<I will dream of it! But after we eat. Which I hope is now.>
Looking across the fire at Granuaile, I said, “Oberon’s happy for you. He’d be even happier if we ate before I get into the story.”
“Sounds good to me. It should be ready, don’t you think?”
I nodded, fetched three bowls, and ladled out the lamb stew for each of us, cautioning Oberon to let it cool a little first so he wouldn’t burn his tongue.
“So were you in England the whole time Shakespeare was writing?”
“No, I missed the reign of Queen Elizabeth entirely and arrived from Japan shortly after her death.”
“What were you doing in Japan?”
“That’s a story for another night, but it was an exciting time. I saw the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate and witnessed early stages of the construction of Nijo Castle in Kyoto. But Aenghus óg eventually found me there and I had to move, and I chose to move much closer to home because an English sailor had told me of this Shakespeare character. My interest was piqued.”
<Wasn’t England composed primarily of fleas at that time?>
“Yes, Oberon. It was mostly fleas and excrement in the streets, and people dying of consumption, and Catholics and Protestants hating each other. Quite different from Japan. But Shakespeare made it all bearable somehow.”
“Kind of makes his work even more amazing when you think about it,” Granuaile commented. “You don’t read Hamlet and think, This man could not avoid stepping in shit every day of his life.”
“It was also difficult at that time to move around London without passing within hexing distance of a witch.”
“They were truly that common back then?”
“Aye. And their existence wasn’t even a question; people in those days knew witchcraft to be a fact as surely as they knew their teeth ached. And King James fancied himself quite the witch-hunter, you know. Wrote a book about it.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Of course, the kind of witches you might run into—and warlocks too; we shouldn’t pretend that only women engaged in such practices—varied widely. For many it was a taste of power that the medieval patriarchy wouldn’t otherwise allow them.”
“Can’t say that I blame them. If you don’t give people a conventional path to power, they will seek out their own unconventional path.”
“Said the Druid’s apprentice,” I teased.
“That’s right. I’m sticking it to the Man!” Granauile said, extending a middle finger to the sky.
<Yeah!> Oberon said, and barked once for Granuaile’s benefit, adding in a tail wag.
“Well, the witches that almost ended Shakespeare certainly wanted to stick it to him.”
“Is this why there’s a curse on Macbeth? You’re not supposed to say its name or bad luck will befall you, right, so actors always call it ‘the Scottish play’ or something?”
“Almost, yes. The way the legend goes, the witches were upset that Shakespeare wrote down their real spells, and they wanted the play suppressed because of it—hence the curse.”
“Those weren’t real spells?” Granuaile asked, lifting a spoonful of stew to her mouth.
“No, but Shakespeare thought they were. What angered the witches was his portrayal of Hecate.”
My apprentice stopped mid-slurp and actually choked a little, losing a bit of stew. “You and Shakespeare met Hecate?”
“That’s a polite way of putting it, but yes. I met her and the three witches, and so did Shakespeare, and that inspired portions of what many now call the Scottish play.”
My apprentice grinned and let loose with another squee of excitement. “Okay, okay, I can’t wait, but I want to finish this stew first. Because I slurp and Oberon turbo-slurps.”
Oberon’s laps at the bowl really were loud enough to blot out all other nearby sound.
<She’s right. I take a backseat to no one at slurping,> Oberon said.
When we’d all finished, Oberon curled up at my feet, where I could pet him easily, Granuaile and I thumbed open some cold ones, and the crackle of the logs under the stewpot provided occasional exclamation points to my tale.
—
In 1604 I arrived in London, paid two pennies, and witnessed a performance of Othello in the Globe Theatre. It smelled foul—they had no toilets in the facility, you know, so people just dropped a deuce wherever they could find space—but the play was divine. That’s when I knew the rumored genius of Shakespeare was an absolute fact. Poetry and pathos and an astounding villain in the form of Iago—I was more than merely impressed. I knew that he was a bard worthy of the ancient Druidic bards of my youth, and I simply had to meet him.
The way to meet almost anyone you wanted in London was to wear expensive clothing and pretend to be French. Clothing equaled money, and money opened all doors, and pretending to be French kept them from checking up on me easily while allowing me to misunderstand questions I didn’t want to answer. I dyed my hair black, shaved my beard into something foppish and pointy, and inquired at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall on Threadneedle Street where I might find a tailor to dress me properly. They gave me a name and address, and I arrived there with a purse full of coin and a French accent, calling myself Jacques Lefebvre, the Marquis de Crèvecoeur in Picardy. That was all it took to establish one’s identity in those days. If you had the means to appear wealthy and noble, then everyone accepted that you were. And the bonuses to being one of the nobility were that I could openly wear Fragarach and get away with wearing gloves all the time. The triskele tattoo on the back of my right hand would raise far too many questions otherwise. To the Jacobeans, there was functionally no difference between a Druid and a witch: If it was magic, their solution was to kill it with fire.