“Here we go. He’s going to give us that penumbra nonsense again,” Nordhausen complained.
“Well think about it, will you?” Dorland took a sip from his cup and extended the pot to Nordhausen as he spoke, filling the other man’s mug with the rich, black coffee. “You’re the man who is so adamant about protecting our cherished past. Perhaps the time continuum has a way of protecting its own, if you will. A man like Shakespeare or Milton is simply too important to the progression of Western culture to be lightly tampered with. Isn’t that why we picked Shakespeare for our first target? So, the continuum surrounds such a man with a protective aura of some kind. Such men stand so tall in the course of history that they cast a deep shadow about them once they first give birth to a work of art or science or whatever it is they do to become so important to the future. The shadow deepens as their influence on other lives grows and changes the progression of the time line. It soon reaches a point where their influence is so great, where they have altered so many individual lives, that it cannot be undone. The shadow they cast on history is so deep that it simply cannot be penetrated—That’s the penumbra surrounding the Prime Mover and insuring the Imperative such a person or event must give rise to. Shakespeare must write Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and all the rest. ”
“Yes, but there’s a problem with that,” said Nordhausen. “What’s the Imperative, the man or the message? Is it Shakespeare that is important to the time line, or Hamlet?”
“To be or not to be? That is the question,” quipped Maeve.
“Well, we darn well better answer it, my friends,” said Nordhausen. “They still aren’t sure if Shakespeare even wrote half of the stuff that has been attributed to him.”
“Oh, now don’t drag in that silly theory about Sir Francis Bacon again,” Maeve protested, a warning in her eyes as she sidled over to the coffee station, mug in hand.
“Suppose it’s true,” said Nordhausen. “Then Shakespeare, the man, would be irrelevant. It’s Hamlet that matters, no matter who wrote the damn thing. I mean, suppose it was written by a squire somewhere and Shakespeare simply bought up the manuscript and published it for the local playhouses—grist for the mill.”
“So now it’s a simple country squire who’s doing the writing for you. Does he happen to work for Sir Francis Bacon?” Maeve jabbed him in the ribs with a firm fingertip.
Nordhausen laughed at this, letting the humor cover his retreat as he made his way to his seat at the study table again.
“The point is, it was published,” said Dorland. “Whether it was written by Shakespeare, or Bacon or his squire doesn’t matter.”
“And what are you getting at?” Nordhausen had reached his chair and was settling in again with a glance at his pocket watch. He snapped it closed and slipped it into his sweater. “Nine-ten.” He muttered.
Paul continued. “It’s the whole milieu of the time that surrounded Shakespeare’s life that gave rise to Hamlet, by one means or another. You can’t separate the man from his environment, and all of the history that gave rise to it. The two arise mutually—hand in glove. If Shakespeare were alive today he couldn’t write Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet or anything even remotely like the plays and sonnets that made him famous. He was a man for his time, and the time produced the man. Don’t you see? It was an era where all the social and cultural elements that allowed a play like Hamlet to be written just came into the proper focus. Someone simply had to write Hamlet, no matter who it turns out to be.”
“Someone did write Hamlet,” said Maeve with an air of finality. “It was Shakespeare.”
Dorland filled her coffee mug with a smile. “Sure you won’t try my hazelnut creamer?”
“Don’t press your luck,” said Maeve, and she went over to the study table to retrieve the copy of the Norton Anthology of Literature she had dragged out of Nordhausen’s bookcase.
Dorland was momentarily distracted by a honking horn outside. He glanced through the study window and noted the traffic only seemed to be getting worse out near Sidney Hall. He saw a group of people running, and thought it a bit unusual for a classical music concert to be so unruly at this hour of the night. His attention to the time produced that brief surge of anxiety in his chest again. “Now where is Kelly?” He was getting more and more exasperated as they waited, as if the commotion outside the room was slowly invading the quiet atmosphere of Nordhausen’s study and stirring up all his old fears about the project again. Here he was, on the most important night of his life, perhaps the most important night of history since the Nativity, and Kelly was late again.
“He’s probably trying to get through that crowd out there by now.” Maeve took a sip of her coffee, and frowned. “You didn’t wait long enough before you pressed this,” she said. “It’s too weak. I thought you were going to bring Major Dickason’s blend?”
“Sorry,” Dorland apologized. “The professor here had me all caught up in this Shakespeare business and I wasn’t watching the time.”
“Don’t blame me, Paul.” Nordhausen was quick to defend himself. “Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business.” He quoted Shakespeare again. “You’re the coffee expert here. You should know better.”
“Thank you, Prospero,” Maeve was quick to pick up Nordhausen’s reference to Shakespeare. “Well, our coffee expert had better learn how to use a press properly. This is too weak.” She pushed her cup aside and began flipping through the pages of her Norton Anthology.
“Looking for that quote?” Nordhausen ventured.
“Looking for trouble?” Maeve shot him a disapproving glance. “The Tempest: Act Five, Scene One.” She knew the play well and didn’t need her anthology to zero in on the reference.
Nordhausen gave her a contented grin. “Oh? I liked the second scene in that act better,” his voice had a teasing edge.
“There wasn’t a second scene,” Maeve was not in any mood for nonsense, and Nordhausen thought the better of prodding her further.
Paul was staring at the coffee press, his feathers ruffled somewhat by Maeve’s last comment. He did fancy himself a bit of a connoisseur when it came to his coffees. After years of swilling down run-of-the-mill Columbian beans off of supermarket shelves, he discovered Peets on the Internet one day and his long habit finally exulted with a brew that was truly addictive. He tried every one of the many blends over the years, finally settling on a few favorites. Major Dickason’s blend was not one of them, but it was a favorite of his good friend Kelly, and Maeve seemed to like it as well. “Sorry, Maeve,” he apologized again. “I just forgot. I had the Guatemalan in my cupboard, so I just grabbed it and ran out to catch BART. If I had known Kelly was going to be this late I could have stopped by and bought something fresh. Can I get you a tea?”
“No thanks,” Maeve was resigned to content herself with the Norton Anthology for a time. “You two can go right on arguing, if you want. Don’t mind me.”
Dorland struggled to contain his frustration. He never thought it would be like this. Here he was on the night before the launch and Kelly was late and he was fussing with a coffee press and arguing with Nordhausen again! He had looked forward to this moment for so long that the seeming inconsequentiality of the events that were playing themselves out just didn’t seem to measure up to his expectations. In one sense, it confirmed a major principle of his own time theory: that most of the time line was littered with insignificant moments that simply flowed along, like bubbles in a stream. These were the ‘Thousand nothings of the hour’ as he liked to call them after a line from Matthew Arnold’s Buried Life. Somewhere in the stream, he knew, there was one tiny bubble that would give rise to Shakespeare and Hamlet and The Tempest. Which one?