Shakespeare is a woman–three women, in fact, who hire a footloose actor as the face of their writing. When they become suspects in a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth, their secret identity is suddenly at risk–along with the queen’s life–in this imaginative historical novel for fans of Hamnet and The Tower.
Everyone knows of William Shakespeare the rakish former actor and famous playwright. But few know the three women writing every word of his sonnets and plays: Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, a frustrated poet; Emelia Bassano, a court musician with a passion for complex stories; and Jane Daggett, a seamstress with an impressive ability to spin fantastic plots. Frustrated by the patriarchal restrictions of their sixteenth century society, they come together to write anonymously.
Soon the three women come under the scrutiny of one of the Queen’s spies, who notices their surreptitious meetings and odd behavior and suspects they are involved in an ongoing plot to kill the Queen. To help guard their secret as they face inquisition, they hire an actor named Will Shakespeare to be the face of their endeavor and divert attention.
As the plague deepens its grip on London and the Queen’s man traces their every move, the women are forced to choose between admitting what they’ve done and betraying each other to the Crown, or hiding the truth at risk of endangering the Queen herself.
The Shakespeare Secret is a thrilling feminist tale of perseverance, justice, and freedom where friendship and trust are put to the test, for fans of Tracy Chevalier and Charlie Lovett.

My Review:

It begins as a question of identity – or rather an obfuscation of identity. The question of whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare.

A question that has been hotly debated for centuries.

There’s not a question that a man named William Shakespeare existed, that he was a player (actor) upon the Elizabethan stage, and that the events that are attributed to his life did happen to a man named William Shakespeare – however he might have signed or spelled that name.

The question has always been about whether or not the actor named William Shakespeare was the true author of the brilliant and captivating plays attributed to him. The reasons for those questions have always been cruel and elitist and classist and a whole bunch of other ‘ists’ that basically boil down to the idea that a man from the middle class with a middle class education (at best on both counts) couldn’t possibly have had the brains or the wit or more importantly the education and the background – to have written the plays published under his name.

After all, history only has his word for it – and his motives for pretending to be the author are fairly obvious.

This book takes that centuries-old question and pushes it further, well, out there. If William Shakespeare wasn’t the author, then who was – and why would they need to hide behind him so thoroughly and successfully?

In this fascinating, compelling historical novel, Shakespeare isn’t the author of his plays – he’s the front man for a group of authors who society of the time would have found even less believable – and more dangerous – than a middling player from Stratford-upon-Avon.

Mary Herbert, Emilia Bassano, and Jane Daggett each have a bone to pick with the way that female characters are written – and performed – by the entirely male theater companies that ‘grace’ the stages of Elizabeth I’s court.

Because those plays and performances are utterly cringeworthy, ruining their stories while reinforcing the prevailing stereotypes of women in their world. Stereotypes that not a one of the three women embodies at all. If anything, they are all the exact opposite – but constricted by the roles that their world places upon women no matter their class.

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is a poet forced to hide behind editing her late brother’s work. Emilia Bassano, court musician, is a brilliant composer who is reduced to her beauty and her voice in a court where rank has its privileges – including the privilege of relegating her to the role of courtesan. Jane Daggett, the lone fictional protagonist in this proposed quadrumvirate, is a storyteller par excellence whose low position means that no one expects this illiterate seamstress to be able to piece together a good story under any circumstance – or even understand one when she sees it.

They each seek escape from the sly, spying, conniving, voracious members of the court as a terrible performance is questionably entertaining the queen. Together they hatch a plan to save their collective sanity – even if they can never own up to what they’ve done.

Jane imagines the plot of what the terrible hack-job of a play should have been. Emilia and Mary write the dialogue. Jane, the wardrobe mistress for the company of players currently onstage, volunteers to present the scene they have just written to one of the more personable but downtrodden players – the hapless Will Shakespeare – to learn if their collective imaginings might possibly be worthy of presenting before an audience.

What they’ve created, together, is the opening scene for The Taming of the Shrew. But what they’ve done, with their secret writing and clandestine meetings, is to draw the attention of the court’s spymaster. Because secret meetings, especially secret meetings with noblewomen that produce reams of even more secret documents might sow the seeds of a plot against the Queen.

And in his zeal for investigation, for seeing treason where there is merely a revolt against the natural order of literature instead of a rebellion against the crown, the Queen’s spymaster places the cabal that would be Shakespeare at hazard of not just their liberty but their very lives.

Escape Rating A-: This was absolutely fascinating – and all the more so because the germ of the original idea is rooted in an original article written by journalist Elizabeth Winkler that became the book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies. The original article just asked the question – the one that is explored in this work of fiction. The resulting storm engendered Winkler’s book, even as the idea generated this one.

Writing is generally a lonely activity – or it certainly was in Shakespeare’s day. The image of the writer holed up in a lonely room with a drink and either a pen (or later a typewriter) is pretty much baked into the collective consciousness. We don’t expect anyone else to be in the room where THAT happens.

There are plenty of writers – even in the present day – who, when unmasked, turn out to be something or someone other than they presented themselves to be. The idea that William Shakespeare the player was not William Shakespeare the playwright has been around for centuries.

What this story does is tell that ‘what-if’ story in a way that catches the heart and mind of the reader and makes them feel like they ARE in the room where it happens. It may initially seem like the women are more of our time than their own, but Herbert and Bassano are both real historical figures and their works still exist. It’s more plausible than it initially seems.

I loved this for the way it presents a much different view, not just of the literary and cultural icon that is William Shakespeare, but a portrait of women’s lives and hopes and dreams at a time when the prevailing male perspective claimed they had none of the above. While the portrayal of the scheming, conniving and absolutely paranoid court of Elizabeth I rang true even as the story peeked behind its glittering curtain into a strong, defiant, class-breaking found sisterhood.

One last reflection; the way that The Shakespeare Secret takes a story we believe we know and pokes hard at all the ‘accepted’ truths reminds me a lot of Josephine Tey’s classic The Daughter of Time. That mystery performs the same service for an entirely different popular image – an image that has its deep and indelible roots in one of William Shakespeare’s famous plays. Whoever William Shakespeare might have been.