THE MOST MYSTERIOUS MAN IN THE WORLD

If Hannibal Lecter had taken to becoming an esoteric scholar of Shakespeare and The Elizabethan Age then he might resemble the man whose expertise I once sought for a screenplay I'd been working on.

Idly researching the publishing history of Cervantes's Don Quixote led me to stumble down an information rabbit hole in the form of The Shakespeare-Bacon essays of Mather Walker web page which still, to this day, has the look of early cyber aesthetic, like a cross between Chuckie Egg and some random pop-up Tarot site.

Reading his two essays, 'The "Madness" of Don Quixote Eyed Awry' and 'Carrying Coal to Newcastle : Second Takes and Hidden Allusions in Don Quixote', I was soon cast under the spell of this scorcerer of literary conspiracy.

Have you ever amused yourself trying to find Waldo in one of those drawings where his images are hidden everywhere?  If you have, this Bud is for you. The only difference is Francis Bacon replaces Waldo.  Like the hidden Waldo whose image can be found all over the landscape, the hidden Francis Bacon can be found all over the landscape in the Elizabethan Literary Renaissance.

Mather's basic premise was that Francis Bacon was responsible for secretly writing Don Quixote (amongst many other works outside of Shakespeare) and that there was a mystery to decipher surrounding the original printing of the book and whether it was translated first from Spanish to English or English to Spanish.

Being young, I was easily swayed by his theories and happy to play along for the sake of my own invented narrative surrounding Don Quixote and the novel's intriguing publishing history.

In fact, so fascinated was I that I soon instigated a correspondence with the author of these detailed and occasionally brain numbing essays in the decrypting of Elizabethan and European masterpieces.

To my pleasant surprise, he quickly responded to my initial introduction and general query regarding Cervantes and Bacon as he then began to draw me, like an unwitting fly into a spider's web, further in to his obscure world of forensic academic research and occasionally abstract conjecture.

Each time I asked him a question, he'd respond in lengthy riddles which took me a week or two to mull over before I'd send him my next set of questions. He'd allude to having once been part of the intellgence service from which he had now retired under mysterious circumstances. Spending his days poring over a comprehensive digital archive of texts, plays and books from the Elizabethan age had now taken over his life, and though there was some mention of a wife, I had the impression, that like television's Lieutenant Columbo, the marriage came second in his list of priorities.

Whenever I asked him if there was some form of payment I could make for his services rendered, he said he would only accept payment in the form of Grey Goose.

With no idea what Grey Goose was back then, I soon found out it was a famous brand of Vodka, and one he was religously devoted to.

In my mind, I had now developed an image of Mather as a myopically obsessed retired intellegence guy, living in Savannah, Georgia, drinking Grey Goose while decoding Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and occasionally trancing out into cosmic relevations that would leave him exhausted and spent.

Sometimes he wouldn't reply to my emails for a week or so, and when he had been delayed in getting back to me I sensed a melancholy in his words when picking up where we'd left off. If I had to hazard a guess I suspected depression but it was all too vague for me to know for sure.

Mather had become a greater mystery to me than the Bacon authorship question which so possessesed his and so many other academics and historians' interest.

Of all the characters from the texts he studied, the magician Prospero was perhaps the one Mather found the greatest affinity with, and in many ways, I imagined him similar to that exiled duke of Milan, except instead of a Mediterranean island he was marooned on his porch in Savannah mulling over the enemies from his mysterious past whilst nursing a tumbler glass of Grey Goose in his hand.

I often wondered what happened to Mather, much like a movie you miss the ending of. Our communication had eventually petered out and as he had a Holden Caulfield-like disdain of Hollywood and film in general I sensed I'd already outstayed my welcome.

Nevertheless, for a brief time back then, I felt as if I was talking to the most mysterious man in the world.