Shakespeare's Changeling

Literature & Fiction

synopsis

Synopsis

Charged in 1616 by the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery to edit a folio of Shakespeare plays, writer Ben Jonson races against time to find the missing manuscripts by seeking out his former nemesis in Stratford. Can William Shaxper's deathbed confession reveal the mysteries of the Shakespeare authorship that could threaten the throne of King James I?

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Author Biography

I am an author and educator who believes that writers create within the context of their own experience. By helping students connect the real Shake-speare with his life and works, we enable them to see relationships in their own learning, thinking and writing. Was there more than one Shake-speare, or was he really Lord Oxford, a known writer of his time forced to hide behind his distant kinsman, a grain merchant from Stratford? Not sure? Read my controversial novel and think about it.

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Author Insight

"Who would be so foolish?"

Whole careers are based on the fanciful notion that the world's greatest English plays were written by a man from Stratford who simply listened to the stories of others, wrote them down and made them immortal. There's no evidence he ever attended his local school, and no evidence of any childhood literary practice on his part. "Scholars" claim that Will Shaxper was Shake-Speare, and yet he owned no books when he died. Did this literary genius spring full grown from the head of Ovid, or was he a changeling cloaking the identity of the real author?

Book Excerpt

Shakespeare's Changeling

“I’ll praise the Sweet Swan of Avon and make it sound as if he had a tin ear for Latin and a mildewed ear for Greek. I’ll have Shaxper’s fellow shareholders Hemminge and Condell write a brash and annoying sales pitch to the reader. The whole thing will look like a hugger-mugger patch-up job, but if the folio looks common, people will think it’s the work of a commoner.”

“What a shame,” Susan said. “It was supposed to have been an enduring tribute.”

“Oh, it will be. Your father’s plays are immortal. I’ll just remind his readers of that fact, and tell them not to pay any attention to the picture or the introductory doggerel.”

“Michael won’t be pleased at having his poetry called doggerel.” “Drayton? Well, I’ll give him a chance to withdraw from the project as a courtesy.”

“And the others?”

“Your father’s friends? We do need a little sincerity in the book. It can’t all be tripe and trumpery.”

“Whatever you do, please don’t harm my brother.”

“On my honor, I won’t. King James is too bland to understand riddles and subtleties, but I warrant you he’ll be very pleased with the finished product. I’ll even devise some convoluted drivel for that ridiculous monument in Stratford.”

“Isn’t that going too far?”

“Not at all. It’ll keep ‘em guessing about the authorship for generations.”

“I suppose,” the Countess sighed. “Still, it’s not the memorial I wanted for my father.”

“No, nor I,” Jonson replied. “But the truth will out. Who would be so foolish as to believe that a merchant from Stratford, with not one word of literary juvenilia or poetic practice to his name, could emerge from the ether to create the greatest plays ever written?”

In a corner of the home’s foundation, a gust of wind blew some ashes into a circle.

The long rain had begun.