Chapters Forty-one and Forty-two

Will was bewildered. He walked along in the wedding parade, and did his best to dance and sing with the rest of the party, but he felt like he was going out of his mind. The enormity of the sacrament he’d taken, creeping through his blood like a bacchic vine, sending out tendrils to the outer edges of his very being, made him feel like something or someone else. The surroundings swirled around him dizzyingly, a confused, disorienting palate of colored burlap and ribbon; the smells were outrageous, the most elegant perfumes and scents of strange spices and exotic foods punctuated with the overpowering stench of raw sewage and unimaginable body odor.

Will rubbed his eyes; was this Temple Grafton or a country fair?

Will tried to steady himself and to recognize the faces around him. There were Father John and Mother Mary; there was Jacob; there was a woman with a bizarre pointed hat; there ahead of him was Dashka — what was she doing here? He passed a black-clad Puritan holding a Bible and screaming, “Papist sinners repent!” and a woman wearing no dress but hose, blue and so tight you could make out the shape of cunt lips underneath.

The wedding procession arrived at the Inn Yard. At one end, under the trees, was a stage where a quartet sang ribald verses. The songs he knew well, or thought he did; he couldn’t understand the words, because the singers sang in an accent that was strange, strange! The perimeter of the yard was ringed by tables offering forth every manner of feasting-foods: that savory smoke must be the venison he’d poached, but there were also turkey legs, a giant meat pie in the shape of a peacock complete with a tail of delicate sugar, surrounded by small paper trays filled with potato chips. On a table was a stack of small, sweet wedding cakes the size of mini-pizzas baked as gifts by the wedding guests, and awaiting the traditional kiss over them, the first kiss between the bride and groom.

Flowing from the taps were ale, beer, and wines; and also lemonade and warm Dr. Pepper, served by a variety of wenches with teeth shockingly rotten and shockingly perfect, with skin dark as an Ethiope or pale as ice, ravaged by pox so festering that it nearly made him sick, or sculpted and painted into a vision of a beauty that surely surpassed that of Cleopatra or Helen of Troy.

Overwhelmed, he leaned against the ale stand, and looked around the crowd . . . there were many people here, some he recognized, many he didn’t. Of course, the greater part of two villages would be here for the wedding, Shottery and Berkeley, the last weekend of the Faire and free venison courtesy of the Shakespeares.

Where is Anne?

On the small stage set for the entertainment of the Inn Yard, the singers finished and the players bounded out on stage, wearing just undershirts and hose of uncanny color and fit. After much shenanigans, they announced, “My lords and ladies, we now intend to perform for you the most mirthful tragedy of Romeus and Juliet!”

As they launched into a breakneck version of their prologue, Will stood astounded. He knew this story well, and yet didn’t know it at all, and yet he felt he should. He knew the source: it was the very same tale of Romeus and Juliet he admired. There were pieces of the story he didn’t recognize, additions or improvisations on the original; and yet the characters were so human. He knew the players, or some of them: was that Pete, in the dress, or Richard Burbage? The performance was so bold, so presentational, so entirely for the benefit of the groundlings; and yet also there were moments when the players spoke to each other as they might in the street, small and real, their gestures temperate, smooth, and gentle. He felt like all the other plays he had seen might as well have been performed by town criers or teenage drama classes for their amateurism. And yet, though he knew the tale to be a tragedy, it was witty, filled with pratfalls and slapstick.

There were also brazen jokes at the expense of Lord Burghley, Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester, Walsingham, and Madonna.

When Romeo, for so he was called, came forth to lament his lost love, his friend and confidant named her “Rosaline.” Rosaline. A Rose by any other name, he thought. Where had he heard that before? He remembered, or thought he remembered, the image of a red and white rose entwined, in the small of a woman’s back. . . .

Will’s head reeled. Time melted. He was watching, all at once, his past, his present, and his future. And then space began to melt, first the scene on stage, then the crowd around him, laughing and talking, all seemed to dissolve like the wax candle he had seen this morning, into a blur of color. The ground around him began to melt, and then his legs. He staggered away from the ale stand; he had to get out of the crowded Inn Yard, he needed to lie down, or something. He stumbled past a man in a t-shirt, with a hole where his left eye should be and a t-shirt that read I VISITEDTHETOWER OF LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT. He saw a sign marked PRYVAT, and stepped through the flap of burlap beneath it.

The world was spinning, but what he saw inside was more confusing than anything he’d seen yet; it was a woman.

She had deep blue eyes and shining, raven-black hair. Anne Hathaway. Or was it Dashka?

And she was on her knees, deeply kissing, with cloven lips, the naked blade of another man.

The man with long black hair, a mustache, and eyes that burned like dark fire.

Immediately on seeing Will, the mustachioed man turned, hiked up his trousers, and called, “He is HERE!”

The woman saw Will, and put a trembling hand to her forehead.

Will’s shock and nausea turned to desperation. He turned and sprinted back out into the Inn Yard. On all sides, men in black doublets, some lettered DEA on the back, and bearing matchlocks, swords, and AK-47s appeared, surrounding the assembled party. Within seconds, they quietly apprehended many. The Puritan with the red hair and arrowhead beard took a smiling, bespectacled man by the arm: the priest, or the fool, or both, and an innocent regardless, Will thought as his mind spun. He lunged forward and pulled a light sword from the scabbard of another agent in black, who had half a finger missing from his right hand and his knee in the back of a prostrate vagabond. Will knocked the surprised agent hard on the head with the sword’s hilt and felt a surprising surge of satisfaction as he fell unconscious. Then Will turned and swatted the red-bearded Puritan on the behind with the broad of the blade. Furious, the Puritan let go of the bespectacled priest, who immediately ran off into the forest. The Puritan advanced toward Will, brandishing a weapon. Will might have run him through with his sword, but then he saw a tankard filled with lemonade on the hay bale next to him. He swept up the cup and threw the contents into the Puritan’s face. While the Puritan yelled, momentarily blinded, Will dropped the sword, dove in between the hay bales, and belly-crawled through the audience toward the stage.

Through the confusion, the theater troupe on stage had kept playing their comedy: the show went on, and no one in the front rows of the audience noticed that anything was going on behind them. Will arrived at the side of the stage and stood stealthily, scanning quickly for the mustachioed man and the Puritan. He saw them both searching the crowd.

There was no escape he could see: agents in black were at every exit. He looked up on the stage. Romeo and Juliet had just met and fallen in love. Juliet told Romeo as he tried to steal a kiss, “No means no!” Juliet climbed on another man’s shoulders to do the balcony scene. As she did, she farted audibly. A muffled voice came from the human balcony, “Juliet, you farted in my face!” and the hidden actor produced an impossibly tiny tinderbox and lit it with a flick of his thumb and waved it, and the groundlings gasped and laughed. Juliet called out, “Romeo, my Romeo!” and Will knew that in a moment a Romeo would enter and say, “But soft, what wind through yonder lighter breaks?” But in that instant, Will knew there was another scene, a soliloquy, before Romeo entered, and he knew what it was, and he knew that he knew it; he looked down at his clothes. Had he really worn Quiney’s old codpiece today?! He checked his pouch: there was Field’s dented sixpence. He felt his hat: cuckold’s horns. Painfully prophetic, to be sure, but fit to the present need. He knew he’d blow the punch line to the fart joke, but it was a matter of life or death; he hoped they’d forgive him. In the instant before Romeo entered, Will leaped up on the stage and started speaking:

“Nay, I’ll conjure too.

Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!

Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh:

I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,

By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,

By her fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh

And the domains that there adjacent lie,

That in thy likeness thou appear to us!”

He became Mercutio: he quivered his thighs; he jingled the bells on his costume; he accented “domains” with a lewd thrust of his hips; and he threw Romeo his new entrance cue, “appear to us!” Romeo entered with a bemused look. Will crossed past him toward the curtained escape whence he’d come, and as he did he whispered, “I will explain myself anon.” He exited toward the back of the stage, glancing over his shoulder toward the audience. As Romeo soldiered on, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” and Juliet replied “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” he saw the mustachioed man and the Puritan, still scanning the audience, but ignoring the fools capering on the stage. Will pushed through the curtain, and finding himself backstage amid a jumble of props and wigs, he jumped into an empty costume trunk, pulled the lid closed, and stayed there until nightfall.