When I first saw Shakespearean text, I could not get how anyone related to things written so many centuries ago. It took me several years before my soul awakened to these words that now felt fresh, like they could have been whispered to me that very day by a best friend who understood all the pain and all the laughter of my life. Very little is known about the man himself leaving writers a lot of room to create their own version of Shakespeare. I know my Shakespeare is just that: my magical, enigmatic, wise Shakespeare. It’s exciting to see how others give him life in their own stories.
I wrote...
Airy Nothing
By
Clarissa Pattern
What is my book about?
John has always seen things others could not see. He runs away to fabled London to find his fortune, but all he finds are grimy streets, rife with hangings and disease. Black Jack is a fast-talking pickpocket ready to show John a new life in the big city. When John first sees Shakespeare's wondrous Globe theatre, he becomes convinced that this is where he truly belongs. But can Black Jack resist the urge to make some easy coin off of his new, naïve friend? And can John step up to the stage before the beast of the city swallows them both? Airy Nothing is a magical period tale of two boys finding friendship, love, and acceptance in seething Elizabethan London.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Sandman Vol. 3: Dream Country
By
Neil Gaiman,
Kelley Jones
Why this book?
As someone who spends my happiest moments in entirely made-up places with people who, it pains me to write, don’t actually exist, I am obsessed with the wavy lines between the life we imagine and the life we live. And no one writes about that cloudy blue haze between reality and our interior world better than Neil Gaiman. Shakespeare is glimpsed in other parts of the epic Sandmansaga, but it is in the stand-alone story A Midsummer Night’s Dream where he is the star. It is both delightful and disturbing in a way that Gaiman is a master of.
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The Daylight Gate
By
Jeanette Winterson
Why this book?
I am secretly, or not so secretly now, in love with Jeanette Winterson. So I was very happy to discover that Winterson wrote a novel based on the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trials featuring an appearance by Mr. William Shakespeare. Not that this is a happy novel. It is brutal and made more horrific by the facts behind it, but that just makes it all the more enthralling to contemplate what humans are capable of doing to each other.
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The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
By
Jorge Luis Borges,
Andrew Hurley
Why this book?
I love anything that explores issues of identity, how we define ourselves and others. Throw in a subtle questioning of the ‘truth’ of our most treasured memories, and I am completely hooked. Jorge Louis Borges does all that in this irresistible short story where it is possible for a person to have access to Shakespeare’s memory. As wondrous as this sounds for scholars of Shakespeare’s work, the reality is actually much more mundane and troubling.
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A Dead Man in Deptford
By
Anthony Burgess
Why this book?
A Dead Man in Deptfordwas the last published novel of Anthony Burgess’s lifetime and can be seen as a companion piece to his earlier fictional biography of William Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun. A Dead Man in Deptford follows Christopher Marlowe’s life, and Will of Warwickshire lurks very very much in the background of this novel. This somehow adds to the poignancy, as even within his own story, the reader is always aware that Marlowe’s era will be dominated by the name of William Shakespeare.
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No Bed for Bacon
By
Caryl Brahms,
S.J. Simon
Why this book?
Shakespeare’s plays can be very funny, (many of my friends disagree with this, but I swear by the goddess of Renaissance puns it’s true!), and this is a light, fluffy book that deserves a place on any bookshelf because it embraces silliness and turns it right up to eleven. Our Will’s key predicament is something everyone who has ever written can relate to, being certain you have a literary masterpiece locked up in your mind if only you can be left alone long enough to make it magically appear on the blank page.
