Willem Shaxbeard

Willem Shaxbeard was an Edenian playwright and historian who eventually served as Sage of Saltgate to Queen Frieda Jacobs. Apprenticed to Sage Albus Lepus for much of his adult life, Willem took the top job upon Albus’ death in 311—when Willem was already 65 years old.

Some called him too old for the job and too close to the increasingly unstable Queen, and he may have been. But his work in chronicling the histories of Eden is still viewed as essential reading to this day.

Appearance & Personality

Shaxbeard was a brown-eyed, brown-haired man of a height and weight average for the time. He was regarded as “rakishly handsome” and had a smile that made many an admirer weak in the knees

Personality-wise, he was hard-working but easily distracted and prone to fits of melancholy. He was overly fond of bawdy humor, and fell easily in love—especially with those who could tell a dirty joke.

Biography

Willem was the son of John and Mary Shaxbeard of Sorgia-upon-Daemon, the third of eight children and the oldest son. His was a happy enough childhood, though the thought of inheriting and taking over his father’s glove-making business was enough to drive a young Will mad.

At seventeen, the imaginative Willem left home to try his hand at being an artist of one sort or another. To make ends meet, he worked as a dragon watcher in the mountains of The Realm and Yesterland. And that was how he came to meet Frieda Jacobs, the future Queen of Hearts, during her mission to unite the seven kingdoms of Wonderland.

After adventuring with Frieda and her companions for a spell and running out of money in the process, Willem returned home to Sorgia at the age of eighteen. For a couple of weeks, he tried to live the mundane life of a glover’s apprentice. He tried to ignore the taunts of the townsfolk who laughed at his hubris and mockingly called him “The Bard.” Then he hooked up with a 26-year-old called Anne, got her pregnant, and was forced to marry her to avoid a beating.

After their first child was born in 264, Anne gave birth to twins in 266. And they might have made it work, Will and Anne, had one of the twins not died at age 11—a tragedy which broke Will’s heart and drove him from Sorgia for the rest of his life.

In 277, at age 31, Willem arrived in The City of Hearts for a visit with his old friends Frieda and Albus. And though Albus did not approve of Will abandoning his wife and children, nor of Will’s occasional dalliances with Frieda, the wise old rabbit took on Willem Shaxbeard as his apprentice.

It wasn’t playwriting or poetry or any of the things he’d dreamed of doing when he was a kid, but it was a steady job—enough to keep himself fed and sheltered in the city and to send the rest home to Anne and the kids.

Over the course of the rest of his life, first as Albus’ apprentice and then as Sage himself, Willem wrote countless books about the history of Eden. From the tragedy of Macbeth to his chronicle of the mischievous midsummer of 295, from his biography of the tragic Veronese lovers Romeo and Juliet to his hilarious memoir about his childhood friends Antipholus and Antipholus—a true comedy of errors—Shaxbeard’s books are still studied today.

In 316, when The Seven Voices sang the Earth-667 iteration of reality, Will’s soul departed Eden along with the rest of humanity. In the new universe, he was reincarnated as a playwright in Elizabethan England and made something of a name for himself.