What’s going on at the edges of the words in a Shakespeare play—or any great canonical text, for that matter? This story is like a guided tour of the strange truth behind the painted backdrop, the real characters underneath the pretend-poetry version, the waterlogged English wood sitting soggily beneath the theatrical pretence, the heart of darknesses (of patriarchy; of imperialism) at the play’s core. And yet it’s also a story of visions, that are poetic, and magic, and hilarious, and unknowable, in their own right.
First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985, and collected in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995; Vintage, 2006
A Personal Anthology 