shakespeare in fiction and fact: grace tiffany
Riveting fiction and Shakespeare chat for lovers of the English Renaissance
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On Taking Countries Back
This year the U.S. presidential election day falls in the same week of England's national holiday Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Bonfire Night (November 5th). In fact, it always falls then, and 2016 isn't the first time in our 240-year history that an election has called forth the kind of rebellious energies that inspired the Gunpowder Plotters. Those were the would-be terrorists whose capture the English holiday commemorates: a cabal of frustrated Catholics who thought the shortest way to restore their country to spiritual health was to blow up half the government. A major difference between them and Donald Trump is, they knew the change they were working for was illegal. That's why they worked in secret, and why they knew the game was up when they got busted. What's bizarre -- well, one thing that's bizarre --
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By my title, "The Master," I don't mean Shakespeare. Every once in a while I write some comments about historical fiction, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and since Hilary Mantel (one of the good ones) is taking so long to give us her last book in the Thomas Cromwell series -- I look for it constantly -- the prize today is going to Patrick O'Brian.
Yes, Patrick O'Brian of the Aubrey-Maturin series, the seemingly (and seamlessly) endless, continuous novel, published through the 1980s and 90s and focusing on the years between 1800 and 1815, when the British Navy was fighting Napoleon. The first book, Master and Commander, was made into a movie starring Russell Crowe. It was a pretty good movie, but no film could prepare a reader for the stunning excellence, the beauty, humor, and literary perfection, of these twenty novels. I have read all of them and I read them in one day. Or it seemed like a day.
How is it that O'Brian can write like Jane Austen -- and I mean with such absolute familiarity with her idiom, with the social practices, customs, and particularly the modes of speech of the early nineteenth century -- when, unlike her, he didn't live back then? Is he a time traveler? The depth of his understanding of not only British maritime life during that time of burgeoning empire, but of general middle- and upper-class Regency culture, is astonishing. It's as bottomless as the sea. O'Brian knows, for example, that the Royal Society was maintained by amateur scientists --
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A Beachin' Novel about the Gunpowder Plot
"A consistently compelling read from beginning to end .... showcases author Grace Tiffany as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller of the first order." --James Cox, Midwest Book Review. "Rich and vivid detail . . . Provides readers with some complex thoughts on the role of religious terrorism throughout history." – Historical Novel Society. (Click on image to order GUNPOWDER PERCY.)
Grace Tiffany
Grace Tiffany is a Shakespeare scholar who likes to make things up. She's not the only one of those, but she has a novel approach. Her newest work of fiction, GUNPOWDER PERCY, was published in 2016 by Bagwyn Books.
Expert Editorial
Need beta readers for your fiction? Click on image. Copyediting, proofreading, internal consistency, grammar.
Has Shakespeare Gone Postal?
Vintage Postage-Stamp Jewelry by Beth Crook-Derdivanis
The All-Male Propeller Company stages TWELFTH NIGHT in Ann Arbor, Michigan, February, 2013
The Shakespeare Coat of Arms
is a Shakespeare scholar and a novelist. She writes and teaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Shakespeare's "The Tempest," critical edition
Click on image for more about this edition
Approaches to Teaching "Shrew"
Ed. M. Dupuis and G. Tiffany
A novel based on the life of Emilia Lanier
Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny
By Grace Tiffany. Click on image for more about this book.
The On-Stage Bear
"Exit pursued by a bear," at act 3, scene 3, line 58 of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Directors have long entertained themselves solving the problem of how old Antigonus is to be chased off stage by a bear in this wilderness scene. The puzzle is mixed up with the question of whether this pivotal moment midway through the tragicomedy is tragic, or comic. The modern stage has used wheeled mechanical bears, shadow bears (see above), and actors in bear suits designed with varying degrees of realism. When my students staged this scene, one of them ran in with a puppet Winnie the Pooh and chased Antigonus out of the classroom. Perhaps, in this play deeply concerned with the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth (Antigonus doesn't outrun the bear, but the baby he's left in the wild survives), the best stage solution was the shaman bear, a man in Plains Indian garb and bearskin hood, who entered the stage in one American production and departed with Antigonus, hand in hand and both dancing to the beat of a drum.
What did Shakespeare and his fellows do for a bear? Something scarier, in my imagination. I describe it in Will, chapter 39. By the way, scholars have recently argued that Shakespeare had a hand in the early seventeenth-century play Mucedorus partly on the grounds that it also contains a chasing bear.
People love this stage direction. There's a theater collaborative in New York called "Exit Pursued by a Bear," and Zazzle sells T-shirts bearing (sorry) the stage direction. A nice discussion of the theatrical bear problem can be found in the "stage history" section of Lawrence Rhu's edition of The Winter's Tale (Wadsworth-Cengage, 2012).
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