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Overview
"The best book about the Bard since Anthony Burgess's Nothing like the Sun"—Samuel R. Delany
Two graduate students, not alike in dignity: Joe Roper, dirt-poor aspiring Shakespeare biographer, finds a letter from William Shakespeare--saying he didn't write the plays. Posy Gould, a Hollywood producer's daughter from Harvard, never met a high concept she didn't like, and she likes this one.
Posy wants to expose Shakespeare as a fraud and make the movie. Joe wants to save Shakespeare.
The two literary sleuths head for London to prove their clashing theories. But they find themselves in a world where the London Eye looks out over Shakespeare's city, Hollywood producers rub elbows with Elizabethan spies, and mystery shadows the heart of Westminster Abbey and the lanes of rural England. And Joe and Posy find that, when you start chasing Shakespeares, what you find is not only who he was, but who you are, and how far you're willing to go...
"Wonderfully entertaining, thought-provoking, and highly readable--a stunning combination of fascinating fact and exciting fiction."--Sir Derek Jacobi
"Smart, sexy modern-day mystery reminiscent of A.S. Byatt's Possession"--Boston Globe
"A remarkable achievement, blending history and fantasy, past and present, ideas and emotions into a seamless whole that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.":--Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost
"Anyone who enjoyed (obvious predecessors) A.S. Byatt's Possession or Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time will be suitably charmed—and enlightened. Literate, polished literary entertainment."--Kirkus Reviews
"Marjorie Garber, meet Reese Witherspoon"—The New York Times
"Romance, intrigue, and the literary whodunit of our time--Chasing Shakespeares is a romp and I savored every moment of it."—Hallie Ephron, author of Careful What You Wish For
"A brilliant and moving work! Sarah Smith gives Josephine Tey a run for her money, revealing vividly a slice of history we never knew we could believe in, intertwined with engrossing modern characters."—Ellen Kushner, author of Swordspoint
"By page five I forgot I was reading to comment and began reading to devour. Chasing Shakespeares is breezy, erudite, never ponderous, a love story about how we make our heroes, and how they make us."—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
"Romance, intrigue, and the literary whodunit of our time—Chasing Shakespeares is a romp and I savored every moment of it."—Hallie Ephron, author of Careful What You Wish For
A Village Voice Summer Read--NEIBA Bestseller--Detroit Free Press four stars
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940166200150 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sarah Smith |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2022 |
| Sold by: | Draft2Digital |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 958,250 |
| File size: | 545 KB |
About the Author
SARAH SMITH STARTED TELLING stories as a child in Japan. Her sitter would tell her ghost stories at night, and the next morning she’d act them out on the school bus for an audience of terrified five-year-olds. Back in America, she lived in an unrestored Victorian house, where every morning she would help her grandmother haul coal and break sticks into kindling to light the household stove. She’s loved storytelling and history ever since.
She studied English at Harvard, where she spent Saturdays in the library reading mysteries, and film in London and Paris, where she sat next to Peter Cushing at a film show and got to pet Francis Bacon’s cat. While teaching English, she got interested in personal computers; she and two friends bought 3 of the first 5 PCs sold in Boston. She realized that software could help her plot bigger stories, and she’s never looked back.
Her bestselling series of Edwardian mysteries, starring Alexander von Reisden and Perdita Halley, has been published in 14 languages. Two of the books have been named New York Times Notable Books. The Vanished Child, the first book in the series, is being made into a musical in Canada. Sarah’s young adult ghost thriller, The Other Side of Dark, has won both the Agatha (for best YA mystery of the year) and the Massachusetts Book Award for best YA book of the year. Her Chasing Shakespeares, a novel about the Shakespeare authorship, has been called “the best novel about the Bard since Nothing like the Sun” (Samuel R. Delany) and has been turned into a play.
Sarah lives in Boston with her family.
Read an Excerpt
Chasing Shakespeares
A NovelBy Sarah Smith
Washington Square Press
Copyright © 2003 Sarah SmithAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7434-6483-4
Chapter One
From Chasing ShakespeareThat day I was just about to lose my vocation, my job, my good sense, probably my mind, but what I thought I was losing was Mary Catherine O'Connor.
"You shouldn't go," I said to Mary Cat. We were in my truck, stuck in traffic on the Southeast Expressway on the way to Logan; I had one more chance to tell her all the things she hadn't listened to before. "You don't want to do this, it isn't your life."
"They want me," Mary Cat said. "I'll be of use, Joe."
"You are of use -" I ground gears, cut off a Toyota that wanted to pass me on the right, and switched into the airport lane. One thing about driving a pile-o'-shit truck with the truck bed full of broken windows, people get out of your way.
"This is the way God means me to be of use."
She was putting on her gentle voice, settling into being a postulant already. She'd worn her worst clothes for the trip, tired-out jeans and a faded orange kerchief over her red hair, and that red parka I hoped she'd have taken out behind the barn and shot. Mary Catherine O'Connor, the most beautiful girl in Boston, was trying to look plain.
She wasn't my girl. Just my friend, my study buddy, my co-researcher at the Kellogg. I'd met Mary Cat my first week of graduate school. We'd been the only two students in Rachel Goscimer's seminar on Elizabethan research, me and this stunning red-haired girl. She wore no makeup at all and cheap striped jeans and a faded sweater and a patched, stained, feather-leaking red parka that looked like she'd got it out of the charity bin at Saint Mike's. But I'd been pretty taken with her, and I'd asked her out before I realized the kerchief over her curls and the little gold cross she wore meant she wanted to be Sister Mary Catherine.
"You were the one who applied to the Society of Mary," I said. "God didn't fill out the application. Mary Cat, you can tell them no. At least you should be applying to someplace you can use your education, not making coffee for pissy old drunks," I said.
I didn't say she should be applying to a teaching order. And she didn't have to say what we both knew, they'd never let her teach. But there was a silence while we both didn't say that. I negotiated the tunnel ramp. Traffic was bad in the tunnel and we crawled forward, breathing fumes, watching a futile road of red brake lights in front of us.
"You'd stay if there were anything good in the Kellogg Collection," I said.
"I wish I weren't leaving you with the Kellogg."
"I don't mind that, I can do the rest of it alone. But you'd stay, wouldn't you?"
"I have to do this," she said.
"You would stay."
She didn't say anything, just nodded, not agreeing, just showing she'd listened.
"Then don't you see you're not going because God called you, you're going because you're pissed off?"
"That's ridiculous, Joe," she said hotly, not like a nun at all.
"Just wait a while," I said. "Finish your Ph.D."
I carried her backpack from the parking lot and waited with her while she stood in line for check-in. I hoisted her backpack up on the scale to be weighed, watched while the baggage handler tagged it, LHR, London Heathrow, and looked after it as it slid away. She was going. She was going after all. We walked together toward the security check.
"Keep in touch," I said. "Write me a letter, e-mail, something."
"If I can," she said. "Come to visit in London. Sister Mary Joseph says we've plenty of room for guests."
"I sure will come to London. I'll make you write your thesis," I said. "I'll stand at the door, frighten the winos, make them give you some peace. Get Sister Mary Joseph to give you afternoons off, go to the British Library."
She laughed at that.
"I mean it. You're too good to throw away. Please."
She looked up directly at me, clouded green eyes. She took my hands in both hers. Hers were as rough as mine, not a scholar's hands. "All I can do is go where I'm needed," she said. "I can't bargain what I'm needed for. Joe, you're the researcher, you'll find something in the Kellogg, I know it. I'll be praying for you. And when you do, and you have your first book planned and you're on your traveling fellowship, come to see me on Docklands Road and tell me all about it." She hugged me, a quick nunlike hug. "I've got to go now."
I watched her go through the security gate. Then I went out and found my truck in Central Parking, and kicked the tires once or twice, and sat in the cab and picked off the seat a couple of feathers from her red parka. Go figure; the feathers were what almost made me cry. I swore a while to make myself feel better.
Didn't help a bit.
My grandfather farmed. My father came back from the Vietnam War, sold the farm, bought a hardware store. Me? I wanted to write Shakespeare's life.
I remember reading my first lines of Shakespeare. I was nine years old and had the measles. Itched like a wool sweater. I'd read everything in the house, comics, an old Reader's Digest Condensed Book, Dad's supply catalogs, and there was only one book left, a big ratty falling-apart paperback mended with duct tape. It fell open to Macbeth.
Double, double, toil and trouble ...
If you're a kid, two plays can start you on Shakespeare, Macbeth or Hamlet. I goggle-eyed my way through witches and murders and ghosts, having as much fun as if it was Stephen King. And then I got to the end of the play. Lady Macbeth is dead, and Macbeth is so torn up he can't even realize it, all he can do is wish it were sometime else when he could sit down and work up to grieving her. And he realizes he's got forever because she'll be dead forever.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow -
That speech took me somewhere a nine-year-old kid had no business going. It was a place that could swallow me up and not even notice. Like the woods beyond where the roads go, where grownups get lost. I put my head down on my arms and cried, and it wasn't just I had the measles, I knew that place was out there. But I knew, when I got there, I'd recognize the place and I'd know a man who had been there too.
That was the first Shakespeare I really read. I've never forgotten. And from then on, I guess, Shakespeare was something that was going to happen to me, a part of my future, something that was going to happen when I grew up.
It must have been then I started wondering who Shakespeare was, but I never thought about Shakespeare being my work until ten years later. It was the summer after my junior year in college. I'd just begun installing windows to get money. Window installers go through jeans like toilet paper; I was picking up a pair on the cheap in the Salvation Army in Montpelier, saw a paperback, Young Man Shakespeare, bought it because it was about Shakespeare. There's a divinity that shapes our ends. I read it that evening, bouncing around in the back of the truck with a houseful of old windows. I read about Shakespeare in Stratford and I looked up, saw the sunset light through the road grit and the wind, and Donny and Ray Lavigne were joking at me from the cab of the truck, sharing a beer and seeing who could belch longest. Some book you got, Joe, ain't even got tits and ass on it, what's it good for?
Shakespeare. A guy eighteen, already married, I knew guys like that, a few years later they were pumping gas and the best thing in their lives was their kid was playing Little League. But Shakespeare? He was going to go places other men couldn't even imagine. What happened?
How could you not want to know?
So I wrote Roland Goscimer and told him how much I'd liked Young Man Shakespeare, and got a letter back from Rachel Goscimer; and a year later I walked into Rachel Goscimer's seminar on Elizabethan research, and the only other person in it was a smart, fine-looking girl named Mary Catherine O'Connor.
And then Rachel Goscimer had pulled off a coup and got Frank Kellogg's collection of Elizabethan books and manuscripts, and got all of us the right to publish what we found there. But Rachel Goscimer was dead now, and Roland Goscimer was mourning her, and Mary Cat was in London washing winos' feet, so there was nobody left to face the Kellogg but me.
That day I found six forgeries in the Kellogg Collection, which was a record, but not by much.
I had been working with the Kellogg Collection seven months, and at four in the afternoon on the Ides of March I cataloged my three hundred and fifty-seventh forgery; do the math, that's about a fake and a half a day. Opening one of Frank Kellogg's archival envelopes had started to be like putting your hand into the potato barrel and feeling something furry. You might not know what it was, but you knew it wasn't good.
The Kellogg Collection had its own room in the basement of Northeastern. The computer I was using to catalog it was brand-new. The room was new; the whole Northeastern library was new. The big library exhibit so far was an elephant tusk carved into a hundred Buddhas. The Kellogg Collection had been going to be the second big thing, Northeastern's exhibit for the new millennium.
The Kellogg wasn't all bad; no collection is. Kellogg's aunt had bought Elizabethan costume books, and we were going to be pretty well set on Elizabethan history and politics. But that wasn't what we'd expected from the Kellogg. We'd wanted the manuscripts.
And we had 'em, all right. Faded brown ink, ragged paper, letters sealed with ribbon and with fragments of wax. Boxes of them. Letters from Mary Queen of Scots, from Queen Elizabeth. Six Shakespeare letters, one with a sonnet attached. I was scanning them all, for the catalog, and I'd started to amuse myself by printing them out and posting them on the bulletin board in the room. The Wall of Sin.
I tacked the printout of the latest forgery to the board and stared at the rest. Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth, Sir William Cecil, Mary Queen of Scots, the Duke of Norfolk.
Frank Kellogg, the Midwest Discount King. At the Warrenton County Agricultural Fair in 1895, his mama Mary Steuart (age thirteen) learned from a gypsy that she was the direct descendant of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Ignoring clues to the contrary, for instance that her father wasn't king of England, Mary married a department-store heir and started collecting. She lassoed her husband and sister in, and eventually her boy Frank, and they bought everything they could find on Mary Stuart, Queen Elizabeth, and the Catholic-Protestant wars.
For years people had talked about that collection. Passed on rumors about it. Wanted it. Sure, the Kelloggs had been a little odd; sure, nobody had really seen the manuscripts; but a collection of Elizabethan materials going back a hundred years? There had to be amazing stuff.
Rachel Goscimer had got the Kellogg for Northeastern. Even the last time she'd been in the hospital, dying, she'd worked on Frank Kellogg. "Dear Mr. Kellogg," she'd whisper, sitting up in bed holding the phone, "we have two of the most marvelous young scholars here, they are so eager to write about your collection!" Kellogg died a month before she did, so she'd known he'd left the collection to Northeastern; but she never knew what was in it, so she died happy.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word, Mark Twain said, is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. For seven months I'd been hearing thunder and swatting bugs.
And Mary Cat had been right here with me; but now she'd given up. I wondered whether I ought to give up too. But at least Mary Cat was going to what she thought she wanted; and what I wanted would have been this, if a word of it had been real.
I stood glaring at the Wall of Sin. William Shakespeare writing to Richard Field about printing Venus and Adonis. The Earl of Southampton writing to Shakespeare, thanking him for a sonnet. Queen Elizabeth sending ten pounds to Shakespeare. Biographies are lives made comprehensible, beginnings, middles, ends, solid as post and beam. Forgery is rot in the beams. Forgery is a bulldozer, an ax, a fire. Forgery kills the heart. Forgery makes good Catholic researchers decide they're wasting their time in graduate school and go off to London to serve the poor. I started pulling the printouts off the board one by one, balling them up and seeing if I could hit the wastebasket with them. I was doing okay, getting myself a little Antoine Walker action going, and if I was missing Mary Cat I was doing pretty good at fooling myself I wasn't, when the phone rang.
For a moment I thought she'd missed the plane, she'd changed her mind. But the voice on the other end of the phone was no one I recognized.
"Is this like Joe Roper?" Breathy Marilyn Monroe kitten voice. Whoever it was, she was on a cell phone; the connection had that drainpipe sound. But the voice went with the March weather, rainy, a little sweet, with an undertone of spring.
"Yeah."
"This is Posy Gould? Roland Goscimer told you about me? I knew Frank Kellogg? I want to see the Kellogg Collection?"
I looked across at the half-bare bulletin board. Goscimer was sending someone here?
"I like just finished my orals in English? And I'm going to work on Sir William Cecil?"
In the Kellogg Collection? A grad student. She sounded like a Valley Girl but she'd pronounced Cecil right, Sissel. Cecil was a funny choice for a thesis in English. Was she a biographer too?
"You knew Frank Kellogg?" I asked. That would mean she was rich. Something in her voice sounded that way, like private schools and private jets.
"Frank was just like sort of a friend of Daddy's."
Yup, rich.
"Are you going to be at Goscimer's reading?" she asked. "I'll meet you. What do you look like?"
Um. "Brown, brown, glasses, six feet, built like I used to play hockey. How'll I know you?"
"Oh," said Posy Gould. "You'll know me."
I hung up the phone and called Goscimer. "Posy Gould?" I said.
Goscimer's chuckle quavered over the line. "Ah, Miss Gould."
"Has anybody told her what's in the Kellogg Collection?"
"Pride goeth before a fall, Joe, and an upright spirit before destruction. I don't believe I mentioned it. Miss Gould has been very persistent."
"Why'd she want to see the collection?"
"Her friend Frank Kellogg told her there were amazing things in it. Miss Gould is rather amazing herself. She is supposed to have a tattoo of Queen Elizabeth's signature, Joe. Somewhere upon her body. Do young people ever still say 'hubba hubba'?"
"Hubba hubba," I said dutifully. "Is she any good as a researcher?"
"A tattoo," Goscimer sighed, as if that explained everything about Posy Gould.
Over the phone there was a moment's silence.
"I'm sorry," Goscimer said. "About the collection, I mean. About Mary Catherine's leaving. I'm - so very sorry to leave you with it, Joe."
Continues...
Excerpted from Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith Copyright © 2003 by Sarah Smith. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Reading Group Guide
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. "Shakespearean is a word, like love," Joe says. Why are readers so fascinated by Shakespeare?
2. "Print the legend," Posy tells Joe. She's quoting from John Ford's film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Shakespeare's traditionally accepted life is a powerful myth of genius, an ordinary man creating great poetry. Is the legend as important as "the truth"?
3. "God is a librarian," says Katherine Darnell, and tells the extraordinary story of the discovery of Blake's manuscripts. The story isn't all true, and the story about Elizabeth waiting in the park at Hatfield probably isn't true, but Sarah Smith uses both legends in Chasing Shakespeares. Do these legends have anything to do with the Shakespeare myth?
4. A big theme in this book is parents and children. Joe Roper and Henry Roper, Posy and Ted Gould, Posy and her absent mother, Edward de Vere and his father, Edward de Vere and his father-in-law William Cecil, William Cecil and Robert Cecil, Edward de Vere and Susan de Vere, and even, possibly, Oxford and his potential son-in-law Southampton. Of all the characters, only Mary Cat doesn't have a family life; she has a "mother house" instead. Why the theme, and why is Mary Cat an exception?
5. God, fate, coincidence, and that other kind of deus ex machina, genius, play big roles in Chasing Shakespeares. Does this bother you? Why or why not? Does it make any difference that the evidence that Joe gets is supposedly real evidence?
6. Is Chasing Shakespeares a historical novel? Is it a mystery? Is it "true crime"?
7. Who do you think wrote the plays? Is it important who wrote the Shakespeare plays?
8. Do you think Joe actually found a Shakespeare poem? An Oxford poem? Are they the same? Does what you think of the poem make a difference to what you think of the book?
9. Joe argues that Shakespeare writing in 1580 wouldn't sound like Shakespeare. Do you agree? What makes "Shakespeare"?
10. Do people change fundamentally from age to age? Are the concerns of national political figures like the Cecils fundamentally different from those of entertainers like the Goulds? Can we understand the Cecils through the Goulds?
11. In the last scene of the book, Joe says that the Goscimers have seen Stratford through the eyes of post-World War II intellectual Boston. Joe himself sees Stratford, and Shakespeare, through the eyes of East Bradenton, Vermont. What are the advantages and disadvantages? The New Historicist movement argues that you can see the past in other ways. Can you ever really see a historical period through eyes "not your own"? How?
12. Who should Joe end up with, Posy or Mary Cat (or neither)?