Life, for Anne, was full of such enigmas.
By tea time Will was up to his codpiece in crimped and crumpled wads of foolscap, and the best he had come up with was:
“Don’t mitten ’em when you can glove ’em
Do your fingers a favor and shove ’em
Into something that’s woolen
And easy to pull-on
Really, we promise you’ll love ’em
The limerick failed to satisfy. “Woolen” and “pull-on” were, at best, a forced rhyme, unworthy of the greatest poet/playwright of all time, which he felt it his destiny, indeed his duty, to one day become. It was a burden. There would never be a Royal Shakespeare Company without him. And what would become of all the legions of writers of derivative plays, movie musicals, and television commercials to say nothing of literary conspiracy theorists who, deprived of their exercise, would be loosed to intermingle—possibly interbreed—with an unwitting public? He was to be an industry. The Royal Bacon Company? He thoughteth not! The phrase polluted the tongue.
Angrily he balled the limerick in his fist and shook it in the face of the Muses, intending that they would be sufficiently chastised to mark this date on the calendar as that upon which they had let the side down, and thereby be reminded not to let it happen again.
Shakespeare was disconsolate. His intellectual leotards were in a twist. Not only was it too late to call upon Miss Hathaway, but tomorrow in the High Street, as surely as the sun would, like a Veronese wench noted for the habit, arise in the east, it would be Francis Bacon’s lyrics on everybody’s lips and, alas, not his own. And he was coming down with a cold, imparted to him, he suspected, by the traitorous lips of his beloved, between sniffs.
Wading through the effluvium of his poetic efforts, he stood in the open door and looked up and down the darkened streets. He couldn’t keep altogether from his mind the notion that the town would greatly benefit from tourism, if only people had a reason to come, but this thought was superseded by his need to take a walk and clear his head. He put feet to the thought and had soon passed beyond the borders of the village, near the point where the river Avon, upon which Stratford was located, takes a gentle turn to the southwest. It began to rain, so he sought shelter under a nearby willow.
The powers that preside over the afterlife, those bureaucrats of the spiritual realm, were not happy with Abedegdod, renowned poet of Ireland’s Golden Age. These entities, while perfectly content to visit a smorgasbord of imaginative horrors upon simple, unsuspecting mortals, take exception to the principle of reciprocity and, therefore, had registered offense at a number of the poet’s later works that, editorializing upon the inconstancy of the gods, cast them, they felt, in an unfavorable light. The overall tone, they decided, was insufficiently obsequious. Of groveling, which to them was solid currency they could spend at the local PX, there was not a whiff.
So it was that Abedegdod, upon his death, found the portals of heaven barred him. While beyond those gates he discerned the more compliant of his predeceasers cavorting with Elysian abandon, he was abandoned to wander cavortless through temporal realms “until such time as you impart to another the gift with which you have been encharged,” said the low-level functionary manning the turnstile whose wings, Abedegdod noted, were scarcely nubs, and even with furious effort would have had difficulty lifting so much as a newt to any significant altitude. This was not a criticism, but an observation. “This shall be accomplished when you succeed in having someone repeat your name,” continued the sub-seraphic individual in monotone, without looking up from his notebook.
This struck Abedegdod as not such a hard bargain, given the alternatives he’d heard whispers of. It would be irresponsible to impart such a gift to just anyone. Still, it should present no insurmountable difficulty to discover a worthy country lad of quick wit and pliable mind in the poetry-sodden byways of Ireland. Melancholia, of course, would be an important ingredient in the disposition of such a candidate—but that characteristic would not be hard to come by in anyone of either sex between the ages of twelve and twenty, during which span individuals of the species generally develop the conviction that the world has conspired to make them miserable—and hence have a natural disposition toward the poetic.
Having received this commission, he turned from the gate to begin his descent to terra firma, figuring he’d be gone perhaps an hour. Two at the most. Odd how close the ground seemed, he thought. Odder still how pungent the earth, the flowers, the water, the dung, as if he’d never noticed them before. He suddenly didn’t see so well, and somehow knew that his dreams henceforward would be monochromatic—sepia at best—but it was to be expected that death demanded certain concessions.
The dung held a particular fascination . . .
“By the way,” said the functionary, before the poet was out of hearing. “You’re a dog.”
And so Abedegdod began his long, lonely, fruitless four-legged sojourn upon the face of the earth. As it turned out, not a soul in all of Ireland—the very Isle of Bards itself—could be made to interpret his growls and gruffles, his baring of teeth and playful little nips about the ankles as invitations to conversation, the introduction to pithy dialogue.
If he were unequal to the task of imparting his secret in Ireland, where shape-shifting was a practically a national sport with a long and glorious history—where every rock, root, bug, and leaf might just as well be someone’s chiropodist and a poetic dog would precipitate little more than a call for another round before closing time—how could he expect ever to succeed?
Year followed year in weary procession, decade upon decade until the centuries heaped up in endless array as far as the eye could see, and the seemingly humble task took on Herculean proportions. Despair was Abedegdod’s constant companion. His only human contact came at the end of a boot or a walking stick. Local dogs, after taking the most alarming liberties to ascertain his pedigree, chased him from village to village.
Wishing nothing more than to breathe into some blessed individual the numenessence of the precious jewel that burned at the center of his being—his gift of poetry—he was utterly forsaken. Reviled. Spat upon. Cursed. Calumniated. There was no end to the ingenuity or resourcefulness of the members of his former race in their persecution of him, or the lengths to which they would go to underscore their disapprobation. Compounding the curse was the fact that he was an unattractive and ungainly quadruped. The point had been driven home once when he’d been rebuffed in his attempt to provide succor to a diminutive red-haired lass he found sitting, crying, by the roadside. Her response, punctuated idiosyncratically with both prodigious tears and surprisingly deft blows from tiny fisted hands, was unequivocal. “Get away from me you flea-infested, maggoty, putrescent mange- ridden English dog of a mongrel!”
The girl was Irish. She would never be at a loss for words with which to express tender sentiments. He was unable to communicate the minor criticism that the words “dog” and “mongrel” were interchangeable and, therefore, redundant.
The remarks cut all the more deeply in that, apart from the reference to maggots, they were true. He had fleas. He had mange. He was ugly. Indisputably a mongrel, all of which made it unlikely that, among all his countrymen, he would find an individual possessed of the sensitivity of soul to see beyond these superficial shortcomings that, taken in aggregate, were off-putting.
He left Ireland, oceans being but long, damp interludes to an immortal dog. In time his journeys took him around the world. But not among the desert hermits, nor the village seers, nor the pillared saints, nor the wandering prophets, the mountaintop gurus, the jungle shamans, the naked fakirs, or the red-painted medicine men huddled in crumbling pueblos wrought by former civilizations could he find an audience. The mass of humanity, so disparate, so deeply divided by culture, custom, tradition, geography, ethnology, belief and preference in breakfast cereals, was united in at least one respect: universal, undiluted, undiminishing antipathy toward the poet-dog Abedegdod.
&n
bsp; In time he completed the circle and his footsteps bore him home to the British Isles. Here, at least, he felt at home. He understood the epithets with which his countrymen bathed him daily. The feet that kicked him were British feet. The monarch on the throne, oblivious to his existence as she was to that of most of her subjects, was, nonetheless, a British monarch. The scraps of food he was denied were British scraps. The low, fat clouds that relieved themselves upon him even now, were British clouds.
He sought shelter under a willow overhanging the river, near the point at which the river Avon turns gently toward the southwest.
Despite that it was exceedingly dark, his superior sense of smell informed him that he was not alone. Someone else lurked in the gloom. A human being. So pathetic was Abedegdod in his need, however, so desperate for companionship, that he freely hazarded his well-being for the small comfort of a box to the ear or a well-placed kick to the ribs. He sniffed out the location of the individual, haunched by the softly flowing stream, and sat beside him, awaiting his displeasure with the sangfroid of which only a dog is capable.
Shakespeare was too thoroughly absorbed in his thoughts to be startled by the appearance of a dog at his elbow. Indeed, by the time he became aware, he had already been massaging the appreciative animal about the neck and ears for some time.
For his part, Abedegdod was transported by ecstasies of delight and sat rooted to the spot as firmly as the willow lest, by movement, he should break the magic of the moment. He had been a dog so long, however, that it was not possible to refrain from wagging his tail, which beat upon the ground like a jungle drum.
“Whence camest thou?” said Shakespeare, shaking off the stupor or his reveries.
Abedegdod responded with a delicate couplet he had composed whilst journeying across the Siberian wastes some decades previous, a sad, somewhat plaintiff paean speculative as to that font from which all life exudes:
“To accompany the strains of our lament
What fictitious forbears we invent . . .”
All Shakespeare heard was a throaty growl salted with yappings, but these were not threatening and therefore not alarming. “I whist not, thou moist companion of the night, what travail hast brought thee into mine acquaintance. Yet ’tis not a friendship I am wary of, for such a mealy-mind as I . . . has hope of little else. What voice have I with which to shake the corridors of time? What prolixity to earn an echo in the hallowed halls of immortality? Who would name so much as a fishing rod after the likes of me?” (These were rhetorical questions. He did not expect the dog to answer.) “The angels of invention have flown, and left me to peculate mine own impoverished vault of wit, an exercise consumptive of time and productive of little but broken wind.” He regressed to the chore that plagued his brain. “‘Those whose fingers she loveth, will into a Shakespeare glove shoveth.’ Bother! ’Tis rant and raving and won’t move product across the counter. What more, ’twill not purge Bacon from the lips that fatten daily on his words.”
Abedegdod did not gather rosebuds of sense from this Elizabethan diatribe, but was too much contented having his ears scratched to raise the issue. Had he, at long last, discovered the individual to whom he could impart the gift of his name? If so, how was the transference to be made?
The answer was not forthcoming by dawn.
All night long the lad had cut and pasted in his mental scrapbook, trying his rhymes on the wind and the dog—neither of which seemed appreciative—and discarded by the fistful the flotsam and jetsam of his labors. Abedegdod wasn’t really listening. He had his own problems. Throughout the long, dark hours, he pressed the weight of his intellect against the seemingly insurmountable linguistic wall that separated them. There was no weakness in that elaborate defense. No slight indentation. No foothold. No breech. No yielding.
“If only,” thought the poet/dog, “this miserable specimen could understand me, as I understand him!” (He considered, at the conclusion of the twelfth hour, which might as well have been the twelfth night, of abortive limericks, that it would be no bad thing if he hadn’t understood.) “That this communication should be so one-sided is apocalyptically unfair.”
No sooner had this observation been made than the cock crew, summoning the sun that had, for some time, been skulking about below the horizon.
“By the unholy powers!” said Shakespeare, when at last he recovered his eyes from trolling the fallow regions of his mind. “Thou art as mightily repugnant an omnivore as ever I clapped eyes upon!” Nevertheless, he did not withdraw his ministering hand, for the beast’s steadfast companionship through the long dark night of the soul had inured him to its imperfections, however harshly revealed by the unblinking light of day.
“And I suspect the stench whereof thou stinketh is spared me only by the furious constipation of my nose. What then? Should I push thee from me for these slight offenses, when thou hast stood by these weary hours and borne so uncomplainingly the full box, bag, and trundle of mine horrors?” He embraced the animal heartily and the dam of poor Aedegdod’s heart broke, sending torrents of tears to his eyes.
Events had progressed to this touching impasse when fate put in her appearance in the form of Annie Hathaway who was proceeding to town, as was her custom of a morning, by way of the river path. Her pleasure upon beholding her beloved was at once superseded by a look of alarm.
“Bod Dieu!” she said, seeing Abedegdod. Her nasal cavity, remember, was completely stuffed, rendering her “m’s” and “n’s” as “eb’s” and “ed’s”. “Prithee, what banner of beast hast thou by the had, by abore? Shall I call Neuf-Une-Une?” She’d been practicing her numbers.
“It is a dog, in evidence of which I direct your attention to its tail, which thumpeth after the manner popularized by the species, and to its odor, likewise.”
“Thou deedest dot call that to my attention,” the woman replied playfully. “That it possesses this characteristic id quadity is apparedt eved to this dose. Yet . . . these slight evidedces, which are subject to idterpretation, aside . . . it could be bost adything.”
Shakespeare would have protested in the dog’s behalf, but there was no defense he could make. So he changed the subject. “Wherefore goest thou, my love?”
“To Dunkin’ Crumpets, of course. Have we been so log parted thou has forgotted by habits?” She tilted her head coquettishly. “It seems, udless bine eyes bear false witdess, thou hast beed here all dight. I awaited thee late last eveding id vaid.”
Shakespeare moaned and threw up his hands as if begging the sun to impale him on its beams that, even now, splintered through the trees. “This jingle! This jingle!” he fumed in paroxysms of despair. “My kingdom for this jingle!” He pulled at his hair.
“Eez dat all?” said Anne with a giggle, lapsing once more into her exaggerated French accent. She did not understand. Sensitivity toward the artistic temperament was not among her attributes. “You will feel better after breakfast, oui? What would you like? ‘Ab ad’ egg, dod?”
What she meant, of course, was “’am an’ egg, non?” However, what was heard in the heavenlies, where a mechanical trip-switch had long-ago been rigged to respond to the Irish poet’s name when repeated by someone other than himself, was “Abedegdod.” So, in fulfillment of the bargain, Abedegdod’s gift was transferred at once to the one who had spoken his name.
“Oooh,” said Annie, with a shivery little shimmy that made her attributes jiggle, “I’ve come over all queer and poetic like.” She sniffed. “And my cold is gone!”
For Abedegdod this was a surprising turn of events, illustrative of the aphorism “You never know.” Even as his soul departed from the animal in which it had so long resided, a bit of him wished he could stick around long enough to see what might eventuate. But at that moment the portals of eternity were creaking open on rusty hinges and there was no telling how long they might remain so. His spirit scampered toward them, only recalling as he crossed the threshold that he need not proceed on all fours. He stood up, brushed himself of
f and, titling his fedora rakishly to one side, gave a brief salute to the functionary manning the gate, and entered.
The humblest intelligence, to whom it must have been evident where the story was going, must now be asking themselves: “What ho? It seemed the Gift was going to be imparted to Shakespeare who, every school child knows, ended up with it. Howforth or hencewise commeth Annie Hathaway into its possession?”
Well, Annie was not the brightest bulb in the bargain bag, so she failed to appreciate the treasure of which she found herself in possession, or to market it properly. Shakespeare, on the other hand, to whom the unwitting woman’s intermittent coruscations of literary genius—which poured out of her by the bucketful whenever she napped, usually after a large meal—were shining shrines of bliss, magnificent blisters of passion, trembling temples of wisdom, vaudeville stages of wit. He saw potential. So he married her. “If ever someone could come up with a socko jingle for Shakespeare’s gloves,” he reasoned. “She’s the number!”
The jingle was not forthcoming. Plays by the yard—tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies, histories, histero-comedies—to the tune of two or three a year. These he copied out and carted up to London where, knowing that no one would take the time to read a play by a woman, he fobbed them off on the theater-crowd as devices of his own. He even acted in a few of them himself and, all in all, made a comfortable living for his family back in Stratford. He’d return there twice or thrice a year to pick up the latest load of literature, which he’d trained his daughters to take in dictation, so the enterprise had become sort of a cottage business. Truth be told, they weren’t bad stabs at the art, and he spent many idle hours wondering whence the Gift had come to her. More than that, if he could figure out how she’d gotten over the cold so quickly, he could fatten his bank account by a few thousand pounds. These were, he resolved, questions he must leave to the gods.
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