Shakespeare's Spy

by Gary Blackwood

  He shrugged. “I read no more than half an act—just to be sure it sounded like Shakespeare.”

  “Oh.” I tried to put myself in the role of someone who had never encountered the script before, to see how it would strike me. I opened the playbook at random and silently scanned the first passage that met my eye:

  O, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us!

  Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt

  Since riches point to misery and contempt?

  Not bad, really. I turned the page and sampled another speech:

  The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

  Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

  And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

  If I had not recalled writing those lines myself, I might have taken them for Mr. Shakespeare’s. Perhaps I was not so poor a playwright as I had imagined. I could string words together well enough, if only I could find a thread strong enough to support them. I recalled Mr. Shakespeare’s reply when I asked how he came up with the stories for his plays. “You wouldn’t happen to have any ideas for sale, would you?”

  The man looked at me blankly. “Ideas?”

  “Never mind.” I tossed the playbook aside and turned away. What was the use in dredging up that foolish ambition again? It was no more likely to succeed than anything else I had attempted lately. If the experiences of these last few months had taught me anything, it was that the efforts we mortals make to determine our own fates are as feeble and fruitless as trying to change the course of the wind by blowing against it.

  Nothing I had put my hand to had turned out as I planned. I had hoped I might win Judith’s affections; instead, she had gone home. I had dreamed of becoming a great playwright and discovered that I was merely promising. I had dragged Sal Pavy from the cold clutches of the Thames, only to have him succumb to the grippe. Fate had mocked me yet again by letting me rescue Tom Cogan from the hangman’s rope and then striking him down with the plague. All my scheming to save Julia had come to naught; she had ended up saving herself.

  I had been walking west, with no particular destination in mind, and now found myself at the wall. If I went on through Ludgate I would wind up in Salisbury Court—hardly the best neighborhood to explore on one’s own. But I had been here before and come to no harm. Besides, what was the use in being cautious? If Fate had it in for me, I was not safe anywhere, and if I was in her good graces, then I had nothing to fear.

  If only a person could know in advance what Fate had planned for him, he might save himself a good deal of trouble and worry. Had I known that Tom Cogan would die anyway, I need not have put myself and Father Gerard in danger. Had Julia foreseen that she would end up performing at the royal court, she could have forgone her ill-fated trip to France.

  The ability to anticipate Fate would let a wight prepare a bit, too. Julia could have been practicing her maid-of-honor skills. The Chamberlain’s Men could have hired half a dozen new players. Had I been forewarned that Judith and Julia would leave, or that Sander would die, I might have been more careful not to grow so fond of them.

  The cunning woman had seen some of what lay in store for Sam and Sal Pavy and me. Perhaps there was more. Though she had warned me that it was not wise to examine the future too closely, I was willing to take the chance. I was sick of being tossed about by the winds of chance. I wanted some star to steer by, however faint.

  When I found La Voisin, she was taking down her tent. Though she had shed most of her woolen scarves, she kept one wrapped about her head and face—to conceal the warts that disfigured her, no doubt. She gave me a suspicous glance. “I suppose you’ve come to complain.”

  “Nay. To ha’ me fortune told.”

  “Again? Most of my customers find that once is quite enough. In fact, a number of them have come to demand their money back. That’s why I’m leaving.”

  “Your predictions for them didn’t come true, then?”

  “Oh, they came true right enough—just not in the way they may have expected.”

  I grinned ruefully. “I ken how that is.”

  “Yet you’ve come back for more?”

  “Aye. I’m weary of being Fortune’s fool. It seems to me that any glimpse of what’s ahead, no matter how brief or how blurry it is, must be better than fumbling along blindly.”

  La Voisin sighed. “Well, I suppose I must oblige you, after you gave me money for coal.” She sat at the table and drew her scrying ball from a pouch at her waist. “Had you not, I might have been forced to burn this, to keep warm.”

  “It would burn?”

  “Of course. Though it may be carved and polished, it’s still a lump of coal.” She uncovered the black ball and peered into it.

  “I was hoping you might tell me—” I began, but she cut me off.

  “I do not make fortunes to order. I see only what I see. Now be silent.”

  Meekly, I took a seat on the other stool and waited, scarcely moving a muscle, until she finally spoke again in that ominous, otherworldly voice. “You will tell a great many lies,” she said.

  I blinked at her, then at the ball. “What sort of prediction is that?”

  She spread her wart-speckled hands, palms up. “I do not interpret, I only see.”

  “But—but I’ve been doing me best not to lie. Now you tell me that I must keep on?”

  The cunning woman wrapped up her scrying ball and returned it to its pouch. “I never said you must. I said you would.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s certainly a comfort.” I rose from the stool. “Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it’s best to fumble along blindly after all. God buy you.”

  As I walked away, La Voisin called after me, “We are not truly Fortune’s fools, you know.”

  “Nay? What are we, then?”

  “Her instruments. You imagine that there’s no use struggling against Fate, that she will always have her way, no matter what we do. But don’t you see? It’s our very efforts to cheat Fate, or to change it, that make things come to pass in the way they were meant to.”

  At first, this explanation of hers seemed to me as baffling as the prediction she had made. But the more I mulled it over, the more I came to see the sense in it. It was easy to conclude that since we could not hope to alter Fate, we might as well not try. But that was like saying that since the plague struck down whomever it chose, there was no use trying to prevent it. It was like saying that we players should not bother rehearsing so hard, since the audience would either like the play or not.

  It was true that most of my own efforts of late had failed. But what might have happened had I not made them at all? Pulling Sal Pavy from the river had not prevented his death, only delayed it—but long enough for him to say farewell, and to forgive me. If I had not helped Tom Cogan arrange his escape from prison, he would have taken the truth about Julia’s parentage with him to the grave. If I had not been so eager to impress Judith and to raise money for Julia’s passage, I would never have written my play.

  Of course, the world would have been no worse off without Timon of Athens. Still, creating it had been satisfying, in a perverse sort of way. It was rather like the satisfaction I had once gotten from being able to lie so convincingly. It was very much like it, in fact. I had always thought of acting as a form of lying; after all, we players habitually posed as someone we were not, and spouted sentiments that were not our own. But, though we were not the people we pretended to be, we were at least people. Plays were nothing but a lot of words on paper, attempting to give the illusion of life. What more outrageous lie could there be than that?

  Though I was well out of sight of La Voisin’s tent by now, I turned and gazed thoughtfully in that direction. Perhaps I was making the same mistake I had made before, the very mistake that the cunning woman’s other clients had made—taking her predictions at face value. She had said that I would tell a great many lies. But might she not have meant the sort of lie that players and playwrights tell, the sort th
at the audience knows is untrue but chooses to believe anyway?

  Well, even if that was not what she had meant, I could choose to believe that it was. If it was my fate to be a liar, then I would revel in it. I would write the most real and riveting lies I could concoct, lies that theatre companies would delight in telling and that folk would pay to hear, again and again.

  I quickened my pace. Before long the sun would be down and I would need to head home, where the boys would be waiting eagerly to harness me and turn me into Banks’s horse, and Mr. Pope would want to hear about all I had seen and done that day, and Tetty would ask me to tuck her into bed. And I would not, for all the world, have had it otherwise.

  But for the next few hours my time was my own, and I meant to spend it in a quiet booth at the nearest tavern, where no one could find me, writing down as many lies as I could think of, in hopes that one of them might turn into a play. I would need paper, of course. I reached into my wallet and drew forth a dozen or so sheets. Though the fronts were filled with my lines from Measure for Measure, the back sides were invitingly empty.

  I glanced at my part, feeling a bit guilty. We were to start rehearsing the play the following afternoon, and I had not yet learned a single line. Well, perhaps I could go over them for half an hour or so that evening, before sleep claimed me. After all, none of the other players would have their parts down yet, either, particularly not the new prentices and hired men the company had taken on. They would be as uncertain as I where they were to stand and what they were to say.

  It occurred to me, then, how nearly real life resembles the first rehearsal of a play. We are all of us stumbling through it, doing our best to say the proper lines and make the proper moves, but not quite comfortable yet in the parts we’ve been given. Still, like players who trust that—despite all evidence to the contrary—the whole mess will make sense eventually, we keep on going, hoping that somehow things will work out for the best.

  I could not be certain what sort of part Fortune had written for me; all I could do was to play it out to the best of my ability. I had the feeling that it would prove to be rather like the script for Timon of Athens—far from perfect, but full of promise.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Though Shakespeare’s Spy is obviously a novel and not a history text, I did my best to make it as accurate as I could. Sometimes, for the sake of the story, I did take a few liberties with the facts, or indulged in a bit of speculation. For example, I’m not certain that the Thames actually froze over in the winter of 1602—1603. But the river did freeze several times during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, so solidly that celebrations called Frost Fairs were held on the ice.

  I also put in a number of people who, as far as I know, didn’t exist. Widge is my own invention, of course; so are Jamie Redshaw, Julia, Tetty, and Tom Cogan. Nearly everyone else in the story is based on a real historical character—though again, I did sometimes fudge the facts a little. La Voisin, the cunning woman, practiced her art in the 1660s and ‘70s, so, unless she lived to an unusually ripe age, she probably wasn’t around in 1603.

  Frances Vavasour was one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and she did marry Thomas Shirley; there’s no evidence that she had an affair with the Earl of Essex, but it’s not at all unlikely, considering how numerous his conquests were. Sal Pavy may never have acted with the Chamberlain’s Men, but he did act at Blackfriars. And, though there’s no record of the cause, he did die at the age of thirteen.

  Shakespeare had not just one daughter, but two—Susanna and Judith. In 1603, Judith would have been seventeen or eighteen. At the age of thirty-one, she married Thomas Quiney, the shiftless, alcoholic son of one of Shakespeare’s friends.

  Father John Gerard’s career contained far more danger and daring than I could fit into this book. Luckily he wrote his own, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, which was reprinted in the 1950s.

  King James’s wife, Anne, really did fancy herself an actress. She and her ladies-in-waiting regularly performed in expensive, elaborate masques at the court. But it wasn’t until 1660, when King Charles II took the throne, that women were allowed at last to appear on the stages of public playhouses in England.

  The cast of characters is not the only thing based on historical fact, of course. Most of the big events—the plague, the queen’s death, the closing of the theatres, James’s accession to the throne—happened more or less the way I’ve presented them. Some of the smaller elements in the book are true as well. As you know if you’ve read Shakespeare’s Scribe, Widge’s “swift writing” was an actual system of shorthand invented by Dr. Timothy Bright in the 1580s. And the cyphers Henslowe uses to communicate with his spy are part of a code devised by Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, whose job it was to uncover Papist plots against Her Majesty.

  Like all the other plays mentioned, Timon of Athens is the real thing. It’s even still staged occasionally. But because the script is, if not exactly putrid, at least not top-notch, many Shakespearean scholars think that someone besides the Bard had a hand in writing it.

  GARY BLACKWOOD has written many novels for young readers, including the first two award-winning books about Widge, The Shakespeare Stealer and Shakespeare's Scribe. Among his other books are The Year of the Hangman, which was a 2002 School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and Wild Timothy.

  Mr. Blackwood lives with his wife and daughter on an acre of land surrounded by cow pastures outside Carthage, Missouri.