The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [565]
“When we dream, it is of this,” he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we’d meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.
After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amniojars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open, and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.
A dozen or more paces farther on, the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare’s plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In a room leading off, we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.
“How many do you think went through here?” asked Bowden in a whisper.
“Hundreds and hundreds,” replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with the name “Shaxpreke, W, 769” written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.
“What happened to them all?”
“Dead,” said a voice, “dead as a ducat!”
33.
Shgakespeafe
“All the World’s a Stage,” Claims Playwright
That was the analogy of life offered by Mr. William Shakespeare yesterday when his latest play opened at the Globe. Mr. Shakespeare went on to further compare plays with the seven stages of life by declaring “all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.” Mr. Shakespeare’s latest offering, a comedy entitled As You Like It, opened to mixed reviews with the ƒouth-wark Gazette calling it “a rollicking comedy of the highest order,” while the Westminster Evening News described it as “tawdry rubbish from the Warwickshire shithouse.” Mr. Shakespeare declined to comment, as he is already penning a follow-up.
Article in Blackfriars News, September 1589
We turned to find a small man with wild, unkempt hair standing at the doorway. He was dressed in Elizabethan clothes that had seen far better days, and his feet were bound with strips of cloth as makeshift shoes. He twitched nervously, and one eye was closed—but beyond this the similarity to the Shakespeares Bowden had found was unmistakable. A survivor. I took a step closer. His face was lined and weathered, and those teeth he still possessed were stained dark brown and worn. He must have been at least seventy, but it didn’t matter. The genius that had been Shakespeare had died in 1616, but genetically speaking, he was with us right now.
“William Shakespeare?”
“I am a William, sir, and my name is Shgakespeafe,” he corrected.
“Mr. Shgakespeafe,” I began again, unsure of how to explain exactly what I wanted, “my name is Thursday Next, and I have a Danish prince urgently in need of your help.”
He looked from me to Bowden to Millon and back to me again. Then a smile broke across his weathered features.
“O wonder!” he said at last. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in’t!”
He stepped forward and shook our hands warmly; it didn’t look as though he had seen anyone for a while.
“What happened to the others, Mr. Shgakespeafe?”
He beckoned us to follow him and then was off like a gazelle. We had a hard job keeping up with him as he darted down the labyrinthine corridors, nimbly avoiding the rubbish and broken equipment. We caught up with him when he stopped at a smashed window that overlooked what