'Are you mad?' he asked, grumbling, his thoughts disturbed. 'Bits of a play in two different hands, two hands we cannot recognise. That's all they are!'
'But don't you see? They were important enough for Marlowe to put them in the pouch! Get them for me, please! Now!'
He swung his feet off the bed, noting with satisfaction the strength in his legs and through his whole body. When he came back, minutes later, she had been to the library and was clutching a dusty volume.
'You're lucky,' he said. 'Most of my papers are still hidden elsewhere from when it seemed we were going to be searched. I've only brought back a few papers, and those the ones that seemed likely to do the least damage. Here they are, for all they're worth.'
He handed her the sheets of paper, watched as she sat back in her chair, eyes devouring the handwritten manuscripts. She delved into the book she had brought, scrambled through the pages until she found the passage she wanted.
'Yes!' she breathed, 'yes! Can't you see it?'
'See what?' asked Gresham, now totally confused.
'Do you remember Hamlet? she said. 'We've seen it several times, here and in Cambridge. Do you remember?'
'You know I remember it. We've talked often enough.' Lines from Hamlet had stuck and resonated in Gresham's mind. 'The readiness is all. The rest is silence.'
'Do you remember that speech about death?'
'Of course I do. "The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns".'
'Then look at this.' Her excitement was so great she nearly dropped the book as she thrust it into Gresham's hand. It was titled Hamlet, and claimed the play had been shown at Oxford and at Cambridge.
'There!' she said, her finger pointing. 'Read!'
He read.
To be or not to be. I, there's the point,
To Die, or sleep, is that all? I, all.
No, to sleep, to dream, I marry there it goes…
He looked up at her, laughing. '"Ay, marry, there it goes!" This is gibberish. It's comic! This isn't the speech we heard…'
'Read on!' she said. Reluctantly, he let his eyes return to the page.
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.
But for this the joyful hope of this,
Who's bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?
'What is this book?' he asked, looking at it distastefully.
'Published in 1603,' said Jane. 'Now look at this…' She thrust one of Marlowe's papers into his hands. The speech, that same speech, commenced just over halfway down, in a florid hand.
'It's the same,' said Gresham. 'Word for word. I still don't understand…'. 'Now read this.' Jane thrust the second of Marlowe's papers into his hands. 'There! Read it!'
To be, or not to be — that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams might come…
'Magnificent,' he breathed. The words reverberating in his head were even more powerful now than they had been from the mouth of Burbage. He looked down the page for the lines he needed:
Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But mat the dread of something after death -
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns — puzzles the will…
Had the man who had written this been where Gresham had been? Had he also so nearly crossed the divide between life and death? Whoever had written these lines had been everywhere men go, and to places men could only dream of, thought Gresham.
'Don't you see it!' asked Jane. 'We've assumed that Bacon and Marlowe and Oxford and all those others sent plays to Shakespeare and he just fiddled around with them for a bit — got them dressed up for the stage and stuck his name on them. But what if the scripts they sent in were rubbish? What if they were awful? What if Shakespeare has this… talent, this… knack of taking other people's work and making something beautiful out of it?*
Gresham was thunderstruck.
'What if Shakespeare was the real genius behind the plays all along?'
Something massively simple fell into place inside Gresham's mind. 'So there's this bumpkin from Stratford, this front man for half the nobles in England, this man who can't write anything worthwhile from scratch but has this skill when other people seed his brain… the skill to create amazing, incredible language, probably something he never realised he had until other people's manuscripts landed on his desk… and he starts adding bits and improving on the original, small bits at first, almost despite himself, and then the bits he writes get the crowd cheering so he does it more and more…'
'And the nobles can't do anything about it without breaking cover, or revealing that what they write is rubbish. Or they pretend to each other that it's what they wrote in the first place because they love to bask in the glory…'
'What a truly wonderful, god-awful, inspirational, appalling mess!' said Gresham, unsure as to whether to laugh or cry. 'So what are these papers?'
'I bet the one with the real speech on it is Shakespeare's writing. And if you want me to guess, I'll lay odds on the dire version being in the Earl of Oxford's hand.'
'Why him?' asked Gresham.
'You remember when you went out to get the food when we were in Shakespeare's rooms? I was pumping him about the plays all the time, and he was giving nothing away. But I asked him about Hamlet, because it was your favourite play, and all he would say was that the Earl of Oxford hated the way it was performed. Then he looked shifty and backed off, and I didn't think anything about it because he was looking so shifty all the time. I bet the other paper is Oxford's writing. And I bet something else too — that Oxford published that book on the bed!'
'Why so?'
'He died in 1604, remember? Been ill for long before that. Everyone says he was a strange man at the end, half mad. Mad enough to think his version was the real one, the better one. Mad enough to publish it too, particularly when he felt he was dying.'
'The Earl of Oxford's last will and testament, you mean?' said Gresham. if he wanted to be remembered by that he must have been mad!'
'Perhaps it helped kill him, poor man,' mused Jane. 'The book was a disaster. That's why I could pick it up so cheaply at St Paul's. I wonder if Oxford waited for it to be hailed as a masterpiece, and then died when it was laughed off the bookstalls?'
'He died of the plague,' said Gresham. ‘In Hackney. Don't you remember? There was a scandal about it. Apparently he left no will, and his son forgot to put up a memorial to him.'
'So if there was a will, bequeathing his manuscripts…'
‘It's gone now,' said Gresham. 'Buried by the heir who wanted nothing to do with it all. It's a brilliant theory. But we need a copy of something in Shakespeare's handwriting to prove it.'
But they found something better than that.
There was a crash on the door and Mannion appeared, throwing something in front of him. It was a drenched Shakespeare, shivering to his bones, dripping foul water all over the floor. He was dressed as a housewife, his beard and moustache gone but the stubble on his lips ludicrously at odds with the lace around his neck and the full-flowing gown.