'Revenges We Are Bound To Take'

DISCLAIMER: There are some historical inaccuracies between the dates of publication and performance of plays and their coordination with Shakespeare’s personal life. However, much of the story is fictional, merely being based off of loose events and real historical figures. By no means is this meant to be fact as much creative liberty has been taken.

Perhaps I really am too unforgiving. We all have our faults after all. Mine so happens to be one that has tormented me in a way I never truly will shrug off. When you want something so terribly, so desperately and so hopelessly foreign from the person you actually are it can drive you into the waters of insanity. I am an apt swimmer, however, and therefore have never feared drowning. No. Drowning is something that I have come to understand others grew to fear, and rightly so. I do not speak of murder. I am not so petty as to end someone’s own misery by kindly providing them a way out of it. No, I flatter myself in knowing that I can completely decimate a person’s being by making it a royal mess. It is always so very personal that the pain seems to etch itself dearly into their bones. I have never been vain about anything. I am nothing to look at and my general knowledge of the world around me is so limited I could be called stupid. But one area I do grow in. I grow, I prosper. And that is the inexplicable feeling I can put into executing punishment for a past wrong. I am a sensitive person. When I feel I am moved by mountains, my veins course with the emotion and my mind breeds with senselessness. That is why I am too unforgiving, because I am too feeling.

You are by now wondering, ‘oh dear, what a little mess I have stumbled upon! What a sorry Greek tragedy!’ Now I will tell you, yes you have. Dear reader I am finding that day by day I am further robbed of everything that should have been mine. The prosperity, the name, the admiration that should all be given to me. So no, you have not found yourself amidst a Greek tragedy, but a ‘Shakespearean’ one. Because the great tragedy King Lear was mine, Hamlet was mine, as was Macbeth. I know one day scholars will confuse these stories to have been derived from some great philosophical point. ‘Oh, how ingenious Shakespeare was, drawing on so many inspirations!’. He was not, well I was not. And yes, those 2,000 words ‘Shakespeare’ created? Well, a lot of those were mine.

So dear reader, I suppose you have found yourself in a very difficult position. Do you trust scholars and historians who claim to know William better than he knew himself? Or do you trust me, Killian Koxcomb, who vented his anger into plays that were stolen and, I am, sure retold and retold? If you will take my advice, I propose the latter to be a more trustworthy source.

…

William and I used to be very good friends. He was a good ten years older than I so I regarded him much as a younger brother would, following his every lead on everything. He took care of me when no one else would. It was not that I was destitute, I simply had a mother who was sick and a father who was negligent. He would take me fishing by the river and taught me how to write. I would often times join him on his morning writing ritual, so to speak, waking up at four in the morning.

I loved him like a brother.

I was 11 when he and Anne had the twins. Judith and Hamnet. And I was there when Hamnet died. I hadn’t really thought of death much until then. Hamnet’s procession was something I will never forget, it left a lasting print. Hamnet had been like a brother too. We were only 11 years apart. His loss left a void in an a place I never even knew existed. The church bells droned/rocked in the back, painfully drawing down everyone’s already weighty hearts. The servants carried their banners and coats of arms, almost mocking his body in the casket.

William hadn’t said much, nor had Annie. She was the invisible egg white that bound the family together. Susanna, William’s eldest, had been completely stony, holding Annie’s hand in a rock-solid grip. Judith was in tears. That was the first time I really saw into her. She had stepped out of childhood that day, maturing into an adult’s mind. I had carried her for most of the procession, her face red and blotchy, her legs tired from carrying the weight of loss.

William changed after that day. He became more absorbed in his work, retiring to his room and not speaking much. He started to carry around a skull, sometimes simply staring at it while he sat by the fire. I had always wondered where he got it from but now…I have my speculations. At the age of 31 he already seemed to be displaying some worrisome signs. He would talk to this skull softly, whispering to it like it could carry his words to the world of the dead. I found it creepy.

He no longer seemed to want my company as much, and no longer needing it myself I spent more time with Anne, Susanne and Judith. In the mornings, I would take Susanne and Judith for horse rides to go and see my mother. They called her Aunt Arabella, bringing her flowers and listening to her talk about the days of when she was a young girl. I would listen to them from my place at the wooden table where I would cut carrots, celery, potatoes and meat to make Mother and Father a stew for their lunch. Mother died soon after, so the visits came to an end. I wish I could have said that I felt her loss as much as Hamnet’s, but while I loved her like any son would, her presence had long been absent.

My days with the Shakespeare family started to become few and far between. Eventually Annie and the girls stopped needing comfort, so I became more absorbed in working the farm with father: ploughing the land, killing the cows, milking the goats. I didn’t mind the work, I rather enjoyed it, I would often escape to a quite place, some meadow or shaded area where I would take my writing supplies and simply write. The environment was good for it, the silence making a cool pool for my thoughts to run free.

On occasion I would join William at the London theatre. He had made quite a name for himself with a series of plays called King Henry VI. I liked it. I loved watching it performed, the rehearsals, the preparation of the props, the music and the backgrounds. He had found his world there and I couldn’t help but feel happy for him.

One day, after one of the readings of the first part of the play, we had gone to a pub. We drank beer and ate some cold meet, cheese and bread.

‘Tell me, Killian, what is it you’re working on?’ he had said.

‘Nothing good. A play.’

‘A play…?’ he gestured for me to carry on.

‘A play about fathers and children. About kings and princesses.’

‘Oh, and this from your own experience of children?’

‘I have been a child, William. I know what families are made of,’ I had said. ‘The good and the bad.’

‘What is it called?’

‘King Lear.’

‘Sounds grand.’

‘It will be.’

‘Let me have a look at it. Leave it with me and when I come back to Stratford I will tell you what I think.’

‘I haven’t brought it with me.’

‘Well that was clever of you wasn’t it? Well. I will read it when I come back then.’

‘When do you plan on returning?’

‘Two weeks. Judith turns sixteen then. I mean to find her a husband.’

‘A husband! What, already?’

‘Yes already, Killian. The girl needs to be set up with someone before she’s out of her prime. Susanne got married three years ago and she’s only eighteen.’

I remember, that was the first time I had really felt that William had hurt me. I had thought him to be family and yet I was not even informed about his eldest’s wedding. He could see I was upset, I have never been good at hiding my feelings. My face has always been as easy to read as one of William’s plays.

‘Where was my invite, Will?’

‘What? You got one, you fiend, do not act so hurt! Even so, if I had not told you you would have heard it from someone else. Perhaps I forgot.’

‘Yes. Perhaps you forgot. Or perhaps I simply don’t remember going to my brother’s daughter’s wedding. Yes, perhaps a lot of things. I’m going home. I’ve left Father long enough as it is, he’s not young and needs the help.’

‘Ah ever the farmer, Killian, you haven’t changed a hair! You should spend more time on your writing, you will never be great if you don’t practice.’

‘Well unfortunately, some of us do not have the luxury of abandoning our families in pursuit of fame.’

I didn’t let him remark on that, I gathered my things and left. I had never been angry with him before. I suppose I had been so blinded by my idolisation that I never had spotted a flaw in him. But all of a sudden, I began to grow more and more acutely aware of his flaws, and more and more unforgiving of them.

I returned to Stratford, finding my Father’s company to be preferable. We would silently work the farm together, the hired hands proving to be of little company as the winter months drew in. William had come home, and I had given him my manuscript. However, he must have forgotten to invite me to the family gathering for Judith too, because I didn’t see him until long after. I hadn’t forgotten her birthday, however.

The celebration of birthday’s had become a recent traditional that I was rather glad to have been around for. It gave something for people to look forward to in a rather dreary existence at times, as well as keeping score as to who had managed to last the longest.

I had bought her a small present, some dried pears and walnuts, wrapping them in a cloth with a piece of brown string. I tapped on her window lightly, having found a ladder to prop against the window. When I saw her, I could hardly recognise her. The lines of her face were more defined, her dark blue eyes startlingly bright and her skin a lovely bronze.

‘Killian?’

I couldn’t say anything. She had turned into a woman almost overnight, and yet not quite so. For I had forgotten how long I had been away form the family. Her black curls hung freely, framing her face.

‘Happy birthday,’ I said helplessly.

William said he didn’t like the play. He called it a string of names all sharing the same meaning as human waste. I was still naïve at that point, believing him to be the master and that I should deftly  follow what he said. I had given the script to Judith afterwards, asking what she had thought. According to her it was incredible, something she had never seen before. But looking back on it now, I don’t know whether what she had said was true or simply clouded by the fact that by that point we were besotted.

William told me to leave the manuscript with him for reviews. And I did. To my detriment, I did. As I did with my play Macbeth, that I finished shortly after, and as I did with Hamlet. I never saw them again. Whenever I asked about the plays he would always get irritated, ‘I will give them back to you when they’re ready! For goodness sake, I’m doing you a good thing and you have to nag at me constantly! Nag, nag, nag. Like a child, Killian! Give it some time. These things take time.’ They did. They took years.

Meanwhile, I wanted to marry Judith. She and I had always been connected differently and I respected her more than I did any other person. She would help me when I fought with Father over what to do with the farming, she would be there to talk to when I was tired and she would bring me food at midday when the sun was too hot to carry on working in the summers. William was away, and Anne didn’t mind my seeing Judith.

But everything crashed all at once.

William had written off my plays as his own.

He’d found out about Judith and I.

And Father died.

William was making money off of my hard work, which he did not alter at all. All his pretence about making edits and revisions to it had all been false. And I had to find out from George who worked on the farm. He had a cousin up in London who had been to see one of the plays at the London Theatre. I confronted William. He had looked me straight in the eye, shrugging his shoulders as he coolly said, ‘Tis the business.’

That day I had also found out that out of spite, he had given Judith to some man named Thomas Quiney. He said the word ‘given’, but really he had sold her. Sold her to a man of forty. I had gone to her after that. I had no intention of stealing her. I couldn’t. She was another man’s wife, my right wither had been taken away. But I had to make sure she was alright.

She was not.

Her face had hard lines drawn on it, her figure skeletal in appearance, her hair knotted in a half attempt at a beautiful hairstyle. He wasn’t s a bad man, but William was. And he had taken his daughter away from someone she had wanted, placing her in a predicament that no young woman should have to face.

When I saw the dim, loveless look in her eye, I had made up my mind. At no moment had I so strongly felt my line from Hamlet. My line. ‘Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.’

For the ravens did croak at that moment.

When I say I did not resolve to murder, I did not mean the concept as a whole. For I did not murder William himself, although the compulsion did rage strongly within. I did however burn many of his manuscripts when he left the house. Anne let me do it too. She had grown to despise him as much as I had, and I had often found a motherly and sisterly figure in her. She had shown me where his work was, and provided the flames for me to use. I had waited for four years however. I allowed the desire for recompense to slosh around me until it was too strong to withhold, unforgiveness marring everything I did from then on.

But I suppose I became a Cain. For I executed my anger, and there was mourning in it’s wake. However, like Cain, it came to no avail. William was still the hero. I hear today that, despite the substantial damage I had done, he became someone far beyond what he or I had ever imagined he could be.  And then I come to find that in not point of time was my name ever associated with his. I had died, been buried and forgotten about long before Shakespeare became a household name. Long before Judith had her sons Shakespeare, Thomas and Richard, and long before all three died. I was in the ground long before Anne breathed her last and Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth got round to marrying twice. For to my despair, my revenge became nothing. I Killian, nothing.

And to my despair, he became everything.

So I suppose revenges we are not really bound to take, for we take them, and then what? Nothing. We gain nothing...and lose all.