Something rotten

'Dead,' said a voice, 'dead as a ducat!'

33 Shgakespeafe

'ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE', CLAIMS PLAYWRIGHT

That was the analogy of life offered by Mr William Shakespeare yesterday when his latest play opened at the Globe. Mr Shakespeare went on to further compare plays with the seven stages of life by declaring that 'All the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances, And one nun in his time plays many parts.' Mr Shakespeare's latest offering, a comedy entitled As You Like It, opened to mixed reviews with the Southwark Gazette declaring it 'a rollicking comedy of the highest order' while the Westminster Evening News described it as 'tawdry rubbish from the Warwickshire shithouse'. Mr Shakespeare declined to comment as he is already penning a follow-up.

Article in Blackfriar New, September 1589

We turned to find a small man with wild, unkempt hair standing in the doorway. He was dressed in Elizabethan clothes that had seen far better days and his feet were bound with strips of cloth as makeshift shoes. He twitched nervously and one eye was closed — but beyond this the similarity to the Shakespeares Bowden had found was unmistakable. A survivor. I took a step closer. His face was lined and weathered and those teeth he still possessed were stained dark brown and worn. He must have been at least seventy but it didn't matter. The genius that had been Shakespeare had died in 1616 but genetically speaking he was with us right now.

'William Shakespeare?'

'I am a William, sir, and my name is Shgakespeafe,' he corrected.

'Mr Shgakespeafe,' I began again, unsure of how to explain exactly what I wanted, 'my name is Thursday Next and I have a Danish prince urgently in need of your help.'

He looked from me to Bowden to Millon and then back to me again. Then a smile broke across his weathered features.

'O, wonder!' he said at last. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!'

He stepped forward and shook our hands warmly; it didn't look as though he had seen anyone for a while.

'What happened to the others, Mr Shgakespeafe?'

He beckoned us to follow him and then was off like a gazelle. We had a hard job keeping up with him as he darted down the labyrinthine corridors, nimbly avoiding the rubbish and broken equipment. We caught up with him when he stopped at a broken window that overlooked what had once been a large exercise compound. In the middle were two grassy mounds. It didn't take a huge amount of imagination to guess what was underneath them.

'O heart, heavy heart, Why sigh'st thou without breaking?' murmured Shgakespeafe sorrowfully. 'After the slaughter of so many peers by falsehood and by treachery, when will our great regenitors be conquered?'

'I only wish I could say your brothers would be avenged,' I told him sadly, 'but in all honesty the men who did this are now dead themselves. I can only offer yourself and any others who survived my protection.'

He took in every word carefully and seemed impressed by my candour. I looked beyond the mass graves of the Shakespeares to several other mounds beyond. I had thought they might have cloned two dozen or so, not hundreds.

'Are there any other Shakespeares here?' asked Bowden.

'Only myself — yet the night echoes with the cries of my cousins,' replied Shgakespeafe. 'You will hear them anon.'

As if in answer there was a strange cry from the hills. We had heard something like it when Stig dispatched the chimera back in Swindon.

'We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe,' said Shgakespeafe, looking around nervously. 'Follow me and give me audience, friends.'

He led us along the corridor and into a room that was full of desks set neatly in rows, each with a typewriter upon it. Only one typewriter was anything like still functioning; around it stood stacks and stacks of typewritten sheets of paper — the product of Shgakespeafe's outpourings. He led us across and gave us some of his work to read, looking on expectantly as our eyes scanned the writing. It was, disappointingly, nothing special at all — merely scraps of existing plays cobbled together to give new meaning. I tried to imagine the whole room full of Shakespeare clones clattering away at their typewriters, their minds filled with the Bard's plays, and scientists moving among them trying to find one, just one, who had even one half the talent of the original.

Shgakespeafe beckoned us to the office next to the writing room, and there showed us mounds and mounds of paperwork, all packaged in brown paper with the name of the Shakespeare clone who had written it printed on a label. As the production of writing outstripped the ability to evaluate it, the people working here could only file what had been written and then store it for some unknown employee in the future to peruse. I looked again at the mound of paperwork. There must have been twenty tons or more in the storeroom. There was a hole in the roof and the rain had got in; much of this small mountain of prose was damp, mouldy and unstable.

'It would take an age to sort through it for anything of potential brilliance,' mused Bowden, who had arrived by my side. Perhaps, ultimately, the experiment had succeeded. Perhaps there was an equal of Shakespeare buried in the mass grave outside, his work somewhere deep within the mountain of unintelligible prose facing us. It was unlikely we would ever know, and if we did it would teach us nothing new — except that it could be done and others might try. I hoped the mound of paperwork would just slowly rot. In the pursuit of great art Goliath had perpetrated a crime that far outstripped anything I had so far seen.

Millon took pictures, his flashgun illuminating the dim intenor of the scriptorium. I shivered and decided I needed to get away from the oppressiveness of the interior. Bowden and I walked to the front of the building and sat among the rubble on the front steps, just next to a fallen statue of Socrates that held a banner proclaiming the value of the pursuit of knowledge.

'Do you think we'll have trouble persuading Shgakespeafe to come with us?' he asked.

As if in answer, Shgakespeafe walked cautiously from the building. He earned a battered suitcase and blinked in the harsh sunlight. Without waiting to be asked he got in the back of the car and started to scribble in a notebook with a pencil stub.

'Does that answer your question?'

The sun dropped below the hill in front of us and the air suddenly felt colder. Every time there was a strange noise from the hills Shgakespeafe jumped and looked around nervously, then continued to scribble. I was just about to fetch Stig when he appeared from the building carrying three enormous leather-bound volumes.

'Did you find what you needed?'

He passed me the first book, which I opened at random. It was, I discovered, a Goliath biotech manual for building a Neanderthal. The page I had selected gave a detailed description of the Neanderthal hand.

'A complete manual,' he said slowly. 'With it we can make children.'

I handed back the volume and he placed it with the others in the boot of the car. There was another unearthly wail in the distance.