I believe it was five winters ago—it was not more—when Cricket came in one day and found him dead. It was a strange thing, for he had not been sick, and was still a fairly young man. As far as anyone knew there was nothing wrong with him, except that his hair had fallen out.
I think his spirit simply decided to go back to his native land.
Cricket grieved for a long time. She still has not taken another husband. Did you happen to see a small boy with pale skin and brown hair, as you came through our town? That is their son Wili.
Look what Cricket gave me. This is the turkey feather that was in Spearshaker’s hand when she found him that day. And this is the piece of mulberry bark that was lying beside him. I will always wonder what it says.
We are such stuff as Dreames are made on: and our little Life Is rounded in a sle
1. Elizabethan spelling was fabulously irregular; the same person might spell the same word in various ways on a single page. Shakespeare’s own spelling is known only from the Quarto and Folio printings of the plays, and the published poetry; and no one knows how far this may have been altered by the printer. It is not even known how close the published texts are to Shakespeare’s original in wording, let alone spelling. All we have in his own hand is his signature, and this indicates that he spelled his own name differently almost every time he wrote it.
I have followed the spelling of the Folio for the most part, but felt free to use my own judgment and even whim, since that was what the original speller did.
I have, however, regularized spelling and punctuation to some extent, and modernized spelling and usage in some instances, so that the text would be readable. I assume this magazine’s readership is well-educated, but it seems unrealistic to expect them to be Elizabethan scholars.
2. Cherokee pronunciation is difficult to render in Roman letters. Even our own syllabary system of writing, invented in the nineteenth century by Sequoyah, does not entirely succeed, as there is no way to indicate the tones and glottal stops. I have followed, more or less, the standard system of transliteration, in which “v” is used for the nasal grunting vowel that has no English equivalent.
It hardly matters, since we do not know how sixteenth-century Cherokees pronounced the language. The sounds have changed considerably in the century and a half since the forced march to Oklahoma; what they were like four hundred years ago is highly conjectural. So is the location of the various tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas during this period; and, of course, so is their culture. (The Cherokees may not then have been the warlike tribe they later became—though, given the national penchant for names incorporating the verb “to kill,” this is unlikely.) The Catawbas were a very old and hated enemy.
3. Edward Spicer’s voyage to America to learn the fate of the Roanoke Colony—or rather his detour to Virginia after a successful privateering operation—did happen, including the bad weather and the loss of a couple of boats, though there is no record that any boat reached the mainland. The disappearance of the Roanoke colonists is a famous event. It is only conjecture—though based on considerable evidence, and accepted by many historians—that Powhatan had the colonists murdered, after they had taken sanctuary with a minor coastal tribe. Disney fantasies to the contrary, Powhatan was not a nice man.
4. I have accepted, for the sake of the story, the view of many scholars that Shakespeare first got the concept of Hamlet in the process of revising Thomas Kyd’s earlier play on the same subject. Thus he might well have had the general idea in his head as early as 1591—assuming, as most do, that by this time he was employed with a regular theatrical company—even though the historic Hamlet is generally agreed to have been written considerably later.
5. As to those who argue that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of Hamlet, but that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Southampton or Elvis Presley, one can only reply: Hah! And again, Hah!