Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel (Fool #3)(77)

“We have no master but the road, love. We shall wander looking to bring laughter and joy to all we meet.”

“We are fools,” said Drool.

“Fancy a frolic before you go?” said Moth.

“Thank you, lamb, but I think not. We already waited until sundown so we could say goodbye.”

We hugged them each, except Jeff, who is a shit and tried to bite Drool. Cobweb clung to my neck for a long time and, truth be told, I did not want to let her go when I did.

“Farewell then,” said I, and I turned and headed down the road.

“Ta,” said Drool.

I was determined I would not look back, and did not, until Drool said, “Pocket.” He threw a thumb over his shoulder. Cobweb was following along behind us, taking awkward and tentative steps in her new shoes.

“What are you doing?” I called.

“I’m coming with you.”

“We may never come back this way.”

“I know. But I have never been anywhere but here. I would see other places.”

“There probably won’t be other fairies. You won’t be able to frolic.”

“I have frolicked before.”

“But you’re a squirrel.”

“Not all the time.”

“But a great crashing lot of the time. The time when it’s not dark.”

“In the day I shall ride on your shoulder and listen to you tell stories of wonder and adventure. Besides, you fancy me, Pocket of Dog Snogging.”

“Fuckstockings,” said I, defeated. “Come along, then.”





Afterword

A Fool in the Forest




I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is my favorite Shakespeare play—it’s the only one I’ve ever made it all the way through without thinking about things I’m going to eat—and you, sir, have besmirched this delightful, spirited sex comedy with murder, goblins, and gratuitous squirrel shagging. You, sir, you cad, you dilettante, you scrofulous scribbler of unscrupulous satire, have made a sow’s ear from a perfectly lovely silk purse. Why? Why, why, why?”

Okay, harsh, but fair.

Why?

I picked A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it’s my favorite too! It’s everybody’s favorite (except for Shakespeare scholars and people who still believe in love). It’s the most performed of all of Shakespeare’s plays, largely, I’d guess, because the plot is so silly and the setting so flexible. Sure, the script says “Athens,” but it’s no Athens anyone has ever seen. There’s no historical period referenced at all, and most of the play is set in the fairy wood, which can be anywhere, really. Once we’re into the wood (and we more or less have to accept that the fairy wood is “but a dream”), the possibilities bloom. I’ve seen productions of MSND where the motif was punk, glitter rock, punk-glitter-rock, Victorian country house, Bollywood London, and even one high school production where the fairy wood was the city dump and the fairies wore bin bags as costumes (clever cost-cutting move for wardrobe). In fact, it was the fungible nature of the fairy wood that made me want to send Pocket there in the first place. I found him in a false medieval Britain (Fool) and moved him to a historical thirteenth-century Venice (The Serpent of Venice), largely because I wanted to tell a story about a water monster in the canals, so I thought, how could I challenge my oh-so-articulate fool? It would be easy enough to get him from the last story to a thirteenth-century Athens, but then what? Since the fairy wood could be anywhere, why not, I thought, make it 1940s San Francisco? Golden Gate Park, to be specific. Have fairies and fools talking tough in the mean streets of Fog City, playing with the language and the extreme discomfort of Pocket dealing with cars and firearms and floozy fairy queens that would as soon stick a shiv in you as take your hat. So I send a rough outline off to my editor, like I do, to make sure we’re all on the same page, and she comes back to my agent with, “Maybe not this next book. We’d like to see a one-off this time.”

This is a first for me. So I call.

“So,” I say, “I hear you guys would like something different?”

“Just right now,” she says. “You can do a Shakespeare book after this if you want. What else do you have?”

Well, what I have is a giant bucket of nothing, but I have been researching the bejeezus out of 1940s San Francisco. So I say, “I could do a kind of noir thing set in San Francisco in the 1940s. Sort of a Maltese Falcony kind of thing. Or another whale book. Or, uh . . .”

“Yes, do that,” she says.

“Do what?”

“The Maltese Falcony kind of thing.”

“Okay,” I say, having absolutely no idea what the hell I’m going to do.

And that is how big-time publishing is done.

I know you hear about screenwriters doing this all the time—pitching a Gothic horror novel set in Empire-era England, and the producer saying, “Great, can you set it in L.A. in the 1970s, and can it be about a dog?” And you go, “Sure thing.” But in the book business, this was new for me. So I said, “Okay.” Then I went off to write a book that I cleverly titled Noir, so you would know that what you were getting was not derived from a Shakespeare play. Which brings me back to a book set in the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now that I’ve used up all my 1940s San Francisco research and tough-guy talk, and I’m left with a deadline and a dream, I think, I’ll just dive into the history of Shakespeare’s source material and see what I can find.