The Long Farewell Read Free Page B

exactly?’
    ‘There’s no end to what people find it possible to decide – no end at all. He must have been to Venice, since he knew that business was transacted on the Rialto. It’s all like that, the talk of Shakespeare in Italy. Crackpot stuff, like saying he must really have been Lord Tomnoddy, since otherwise he couldn’t have made all those references to hunting and hawking and heraldry.’ Packford reached comfortably for the Chianti flask. ‘And, after all, does it much matter whether he travelled in Italy or not? The plays remain just as wonderful either way.’
    ‘Oh, quite so.’ Coming from Packford, it seemed to Appleby, this austere critical doctrine verged on the disingenuous. ‘But I’ve known you pursue rather similar curiosities from time to time.’
    Packford waved this aside. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘there would be real critical interest in a related question. Did he know Italian? Could he read it? One would give something to be able to answer that.’
    ‘I seem to remember being told that Othello is important there. Isn’t it true that its only source was in Italian?’
    ‘Ah, yes – Cintio’s Ecatommiti .’ Packford paused, as if his mind were wandering. ‘But Cintio’s yarn may have got translated into English, you know, without the translation’s having survived. Or a translation into French may have come his way. There’s an English ballad on the story. Unfortunately it’s one of John Payne Collier’s forgeries.’ He chuckled. ‘Now, there’s a fascinating subject: the history of the great Shakespearian forgers! What a pity that it can’t happen any more.’
    Appleby was interested. ‘But can’t it? Why not?’
    ‘Too many experts. Too much science.’
    ‘Perhaps so. But expert knowledge, and the command of scientific techniques, can work both ways. In some fields I’m familiar with, the forger who commands them can put up quite an alarming show. It’s rather as with warfare. Sometimes science puts the attack on top, and sometimes the defence. Of course I agree that nowadays there are certain directions in which the forger’s liberty has been drastically curtailed. Think of Van Meegeren’s spurious Vermeers and De Hooghs. There wasn’t a chance for them once the chemists came along and spotted a resin of the phenolformaldehyde group, unknown until the last years of the nineteenth century. And it was the same with the most noted of the recent literary forgers, T J Wise.’
    Packford shook his head. ‘Not quite. Wise pretty well confined himself to the forging of nineteenth-century printed material. If he’d known enough on the scientific side, and taken enough trouble, he might have produced things that were indetectable. Or take inks. You or I could quite readily manufacture ink according to one or another of the methods current at, say, the beginning of the seventeenth century. And if we then used it cleverly and sparingly on paper preserved from that period – which isn’t hard to come by in small quantity – the result would quite soon baffle the back-room boys in their labs. Conceivably in five years, certainly in twenty, the chemical situation would be tricky enough to produce divided opinions.’
    ‘Always provided that materials from organic sources weren’t much involved. It’s no longer possible to tell fibs by the century, so to speak, where the new carbon tests can be brought in. Think how they’ve vindicated the antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls.’ Appleby paused. There was a new delicious smell on the terrace. It was evident that Giuseppina knew how to make coffee. ‘But hasn’t it always been possible,’ he asked, ‘to tell simply by the smell? If, I mean, you really knew your stuff. Amateurs of literature all over Europe fell for Macpherson’s Ossian, but it didn’t take in a professional like Dr Johnson. Chatterton was a marvellous boy, and his Rowley poems impressed the respectable antiquaries of Bristol. But he was sunk as soon as