The School of Night: A Novel (18 page)

It doesn’t take much to create a myth, I’d certainly learnt that in the newsroom, if nothing else. All that’s needed is for a few people to speak compellingly and some others to stay silent. And once a myth is launched on its career, no amount of refutation will ever abolish it completely. Within a few years it will have become tradition. So I worked hard on Shakespeare’s identity and began to feel at last the beginning of a paradigm shift. The trick here is not to be bullied by conventional wisdom, not to snort, as Dominique had snorted at Bernini’s Teresa, because of your assumption that you already know all the facts. Suspicion of certainty is the first requirement. Total solitude, and a life spent largely in the dark, undoubtedly help. Intellectual ascesis, you see: getting rid of the unwanted clutter. I wrote at my little table, after first covering the mirror on the wall behind it with a black sheet. Whenever I left the hotel, Maggie would come into the room and remove that sheet, and whenever I came back, I’d put it back again.

‘Why, Sean?’ I remembered Dominique asking me once, ‘why do you hate looking in the mirror so much?’ I shrugged; didn’t even mention that I was said to be the living image of my dead mother. When I did stare into one of those silvery pools, which was not often, I always saw her face coming up out of the depths to meet me, and felt then something like panic. Felt a different sort of dark around me, one that no one had ever even attempted to map. Dominique was deep into Lacan by then.

‘When you were young your gaze should have been met by your mother and father. They vanished from view. When you see your own face now what you’re seeing is the void that no one affirmed, no one responded to.’

‘I just don’t like looking in mirrors, that’s all,’ I said. So I kept the mirror veiled. The tiny proportions of the hotel bedroom reminded me sometimes of the celibate spaces of the Dominicans at Blackfriars. I had tried to convince myself once that I might be able to live in one of them, but Brother Geoffrey had gently dissuaded me, realising long before I did that my psyche wasn’t tailored to the task. You’d have to be far more sociable than I was to be a real monk. But it had begun to seem as though I’d have to get used to a life of celibacy, all the same.

Now the shift system had given me three days to myself, so I had taken the train to Mortlake and walked along the river, where I found the old church of St Mary’s, and then mapped out from there where Dr Dee’s house must have stood in relation to it, though not a trace of the house now remains. Robert Cotton had paid for the whole field round about to be dug up after the old man’s death, convinced that documents beyond price must be hidden there. Elias Ashmole sent maggot-headed Aubrey himself on his own search. In its time Dee’s library had been for some people by way of an omphalos, the very centre of a mystic world for those who would see the unseen and hear the unheard, those who needed intercourse with the spirits beyond this realm. Queen Elizabeth had come down here to the legendary site of Bibliotheca Mortlacensis. The stacks of books and codices together probably formed the greatest collection England could boast at the time, much of it gathered up from the sacked libraries of the monasteries, particularly St Augustine’s Abbey, but Dee’s house was soon buried under the new Mortlake tapestry works and then his own books were scattered throughout the world.

When later that day I arrived at the London Library, I checked some dates in a Shakespeare biography. I was still troubled by that question: could the figure of Prospero actually have been based on John Dee? Was it biographically possible? Once again we seemed to be back with that recurring question: whom and what did Shakespeare actually know? Who and what
was
he? In 1605 the King’s Men stopped over at Mortlake. Nobody can say exactly where the Warwickshire Shakespeare was, but he might have been with them. We know that Dee was back there by then in his house. A broken man, near the end of his life. A man of immense learning, all of which seems to have come to nothing. But still a most striking-looking fellow – we have this much on the authority of all who came across him: a long white beard, slender and tall, and the gravest of demeanours. So it’s just possible that Shakespeare might have encountered him there. One thing was certain: the members of the School of Night all knew him well enough, and Hariot had been a lifetime companion.

I found myself thinking again of that imagination we’ve all heard so much about. Whoever the man was, no mind has ever been more susceptible to having impressions made upon it. Place before it this figure of legend, this living Merlin, this alchemist, astrologer, cabbalist. A man who appears to have spent his life labouring through the world’s bookshelves, transforming the inside of his skull into a tiny microcosm of the universe of knowledge.

All the exotic ingredients of alchemy – all the metals and minerals and compounds – are in truth one, and that singularity is neither more nor less than the person of the alchemist himself. If the base metal is in need of purification then so, even more so, is he. Out of the corruption and confusion he must find a oneness in which nature and divinity are reconciled. Out of the unstillness of his own impurity must come the transforming power to achieve redemption. Curiously, the best scryers in a shewstone were said to be the tainted ones, since too pellucid a medium precluded any visible manifestations.

But Dee’s unworldliness had already led to his ruin. Insofar as he trusted the powers of this world, those same powers had brought about his downfall. He had been cozened by bogus scryers, his library despoiled and looted, his scientific instruments vandalised. He was reduced to selling his own books; his daughter sold even more of them without telling him, there being no other way to get money. On hearing of it, the news was said to have sped his death.

It seemed to me almost impossible to imagine the writer we call Shakespeare not responding; impossible not to see him placing such a luminous and tragic figure in a play. And he knew only too well what had destroyed Dee: zeros. That cipher which had only recently entered the English language and English calculation. The O which by itself signified nothing except vacuity, but which, with any solid number before it and its own kind breeding a train of hollows behind, meant riches. The whole world could now be contained inside an O, as Shakespeare said it was inside the wooden one of the Globe.

This word had grown unexpectedly out of a Hindu void through an Arabic symbol, but now the zero of accountancy was becoming all-powerful. That might have been exactly what Hamlet meant when he cried, ‘For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot.’ It’s almost certainly what the Fool meant when he said to Lear, ‘Now thou art an O without a figure’. The cipher of nothing had permitted the pricing of everything. Double-entry book-keeping was not possible without the zero. Shakespeare was obsessed by it; by nought and its symbol, and the way it enabled contemporary humanity to calculate, control, consume, circle the whole of existence like a snake swallowing its own tail. The terrible decline of Lear begins when Cordelia utters that one word, ‘Nothing’.

Dee was aware of it too, crystallomantic that he was. What, after all, was his crystal but an O whose very emptiness permitted it to become an
omnium gatherum
? He was aware too of the theological doctrine of
horror vacui
, which was soon secularised into the simpler notion that nature abhors a vacuum, but so many of his topographies and herbals, his anatomies, glossaries and alchemical treatises, could never have come into his hands had it not been for the despoliation of the mighty monastery libraries. There was a dreadful O to ponder there. The beginning of the great private collections was based on the vastation of the great public ones. Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Aubrey recounts the memories of old men who saw fragments of illuminated manuscripts being blown around the edges of country towns like dirty leaves, rammed into roofs as insulation, piled up in the jakes. Vellum sheets that had cost devoted monks years of their lives and half their eyesight.

For all his intellectual riches Dee could not get his hands on the financial variety. His queen decided to place the noughts behind other chosen figures and Dr Dee died in want. I had walked for a few hours after my trip to Mortlake. In the light rain that had started to fall a power station hissed with potency from the other bank. A supermarket trolley lay on the river bed, with an ancient one-eyed doll trapped inside it, bobbing about in the current.

The next day I was at the Bank of England. This was where they had buried Thomas Hariot. Well, in fact they had buried him in a little church called Christopher le Stocks, which had gradually vanished, its site incorporated into the cathedral of finance on Threadneedle Street. At the very heart of this mausoleum of money there is a tiny garden, a sanctuary of peace and silence surrounded on all sides by the noise and speed of the ledger that encircles the world. And Hariot’s body lay here. At least I’d read that it did, but after persistent questioning of one of the officials I discovered that the remains of many of the interred had been removed in the nineteenth century and no one knew which ones. Again it seemed that the body of evidence had led me to a place where the body itself was missing.

Hariot, I’d come to feel, was the silent figure who could tell us the most about those days, if only one could get him to talk; to explain who and what really constituted the School of Night. He could also resolve the matter of Shakespeare’s identity, I knew that. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew it. How many things that we really know can we prove? The School of Night had finally taught me to read. Because no text was too sacred for their savage inquisition, they set themselves to gaze anew upon the world and its beliefs. Traditions were mere confusions in which superstitious men unnecessarily enmeshed themselves and reverence was no more and no less than fear of true knowledge. Marlowe was reported to have said, ‘Moses was no more than a juggler; Hariot can do more than he.’ So the light of the mind, given its liberty, could burn away the darkness and the dross. How seldom, though, these men appeared to be telling us, was it given its liberty.

Hariot was in effect the inventor of modern algebra, devising the signs of inequality. He was also the first man in England to see the planets of Jupiter, through a telescope of his own creation, one reputed to be as fine as Galileo’s own. When he died many years later at Syon House, where he had lived courtesy of the Earl of Northumberland, the alchemical Wizard Earl, his papers contained important observations and conclusions regarding mechanics, hydrostatics, specific gravity, magnetism, harmony, solid geometry and infinite series. Many years before he had sailed with Ralegh to Virginia and written an account of the place which still remains exemplary for its clarity and economy four hundred years later. I had searched for the little house which Northumberland had built for him in Syon’s grounds one day, only to discover that it had vanished entirely. Not a trace remained. Another disappearance.

Why exactly had the Shakespeare text dubbed this gifted crew the School of Night? The name itself might have come from their devotion to astronomy, since if you wish to observe stars you’ll need to stay awake through the hours of darkness. Perhaps it was this that led one of their group, George Chapman, to write his poem ‘The Shadow of Night’, in which he praises the world of darkness and exalts melancholy over celebration: ‘Come to this house of mourning, serve the Night.’ Chapman spent some of his time in prison too. He knew all about melancholy; he felt that joy imprisoned the mind in unwanted earthly confusions.

It was said of them, though unreliably, that when they met together, this troublesome cabal, they delighted to point out that God was an anagram of dog. Marlowe offered sneeringly to rewrite the gospels, but this time in decent Greek. Of the group, the two most famous members were killed – Walter Ralegh publicly and straightforwardly with an axe on Tower Hill after many years of imprisonment; Christopher Marlowe by subterfuge in murky circumstances, put to death, it would seem, by men who were at times agents of the State. Two, Thomas Nashe and George Chapman, spent time in prison for writings deemed subversive and both died in great poverty.

Ralegh himself was called the Witch, perhaps for his bewitching effect upon the queen, though he did live in the heart of witching England; Cerne Abbas has a potent reputation to this day. The Giant there, cut into the chalk of the hillside, represents a protest on behalf of paganism at the Christian banishment of the old gods of darkness and fecundity.

By the end Ralegh was renamed the white eagle, ravaged by fever, a spectacular failure, his son dead under his command, heading home at last without the promised gold, to final imprisonment and death. For the School of Night by this stage there was only one final examination to come. And always at the centre of it all was the elusive Hariot, thought by some like the Jesuit Robert Parsons to be the intellectual hub about which this dark wheel spun; the mysterious figure they all looked to so they could find out what they were meant to believe. There wasn’t too much going on in the intellectual world, either in England or anywhere else, that Hariot didn’t know about. Whatever your question about that age, Hariot could surely answer it.

On the third day I went down by train to Deptford, and walked from there to the churchyard of St Nicholas. This is where they said they’d buried Marlowe, assuming it was Marlowe, assuming they’d ever buried anyone. The churchyard is guarded by two white skulls on gateposts, which have a singularly unredemptive look about them. I walked up and down amongst the gravestones, but there is only a sign on the wall saying that the brilliant young Kit was buried ‘nearby’, and I thought I heard Dan’s voice in my head again, from all those years before in Yorkshire, where he had walked between the graves, having already lost patience with this graveyard-stalking business of mine: ‘Anybody would think you’re expecting them to get out of there, Sean,’ he had called to me one day. ‘Do you really think they’re going to sit up and start talking to you?’