Cultural Interference

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Talfar had always admired Shakespeare. He subscribed to the theory that the great bard wasn’t born in England, but in Vicino Prossimo. I mean, who really believes that Shakespeare was some schoolmaster, or some two-bit actor lighting fools the way to dusty death?

The Demon Priests of Fallar Discordia also claimed Shakespeare as one of their own. They cited numerous passages in Richard III and Othello as clear evidence. They worshipped his free verse, and advanced the notion that any rhyme was pure interpolation, foreign interference, artificial, degrading, almost Vicinese. They also claimed to have sent Copernicus to Krakow, Bacon to London, Montaigne to the Dordogne, Cervantes to Madrid, Hume to Scotland, and Nietzsche to Germany.

Yet Talfar was convinced that Shakespeare was planted on Earth by the Vicinese Bright Council. At the time, the Council was trying to lift the hapless humans out of their drowsy Middle Ages. Of course, their patronage of Reason and Art didn’t always go according to plan. In 1600 they watched as the ashes of their most courageous spy, Giordano Bruno, rose into the night sky in Rome. The Inquisitors clamped his tongue, stripped him naked, and burned him alive.

Thirty-three years later the Bright Guard watched their own dear Galileo retract the intractable facts of astronomy. The Inquisitional proceeding was broadcast all over the Kraslika, and plunged the Councillors into a collective funk. They’d been so optimistic about Italy, having earlier gifted that land a trinity of their finest Vicinese writers: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. True, they had an ulterior motive: to give the Italian dialect of Vicinese the linguistic corrective it needed. As one Vicinese linguist put it, “Otherwise, the language was in danger of becoming French.”

The Vicinese Councillors suspected that the Inquisitors were in fact Demon Priests. Yet the great Fallarian scholar Ossobuco argued convincingly that the Fallarians had always championed science and realism over abstract art. He noted, very correctly, that it was the Vicinese who painted clouds pink to obscure our view, and who played secret tracks of music deep in the Vatican.

As usual, however, the arguments on both sides were so convoluted that no one could prove anything. The only one who understood it all was an obscure writer from Exeter named Dan Brown. Ossobuco tried in vain to poke holes in Brown’s theories, yet he always ended up in a downward spiral, like Dante’s Alichino and Calcabrina in the lake of pitch. Ossobuco tried to get out of the hole he dug for himself by quoting Brown himself, hoping that it would make clear the absurdities that had enmeshed his own arguments in black tar. Desperately scrambling for an anchor in the tempest of scholarship, Ossobuco snatched a quote from Wikipedia: “The further you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, ‘Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.’"

Knocking back half a bottle of Tignanello, Ossobuco convinced himself that such nonsense must securely pin Brown against the wall. Yet to his dismay he read that Dan Brown had become more popular than ever. He read the writing on the wall, in large print, with circles of Heaven or Hell in the background. In garish yellow and green letters the poster informed him that Dan Brown had come out with a new blockbuster, one in which the deeper conspiracies of the Vatican were in fact controlled by the devastatingly beautiful gypsy from the TV series Suburra: Blood on Rome, who the Fallarians immediately claimed as one of their own.

Talfar had to admit that the question of Shakespeare’s origin remained vexed. He was a chameleon, one minute slithering like a Fallarian snake into a garden, the next hopping like a Vicinese nightingale into the highest branches. Shakespeare could squeeze nectar from the most obscure beauty, as in the invisible star to every wandering bark, yet also from the most extreme treachery, as in the deep damnation of Macbeth’s taking off.

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