The Book of Air and Shadows

leaden claustral feeling I always get in the presence of a maniac. It is sadly not an unfamiliar one, for we IP lawyers are all too well-acquainted with the mad. No showbiz hit, no world-conquering diet book, no moneymaking product of the human imagination ever appears unaccompanied by a gang of shabby pretenders clutching greasy folders stuffed with documentary proof that they thought of it first. And they don’t want to hear that no one can copyright an idea, a concept. They don’t want to hear that ideas are like water or air or carbon, free for the taking, and the only thing from which loot can be wrenched by copyright is a particular
set
of words, or musical notes, or chemicals. I admit I had not had the Secret Document type before, but here he now was. I recall hoping that the poor bastard’s check was good.
    So I waited for the florescence of the craziness: an outpouring of hectic enthusiasm about how important the lost manuscript was, what literary secrets it might reveal, its provenance, how close he was to cracking the secret code, but, somewhat to my surprise, he seemed to deflate after his revelation, and I thought that he was regretting having shared so much, and had already started to work me into his paranoia, yet another potential thief of his Precious.
    We signed the forms and he left. I had Ms. M. zip downstairs and deposit the check and place the package in our safe-deposit box; and then, although I was feeling the belly rumbles of my delayed lunch, I turned to my computer and googled Andrew Bulstrode, and found a good deal more on Dr. B. than one might have expected on a simple academic. Five years ago, it appeared, Bulstrode had been a professor of English lit at Oxford, an expert on Shakespearean editions, and he had fallen prey to a man who turned out to be one of the great forgers of modern times. Leonard Hastings Pascoe was a name that even I recognized. His specialty was early printing-incunabula-and manuscripts associated with significant authors, and he was very clever indeed. He claimed to have discovered a new bad quarto of
Hamlet
. A bad quarto is a sort of early literary piracy, in which printers would assemble a play from the memories of actors, and whatever actual scripts they could get hold of, and print it without the permission of the author.
    This was apparently a major find, for (according to the googled articles) the publishing history of
Hamlet
is extremely complex. There is a First Quarto (bad) and a Second Quarto (good, or authorized by the author) and the First Folio, which Shakespeare’s friends and theatrical-business partners, Heminge and Condell, had assembled after his death, which is essentially the play we now know. The supposed new bad quarto had in it many intriguing differences from the authorized play and suggested a view into Shakespeare’s writing process. It was dated 1602, right after
Hamlet
was registered and a year earlier than the First Quarto, raising interesting questions: were the differences mere transcription errors or did they mean that the author had changed his play after it was performed? It was the sort of thing that generates multiple orgasms among the learned. The British Museum was offered first crack by the patriotic Pascoe, and they snapped at it for the asking price, provided that the distinguished expert Andrew Bulstrode vetted it as genuine.
    Which he did. Pascoe had used genuine seventeenth-century paper and ox-gall-iron ink of the correct formulation and period (derived by chemical extraction from contemporary documents, to defeat any ink-aging tests) and his type fonts had been meticulously copied from one of the bad quartos in the Folger Library. The museum bought the thing for 850,000 pounds. Bulstrode had first dibs on it, of course, and within six months had produced a magisterial work, demonstrating that in his opinion the author had heavily rewritten the great play and that in fact the Pascoe Quarto, so called, was in actuality an important link among the various proto-Hamlets that Shakespeare had used as source texts. Sensation among the dons!
    And it might have become part of the critical canon had not L. H. Pascoe delighted in delicious young fellows with smoky eyes and pouting lips, and having such a taste, not promised one of these a trip to Cap d’Antibes, and a new wardrobe with it, and having so promised, not reneged, causing the young fellow, naturally enough, to drop a dime on his patron. The police raided a