with the others, in a chest with its lid open, a chest stuffed otherwise with printed pamphlets and broadsheets. One of them caught Gresham's eye. It had been torn out of something. To our English Terence, Mr Will. Shakes'Speare.
Terence. The classical author.
Light exploded in Gresham's head. Of course! The explanation! It had to be! What a fool he had been!
'I'm sorry, Master Shakespeare,' Gresham said charmingly. None of the revelation in his mind showed. Shakespeare had paused in his explanation of Venus and Adonis to Gresham's own Venus. 'I really should have asked if you wanted to eat before I set your table. May I ask you to sit and sup of this very humble fare?'
Humble it might have been, but the way Shakespeare attacked the food after his initial hesitation confirmed what Gresham had thought. Master Shakespeare, who looked as if he had the capacity to be a good trencherman, had been feeding as Well as drinking out of the bottle in recent weeks.
The wine was good. Not excellent, but good. Gresham treated himself to two glasses. Shakespeare had adapted with some ease to his attackers becoming his dinner guests. Actors, thought Gresham, do not live by any known codes. They are outsiders, perhaps even outcasts. They make their own rules. Shakespeare had insisted on moving to the next room — Mannion had moved casually to the door to make sure another priest's escape route was not being utilised — and bringing back four exquisite glasses, clearly Venetian. In Mannion's paw the vessel looked like a new-born babe in the hands of a devil. Just pray he doesn't smash it, thought Gresham. And that Shakespeare doesn't drop one, as he had dropped the goblet, when I tell him what I now know.
There are moments when humanity thinks history is made, when a great battle is fought or a mighty coronation observed. Yet there are other moments, hidden in the warp and weave of everyday conversation, masquerading as normality, that change lives and sometimes even the world. Moments which expose or hide a truth for ever more, that write a new version of human history. Moments based on the chance of a particular pamphlet lying at the top of a pile, and the chance of a particular man seeing it there at a particular moment when two glasses of wine had been drunk just ever so slightly too fast.
Gresham let Shakespeare finish his meal. He would need all the strength he could muster. He waited until the man, garrulous by now, was telling Jane about his plans for a new sonnet sequence. It was as if the room shivered before him. It was an extraordinary sensation, one he had never experienced. He had dealt with kings and queens! He had held their fate in his hands! He had kept secrets the world would have shuddered for! So why now, with the plump and drunk figure of a nobody in front of him, did he feel that something inexplicably important for the future was taking place in this room? He shook his head to rid it of this nonsense. He must have drunk, more wine than he had thought. Then, in a pause while the actor reached for yet another glass, Gresham spoke.
'You didn't write your plays, did you, Master Shakespeare? You wrote your poems, I'm sure, but your plays — the work you've become famous for — you didn't write them, did you?'
Shakespeare looked at Gresham with an expression of such appalled horror that for a moment Gresham felt the most intense and cutting pity for the wreck of a man in front of him. Was he going to throw up the first food he had eaten in days? Or would he make it to speech first?
'I… how could you? Are you some devil incarnate?' There, it was out. And it was the truth, Gresham noted. If it were otherwise, the man would have denied it in his shock.
'No, no devil, as far as I know,' said Gresham. 'But I observe, and I listen. Manuscripts of plays are stolen, manuscripts pre-* sumably in the handwriting of their author. There's panic in the corridors of power. With the Catholics banished to hell for ever more after the gunpowder plot, there's a new power in the land. The Puritans. They get their Bible. They rail against the corrup' tion of King and Court. And they hate the theatre above all else! They call it Satan's chapel, and the actors the spawn of Lucifer.'
'So?' said Shakespeare violently, rallying. 'We've endured their vilification for years. And not just them. We're vilified by the people who use us most, just like a whore! What of it?' There was a pathetic braggadocio to the man. Or perhaps a trace of real courage. Would Gresham have been happy to fight alongside this man? he wondered. Strangely, against all reason, perhaps he might have been/Providing, of course, he had been able to pour a bottle of wine down him first. Dismissing the thought, he bored in to Shakespeare.
'What if the very powers of the land, the Establishment, its aris-tocracy and nobility, have succumbed to the new power of the theatre? What if, instead of wanting their thoughts and dreams and the wild imaginings read out in private to a closed group of adoring Court ladies and fawning men, they want them played before thousands, night after night? What if they have found themselves lured into Writing plays? Plays they cannot own up to, of course. Heaven forbid that the ruling classes should stoop so low as to write a play! Yet suppose their idle brains have found amusement in so doing? What easier than to find a cipher, a nameless man of the theatre, to give his name to their offerings? What if they chose a feeble poet, a man who had proved his ability for deceit in his life as a spy, and an actor of at best limited ability, to put his name to their work?'
'What if they have?' mumbled Shakespeare, seeming to see the end of the world in the bottom of an empty wine glass.
'Well then,' said Gresham, 'what if some mischief-maker decides to expose these idle aristocrats? Expose them to the Puritans. Expose them to the people as too cowardly to own up to their own words. Expose them as liars. Expose them as deceivers. Expose them to ridiculeV
'And what if they do?' Shakespeare had looked up from his glass now. He gazed into Gresham's eyes, but did not see them. He was looking into a void, an abyss of hopelessness that not even Gresham's greatest depression had plunged him in to.
'What if they do?' continued Gresham remorselessly. 'Well, we know our rulers are liars. Machiavelli told us why they have to be. Yet look at the response when Machiavelli dared to tell people the truth. He was consigned to hell. We must not know that our rulers tell lies! But if they do want to expose the truth,' Gresham carried on remorselessly, 'then two separate forces will work on the source of the lie. On you, Master William Shakespeare. The supposed author of these plays. The man who in reality takes the manuscripts, tidies them up a bit for theatre and puts them out as his work — all for a healthy fee, of course! There'll be the force of those who desperately want their foray into the theatre kept a secret. Then there's the other party, the ones who want their genius acknowledged, who want to take the glory of their writing for themselves.'
Shakespeare's head jerked up at that. So at least one person wanted their anonymity removed, wanted to claim the credit for the play they had laundered through Shakespeare's name.
'What a mess you're in, Master William Shakespeare! One party will try to keep your secret by having you killed. The other party will try everything to keep you alive and pressure you into telling the truth. And the
