The Book of Air and Shadows

a trip to England about that time-it was last summer-and when he came back he was, I don’t know, not himself. Nervous. Irritable. He refused to talk about what he had, except that it was a completely unknown mention of William Shakespeare in a genuine contemporary manuscript. He didn’t tell me where he’d found it, by the way. I bet that’s some story!”
    “You mean somebody just
mentioning
Shakespeare in a manuscript, that would make it valuable per se?”
    He stopped mopping sauce with his bread: another gape here and an incredulous laugh.
    “Valuable? Christ, yes! Cosmically important. Epochally significant. I thought I explained this to you any number of times, but obviously not enough.”
    “Then once more, please.”
    Mickey cleared his throat and held his fork up like a classroom pointer. “Okay. Aside from his work, the single greatest literary achievement by an individual human being in all of history, William Shakespeare left practically no physical trace in the world. You can just about write down everything we know for sure about him on a wallet card. He was born, christened, got married, had three kids, wrote a will, signed a few legal documents, composed an epitaph, and died. The only physical evidence of his existence besides those records and his grave is a suspect sample of what looks like his handwriting on a manuscript of a play called
The Book of Sir Thomas More
. Not a single letter, or inscription, not a book with his name in it. Okay, the guy was a luminary of the London theater for nearly twenty years, so there are a whole bunch of references to him, but they’re pretty thin soup. The first one is an attack on someone called ‘Shake-scene’ by an asshole called Robert Greene, and an apology for printing it by a guy named Chettle. Francis Mere wrote a book called
Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury
, which would have been justly forgotten except that he mentions Shakespeare as the best English dramatist. He’s mentioned by William Camden, the headmaster of Westminster, and by Webster in the preface to
The White Devil
, and there’s a mention by Beaumont in
The Knight of the Burning Pestle
. And there’s a bunch of legal stuff, contracts, lawsuits, leases, plus various theater references, plus, of course, the central fact of the First Folio. His pals thought enough of him to publish all his plays in one book after he died, and name him as author. That’s basically it-what is that, a couple dozen or so substantive contemporary references. And on this has been built an absolutely enormous scholarship, mining the plays and poems for suggestions about the man, completely speculative, of course, because we just don’t know. It drives us crazy because the guy was smoke. I mean there’s
nothing
there.”
    “It was a long time ago.”
    “Yes, but we know shitloads more about Leonardo, just to name an obvious example, and
he
lived a century earlier. For the sake of comparison-just one example-we have an actual letter from Edmund Spenser to Walter Raleigh explaining some of the allegories in
The Faerie Queene
. We know a
lot
about Ben Jonson. Michelangelo-there are nearly
five hundred
of his letters surviving, notebooks, fucking
menus
, and from Shakespeare, the greatest
writer
of all time, and an important theatrical entrepreneur besides, not a single letter. And the problem is that the vacuum sucks fake stuff in. There was a vast Shakespeare forgery industry back in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, and there’s even some today, which is how Bulstrode got caught. Not to mention the cottage industry represented by the so-called authorship question: we haven’t got anything from him except the work, ergo someone else did the work-Southampton, Bacon,
extraterrestrials
… I mean I can’t express to you how intense the desire is to find out stuff about the son of a bitch. If Bulstrode actually did find a contemporary manuscript that mentions Shakespeare, especially if it contained substantive information-why it would absolutely resurrect him in the field.”
    When Mickey talks about his work he drops twenty years and resembles more than he usually does now the youth I met in that scabby apartment on 113th Street. I confess that I can’t imagine such a transformation in my case, should I wish to expatiate on the intricacies of, say, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He loves his profession, and I admire him for it. And am a little envious too, I suppose. But now, as he