Free The School of Night: A Novel by Alan Wall

so intently in the dark? This might sound ridiculous, but I knew, even then, that I was being given my life’s assignment. I’d known it would come, known ever since I was little that a puzzle awaited my solution and that solving it was what I was for. We’ll have to come back to this: I can’t explain everything now. I learnt later all the terms that can be employed to describe this condition of mine, but they’re all misguided, because none of them can accept one indispensable premise: that what I’m saying happens to be true.
    The literal source of my lifetime riddle, whose tail is now at last uncurling as I turn the pages of the books on the table before me, is this: a single reference, a quote from Love’s Labour’s Lost , found originally in Thomas Bridewell’s book about Walter Ralegh’s circle. I quoted it to my tutor the next day, as a paradigm of historical knowledge, or rather as a paradigm of its absence, whenever you most need it. The School of Night.
    ‘Your subject, Sean, I can see that,’ he said, as he unfolded another map. Not his, obviously. So I started looking into the matter more closely. So closely, in fact, that I was soon doing little else.
    There has only ever been one known use of the phrase, in Shakespeare’s play, and the truth is that when history summons whoever Shakespeare was to answer for himself, which is to say to explain whatever heresy of hopelessness or expectation he has been seen to exemplify lately, by whoever his newest band of enemies are, his ghost will doubtless plead the text’s unworthiness and point to four centuries of exegesis, a squabbling line of editors and scholars whose snaking succession only goes to show that there simply isn’t evidence enough to hang a cat. Because between whatever Shakespeare wrote and the words ascribed to him today falls a mighty shadow.
    All the same, my starting point was Love’s Labour’s Lost – since I could have no other. Upstairs in the Bodleian I worked away at the sources. The quarto text dates from 1598, though some say it is no more than a prompter’s or actor’s copy, corrupt beyond reconstitution. However this may be, the quarto is all we’ve got, since that is the primary evidence, even though, like the legendary directions on the road to Dublin, it might have been better not to start from here.
    It was, we are told, ‘imprinted at London by W.W. for Cutbert Burby’. W.W., I soon discovered, stands for William White, who had set up in business by himself in 1597, which did not give him long to practise before posterity landed him with his mighty task. Sadly, the evidence strongly suggests that he had never been much of a printer in the first place. Ballads and other ephemeral matter, read briefly or even sung in the tavern and then swiftly binned, seem to have been his stock-in-trade. With those, it is safe to assume, the rubric and typography were seldom of the first importance.
    The text he bequeathed us is so incompetent, so riddled with errors both intellectual and mechanical, that the kindest supposition is that William White’s print shop was still being built at the time this job arrived. The compositor responsible gives the impression of being semi-literate and partially blind, or perhaps merely permanently drunk. He doesn’t appear to know how to use his own type-cases. He has often inserted the wrong letters in his stick, and even when he has the right ones the letters end up loose in the chase and fall out once the press has started rattling, and if the movement of the press didn’t dislodge them, then the dabbing of the ink-balls did, pushing the unsecured type out of the formes and on to the floor. Shakespeare’s words were coming astray even as they were being set; his text was falling apart at the exact moment of its translation to the printed page. The later the pull, the greater the debasement.
    So in a text in which wrong becomes woug, and Ione Love, it is hardly surprising that any crux