William Dean Howells
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1914
The scarcity of the information on Shakespeare’s life offers a license for fictional authors to reconstruct his personality. This ‘Fantasy’ takes the form of a travelogue in which an American tourist is following the Shakespeare trail, attending the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. On his travels, the narrator happens to ‘wonder at the cinematic apparition’ of William Shakespeare. Luckily Shakespeare’s phantom is a friendly and genial fellow who insists on taking the narrator on a personal tour of his birthplace. This romanticized narrative covers all disputed aspects of Shakespeare’s life. The narrator can directly converse with Shakespeare on issues such as his relationship with his wife and the authorship debate. It also includes a very appealing characterization of Francis Bacon, as the narrator gets to meet with the ghost of Bacon, an extremely unsavory and grumpy man. –VL