I like Jude Morgan as an author, especially his novel 'Passion', which for my money has the best fictional presentation of both Byron and Mary Shelley. (The other Romantics in it, both female and male, are very well drawn, too.) So I knew he could credibly write a) legendary writers without giving them embarassing dialogue, and b) convey atmosphere and spirit of the times. Accordingly, I was looking forward to his take on Shakespeare, and though I have some quibblings, I wasn't disappointed.

Most trivial things first: forget the melodramatic title. I suspect some book editor wanted something sensationalistic-sounding. But then, I always have trouble choosing titles as well. Be that as it may: this novel has three main characters - Shakesepare, his wife, Anne Hathaway, and Shakespeare's fellow playwright Ben Jonson - and a rich chast of supporting characters. Now I've seen and read quite a lot of fiction using Shakespeare as a character, and what stands out in this particular version is that Morgan manages to bring so many of the surrounding people to life and through them the time. Anne's relationship with her brother Bartholomew and said brother, Will's sister Joan and younger brother Edmund, their friends Hamnet and Judith Saddler whom their twins were called after, all people who usually are only namechecked, if that, are very present in this novel's Stratford; in London, you get several of the actors (Burbage, of course, but also two who become of very personal importance to Will, Jack Towne and Matthew), various French huguenots (one can tell the author has read the non-fiction book "The Lodger" as well as James Shapiro's take on Shakespeare which pays particular attention to the Shakespeare-Huguenots in exile connections), one of whom, Jacqueline, marries fellow Stratfordian and printer Richard Fields, and the other, Isabelle Berger, is this novel's version of the Dark Lady, and of course the fellow playwrights, each of whom has a unique relationship with Will. There's the UST ridden one with Christopher Marlowe (though it's less about wanting to have sex than about wanting to get into each other's heads), and the odd couple/buddy-buddy one with Ben Jonson. Morgan has a lot of fun with Jonson and his writerly egomania, but he also takes the man seriously when he goes through tragedies; his relationship with his wife Agnes makes for an interesting parallel/contrast to Will's relationship with Anne, which is the central one of the novel.

This brings me to my one complaint, because I felt the novel ends a bit too abruptly where all other relationships are concerned. Not for Will and Anne themselves; there's an arc of early marriage (due to pregnancy but also for love), growing estrangment for various reasons (he wants to leave Stratford pretty much from the get go, and three children in a row make that impossible early on); later, when he's in London and returns only for short visits, she tries to live in his world for a while but can't , then the death of their son Hamnet creates a nearly complete rift, and by the end, their reconciliation has come to a point where there's genuine hope for the future, so I can see why the novel ends at that point for them, but the other people 's stories with both of them feel as if they could have continued for a while. As the story of a difficult yet enduring marriage, though, it's really well done, and it says something of the author's skill that once Will is in London, the scenes with Anne in Stratford, living her own life there and becoming queen of her own domain are just as interesting so that you're never tempted to skip them in order to get back to the capital.

Interestingly, Morgan doesn't give any cameos to the Elizabethan celebrities of the era. They're kept off stage and only referenced now and then. There's talk about Marlowe's Walsingham connections, for example, and Will mentions the Lord Chamberlain's Men performing at court for the Queen, but the only noble who makes an actual "on stage" appearance in the novel is the Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southhampton (well, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" are dedicated to him, so he pretty much had to), and his appearances are kept to a minimum. This focus on the "citizen" sphere both in Stratford and in London helps giving the novel its own atmosphere and to my mind was the right choice. The most impressive and startling use of a "big" historical event was not, as you'd think, the Armada or the Essex Rebellion, but the point where Will finds out the past of Isabelle Berger. (She survived the St. Bartholomew's Night massacre as a child, and the description is incredibly intense and haunting and made that event as real for me as the 20th century massacres we're unfortunately more familiar with.)

Of course, given that Southhampton is one of the candidates for the Faith Youth of the sonnets, this brings me to the inevitable question of: how does the author present Shakespeare's sexuality? I'd say more theatre-and-booksexual than anything else, and otherwise bi but not living it out completely. There are three men, none of whom is Southhampton (whom I've never liked, so I'm all for him only showing up as a patron) Will has a relationship with that's less than straight. There's Jack Towne, a young actor from the troupe coming through Stratford at the beginning of the novel, on whom our hero has a crush on which he's too inexperienced to follow through when Jack makes an unmistakable overture, and somehow they keep missing each other through the periodic meetings through the years until the end when they do talk about what they felt; Marlowe, where it's admiration, rivarly and a mixture of attraction and being rebelled with a heavy dose of mindfuck; and the ambiguous one with the young actor Matthew for whom Will writes some of his best female roles, like Rosalind, which he insists is strictly paternal, but his mistress Isabelle thinks is Will-being-in-denial. For Anne, though, the main and real competition is the theatre itself and Will's living through writing and relating to the imagined lives as strong, if not stronger, as he does to the people around them.

This is one of several reasons why I'm sure Jude Morgan has read Sandman. I spotted at least two other nods to Neil Gaiman's interpretation of Shakespeare as well: Marlowe teases Shakespeare in a tavern about having made a deal with the devil so he can equal or surpass him (see also: A Doll's House), and Hamnet falls ill and dies after a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Dream Country). One thing Morgan doesn't do is try to equate any of his characters (i.e. the people in Will's and Anne's lives) with people from Shakespeare's works; the closest he comes to that is with Will's father John, whose relationship to his son has overtones of both Falstaff and Henry IV's ones with Hal, but never just one or the other, and John Shakespeare's death scene wins for most effective use of a a Shakespeare quote in reverse. "I know thee not" said from the old man to the younger one. Best meta commentary on Shakespeare the playwright is when Ben Jonson gets to read the first draft of Hamlet, rolls his eyes and says something along the lines of "pirates? again?" (Ah, Will and his off stage pirates.) But the book definitely doesn't go for the "great-writing-must-be-autobiography" approach, being true to the fact that most Shakespeare plays are based on previous plays or books, and also remembering just how much Elizabethan playwrights collaborated with each other.

In conclusion: a fine Elizabethan novel. Get thee to a bookstore, friend!