1900’s

Shakespeare’s Memory

Jorge Luis Borges
First published in Veinticinco Agosto 1983 y otros cuentos. Madrid: Siruela, 1983
Translated into English by Andrew Hurley in The New Yorker, 13 April 1998: 66-69

Borges contemplates not so much a spirit of Shakespeare as the memory palace of the Bard, which has been transmitted to various takers over the years. When a Shakespeare scholar obtains the memories, he is finally able to understand his subject perfectly. But what at first seems a boon, soon becomes a curse.

Access the full text

1900's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare's Spirit

Serenissma

Erica Jong
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987

The modern-day actress Jessica Pruit is in Venice filming a modern-day version of The Merchant of Venice when she falls ill and is somehow transported back to the sixteenth-century. Also in Venice at that time is Shakespeare, who is there to avoid a plague outbreak in England. In Jessica, he finds inspiration in a steamy and chronologically uninhibited romance. Shakespeare is romantic, impetuous, bi-sexual, and prone to quote himself. Also published in 2003 as Shylock’s Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice. —VH

Read more about the book on goodreads.com

1900's Gaiman - Kipling Shakespeare in Love

Dark Lady

Karen Sunde
The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1988

Less a characterization of Shakespeare, who appears as a fairly traditional lover attempting to woo an unreachable prize, than another theory in fictional form, about the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Sunde argues for Emilia Bassano (1569-1645), an English musician and poet (later Emilia Lanier). Emilia was the mistress of Henry Carey, Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain. Shakespeare, as one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, may have had contact with her. A beauty, she is described as “black” by some contemporaries and may also have had some Jewish heritage. In this play, Shakespeare is the enamored poet who finds inspiration in this remarkable—and historic—woman. —VH

Read more about the play

1900's Sanders - Woolf Shakespeare in Love

Wyrd Sisters

Terry Pratchett
London: Victor Gollancz, 1988

Among fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett’s talents is a flair for creating spoofs of real-world people to populate his Discworld, the round, flat, and magical land in which most of his novels take place. Here, we find Shakespeare, but in another place and time — or reality. In Wyrd Sisters, a retelling of Macbeth (with a bit of Hamlet), Pratchett turns his satirical pen to the Bard. Pratchett’s Discworld Shakespeare is a dwarf named Hwel, author of numerous blank verse masterpieces and playwright for the theater company Mr. Vitoller’s Men. Traditionally a traveling company, Vitoller’s Men are starting construction on the Discworld’s first-ever theater, the Dysk, when Hwel receives an intriguing commission. Concerned by the distrust they sense from their subjects in the kingdom of Lancre, the evil and insane Lord and Lady Felmet want Hwel to write a play that will establish them as Lancre’s true rulers. Events take an unexpected turn, however, courtesy of witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick. Perfect for fans of the central triangle on the Venn diagram of Shakespeare, fantasy, and Monty Python-style humor, Wyrd Sisters is a tribute to the power of words and one who, like Hwel, was a master of them, albeit on a more globular world. –BS

Read more about the book on goodreads.com

1900's Leigh - Rowlands Not of an Age

The Lost Chronicle of Edward de Vere

Lord Great Chamberlain, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Poet and Playwright William Shakespeare
Andrew Field
London: Viking, 1990

Another candidate for the writer behind Shakespeare, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, here in a fictional biography of the great genius who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. At least since the mid-twentieth century, the Earl of Oxford theory has been the most popular alternative among the anti-Stratford theorists. The conceit of a lost manuscript by de Vere is the foundation for this version of the argument.

Read more about the book on goodreads.com

1900's Clarke - Furness Greatness Thrust Upon Him

The School of Night

Peter Whelan
London: Josef Weinberger Plays, 1992

Shakespeare appears in this play disguised as Tom Stone, an actor and admirer of Christopher Marlowe—but is he, like Marlowe, perhaps also a spy? The action, which takes place in 1592 and 1593, centers around Marlowe, his genius, and his untimely death. It also veers into Marlovian theories of Shakespearian authorship. The School of Night is presented as a secret society of sceptics to which Sir Walter Raleigh, Walsingham, and Marlowe belonged. Tom Stone/Shakespeare’s questions about the group both intrigue Marlowe and raise his suspicions about this actor with pretensions (and talent) to be a worthy rival or perhaps a mouthpiece for Marlowe’s “posthumous” plays. -VH

Read more about the play on goodreads.com

1900's Greatness Thrust Upon Him Sanders - Woolf

Shakespeare and Nicholas Cooke

Stephanie Cowell
Nicholas Cooke: Actor, Soldier, Physician, Priest (1993) and The Players: A Novel of the Young Shakespeare (1997)
New York: Norton

In these works of historical fiction, Stephanie Cowell focuses on two extraordinary men: one real, one fictional, both tormented by the attempt to discover their true place in life. The real man is William Shakespeare: in The Players, Cowell covers Shakespeare’s life up to 1595, with the majority of the novel dedicated to his early years in London. Readers follow Shakespeare through events that form the foundation of his later success and fame: meeting John Heminges, taking his first roles on stage, writing history plays and sonnets. The fictional man is young Nicholas Cooke, star of the eponymous novel. After running away from his hometown, Nick finds his way to the London theater scene, where he acts with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as Heminges’ apprentice. Continue reading →

1900's Clarke - Furness Upon the Boards

Sandman Series

Neil Gaiman
“Men of Good Fortune” in The Doll’s House, Sandman 2/13 (1995); “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Dream Country, Sandman 3/19 (1995); and “The Tempest” in The Wake, Sandman 10/75 (1997)
New York: DC Comics

Shakespeare appears as a character in three of Neil Gaiman’s short stories. In “Men of Good Fortune,” we find Shakespeare, not only speaking admiringly to Christopher Marlowe, but also apparently on the verge of a Faustian deal: “I would give anything to have your gifts. Or more than anything to give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead. I’d bargain, like your Faustus, for that boon.” And, in fact, a deal is made, not with the devil, but with Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams. The other two stories deal with the plays Shakespeare writes, inspired by Morpheus, but not at the price of Shakespeare’s soul. As the Morpheus says, “There is no witchcraft, Will, no magic. I opened a door within you, that was all.” There may, however, be a cost, as Shakespeare’s craft consumes him, even at the cost of his personal life and family relations. Though the Lord of Dreams provides the stuff of inspiration, the characters and themes come from within Shakespeare himself, who says of The Tempest: “I am Prospero, certainly, … But I am also Ariel – A flaming, firing spirit, crackling like lightning in the sky. And I am dull Caliban. I am dark Antonio, brooding and planning, and old Gonzalo, counseling silly wisdom. And I am Trinculo, the jester, and Stephano the butler, for they are clowns and fools, and I am also a clown and a fool, and on occasion, drunkard.” –VH

Read more about the series on goodreads.com

1900's Gaiman - Kipling Rare Talent

Dogg’s Hamlet

Tom Stoppard
In Tom Stoppard Plays: I
London: Faber and Faber, 1996

The two short pieces that eventually became Dogg’s Hamlet were first presented in 1971. They bring together an enactment of a philosophical scenario envisioned by Wittgenstein about the mutual intelligibility of language, as well as a radically condensed “15-Minute Hamlet” performance. Shakespeare appears as a character when the first section of the play transitions to the second. He appears in the role of prologue to the Hamlet production, and proceeds to speak several lines, jumbled together, from the play, including “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and “To be or not to be.” The lines don’t cohere into anything but a tapas-like selection of Shakespearean appetizers. Shakespeare can describe his own work only by reference to itself, and yet his “chorus” still feels uncannily lucid. That this speechis not intelligible in itself, but still has unmistakable aesthetic power, is both a testament to the familiarity and cultural weight of Hamlet, if even in its fragments, and to Shakespeare’s line-by-line poetic craftsmanship, as well as a reflection on Stoppard/Wittengenstein’s investigation into language as a tool for creating communion as well as alienation. Dogg’s Hamlet is often presented (as it is in the Faber and Faber edition of Stoppard’s plays) alongside a companion piece, Cahoot’s Macbeth, a play that derives from Stoppard’s involvement with the Charter ’77 movement, and which deals explicitly with the fate of theater under totalitarianism. But while Shakespeare is discussed in this play, only in Dogg’s Hamlet does Shakespeare appear as a character. –BW

Read more about the play on goodreads.com

1900's Sanders - Woolf Upon the Boards

The Undiscovered

William Sanders
Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 1997

In early performances of Paul Green’s outdoor play “The Lost Colony,” performed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina countless times since its premier in 1937, a young William Shakespeare tries to sign on with the colonists going to Roanoke, but is discouraged by Walter Raleigh, who has read his poetry and tells him to stay in London and devote himself to his work. Sanders takes this idea a step further in this story narrated by a sixteenth-century Cherokee, who claims that his tribe adopted an English colonist named Spear-Shaker. He describes a cultural clash when Spear-Shaker tried to produce a play—clearly Hamlet—but the tribe did not understand what he was trying to do. –VH

Read the full text

1900's Not of an Age Sanders - Woolf