Entries by M. G. Turner

Reading Homer: A Struggle and an Odyssey by M. G. Turner

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Homer’s Iliad is an unforgivingly brutal book. I finished reading it this week, having started it directly after my completion of The Odyssey  which is by contrast a remarkably wonderful book. The latter is filled with mirth and magic and contains valuable and applicable life lessons that anyone may take with them and put toward any situation. On the other hand, the former is a 600-page torrential onslaught of blood, guts, and gore that leaves one with more questions than answers. Also, contrary to popular belief, the three most important events of the Trojan War, that is The Judgement of Paris; Helen’s elopement with Paris back to Troy; and of course the Trojan Horse, are not depicted and whose existence we only know about due to later mythological tracts such as the Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna, as well as from brief anecdotes in The Odyssey.

It seems strange to have both loved and loathed two books that are so uniquely intertwined, but this is perhaps not so strange seeing as it is almost unanimously agreed upon by scholars that Homer, whoever he was, wrote one but not the other (indeed, many arguing it was The Iliad and not The Odyssey which bears his signature.) From my standpoint as a writer, I accept the questionable nature of his joint authorship based on the wildly divergent styles of the two epic poems, especially since I read the same translator—Robert Fagles—for both, whose style was identical in each epic, yet whose tone changed to suit what I’d contend were the voices of different storytellers. The Iliad is a linear progression, stultifying in its inchworm progress, and contains few moments of epiphany or release; while The Odyssey is a wildly diverting narrative which contains stories within stories and pleasing digressions and detours; in this way the storyline seems to match the crux of what the hero Odysseus is going through as he journeys home to Ithaca, thus unifying both the message and the action.

Perhaps my distaste for The Iliad is not so much a fault of the work, but its own reluctant triumph. The depiction of war is accurate. Indeed, war is tedious and petty and backbreaking, and progress is made and lost seemingly at the behest of forces on high which do not care for man’s own preferences. Wars are begun for personal reasons, for private enmities, and sometimes spring from rumors, or in our modern parlance “bad intelligence.” This is what the great Simone Weil calls “the wantonness of the conqueror” in her classic essay The Iliad, or The Poem of Force which is a remarkable examination of the poem’s inherent negativity. As she was writing in relation to the Second World War that is also the lens she is choosing to view it through. As a humble reader of the 21st Century it is natural to tie The Iliad to current events. However, one could say, well, Putin isn’t waging his war in Ukraine for the purposes of delivering himself a kidnapped love, he’s simply conducting an outrageous and illegal land-grab. Yet reading about Agamemnon’s motivations one wonders, simply due to her bizarre lack of depiction, if Helen of Troy was simply a pretext for a wider war of aggression, especially as most kings throughout history callously and luridly availed themselves of more than one wife. It is stirring in this way that Helen’s cameo in The Odyssey is so gentle and so moving. This strikes me as another reason why the authors had to be different people, for the treatment of women in both books is remarkably at odds. Odysseus’s wife Penelope is master of her destiny—not to mention the other powerful women of that saga such as Calypso and Circe—while Briseis is a victim, ventriloquized by Homer as hopelessly in love with Achilles, the man who murdered her betrothed, and who would rather be with him than with Agamemnon who treats her as an object. It is certainly unfair to blame Briseis for her depiction, but one can’t help wondering why, amid all this bloodshed, she did not take matters into her own hands and murder the brooding Achilles in his sleep since he left himself so vulnerable to her? Perhaps if Quentin Tarantino had been dressed in Homer’s toga he would have done just that!

Another staggering and disturbing quality in The Iliad which was identified once again by Simone Weil is the way heroes who are murdered on the battlefield become “things.” Their bodies stripped of life they are fodder to be dragged around by horses, eaten by vultures, and whose armor and trinkets are ripe for plunder. Here, it is most tragic that we know next to nothing about Homer, since we do not know what perspective he was writing from, or whether the dramatic irony implicit in his works is intentional. He surely feels enough for the fallen Hector to craft the most redemptive scene in the entire narrative, Book 24, in which King Priam of Troy secretly visits Achilles to beg for the return of his son’s body so that he may be suitably honored, or in our conception buried in consecrated ground. There are several very obvious real-world parallels that could be made here regarding the return of loved ones’ remains, but I will refrain from doing so, as this is a poem that could be applied to almost any conflict, though perhaps fits better with those that are morally ambiguous in nature and which has heroes and villains on both sides.

I want to be clear: I am not writing this piece to disparage The Iliad while concurrently celebrating The Odyssey, but rather to examine whether the poem’s inherent value lies in its irony or its realism. Each gruesome death is realistic given the nature of the time period and the nature of the conflict, but what struck me as so off-putting was the utter lack of breathing room, at least in terms of narrative storytelling. “The heart must pause to breathe,” as Lord Byron wrote, who himself died during a martial folly when he volunteered to fight a war on the shores of Greece and which resulted in his ignoble malarial death. And yet we get few respites during this supposed ten-years war, the decade-long siege of Troy, an Anatolian kingdom that would have had little contact with mainland Greece otherwise.

Another image that strikes me, if you will forgive a final digression, is Dante’s placement of Homer in Hell—or rather in the austere limbo-esque province of the Nobile Castello which rests on the outer levels of the Inferno. Here all the poets, philosophers, and scientists who were born before the coming of Christ live out eternity; they never heard the message of the Son of God and thus are damned to their very own brand of grey non-existence. Yet I can’t help but feel there is a more symbolic reason for their placement here, one that Dante himself may not have been aware of when he was writing his comedia: Homer is in the Nobile Castello because he did not understand mercy. As it is nearing Christmas I feel content as a non-Christian—though one who respects religious art and feels drawn to its own particular themes and thematics—stating the most attractive element of Christianity is its highlighting of mercy as a worthy mind state that may be cultivated and shared. In Homer, both The Iliad and The Odyssey, there is no mercy for any of the characters. The gods have no mercy for mortal men and mortal men have no mercy for each other. Not even the gods treat each other with respect. This is a cosmology of oppression and disdain, a universe where might is right and pride comes before honor. However, some may argue that Achilles’s release of Hector’s body to Priam is a merciful act. Yet I think this is the best that Homer can do. For is it truly mercy when his son is already dead, having been dragged through the dirt by a chariot, his body disfigured and destroyed by his own native soil?

Perhaps Homer belongs in Dante’s Nobile Castello. Though I admit I shudder at the notion of poets being condemned by what they’ve written—or in the case of Homer, sung—there is another view which suggests he was just a mirror for his times, and did not punctuate the dramatic barbarism of The Iliad with release for the mere fact that the concept was unknown to him. Even Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca is a long and strange one, almost relentless in its misfortunes and mishaps, and its last hopeful notes come only after the brutal and merciless slaughter of Penelope’s former suitors by father and son. I guess it just goes to show that in the ancient world even the poetry ran with blood.

Bust of Homer

For Halloween, “Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse” by M. G. Turner

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My dad and I share an affinity for the legendary literary character Faust, who in various retellings over the centuries has been depicted as selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a number of enticing rewards, including immortal life, admiration from the public, endless amounts of money, and much more. For Philip, this interest goes back to his student days, when with a professor named Donald Sheehan he took a course at Franconia College called “Faust,” and wrote a paper on the topic. Then a few years ago, I undertook the writing of what I call a “novella in verse” which retells the Faust legend for our modern times. With these materials in hand we decided to publish another in the series of chapbooks I’ve brought out this year under our Riverside Press imprint (preceded by Dreams of the Romantics and Roman Visions), using my pen name M. G. Turner. Collected with the narrative poem are two other devilish tales I’ve written, “The Tale of Hanns Drumpf” and “Johann Fust: Patron of Gutenberg,” plus Philip’s essay from 1974, “Faust: Man and Myth.” We believe all this writing goes well together and are now happy to announce publication of Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse for Halloween. For those who would like to buy a copy from us directly before we begin distributing it online, we are selling them for 13 dollars plus 5 dollars shipping.

To learn a little more about our new title, here is the back cover copy:

The “Faust” legend is as old as time, as is the proverbial “deal with the devil.” In M. G. Turner’s Reader Faustus this idea is brought into a modern context, as a young poet chooses to sell his soul in exchange for the power to read every book ever written. While Turner’s “novella in verse” hearkens back to Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1601), Goethe’s Faust (1808), and Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947)—Reader Faustus zeroes in on today’s zeitgeist, in which people feel burdened to consume endless content, and who see Faustian bargains all around them, in politics, technology, science, and the arts. Readers of the macabre will surely enjoy this new offering, a veritable museum of Faust, from the author of Dreams of the Romantics.

I’m honored to have received two endorsements in advance of publication:

“The Faust legend is ever regenerative and ever redefined, as seen in M. G. Turner’s beguiling new verse tale Reader Faustus. In elegant, Augustan rhyming couplets, Turner tells the story of the devil’s bargain anew, but with a focus on the wages of modernity, when those who create are cursed by having to consume ever more content. Clever, thoughtful, and fun, Reader Faustus uses classical language to speak to very contemporary problems.”—Ed Simon, author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and Editor of Belt Magazine

“M. G. Turner’s richly imaginative Reader Faustus offers a new twist on the devil’s bargain. In verse both erudite and playful, Turner asks us to reflect on what we might offer in exchange for our pursuit of both knowledge and enjoyment. While Turner takes glee in the use of antique language and form, the poem is also uncannily modern, as it proposes a complex relationship between the ability to consume content and the ability to create content—a relationship that is always under negotiation, and which has become particularly fraught in our digital age. As Turner’s work recognizes, the stakes for this bargain have never been higher.”—Brandon Grafius, author of Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture 

We hope you find the Faust legend as compelling as we do, and will be interested in visiting, and reading, our “veritable museum of Faust.” Please let us know!

M. G. Turner: “‘False Memories & Eldritch Interludes’ is a spooky delight”

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A review by Ewan “M. G.” Turner of a new horror-inflected book:

False Memories & Eldritch Interludes is a spooky delight! Part-memoir, part tall tale, author Joseph Citro takes a novel approach by making himself known to readers in among a series of stories, narratives, and as he calls them, “eldritch” interludes. If that word is familiar it’s because it was popularized by fellow New England writer H.P. Lovecraft, whom Citro acknowledges as a major influence, as he was on so many, acting as a model for all who preserve local history in that most gothic region. Citro’s writing itself is excellent—personal and touching, and as a fellow horror writer/enthusiast myself, it is special to meet him in these ingenious pages. Along the way you feel less like you’re reading a book and more like you’re in the presence of a great storyteller who is weaving narratives that at first seem opposed to each other but surprise you with their profound resonance.

It is also a joy to read stories and then have them commented upon by the omniscient writer’s voice in welcome “Behind the Scenes” sections which provide an excellent dichotomy between fright and fable, and give you an even deeper view into the author—something Lovecraft himself was never able to do, but Citro does remarkably well and without it feeling contrived or too self-referential. Also, I should add that it is very refreshing to read work like this, though I hesitate to describe it as “no-nonsense.” Instead what I mean is that you have the feeling of being given a chance to see the inner workings of a seasoned writer’s mind and with him as a guide we’ll live to tell the tale! (Also, it’s just nice to read something unpretentious in style and yet extremely deep in terms of content, a nearly impossible feat to pull off.)

Favorite pieces in the collection include: “Them Bald-Headed Snays”; “Soul-Keeper”; “Kirby”; and “The Last Fortune Cookie.” “False Memories” is a must-read for all horror enthusiasts and for people who enjoy the work of highly skilled writers who tell stories connected to their local communities and expand upon and ultimately craft their own urban legends. Last, evocative illustrations by Corey Forman round out the package nicely.  It’s available on Amazon.

The Vermonter publication has described Joe Citro as “Vermont’s most recognized authority on ghosts, haunting, and the state’s mysterious past. He’s written many fascinating books on the subject, including his bestselling work, Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors.” Citro really is a New England treasure, as is clear in this 2020 profile in Seven Days magazine.

The Tragedy of Bruno Schulz, A Mysterious and Captivating Writer by M. G. Turner

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Reading the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz is an experience like no other: scholars have compared him favorably to both Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. However, each of these authors provides only a partial analogy, despite Schulz’s work exhibiting the absurdity of the former and the nostalgia of the latter. But even with these similarities to existing storytellers, he is his own man, a wild, surreal magician of the written word who could conjure whole worlds right in his hometown of Drohobycz—then Poland, today Ukraine. In addition to being a linguistic marvel, he was also an accomplished illustrator of his own work, drawing bizarre phantasmagorical images which often featured a distorted version of himself.

Schulz is one of the few deceased writers I have ever felt creatively jealous of, for he achieved something on the page which is extremely elusive and usually relegated only to the medium of cinema: the ability to transmit surrealism into fiction. There are some technical reasons why fiction does not lend itself well to this style; in film, directors can move from image to image at will, while with words we must always be building and rounding out our world, as well as shoring up our grammar, and at the same time constantly keeping in mind the reader who may at any moment put the book down. However inexplicably, Schulz does both of these things—that is to say, building a world and transmitting surrealism—to powerful effect. He crafts confounding fables of a family in turmoil, of a son bewildered by his father, of a city where the rules of reality are supplanted by a magical dream logic that sweeps the characters and the reader into rollicking journeys of remarkable and sublime poignancy. And despite the inherent darkness of this world, in which it always seems to be night, it is truly a delight to go with him. Another literary feat he manages to accomplish is making the harsh realities of Jewish life in pre-war, and then war-torn Poland seem beautiful and in, its own way, holy. For there are no laments or complaints in his prose, or even dirges on suffering; rather, his work, in its own roundabout way, appears to be a celebration of the human imagination and its ability to influence and effect our lives in a palpable and entertaining fashion. Not to mention the fact that, like Kafka, his characters are not recognizably Jewish.

Still, the fact Schulz was Jewish—and later murdered by a jealous S.S. officer who resented his artistic endeavors, while walking home with a loaf of bread—does lend the work a feeling of impending doom. Like Kakfa, he is perpetually aware of his own perceived inadequacy and manages to fight this psychological oppression by saying in effect, “Okay, you’re right, I am hideous and inferior. But so are you, and more so—you are agents of darkness while I am only an agent of the strange.” This is my own rendering of what I take to be Schulz’s overarching idea and modus operandi. The world he permeates with strangers and drifters and birds and hats with a will of their own has no hue or whiff of evil to it; instead, confusion seems to be its main characteristic and echoes what he and his family must have been feeling at the height of the war when they’d been forced into the Drohobycz ghetto by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.

The confusion present in his two story collections—the only ones that survive, as the rest of his literary output, including a novel called The Messiah, is lost to history—has a logical conclusion, and that is madness. A sense of madness was what Schulz must have been feeling as his family members were taken away, a sense of the vicious absurdity of trying to be an artist in a world that was crumbling around him. If it was driving the author mad, it made sense that the characters themselves are occupying a mad world where the laws of physics are suspended, or else don’t even apply. But in fiction, unlike in life, this kind of societal collapse can be rendered beautiful and even, to the reader, pleasurable to read—and all for its dream-like qualities which are born of the author’s escapist fancy and aesthetic brilliance. We enter a trance when reading Schulz, a healing type of meditative state, that even in the English translation by Celina Wieniewska (Schulz wrote in Polish) is distinct from the kind acquired from reading Kafka or Proust. This is due to the writer’s fusion of linguistic excellence with unbridled imagination that reveled in knowing no bounds—especially as his external world became increasingly cramped, closed-in, and imprisoning.

Schulz’s best story, I believe, is “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” a must-read for anyone interested in dream logic pushed to its most extreme. In this story the narrator’s father has died; yet he remains alive in only one location, a mysterious sanatorium where the rules of life and death go unenforced. Time is the key element here: in the sanatorium his father’s death simply has yet to occur, and it is here the narrator finds himself visiting the man whose antics have plagued him for many consecutive stories. Some scholars have pointed out the similarity of this theme to those of Franz Kafka whose issues with his own father were often on display in pieces like The Judgment, and of course The Metamorphosis. But instead of making us feel, as Kafka does, that the author is finding comparable metaphors in fiction for the most intense emotions in his own life, Schulz takes a more nebulous and, in many ways, more nuanced approach. There is simply no resolution in “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” or really in any of his work. This mirrors the writer’s own death. As stated earlier, Schulz was shot down in the street at the age of fifty by an S.S. officer who did not appreciate Schulz’s artistic efforts—efforts he was lending to a rival Nazi commander who’d contracted his services to paint a mural of fairy tales on his children’s bedroom wall, in exchange for money and some degree of protection, which in the end did not save him. (This mural is now restored and on display in Israel’s Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center.)

Perhaps Isaac Bashevis Singer said it best, when he lent a blurb to the publication of Schulz’s work, that had he “…been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” I could not agree more. I highly recommend delving into this mysterious and tragic author if dream logic, surrealism, and magical realism appeal to you—though he is so much more than any label, name, or genre, can stick to him. In life he defied convention, and in death he did the same; thus, his immortality as a mid-century European literary master, albeit one who died before their time, is unquestionably assured.

M. G. Turner

January 2025

Clara Reeve: My New Literary Hero by M. G. Turner

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Recently I had the good fortune of making a literary discovery, which was really the discovery of a new literary hero: Clara Reeve. For those who may be unfamiliar with her work, in 1777, Reeve—an Englishwoman born in Ipswich (1729-1807)—wrote a small masterpiece entitled The Old English Baron which is a clever, exciting, and thoroughly captivating retelling of Horace Walpole’s slim novella The Castle of Otranto, written more than a decade prior. Otranto is considered as the first gothic novel and should be thought of as a seminal work. But as is often the plight of anything that is the first it is also flawed, flawed in a way that Reeve took upon herself to openly correct in her own penetrating novel that seamlessly moved the setting from rural and rugged Italy to Medieval England during the time of the crusades. The plot centers around a knight who returns to his friend’s estate after a period of war only to find that it has fallen into a state of dilapidation. It is important to note that this would become a gothic trope, beginning with Otranto and continuing with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca—showing how time and neglect can take a piece of property formerly regal and beautiful and obscure its true nature. In this way the gothic writer laments the passage of time and does so by using style as a metaphor and trope as its device. The only difference for Clara Reeve was that she found Walpole’s novel too extreme in its many bold choices and thus tried to rectify them.

Indeed, Reeve’s conceit is one I try to take to heart myself and apply to my own writing. It is simply that when reaching out to portray the supernatural it is important not to go too far, to remain as it were on the “razor’s edge” between unbridled fantasy and stultifying reality. She recognized with the precision of a true artist something that I innately felt about Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: it was overdone, there was too much mayhem, too much absurdity; why does a giant helmet fall out of the sky and happen to crush the groom? Why are people walking in and out of tapestries as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Why is the father, after the death of his beloved son, so instantly possessed with such lusty rage that he must attempt to marry the young man’s bride? Feeling courageous and sure of herself, Reeve tried her hand at addressing some of what she saw as Walpole’s errors. For my part, I have to admit I like Otranto just fine. But that’s just it: I like it fine. I can distinctly recall rolling my eyes at the exact points Reeve took issue with and felt compelled to explore in her own much more considered way. Reeve is an artist; Walpole is an inventor. He deserves credit for pulling together the disparate strands of style and inventing the gothic genre, but she deserves to be recognized for having written a better book, a work she herself referred to as Otranto’s “literary offspring.”

And it seems she was, in some sense, recognized for this. Though there is not much known about her life and her literary output is small—she did translations, wrote a book of poetry, and penned histories—The Old English Baron deeply offended the man she had written it in emulation of. Walpole was simply aghast than anyone, particularly a woman, would have the temerity to take his form and do something spectacular with it. Of course, both he, and later Walter Scott, claimed that her efforts were not spectacular; they put down The Old English Baron as frivolous, boring, and charmless. Walpole, in a letter to the Reverend William Cole, decreed that Reeve’s novel is: “stripped of the marvelous…, except in one awkward attempt at a ghost or two, that it is the most insipid dull thing you ever saw…” From my own perspective it is hard to see this judgement by Walpole as little more than paternalistic bitterness. Where he failed, she succeeded; where she failed, he succeeded. The two works complement each other and offer something that the other does not have; in the case of Baron a more deft way of deploying the supernatural that does not feel forced or cartoonish but instead makes you shiver with genuine fright due to its well-composed restraint; while Otranto possesses more style than its successor. Either way, these early gothic works led to Mary Shelley, to Bram Stoker, to Edgar Allan Poe, and much later, to Jorge Luis Borges. Here is a continuum that Walpole and Reeve both ushered in, and which matters in the context of our times. For the gothic has been referred to as the most “anxious” of styles and we are now in the most anxious of ages. It recognizes the innate darkness that subsumes so much of our world; estates that were once beautiful and grand can, with the passage of only a few years and within even one generation, fall into decay and utter ruin. The honor of the past is often supplanted by an insipid criminality that is always trying to get away with something. The gothic is not old fashioned, nor is it new-fangled. It is the most present of styles because it acknowledges that change is the most supreme truth of human life. All empires crumble, all families break apart. People fail to live up their promise and due to innate hubris are struck down. These are all themes that filter through both Otranto and Baron and it is our pleasure as readers—and appreciators of style—to debate which one we think did it best.

But there is something even more important in all of this, something even more topical. In this age wherein we are rediscovering voices from the past who were traditionally overlooked, neglected, or wholeheartedly ignored let us not forget the daring Clara Reeve who had the audacity to challenge a powerful man—and carve out her own not insubstantial piece of literary history; for she is the reason for the essay having been written at all! She made Walpole’s rather lurid fantasia something more profound, something that I could recognize as of a kind with greatest works of horror fiction. Because she was a woman writing in an era dominated by men doesn’t mean she should remain unappreciated. And like the ghosts which she deployed with such deftness and alacrity she can rise again, to be known as she should be known: as a pioneer of the macabre and a writer of immense talent, as fearless and brave as the champions of virtue she set down on the page.

M. G. Turner

“The Shakespeare Authorship Conundrum Society” by M. G. Turner

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The Shakespeare Authorship Conundrum Society met Thursdays at the public mansion on Riverside Drive and 107th street. It was there that Theodore Gurney, Teddy for short, had found his confidantes—a ragtag gang of young and old aesthetes united over the dubious though benign conspiracy theory that the Bard of Avon was not the author of the greatest plays ever written. And in a culture plagued by misinformation of a more destructive sort, their little club wasn’t doing much harm. In fact, it was a delight to meet each week especially on those often rainy April afternoons and discuss, argue, and interpret. Everyone there was well-educated and a lover of the Bard’s work—that is, whoever the Bard actually was.

For some it was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Several of his close family members had, according to Bennet Leach, a forty-three-year-old professional fact checker, been the supposed Shakespeare’s patrons. He, as well as several others in the group, adhered to the idea that Old Will was indeed a real person, but more of a steward, a frontman for the work of someone else who for reasons of political impropriety could not go public with their quill. How, this particular faction argued, could an uneducated man of humble background, whose father was a mere tanner, have written so penetratingly about kings, queens, and other members of the royal elite? How could he have always had the inside scoop on court intrigue? He couldn’t, they claimed—hence the existence of a secret that, if confirmed, threatened to unseat nearly five hundred years of orthodoxy surrounding the Bard’s majestic output.

But Teddy didn’t fall into this category. Nor did he fall in with the others, some of whom claimed Shakespeare was a Sicilian by the name of Collolanza who’d supposedly been puttering around England at this time, or that he was in fact Christopher Marlowe himself, who’d inexplicably succeeded at faking his infamous barroom death. Nor did Teddy believe he was one of the kings and queens who graced the English, French, or Spanish thrones, whose names over the course of centuries had been tossed into the hat for consideration by amateur critics and armchair scholars.

It is important to note that Teddy’s own belief about the veracity of Shakespeare’s genius lay in a more considered, accurate, though certainly less exciting realm. His own postulation which had come to him after several weeks of attending the Thursday meetings and taking in all the diverse opinions—as well as doing frenzied research of his own—was that Shakespeare was indeed Shakespeare, but that, seeing as he was part of the consummate Elizabethan repertory company at the renowned Globe Theater, many of the plays, including some of the most famous might have been written, or edited, or looked over by actors, namely Richard Burbage, who some scholars had even gone so far as to posit as the unacknowledged co-author of Hamlet.

But amid all the wild theories that dove inside his ears each week Teddy felt reluctant to lay bare this, by comparison, banal theory. To him the very fact of its subdued suggestiveness made it more stirring than say, the unsubstantiated idea that Shakespeare was really Sir Francis Drake, composing plays and sonnets while circling “the whole globe.” Thusly, it wasn’t until the sixth week of his involvement with the Society as he was now thinking of it, that his courage became plucked up enough to share his hypothesis. He decided to begin by validating all the other theories he had heard that day and in subsequent weeks before pouring the proverbial cold water on the wildest of them. “Never in my life,” he began, “have I had occasion to enjoy such compelling and consequential talk. But there is another theory which has gone neglected that I would like to share with you today.”

The faces of his co-conspirators glimmered under the resplendent lights of the Library Room. Several of them smiled, while some looked demonically expectant, as if daring him to outdo their spirited reveries.

“Go ahead, please,” said Margaret Crawley—a sixty-four-year-old librarian who was on the verge of retirement and was herself planning a “truth-seeking trip” to Stratford-upon-Avon, aka “The Birthplace” in the fall. “You have not spoken much in our meetings and we’d all be glad to hear from you.”

“Well,” Teddy cleared his throat. “As I see it, none of us will soon get the validation from academia required for a public acceptance of our theories, but there is one suggestion made by some scholars whose names I can share that seems to me almost indisputable.”

After a shared gasp there was a round of excited voices—some angry and some mortally pleased. Teddy went on:

“It is that, seeing as the Globe was a place of collaboration and collective creativity, portions of the plays—maybe even large portions of them—could have been contributed by the actors. It has even been suggested that the renowned thespian Richard Burbage—and in some ways the Bard’s right hand man—took a leading role in not only the production but in the writing of Hamlet. Who knows how many times an actor would flub a line, but in the process of this divine accident make it sound even better than it had been written on the page and Old Will watching from the back of the theater might have called out: ‘Forsooth, that is better than what I had quilled! Leave as is.’

“And though this line of thinking cannot be expressly proved it cannot be expressly refuted either, which I think lends it a great deal of credence and intellectual power. I would love to know your thoughts.”

As Teddy stopped speaking a great silence filled the Library Room, which was only broken several seconds later by Lloyd Hanger, a fifty-seven-year-old linguistics professor who was the unofficial “heavy” of the group, “THAT IS TREASON!”

“Yes! How absurd!” came another voice, which was met by a second chorus, some in defense, some in derision:

“I think Teddy has a point!”

“What does he know, he hasn’t even spoken until today!”

“But of all the theories his makes the most sense!”

“Don’t forget about Edward de Vere—you can’t explain him away!”

“I think this young man just did.”

“Oh, poppycock.”

“Care to take it outside?”

“I’d like to.”

“SILENCE!” This one word, from the instigator of the unexpected skirmish, quieted the rabble. Especially as Lloyd added: “Do we want to get kicked out of here?”

“He’s right.” Margaret let out a deep, feeling sigh. “This idea you have presented to us, Teddy, has certainly raised the temperature. How curious too, considering it is one of the most moderate we have heard. However, so as not jeopardize our position here, I suggest we move on to other business.”

With that mild word the war had been put down and Teddy sat in silence, unsure if another contribution of his was apt to be considered. But truthfully he didn’t have one and when he walked out that April day, after saying goodbye to his co-conspirators he made a silent vow to not return. For as the rain pattered down upon the earth and misted the Westside in its dew he felt as if he could, like Schrodinger, see all the possible identities of Shakespeare both having existed and not. He was simultaneously a great naval-man, a great earl, a great king, and a great scholar. He was a Sicilian wanderer and Miguel de Cervantes. But something all these theories seemed to reject, and something all the theorists seemed allergic to was that someone of so humble a background could be imbued with genius. Like most conspiracy theories, it neglected to consider a bare, and perhaps humdrum truth—in this case, that the embers of creativity can spark anywhere resulting in a blaze so tall and great we remain in awe for hundreds of literarily blessed years after.

And some five hundred years prior, in a green corner of jolly old England a bard was brought into the world—though in the minds of the most benignly credulous, who he truly was we’ll never know.

M. G. Turner
New York City
December 2023