A Mystery Of Errors

The irony of his career is that while he became, indisputably, the best known storyteller in the world, he is one of the least known when it comes to the story of his life. Much has been written and surmised about him, both biographically and fictionally, and it is not my purpose to go into any great detail about that here. I shall not dwell upon the so-called “Authorship Debate,” other than to state briefly my own opinion, which is that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Will Shakespeare, not Bacon or De Vere or, for that matter, Kilgore Trout. I shall not make any attempt to analyze anything he wrote, other than to comment for the purpose of this afterword where I stretched the truth somewhat (at least so far as it is known or might be justifiably inferred) and where true “congressional rhetoric” begins.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, the exact date is unknown, one of eight children (only one of whom, his sister Joan, was to survive him), in Stratford-upon-Avon, as is well known. His father, John, the son of a Snitterfield farmer, was a tradesman, a glover, and his mother, Mary, came of aristocratic Arden stock. He had the basic grammar school education (there is no record of his ever having attended any university and considerable circumstantial evidence that he was not a “college man”) and it is likely that he learned at least something of the glovemaking trade from his father, though there is no evidence that he ever formally entered upon the trade himself.

Much is made of the so-called “Lost Years” (the time in which this novel is set), the period from roughly 1586 to 1592, during which time nothing is known about his life. No record exists from the time his name was mentioned in a legal document in Stratford in 1587 to the time he was mentioned in a book by Robert Greene in 1592, at which point he was apparently already a successful playwright. There has been much conjecture, however, based on inferences and deductions from circumstantial evidence. There have been various proposed scenarios of varying credibility that have had him working as an apprentice glover, a butcher, a law clerk, an ostler, an actor, a tutor, even a poacher. The one thing that is clear is that only a few years after his marriage to Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582 and the birth of three children (a daughter born only six months after the marriage and twins born about two years later), he left his family in Stratford and moved to London, where he “resurfaced” as an actor/playwright and member of the theatrical company of Lord Strange’s Men almost a decade later.

Among all the theories about Shakespeare’s activities during these “hidden years,” I gravitate toward the scenario proposed by Anthony Burgess in his spare and highly readable biography, Shakespeare. Burgess suggests, with some good evidence to back up his arguments, that Shakespeare had a “shotgun wedding,” that his plans to marry a girl named Anne Whateley, of Temple Grafton, were derailed by his being forced to marry Anne Hathaway, of Shottery, an older woman whom he had obviously impregnated. For a more detailed explication, I refer interested readers to Mr. Burgess, who as a writer is far more lucid and entertaining on the subject than are most scholars and literary critics, some of whom tend to be agenda-driven apologists. But suffice it to say, as far as history and this novel are concerned, that everything that happened to William Shakespeare from the time he left Stratford until he resurfaced as a member of the company known as Lord Strange’s Men (eventually to become more famous as The Lord Chamberlain’s Men) is pure conjecture.

Consequently, there is no historical counterpart (at least so far as I know) to the character of Black Billy/Sir William Worley. That character is made up entirely of a dash of Errol Flynn, a pinch of Oliver Reed, a measure of Peter O’Toole, and a whole bunch of personal wish fulfillment. It is not, however, entirely out of the realm of possibility that someone like Worley might well have existed in real life, for the modern British Secret Service had its beginnings in the time of Elizabeth I, with Sir Francis Walsingham, her minister and chief hatchet man, so to speak.