Gazing up at the tall bookshelves that were packed tightly into this unfamiliar bookshop, I paused as I gloated over the choice before me. Swift? Dickens? George Orwell? Or what about a Kafka? I plucked a copy of The Trial from the Classics shelves. I was flicking through it when a fellow shopper ambled past the end of the aisle. I glanced at him as he was briefly outlined against the light. He turned away from me, walking down the opposite aisle; it was a few moments before his appearance registered properly with me. But he was undoubtedly William Shakespeare.

I was a little slow to recognise him because I focused at first on the long hair and the vintage jacket before taking in the high, domed forehead. I was not surprised to see him there, because the bookshop we were in had a very strange air to it. I had sensed as much on entering it, through those narrow doors off the main street of Stratford-upon-Avon. It was a confusing shop with curious alcoves and a distinctly odd, faintly Tardis-like layout; my wife had been quite unable to find me anywhere in the shop a few minutes earlier, when she had come to meet me as arranged. As it happened, I had just replied softly to her frustrated mobile phone call; as William as walking away she appeared, as if from nowhere, just in time for me to point out his receding back to her.

Stirred, on examining again the man’s noble, leonine silhouette, I put my book back onto the shelf, left my wife to follow at her own pace, and strolled after him. He paused at the counter to pay for two books of his own, then strode out of the shop onto the street. When I emerged, I found him sitting helmeted astride a Harley Davidson, his books strapped down behind him, about to ride away. I caught his attention with my eyes. He raised his helmet visor to hear my words. I thought up a suitable question. ‘Excuse me? Do you read the classics?’

He smiled and lifted the helmet off again. ‘Was that a Kafka I saw you with? Are you a literary scholar?’

I laughed. ‘No. I’m a scientist! I’m trying to educate myself. The classics are a strange world to me. They seem to be expanding, though: I noticed Darwin’s Origin of Species is shelved among them. I can’t imagine that many literary students have read that—I’ve been trying to finish it myself for years; not that that stops half the world from acting as though they had absorbed it all.’

He nodded. ‘Probably no other book has ever been criticised by more people who have never read it. Except, of course, the Bible.’

‘The Bible?’ I looked at him. ‘That’s a point—I’ve been wondering why there are no Shakespeare plays based on characters from the Bible.’

He frowned. ‘What? Well, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living”. History is the dead past, and any writer can dramatise it as they choose. But no great artist would dare to choose the same subject as one that his Master was still working with.’

‘Because the Bible is a living document?’

‘It’s about life right now, the life that is all around us.’

‘That was Darwin’s subject too,’ I pointed out. ‘And if it comes to that, some will say—although I don’t—that you have to choose one or the other of those two books, unless you want to settle for a dishonest compromise.’

He grinned broadly. ‘Dishonest? I recommend that you read some philosophy. You need to learn the techniques of philosophical debate—especially the twists of logic that people use to try and make their point of view into the only one you can agree with.’

I frowned. ‘Such as?’

‘One trick that I often come across is called “stipulated definition”: that’s when someone insists that an emotive word—such as, for example, “Christian”, has a particular meaning—a distorted meaning, of course, not the one you thought it had. Then they keep on repeating their claim over and over, until people start to believe them—which many will, if the speaker is famous and clever.’

‘I wonder which well-known speakers you might be thinking of?’

He nodded. ‘Another classic debating trick is the one you have just described; it’s known as the “fallacy of the excluded middle”. To say there is nothing between two extremes is the road to madness. There is always solid ground somewhere in between. As Jesus once put it, “Wisdom is justified by all of her children.”’

I frowned. ‘You know your Bible well. What a play you could have written from it—’

‘If I were—what?’ He laughed. ‘Written a play? Who do you think I am? William Shakespeare?’

‘Ah—er—well,’ I mumbled, as my wife emerged through the shop doors just behind me. ‘That’s a peculiar shop. It gives one weird ideas.’

‘Indeed, it does.’ Suddenly, his great face widened into a gloriously warm smile. He reached into a pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a small bag made of sacking. ‘Here—would you like a dried locust? The brown ones are coated with wild honey.’

I stared at him wildly. ‘Who are you?’ I glanced down at the books strapped down behind him. The top one bore the legend Lamb and Sheep Identification; the one below it was entitled Wild Swimming in Israel and Jordan.

His face went serious. ‘I’m no-one. Just a voice crying in the wilderness. Preparing the way for—well—who else would you spend your whole life living like that for? Who would have to be following you, in order to make all that worthwhile?’ He grinned once more, put the bag away and started putting his helmet back on. ‘And speaking of the wilderness, well—I need to be getting back.’

It was only as he pulled his camelhair jacket tight and gunned up his motorcycle with a mighty roar, that I registered that his magnificent machine was entirely coated with very fine, yellow-grey sand. The sand whipped up in a cloud as he accelerated away down the street.

A movement behind me made me turn. Another stranger had emerged from the weird bookshop and a third was following. The one in front, who had halted to stare at the street with a bewildered expression, looked exactly, even to the dress, as he did in his First Folio etching. He was undoubtedly William Shakespeare.

Behind him was following Someone else, Someone whose very presence seemed like a breath of living freshness, a Someone whose Face I seemed both to know and not to know, Someone who turned and walked purposefully off down the street after the motorbike, plainly heading toward the crowds wandering aimlessly there.

Slowly I turned and, with my wife at my side, began to follow Him.

[George B. Hill (2010)]