“Never in person,” I said.
“You are a playwright too, kind sir?” she asked.
“I am. But I’m no Bard of Avon.”
“No one is. But not all have to be to share their gifts with theater.”
“That was sweet of you to say.”
Juliet took my hand and I nearly fell over. Her own hand was soft and tiny. She then leaned to Romeo and kissed his cheek. She spun around and the two of them ran off like two teenagers in love, which was exactly what they were.
“My God, how the hell did he create such a masterpiece of a human heart?” I asked.
Joe again urged me to continue walking and we left the theater. “Lots of talent, but like I said before, he was lucky.”
“Who was lucky?”
“Shakespeare. He had an advocate after he died.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yes. For fifty years after his death, no one really thought he was a great playwright. It wasn’t until someone bailed the great critic Samuel Johnson out of debtors’ prison and hired him to write a critical study of Shakespeare’s work that Willie became famous.”
“Who hired Johnson?”
“Jacob Tonson. That you can easily find out in a history book. The real question is, who cajoled and then persuaded Tonson to hire Johnson?”
I was enthralled with this new information.
“More about all that later. But now would you like to meet Willie?”
Moments later I was on stage facing the great playwright while standing under the bright sunshine that was pouring through the ceiling.
Shakespeare had the charisma of a movie star, I thought to myself as I smiled at him. I wondered, though, if it was being famous that made him appear that way. He was a thin, tiny man with a sparkling smile.
“I was once hired to do a rewrite of an adaptation of one your plays for Warner Brothers,” I told him.
“Excellent,” he said, quickly eying Ophelia as he spoke to me.
“It was a modernized version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I continued to smile.
“Good,” he said again, this time taking Ophelia by the hand and placing her back on his lap.
Rosalind stepped forward and kissed Willie on the lips. There was more laughter, and then she turned and Shakespeare ran after her across the stage, disappearing into the wings, with the beautiful Ophelia following in pursuit.
“Like I said, a lucky man,” I heard Joe say. I listened closely as Joe went on to remind me that no one thought Shakespeare was great until Jacob Tonson mysteriously hired Samuel Johnson to write a history of the literary importance of Willie. Up until then the world thought Ben Johnson was the Elizabethan era’s great playwright.
Just then, Joe stopped and nodded to an Elizabethan gentleman sitting alone on a bench outside the theater. He was looking up at the Globe, brooding. “There he is. The forgotten Ben Johnson.”
I inched my way over to him. There was a metaphoric as well as a literal cloud of gloom hanging over the man’s head.
When I was right beside Ben Johnson, he turned to me and his look said everything. Though he was dressed in the finest clothing of his time, with gold bracelets and emerald rings on his fingers, he was sad. His time for fame had come and gone and now all he could do was hope that sometime in the future of literature, he would be considered a great playwright and poet.
Christopher Marlowe popped up from behind a tree. I already knew a lot about him; he’d been a friend of Shakespeare’s and had died in his twenties. He was murdered in a bar and he might have been a spy of some kind for the queen of England. His Faust, though not as long as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, was pretty well known. He was one of those who’d died just as he was becoming famous.
“You see, up here, there are Eternals; there are those who were famous while on Earth and now forgotten; and there are those who are, like you on the verge,” Joe said.
“The verge,” I repeated.
“Those who died before fame happened. Christopher Marlowe is more famous than you think and that too came after his death.”
We watched the handsome, young, and carefree Marlowe running through the trees, seemingly drunk, followed by several other handsome young men as carefree and seemingly as drunk. Their voices quickly disappeared.
“He seems happy.”
“Well, in his instance graduate students keep him famous. He did write some famous lines. And I guess that’s fame enough for him. Think about it, his competition is Shakespeare and Marlowe did die at twenty-nine.”
“‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’” I quickly added.
“The majority of writers here fall into the last category: on the verge, those who tried and failed, and wait in the Valley of Those on the Verge in hopes of one day becoming an Eternal. There are thousands of you like that.”
“So it can happen?” I asked.
“Yes. It does happen.”
“Emily Dickinson only published seven poems in her lifetime. Think about that! She is now considered the most famous woman poet of all time,” Joe said.
“How did that happen for her?” I asked.
“After Emily died, her sister, Lavinia, collected all of her poetry in a book and sent it to a publisher.”
“Wow.” I sighed.
“And Franz Kafka! He was virtually unknown when he died and told his friends to burn all of his work. In fact, his Metamorphosis was the only thing he ever completed and it was very short for a novel,” Joe continued. “It was his friend Max Brod who made sure Kafka’s work was published after he died. Now there’s the Franz Kafka Society Center in Prague.”
I took it all in, not knowing any of this when I was alive.
“So yes, it can happen for those who are lucky to have someone care about their work after they die—and for those who go back to influence at least one person who is still alive and can make the difference.”
I was stunned. “We can influence those still alive?”
Joe nodded. “Yes, you have one chance, one opportunity to go back to life and do all you can to change the fate of your fame.”
We walked on. I was perplexed, and Joe could see it. “It’s all very complicated,” he said, “and you will learn all the details in time.”
CHAPTER 5
“Who is that?” I asked as Joe and I walked along the sidewalk of a big city somewhere in the twentieth century. I’d just noticed a middle-aged man sitting alone in a park.
Naturally the city was deserted and only an illusion, as was all that existed in the Writers Afterlife. Joe nodded. “Sad story, his,” he replied. “He had five best sellers in America in the early twentieth century. He was the first person to ever make a million dollars for writing fiction. He was very wealthy and very, very popular. Only Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott have had more best sellers in the English language before him.”
“Who is he?”
“You wouldn’t even recognized his name if I told you.”
“Really?”
“Fifteen movies were based on his stories. Gary Cooper and John Wayne starred in two of them. He wrote plays and published nineteen