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Authors: Michael Gruber
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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 certain industrial estate in Ealing and found the handpress and the paper and the ink, with the fake
Hamlet
still set up in the forms. This occurred some eighteen months after the sale.
The money from this had apparently been mostly spent on high living of a particularly lubricious kind. The tabloids ate it whole, reserving a special venom for the peccant expert, Bulstrode. Into this mess strode my old pal Mickey Haas, who defended his colleague in the public press as having made an error that any other expert in the world would have made, including Dr. Haas himself. He arranged for Bulstrode to occupy a visiting professorship at Columbia in the hope that England might cool down after an interval. And now it seemed someone else had unloaded a document on Bulstrode, which I thought odd, since he was the last person eligible to present any important manuscript to the world, and also the last person to want to. But I had long surrendered any notion that experience was an efficient teacher. I, for example, would still be happily married had I been able to learn from my mistakes.
Or perhaps he had snapped under the strain. Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession their madness is less often remarked. As a reality check I looked up Lord Dunbarton and, somewhat to my surprise, found he was no figment. Henry Reith (1570-1655), second Baron Dunbarton, was a Puritan grandee. His dad, the first Lord Dunbarton, had won his spurs as one of Henry VIII’s ransacking minions, a “visitor” as they called them, kicking nuns and monks out of their cloisters and making sure that the Protestant Reformation reached every lootable ecclesiastic property in England. He was rewarded with a title and an estate in Warwickshire, Darden Hall. The son was introduced at court late in Elizabeth’s reign, won the favor of Lord Burghley, and got into what they then called the “intelligencer” business, working to catch Jesuits and expose their knavish
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 certain industrial estate in Ealing and found the handpress and the paper and the ink, with the fake
Hamlet
still set up in the forms. This occurred some eighteen months after the sale.
The money from this had apparently been mostly spent on high living of a particularly lubricious kind. The tabloids ate it whole, reserving a special venom for the peccant expert, Bulstrode. Into this mess strode my old pal Mickey Haas, who defended his colleague in the public press as having made an error that any other expert in the world would have made, including Dr. Haas himself. He arranged for Bulstrode to occupy a visiting professorship at Columbia in the hope that England might cool down after an interval. And now it seemed someone else had unloaded a document on Bulstrode, which I thought odd, since he was the last person eligible to present any important manuscript to the world, and also the last person to want to. But I had long surrendered any notion that experience was an efficient teacher. I, for example, would still be happily married had I been able to learn from my mistakes.
Or perhaps he had snapped under the strain. Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession their madness is less often remarked. As a reality check I looked up Lord Dunbarton and, somewhat to my surprise, found he was no figment. Henry Reith (1570-1655), second Baron Dunbarton, was a Puritan grandee. His dad, the first Lord Dunbarton, had won his spurs as one of Henry VIII’s ransacking minions, a “visitor” as they called them, kicking nuns and monks out of their cloisters and making sure that the Protestant Reformation reached every lootable ecclesiastic property in England. He was rewarded with a title and an estate in Warwickshire, Darden Hall. The son was introduced at court late in Elizabeth’s reign, won the favor of Lord Burghley, and got into what they then called the “intelligencer” business, working to catch Jesuits and expose their knavish
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