Shakespeare ground his teeth as he walked past a stall full of such plays. He'd suffered from stolen and surreptitious publications himself. That he got nothing for them was bad enough. That they mangled his words was worse. What they'd done to his Prince of Denmark.
He'd added injury to insult by buying his own copy of that one, to see if it were as bad as everyone told him. It wasn't. It was worse. When he thought about the Prince's so-called soliloquy: To be, or not to be. Aye there's the point.
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye alclass="underline"
No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes.
He'd seen that, burned it into his memory, so he could quote it as readily as what he'd really written. He could-but he didn't have the stomach to get past the third line.
Splendid in his red robes, a bishop came out of St. Paul's and down the steps, surrounded by a retinue of more plainly dressed priests and laymen. The soldiers on guard at the bottom of the stairs stiffened to attention. One of them-by his fair hair, surely an Englishman-knelt to kiss the cleric's ring as he went past.
The Spaniards enslaved some of us, Shakespeare thought. Others, though-others enslaved themselves. No one had made that soldier bend the knee to the bishop. No one would have thought less of him had he not done it. But he had. By all appearances, he'd been proud to do it.
Even if I go on with this madcap scheme, will it have the issue Lord Burghley desires?
Shakespeare shrugged. He'd come too far to back away now unless he inclined to treason. That might save you. It might make you rich. He shrugged again. Some things were bought too dear.
Motion up at the top of St. Paul's caught his eye. A man in artisan's plain hose and jerkin was walking about on the flat-roofed steeple, now and then stooping as if to measure. We have a Catholic Queen and King once more. Will they order the spire finished at last? Shakespeare shrugged one more time. It would be yet another sign we are not what we were, what we once set out to be. But how many even care? Gloom threatened to choke him.
Gloom also made him inattentive, so that he almost walked past the stall he sought. It wasn't the sight of the books that made him pause, but the sight of the bookseller. "Good den, Master Seymour," he said.
"Why, Master Shakespeare! God give you good den as well," Harry Seymour replied. He was a tall, lean man who would have been good-looking had he not had a large, hairy wen on the end of his nose.
"Do you but pass the time of day, or can I find summat for you?"
"I'm always pleased to pass the time of day with you," Shakespeare answered, which was true: he'd never known Seymour to print or sell pirated plays. He went on, "But if you've the Annals of Tacitus done into English, I'd be pleased to buy it of you."
"As my head lives, Master Shakespeare, I do indeed. And I'll take oath I fetched hither some few of that title this morning." Seymour came around to the front of the stall. "Now where did I put 'em?. Ah!
Here we are." He handed Shakespeare a copy. "Will you want it for a play?"
"I might. But my Latin doth stale with disuse, wherefore I'm fain to take the short road to reminding me what he treats of." Shakespeare admired the ornate first page, illustrated with a woodcut of swaggering, toga-clad Romans. "A handsome volume, I'll not deny."
" 'Twould be handsomer still, cased in buckram or fine morocco." Like any book dealer, Seymour sold his wares unbound; what boards they eventually wore depended on the customer's taste and purse.
"No doubt," Shakespeare said politely, by which he meant he didn't intend to bind the book at all. Not even Baron Burghley's gold could tempt him to such extravagance. As a player and a poet, he knew too well how money could rain down one day and dry up the next. He would cling to as many of those coins as he could. In aid of which. He held up the translation. "What's the scot?"
"Six shillings," Harry Seymour answered.
"My good fellow, you are a thief professed," Shakespeare exclaimed. "But your theft is too open. Your filching is like an unskilful singer; you keep not time."
"Say what you will, Will, but I'll have my price or you'll not have your book," Seymour said. "I give thanks to the holy Mother of God that I can stay at my trade at all. Times are hard, and grow no easier."
"I am not some wanderer, staggering half drunk past your stall. I do regularly give you my custom when I seek some work of scholarship-or so I have done, up till now." Shakespeare's indignation was part perfectly real, part feigned. If he gave in too easily, the bookseller might wonder why-and Seymour's oath had proved him a Catholic. I must seem as I always was, Shakespeare thought. The deeper into this exercise he got, the harder that would grow.
"You know not what I had to pay Master Daniels, the which rendered into our tongue the noble Roman's words," Seymour protested.
Sensing weakness, Shakespeare pressed him: "That you're a subtle knave, a villain with a smiling cheek, makes you no less a knave and a villain." He made as if to thrust the Annals back at Seymour.
The bookseller had grit. "Save your player's tricks for the stage," he said. "I gave you my price."
"And I give you my farewell, if you use me so." Shakespeare didn't want to have to search for a different translation elsewhere, not when he had this one in his hands, but he didn't want to pay six shillings, either.
Nine days' wages for a soldier, on one book?
Harry Seymour made a rumbling, unhappy noise down deep in his throat. "Five and sixpence, then," he said, as if wounded unto death, "and for no other man alive would I lessen the price even a farthing."
His honor salved, Shakespeare paid at once, saying, "There, you see? I knew you for the gentleman you are, exceedingly well read and wondrous affable: stuffed, as they say, with honorable parts."
"You reckon him a gentleman who doth as you list," Seymour said sourly. "Go your way, Master Shakespeare; I am yet out of temper with you. May you have joy of the sixpence you prised from me."
His joy in that sixpence quite quenched, Shakespeare strode north and east, back towards his Bishopsgate lodgings. Light faded from the sky with every step he took. The winter solstice was coming soon, with Christmas hard on its heels. They were both coming sooner, indeed, than he reckoned right.
After their coronation, Isabella and Albert had imposed on England Pope Gregory's newfangled calendar, cutting ten days out of June in 1589 to bring the kingdom into conformity with Spain and the rest of Catholic Europe. When Shakespeare looked at things logically, he understood those ten days weren't really stolen. When he didn't-which was, mankind being what it was, more often-he still felt as if he'd had his pocket picked of time.
Some stubborn souls still celebrated the feast of the Nativity on what Gregory's calendar insisted was January 4. They did so in secret. They had to do so in secret, for the English Inquisition prowled hardest at this season of the year, sniffing after those who showed affection for the old calendar and thus for the Protestant faith adhering to it.
Along with darkness, fog began filling the streets. Here and there, men lit cressets in front of their homes and shops, but the flickering flames did little to pierce the gloom. Shakespeare hurried up Cheapside to the Poultry, past the smaller churches of St. Peter and St. Mildred, and up onto Threadneedle Street, which boasted on the west side churches dedicated to St. Christopher-le-Stock and St. Bartholomew.
He let out a sigh of relief when Threadneedle Street opened on to Bishopsgate. A moment later, he let out a gasp, for a squad of Spaniards tramped toward him. But their leader only gave him a brusque jerk of the thumb, as if to tell him to hurry home.