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Scene Fifty One




It is a week later, at night in Will’s lodgings, and Will sits by candlelight before a completed manuscript, frowning down at a letter in his hands. From outside come the sounds of tavern shills and drinking songs, and the call of sellers hawking their wares.


Will read the letter three times. The handwriting was not Nan’s — who couldn’t write — but the small, perfect handwriting of Will’s brother, Gilbert, a worthy Stratford merchant.

But the words were Nan’s and, from the page, leapt her distress and grief at the news she gave.

She said Hamnet had been found dead in the woods, and they’d buried him for, it being summer, they could not risk the corruption that would soon come. 

Will would no more see his small son, only perhaps to pray at his humble grave.

And Will, knowing his son wasn’t dead, that what they’d brought from the woods was a stock -- a stick or twig enchanted to look and feel all like Hamnet’s corpse -- wondered whether to tell Nan. Would it multiply her grief or soothe it? Faith, he could not bear it if she hated him for having consented to the arrangement.

What else, though, could Will have done?

He closed his eyes, trying to decide. Either way, he must go to Stratford soon and console his wife and his grieving daughters.

They were all he had now.

For though his son was alive, Will had lost him, perhaps as all fathers must lose their sons.

Hamnet, for whom Will had dared dream so much had, after all, grown into a life that his father couldn’t imagine.

In the kingdom of elves would his life be lived, a kingdom so different from his father’s sphere as to defy Will’s understanding.

And yet, Will thought, wasn’t his own sphere of London and the theater a puzzle to his father, the provincial glover?

Someone knocked at the door and Will went to open it.

He found himself facing Ned. “You look hag-ridden, still,” Ned said. And, anxiously. “Have you any play yet?”

Will smiled. He went to the desk and got his manuscript and slowly set it in Ned’s hands.

“Here is,” he said. “The Tragedy Of Romeo and Juliet.”

“A tragedy?” Ned said. “Are you sure? And wasn’t the name different you told me before? Rowena and...what was it?”

Will smiled. He felt serene confidence that this play, written with his own words and without Marlowe’s was, yet, the best thing that he’d penned. “It is the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.”

Ned peered doubtfully at the first page. “Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean--” Ned read. He looked up and blinked. “This is like nothing you ever wrote before, Will.”

“I know,” Will said.

Ned peered back down on the paper. “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of starcrossed lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows doth, with their death, bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-marked love, and the continuance of their parents’ rage, Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove, is now the two hours traffic of our stage,” Ned looked up and slowly, a rare smile curled his lips upwards, erasing the marks of tension in his features. “Faith, Will, it is the best you’ve written.”

Will grinned. “I know.”

And it seemed to him, though it couldn’t be true, that somewhere nearby Marlowe’s ghost laughed.


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Framed