Will
Christopher Rush
Overlook Press, 2009

The double entendre that is the title of Christopher Rush’s bracing, brilliant new novel Will is shorthand for the inspired idea at the heart of the book: a lawyer has come to Stratford to take down the last will and testament of Will Shakespeare, who’s feeling old and ailing and doesn’t, we know, have long to live. Just that: just that simple: Rush uses the famous will to prod the famous Will to retrace the winding paths of his life and times, with the lawyer as first questioner and then quickly awestruck audience. And the lawyer’s not the only one; by the time half a dozen pages have passed, the reader is also awestruck – and mighty damn pleased. This is a book to grapple to you with hoops of steel, an entirely grand, roistering, true book that you know right away you’ll wish to savor, to inhabit, and to endlessly recommend.

Rush in his parting comments tells us that this novel has been “growing underground” for his entire life, and certainly the finished product shows it. There’s not a scene, not a scrap of dialogue, not a single throwaway observation that doesn’t spring wholly to life in your mind, and virtually every page features some passage that begs to be copied out longhand. For instance, here’s Will’s imagining of his mother’s grief at the death of her firstborn baby girl:

So nobody noticed when an old air started up from Henley Street: Mary Arden, down on her hunkers in the dust, bubbling and snivelling and singing her song. A wordless ballad that all mothers sing for a dead child. They know it by heart throughout the world, that raw crying. It’s the coldest air in the universe. It never wakens the dead.

Rush’s Will is having his final say about everything, in one headlong monologue after another, and as with the real Bard, you want to quote almost all of it – like the page-long rumination on the infamous Tower of London, a part of which reads like this:

Founded on tears and corpses, its stones cemented by human blood, and at night its corridors and stairways stalked by the ghosts of all who’d come to the Bloody Tower through Traitor’s Gate. The young Princess came through this gate one pouring Palm Sunday, sat down on the drenched steps, and cried out in the downpour that she was the truest subject landed there. She knew that the headless body of her mother lay buried and bloodstained somewhere inside those awful walls, behind which was Tower Hill, darkened by the shadow of the scaffold and gibbet. Many proud heads bent and fell on Tower Green, the lopped flowers of the nobles.The last of the Plantagenets bled horribly to death there. Margaret of Salisbury, stubborn old nob, refusing point blank to put her head down on the block simply to let Henry Tudor’s head rest easier under its crown, and the poor old bitch was pursued by the headsman, who hacked her to death like a beast in the shambles, like a bolted cow.

Or Will’s grudging-generous tribute to Philip Henslowe, seedy proprietor of the Rose theater:

One thing, he would never see you stuck, always saw you round a hard corner. Drove you to regret it later, but without him there might never have been a later. He stood between some poor swine and suicide or the wolf at the door, and when times were hard in London I knew I could always go to Henslowe. He knew what he could wring out of me in return. ‘Your pen is mine, Will. Write me a bright speech, finish me that dull play and make it sparkle, conclude that Act. I have a scene here needs re-working for tomorrow and there’s no pen that speeds like your pen. Harry the Sixth? Harry the Sixth can wait. Harry the Sixth comes after Henslowe the First, Philip the Foremost.’ (Philip the Foreskin to his debtors).

We would expect a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare to be on display in a novel about the Swan of Avon (although countless novels have bungled their way into disarming that expectation), but what really shines in excerpts like these and countless others in the book is something more, a love of Shakespeare that suffuses everything about the man, his times, and his plays. Elizabethan and Jacobean times come alive on these pages, but the real treat here is the sense of the man. Actual biographies of Shakespeare can be a losing game, as Samuel Schoenbaum so amply demonstrated in his massive Shakespeare’s Lives (and as talented writers can play nonetheless, as, for instance, Charles Nicholl showed in his recent study The Lodger Shakespeare), and here fiction can act with more freedom. At one point Rush’s Shakespeare satisfyingly describes himself, saying “The upstart crow was in fact a good citizen and a talented and genuine writer: upright in his actions, honest in his dealings, civil in his demeanor, urbane in his art – and with a ball-crushing grip” … and reading along, we can’t help but agree.

Novels as strong as Will don’t come along as often as anybody would wish. Under no circumstances miss this book.

– Steve Donoghue