ACT 1: Will the Real Billy Bard Please Stand Up?
A lady told me the other day
that Shakespeare was really a man by the name
of Edward de Vere—an earl, or a count, or a
royal gondolier from Oxford or Downtown Abbey
or something—
and expected me to fall over aft-ways at the prospect
of such historical perfidy and apocryphality.
She huffed and puffed and
plumed and gloomed about
shaky signatures, grain-focused lawsuits,
illiterate next of kin, rosy cross sigils,
in-the-shadows WM secret societies—
and some kind of friendly bacon named Francis?
Or was it helpful marshmallows?
The food was helping the gondolier write
the ageless sonnets and plays, I think.
And, in a way, it was all very beautiful—
that veiled lives from the 15/1600s could move this person
so foundationally.
“What a revelation,” I said. “Did you
read about that in one of the books here?”
(We were at the library.)
“No—I read about it
in an old Atlantic article online,” she said. “I
just come here sometimes to get out of the house.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “I’m 24.
I haven’t eaten in three days. And sometimes,
I cometh here to bathe.”
*
ACT 2: A Shitty Midcommute’s Dream
And now I’m sitting on the SkyTrain
reading about literary hoaxes because
I’m invested.
The two teens fighting over
the SMOK pods and Blue Heat Takis
beside me might be amazed to know that
there’ve been many WM-y literary
grifts and ruses over the years—
Harold Stewart (it’s always a Harold)
and James McAuley (it’s always a James) ran
Angry Penguins out of print by posing
as the deceased Ern Malley and getting
its editor to publish obscene “modernist” poetry.
Jack-Alain Léger (né Daniel Théron—
you know it’s serious when they’ve changed
their legal name, too) became Melmoth, Dashiell Heyadat,
Eve Saint-Roche, and the Beur icon Paul Smaïl.
His books still sell well today, despite the subterfuge.
I’d explain all this to the teens, get them similarly hooked, but
it’s hard to hear anything over the
grocery-store-deadzone-esque intercom voice,
and the boys now appear to be occupied with watching
interracial porn on the shorter, noisier one’s iPhone.
As we hurtle toward Wrwrrwfrwron Stafrtion,
I realize Atlantic lady might’ve been on to something:
Here I’ve been,
grinding things out as a modern debt slave, a
Black student in the Arts, a library-showerer in the year 202X,
bearing my naked, shaking body to de Vere’s sea of troubles
when what I should’ve been doing all along was
operating under a persona, a fiction.
Maybe Bingsleyforshire Aari N. Seneviratne IV,
sixteenth in line for the Danish crown,
(despite his conspicuously Sri Lankan heritage),
furious at having been spurned by his patrilineal competitors
and now hellbent on exposing
through verse, prose, and the occasional diatribe,
the numerous transgressions of his royal ilk?
Or Bo Dingle, a refrigerator repairman from Post Falls, Idaho,
who, after being struck by lightning for the seventh time, developed a
keen and near-parametric understanding of super-ironic,
internet-derived metamodern poetics?
What a trip that would be.
No more dueling with quick-shut taps, no more
student loans, no more starving,
no more mid-trip agonies.
And certainly no more unsolicited porn watch-alongs.
(They’re onto Japanese DP now.)
Oh, what heaven!
Maybe I’d even have the freedom to do things—
all the things!—side gigs,
like reading actually-legible SkyTrain announcements:
The wildest hath not such a heart as you.
Run when you will, the story shall be changed.
Doors will open on the left.
Adele Nwankwo (they/them) is a genderfluid member of the Nigerian diaspora. They have an ongoing fascination with Shakespeare/Edward de Vere (clearly) that their ADHD and OCD will not allow them to let go of! Their work has appeared in several journals, including The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Queerlings, and Meow Meow Pow Pow.
