Reading Room - Fictional Treatments

The imaginative freedom of the novelist and dramatist can sometimes catch the spirit of Shakespeare in a way that the scholar, shackled to standards of proof, cannot. There is a long tradition, going back to Sir Walter Scott and beyond, of fictional representations of Shakespeare. Perhaps the best of them are:

Edward Bond's Bingo (premiered 1973, performed at RSC 1976, included in his Plays 3, 1987) – imagines a visit from Ben Jonson to Shakespeare in his last years and takes a dark view of the Stratford man's commercial dealings; might be read in contrast to Peter Whelan, The Herbal Bed (performed at RSC 1996, published in his Plays 1, 2003), a sympathetic imagining of Shakespeare's daughter Susanna

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, No Bed for Bacon (1941) – hilarious but also well-informed ... and with a story that will seem familiar to viewers of Shakespeare in Love (1998), a movie that, for all its creative licence, is also a fine introduction to Shakespeare's theatre-world

Anthony Burgess, Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (1964) – a glorious romp through Shakespeare's imagined youth

Robert Nye, Falstaff (1976), Mrs Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1993) and The Late Mr Shakespeare (1999) - three independent novels, which really ought to be republished as a trilogy; the third is narrated in the voice of an imaginary boy actor

Alan Wall, The School of Night (2000) – atmospheric literary detective thriller based on the 'authorship controversy'

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928) - imagines a young man named Orlando, born during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old; he passes through the ages as a young man until he wakes up one morning to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman, so the remaining centuries up to the time the book was written are seen through a woman's eyes. Orlando is traditionally linked to Woolf's friend Vita Sackville-West, but there is a profound allegorical sense in which he is also Shakespeare (who puts in a cameo appearance in his own person). Should be read in conjunction with the famous passage imagining the fate of Shakespeare's sister ('Judith') in Woolf's A Room of one's Own (1929)

There are hundreds more fine books on Shakespeare, but anyone who reads The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works from cover to cover and then devours a reasonable proportion of the above will have earned the right to consider themselves an exceptionally highly informed Shakespearean.