The Cottage by Alan K. Austin

Author:Alan K. Austin [Austin, Alan K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462068715
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2012-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

“It amuses me that you Americans are the ones who insist that only an earl or a duke or someone with royal blood could have written the plays.”

Lester Crowne lounged possessively on “Shakespeare’s Bed” in Stratford-upon-Avon and lectured Jack on the royalist leanings of the colonies. He had brushed aside most of Jack’s questions with a snort, and once—when Jack recited a few lines from a sonnet to make a point—he pointedly seemed ready to curl up and go to sleep on that hallowed ticking, well aware that the bed and mattresses were constructed two hundred or more years after Shakespeare’s death.

“No one in England would bother with such nonsense,” Crowne steamed ahead with his monologue. “No one who knows anything at all. It was the public schoolboys who wrote the plays. People like Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Earls and dukes didn’t write plays.”

He gave his umbrella a dismissive swish. Jack crossed his legs reflexively.

“Marlowe and Jonson,” Jack shouted to him. “The second- and third-best playwrights of the day, were they?”

“You might say that.”

“Those guys were all over the place,” Jack said. “Their pictures were painted, they went to jail, and they were the talk of the town. Why is it that the best playwright, Shakespeare, was so invisible? Nobody ever saw him. No one painted his picture or connected him with Stratford or mourned his death until years after he died.”

“Mr. Duncan, you seem woefully ignorant of the facts. Robert Greene left us an uncontestable identification of the poet early in his career.”

“Oh?”

Jack saw Robin Corcoran stiffen, her eyes narrowing as though she suspected he was baiting her boss, that Jack knew more than he pretended. She would have been partly right. Jack had spent a long time trying to understand the Stratfordians’ prime piece of evidence that William Shakespeare was anything but a pseudonym, and the more he studied it, the more bewildering it had become. And that, he finally deduced, was its real value to them—to confuse and bore the doubters until they threw up their hands and turned on television.

“Of course,” Crowne said. “Have you never heard of a book published in 1592 entitled Robert Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit?”

He had taken the bait. “What did it say?” Jack eased him along.

“Robert Greene was a penniless, dying dramatist. You would say ‘playwright.’ He wrote this portion of the book to warn three of his fellow dramatists about one of their actors.” Crowne gazed at the ceiling. “He wrote, ‘There is an upstart crow, beautified with your feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.’ He goes on to say that this upstart crow considers himself the ‘the only Shakescene in a country.’ Crystal clear. That document says it all. Case closed.” Crowne did one of his Mussolini triumphal poses, gloating at the ceiling as though he could hear the cheers of multitudes.

Jack’s mind wandered momentarily: He knows that little book by heart.

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