The truth is not arrived at by purely mimetic means. An image can be captured by a camera or by a paintbrush. A painting of a starry night is no less truthful than a photograph of one; arguably, if the painter is Van Gogh, it’s far more truthful, even though far less “realistic.” (I say Van Gogh, you say VanGo, as if he were a competitor to U-Haul, but the Dutch, you should know, call him Van Ghogh, which sounds like a man expectorating a stream of betel juice into a Bombay gutter. Practice that.) The literature of the fantastic—the wonder tale, the fable, the folktale, the magic-realist novel—has always embodied profound truths about human beings, their finest attributes and their deepest prejudices too: about, to take just one example, women.

  Some of the most brilliant practitioners and critics of the modern wonder tale, like the novelist and story writer Angela Carter and the British critic and novelist Marina Warner, have eloquently investigated the place of women in wonderland, where they are repositories of ultimate virtue (the imprisoned princess) or ultimate vice (the witch). As I personally don’t have much time for princesses in need of rescuing, I will focus here on the witches. Warner points out that the iconography of the witch has always been entirely domestic. The pointed hat was common headgear in the Middle Ages, the broomstick was to be found in every household, and even the witch’s supposed demonic “familiar” spirit was usually no more than a cat. The mark of the witch—the supposed third nipple or “witch’s tit,” upon which the devil could suck—could be found on the bodies of many women in times when moles and warts were commonplace. All that was needed, in fact, was an accusation. Point a finger and call a woman a witch and the proofs were there in almost every home.

  The conventional image of the witch was that of an ugly woman, a bent and misshapen hag or crone, and this is the witch we find in the Grimm stories. But in one Grimm story at least—Schneewittchen, or “Snow White,” with its wicked queen gazing into the magic mirror on her wall and asking her lethal question, “Who’s the fairest one of all?”—we see the arrival of what will become, in Renaissance art and literature, a more prevalent motif: the beautiful witch. (In fact, the beautiful witch is found much earlier too, in Greek mythology, for example, where the sorceress Circe can be found ensnaring Odysseus and his men, turning many of his crew into pigs. Circe also traveled to India and showed up in the Katha Sarit Sagara of Somadeva, the same story compendium to which I referred earlier, the Kashmiri “Ocean of the Streams of Story,” where she becomes a demoness whose magic flute turns men into beasts.)

  This bringing together of two kinds of female power, erotic power and occult power, in the image of the beautiful witch—this replacement of the hag by the enchantress—reached its peak in the High Renaissance, when Ariosto filled his long narrative poem Orlando Furioso with such women, and when the artists of the period—Dosso Dossi’s Circe comes to mind—returned over and over, one might almost say obsessively, to the theme. When I wrote my novel The Enchantress of Florence, I tried to look at what it might have meant for actual women to be thought capable of such double enchantment, for sex to be linked, in this way, to magic. On the one hand, it was clear, such a linkage apparently increased the power of these women. The “enchantress” in my novel, believed to be capable of working miracles, comes close to sainthood, and even the Medici pope in Rome is half persuaded of her sanctity. Also, she can make men weak at the knees with desire, on account of her exceptional physical beauty. But the suspicion of witchcraft has, as I have suggested, historically been very dangerous for women, and if the wind changes, if the public mood shifts, the same people who venerated you as a saint yesterday can come to burn you tomorrow, as the example of Saint Joan of Arc demonstrates. I too was writing about a woman walking along the knife-edge of this vulnerable power and eventually having to run for her life, and I was struck by how much of the literature of the fantastic deals with the fear of women and the veneration that is the illusory reverse of that fear.

  In Sheldon Cashdan’s study The Witch Must Die, he proposes that female characters are used in folktale as exemplars of the deadly sins: the vanity of the queen in “Snow White” (“mirror, mirror on the wall”); the envy of Cinderella, Aschenputtel, by her two Ugly Sisters; and the greed of the fisherman’s wife in the Grimm story, culminating in her demand that she be made pope, which undoes the miracle of untold wealth granted to the fisherman by the talking flounder whose life he once spared. Everything vanishes—the palace, the jewels, the gold—and the fisherman and his wife are returned to the hovel (actually, the word used in the Grimm tale is “pisspot”) in which they formerly lived.

  * * *

  —

  The wonder tale tells us truths about ourselves that are often unpalatable; it exposes bigotry, explores the libido, brings our deepest fears to light. Such stories are by no means intended simply for the amusement of children, and many of them were not originally intended for children at all. Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin were not Disney characters when they started out on their journeys.

  It is, however, a rich age in literature for children and young-hearted adults. From Sendak’s place Where the Wild Things Are to Philip Pullman’s post-religious otherworlds, from Narnia, which we reach through a wardrobe, to the strange worlds arrived at through a phantom tollbooth, from Hogwarts to Middle-earth, wonderland is alive and well. And in many of these adventures, including my own two contributions, it is children who grow into heroes, often to rescue the adult world; the children we were, the children who are still within us, the children who understand wonderland, who know the truth about stories, save the adults, who have forgotten those truths.

  PROTEUS

  Edward Bond and the Silence of Shakespeare

  Now that I’m getting on a bit, I occasionally feel like the Japanese poet-philosopher Basho, who, after many years spent traveling in search of wisdom along the Narrow Road to the Deep North in Edward Bond’s play of that name, is asked what he has learned, and replies, “I learned that there is nothing to learn in the Deep North.” Nothing to learn on the journey is the wisdom of the journey, wisdom itself being the grand illusion.

  Edward Bond was one of the great figures of the golden age of British theater in the 1970s, his vision bleak and uncompromising but always rich in drama. What people remember now about Edward Bond is that he wrote a play called Saved, in which a baby was stoned to death onstage, or, to be exact, actors threw stones at a pram in which the audience was informed a baby was lying, although there was no baby and even the stoniness of the stones is suspect, because they were props, after all, and the fictionality of the enterprise was clearly established by the fact that it all took place on a stage while people, some well dressed, others not, London theatergoers being capable of going either way, sat in cheap and expensive seats to watch it happen, and this was not in gladiatorial Rome, after all, not even in London back in the day when crowds would gather at what is now Marble Arch to cheer the hangings taking place at what was then Tyburn Tree; no, this was the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, and outside the theater was “swinging London,” swinging as hard as it could, swinging, as the song had it, like a pendulum do. Now, the fictionality of fiction is an important matter; it lies at the heart of the transaction, the contract, between the work and its audience, the work confessing its untruth while promising to uncover truth, the audience suspending its disbelief in what it knows is not to be believed and so discovering material that is worth believing in. This is what people do when they experience literature on a stage or in a book, but they forget they are doing it, or if they remember they don’t think it’s important, they think it’s natural, even though it’s the opposite, it’s unnatural, it’s an artifice, artificial. The act of reading or viewing is also a creative act, a participation in fiction, clap hands if you believe in fairies, and without it the magic doesn’t work, and Tinker Bell dies. Children know this, but people grow up and forget, just as the little Darlings forgot Peter Pan.

  People remember scandal, don’t they, so they remember Edward Bond’s stoned baby. They don’t so much remember, for instance, Bond’s extraordinary play Lear, which took on Shakespeare in a heavyweight prizefight and somehow went the distance, failed to get steamrollered, and came out of the battle with what is called a draw in England and, in an oddly sartorial image, a tie in America. People don’t remember, or perhaps they do, perhaps a few people remember, Edward Bond’s play Bingo, in which Shakespeare himself shows up, because for writers there’s no escape from the fellow. (I myself have a brass door knocker in the shape of a bust of Shakespeare on my study door, so that every day when I go in to work, I can knock on my door and tell myself to come in and know that I’m entering not my domain but his, Shakespeare’s, whom no door knocker can limit or contain, who leaps off the door knocker and takes possession of the room behind the door, ruling it as he rules all the rooms in literature’s poor, rich house.)

  Edward Bond’s Shakespeare, in the play Bingo, which maybe people remember and maybe they don’t, gets drunk with Ben Jonson, Edward Bond’s Ben Jonson, who has come up to visit Shakespeare in his mysterious Stratford retirement, to penetrate a secret as profound as the mystery of his genius—namely, the secret of his silence.

  (People spend a lot of time on the wrong mystery, the un-mystery of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe or, my personal favorite, not William Shakespeare but another person of the same name, but the plain truth is that obviously Shakespeare was Shakespeare. It may be unbearable that an autodidact provincial actor-cum-scribbler who couldn’t spell his own name was Shakespeare, but that is who he was.)

  Edward Bond understood that the silence of Shakespeare is the interesting mystery, the decision of the greatest genius in the history of English literature to walk away from that genius, at the height of his career, to give up writing and acting and theater managing and Southwark, the lowlife zone of theaters and gambling dens and whorehouses and cockfights, which he must have loved, because even after he became the most successful playwright of the age he never left it for more salubrious neighborhoods, and when he did move it wasn’t very far. Then all of a sudden, sometime in 1613, he decided his work was done and dropped everything and returned to Stratford without so much as a backward look and lived on for three years of philistine but apparently contented bourgeois provincial life, life with Anne Hathaway, life and death with Anne, to whom in his will he left his second-best bed, which may not be as insulting as it sounds because, according to some scholars, in an Elizabethan bourgeois household such as Shakespeare and Anne’s, the best bed was kept apart in case some mighty visitor came to stay, kept pristine and unused in case of an earl’s unexpected descent, or even a queen’s or a king’s, while the second-best bed was the marital bed, the bed in which they made love, Mistress Hathaway and the genius who couldn’t spell his own name, writing it, on one occasion in those days before formalized orthography and spelling bees, as Chackspaw.

  The silence of Shakespeare: the domesticated stilling of the song of sweet Will, the magician who, like Prospero, the magician he created, left his isle full of noises, broke his staff and abjured his art, and why? We don’t know. He didn’t leave us reasons. But if we trust his genius, then we can guess that the last insight of that genius was the realization that he had finished, that it was time to stop. And so he stopped, in an act of magnificent, though not sweet, will.

  He left us no letters, no diaries, no first drafts, no commonplace books, no autobiography, nothing except the work, the inexhaustible work. This too was part of the genius of Shakespeare, to make sure that his silence would outlast him by destroying his stumblings, his workings-out, his hesitations and explanations, and he must have done it himself, because if you’re going to destroy such materials, you have to do it yourself; don’t ask anyone to do it for you after you’ve gone, because they won’t, they’ll do what Max Brod did to or for Kafka, they’ll publish the stuff you wanted burned, against your express wishes they’ll publish The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, the Letters to Felice, and the Letters to the other girl as well—to Milena, that was it.

  But maybe Kafka knew what would happen, because he and Max had had a conversation about it, and Max Brod had told him that if named as his executor he would not destroy the unpublished work, and in spite of that, Kafka went ahead and named Brod as his executor and asked him to “burn everything,” the letters to Milena and Felice, as well as The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, asked him to do it while knowing full well he would not.

  But Shakespeare was different, he wasn’t like Kafka, most of whose masterworks lay unpublished until after his death; Shakespeare had said what he had to say, the poems had been written and the plays had been staged, and then having chosen silence he was determined not to speak again, not even after his death. He didn’t want the half-things to be read, the wrong things, didn’t want to be interpreted and explicated through the study of the workings of his mind but only through the work itself, the inexhaustible, inexplicable work. He fell silent because he had nothing to say, he burned the years that were left to him as if they were manuscripts, and he gave no sign that he minded; up there in Stratford he seemed quite content, never returning to London, never as far as we know even going to see a play, ceasing to be the person he had been, and not minding, staying, instead, with Anne. In Edward Bond’s play Bingo, Shakespeare is visited by Ben Jonson and they go out drinking and get royally drunk and on the way home Shakespeare catches a chill and dies, but not before he has told Ben Jonson how much he envies his good reviews, not before Ben Jonson has told him how much he envies his popularity, because they are both under the curse of literature, never to be satisfied with what they have, even if they are the authors of Volpone and The Alchemist, Hamlet and King Lear, even if they are Jonson and Shakespeare.

  Edward Bond and his Shakespeare are writers who, like Kafka, long ago entered my personal tradition, the only tradition that’s worth a damn to a practicing writer being the one he forges for himself, that is not laid down by high priests of literature, not a stone-carved commandment brought down from Sinai or the Cambridge University English faculty by a Leavisite Moses but a pagan thing, a melting down of treasures, a golden calf. Or, let’s say, a thing born of the happenstance of a life led in the fields of the word, born of the happy and—even better—the useful contaminations by others of the writer’s reading mind.

  I acted in a play by Jonson once, playing Pertinax Surly in an undergraduate production of The Alchemist performed in the cloisters of Jesus College, Cambridge, the exact spot where the first production of the play had taken place some four hundred years before, or so I was told. I acted in Jonson but he hasn’t remained useful to me, whereas Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil, but I understand the nature of the contract of fiction, so I can agree to suspend disbelief in what I know is not to be believed in the hope of finding, by doing so, some truth on which I can rely, in which I can have faith.

  Howard Brenton, and Shakespeare as Proteus

  As a matter of fact he’s not only Edward Bond’s Shakespeare; he belongs in part to another playwright, Howard Brenton. I remember a thing Brenton said long ago in a room in New College, Oxford; he said—or at least this is the way I remember it, this is the golden calf I’ve made from whatever it was that actually came out of Brenton’s mouth—that one of the greatest gifts given by Shakespeare to writers in the English language is his incredible freedom of form, a freedom not granted to, for example, French writers by, for example, Racine, who might have been a great playwright but his forms weren’t free, they were classicist and straitjacket-like and confining, he was an artist in formal attire, wearing a wig and sipping fine wine, so to speak, whereas Shakespeare wore an open shirt and sat in a tavern, spilling ale.

  Take Hamlet, for example. It’s a ghost story, to begin by stating the obvious. “I am thy father’s spirit,” says the dead king, whose name is also Hamlet (at least it is in Shakespeare’s play, even though in Saxo Grammaticus’s The History of the Danes, from which Shakespeare pinched the plot, the name of Hamlet’s father is not Hamlet but Horwendillus, a name worth changing, I think). So Hamlet is about one Hamlet and the ghost of another Hamlet, a play about a son haunted by his father, written by a father haunted by the ghost of a dead son named Hamnet, all of which allows Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses to have some sport with the play in a well-beloved and certainly well-lubricated lecture (“Wait till I have a few pints in me first,” Buck Mulligan pleads) in which he “proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” So, a ghost story, yes, but not only a ghost story, because it keeps changing form, becoming, by turns, a murder story, and a political drama about intrigues at the Danish court and the threat of invasion by Fortinbras, and a psychodrama about indecision, and a revenge tragedy, and a tragic love story, and a postmodernist play about a play, a play called Hamlet containing a play called The Mousetrap, which tells the story of a regicide just like the regicide in the story of Hamlet…but it’s still a ghost story, still the story of a dead father howling for vengeance, and this is what Brenton meant, I think, by the freedom that is Shakespeare’s gift to those of us who have the temerity to follow him into the English language: He meant that Shakespeare’s great example gives us permission to create work that is many things at once, shape-shifting, a work that doesn’t have to be either a ghost story or a love story or a cross-dressing burlesque comedy or a history play or a psychodrama but can be all those things at once, without sacrificing truth or depth or passion or shapeliness or interest, without becoming a confusing, bewildering, shallow, pointless mess. Or take Macbeth: the witches, Banquo’s ghost, the vision of the dagger, all that hocus-pocus, all that magic, in one of the most savagely truthful plays ever written about power, a play so frightening, with such power to conjure demons, that you’re not supposed to speak its name within the walls of a theater: “the Scottish Play,” that realistic masterpiece about the battle for what Akira Kurosawa in his samurai movie remake called the Throne of Blood.