The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [117]
He pounded the papers with a stubby digit. “Do you realize what this is?”
“Sort of. Miranda read it and explained its value, although I’m sure I don’t have a scholar’s sense of it.”
“Miranda Kellogg? She’s seen this?” He seemed a little upset.
“Well, yes. She’s the legal owner of the original.”
“But you have custody of it at present?”
So I related the events of the past twenty-four hours. He was stunned. “That’s terrible,” he said. “Absolutely catastrophic!”
“Yes, I’m extremely concerned about her.”
“No, I meant the manuscript, the original,” he said, with a callousness worthy of a lawyer. “Without that, this is valueless,” he added, tapping the pile of copy paper again. “My God, we have to get it back! Do you have any idea what’s at stake?”
“People are always asking me that, and my answer is ‘not really.’ Ammunition in some literary squabble?” My tone was cold but he ignored it, for this was a new Mickey, no more the laid-back gentleman-scholar, amusingly contemptuous of how his confreres struggled to climb the greasy poles of academe. He had the fire in his eye. The new Mickey expatiated upon the colossal academic value of Mr. B.’s screed; I listened, as to someone describing the details of a complex and tedious surgical procedure.
At length I put in, “So it’s a big deal if Shakespeare was a Catholic?”
“It’s a big deal if Shakespeare was anything. I already went through this with you. We know almost nothing about the interior life of the greatest writer in the history of the human race. Look…just one example of thousands, and bears on the matter at hand. A woman has recently written a book, she’s an amateur scholar, but she’s certainly done her research, and in this book she claims that nearly the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s work, in particular the plays, is an elaborate coded apology for Catholicism and a plea to the monarch of the day for relief of the disabilities that Catholics then suffered. I mean she gives literally hundreds of heterodox readings arguing this theory in reference to all the plays, and she also proposes the protective hand of powerful contemporary Catholic peers to explain why Shakespeare wasn’t called to account for writing this easily readable code for the public stage. I mean it’s a complete and original picture explaining nearly all of Shakespeare’s work. How about that?”
I shrugged and asked, “So—is she right?”
“I don’t know! Nobody knows!” This a semishout, provoking more looks from the peers. I could now see why Mickey might hesitate to dine here. “That’s the fucking point, Jake! She could be right. Or someone could write a book demonstrating through just as thorough an analysis of the same plays that Shakespeare was gay, a good Protestant faggot. Or a monarchist. Or a lefty. Or a woman. Or the Earl of Oxford. That’s the basic, intractable problem with all Shakespeare studies that bear on intent or biography, and now this!” Tap tap tap. “If genuine…I say if genuine, it will be the greatest single event in Shakespeare studies since…I don’t know, since forever. Since the field was born as a rational entity in the eighteenth century.”
“This letter does that?”
“Not as such. It’s just the first taste, the first tiny opening taste of paradise. But Jake”—he lowered his voice and moved his mouth closer to my ear in a near parody of a man seeking confidentiality—“Jake, if this guy spied on William Shakespeare, if he wrote down reports, if he described Shakespeare’s life the way he described his own miserable life…oh, Jesus, that would be something real. Not just speculation based on the use of images in the second act of King fucking Lear, but actual data. Who he saw, what he said, his ordinary speech, what he believed, what he ate and drank, was he a big tipper, how long was his dick…Jake, you have no fucking idea.”
“Well, I have some idea what that manuscript play would be worth.” He