The Spy of Venice

"I have, of course, several walls of books about Shakespeare , partly because I began writing my first biography of Shakespeare when I was ten. Still got it somewhere. My favourite book about Shakespeare is a book by John Masefield, called William Shakespeare, and it’s basically a guide to every one of the 37 plays – with the plays he may have part-written, that’s about 41 plays, and the poems as well. He tells you the history of the play, the plot summary, then he gives you his critical analysis of it. It’s a short and beautiful book. You name it, I’ve got every book on Shakespeare you can imagine, including Emma Smith ’s, which is on my bedside table at the moment. There are many good biographies of Shakespeare, including one by Anthony Burgess and another by Anthony Holden. But what’s amazing about Shakespeare is that though we know very little about him, he seems to know everything about us. That’s extraordinary. But I wanted to give you a book that gave you Shakespeare’s world, and happily I have the answer. If the first four books introduced you to the world of British, French, music hall and amateur theatre, this last book introduces you to the world of William Shakespeare. Who was he? What was he like? We can’t know for sure, because we haven’t got enough information. We can only know him in the world of the imagination. I’m blessed in having a brilliant son who is by day a barrister – he’s a QC – but also a bit of a Shakespeare scholar. He’s rhetoric coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company, among others, and he teachers rhetoric at drama schools. Rhetoric, as you know, was a mainstay of education in Shakespeare’s day. And when my son Benet was a little boy, we used to have a house in Stratford-upon-Avon overlooking the church where Shakespeare’s body now lies. So we brought our children up on Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is the foundation of everything. He is the reason that this country is preeminent in theatre globally. Shakespeare is the ultimate. So my son, boldly, amazingly, has written two novels: the first is called The Spy of Venice and it’s a playful and inventive novel about Shakespeare as a young man, escaping from Anne Hathaway and Stratford-upon-Avon and disappearing to Italy, to Venice, to seek his fortune. As a family we’ve always been fascinated by what Shakespeare did during the ‘missing years’. He meets up with a character who you might see one day as being the basis of John Falstaff. It’s a wonderful late-16th century romp, where you get the world, the wit of William Shakespeare, and – if you are a Shakespearean groupie – you get the pleasure of recognising subtle references to the places where he might be getting ideas for characters that he uses in later years. It’s clever in the sense that he uses the vocabulary that was available to Shakespeare, no modern words. It’s the first of two novels – the second is called The Assassin of Verona – and as well as being a rattling good yarn it gives you an unexpected insight into the world of young Will Shakespeare. And, at the end of the interview, I say: the rest is silence."