Writing "Shakespeare's Twin Sister"

Virginia Woolf imagined a sister of William Shakespeare, who was as talented as he but didn’t have an opportunity to get an education, much less to write plays.

I was intrigued by the idea of not just a sister, but a twin sister who, with disguise, could act as his double so they could share the work. So I immersed myself in his plays, rereading all of them twice, and reading biographies of Shakespeare and histories of his time.

The known facts of Shakespeare’s life are few. You could summarize them in a paragraph, leaving lots of wiggle room for the imagination. The anomalies are intriguing. Will, at the age of 18, married a 26-year-old woman, who gave birth six months later. A few years after that, she had twins, and, almost immediately, Will skipped town.

His whereabouts were unknown until he appeared in London seven years later. An outsider, with a negligible education, he soon became a full-time actor and playwright in the highly competitive London stage. He would rehearse one play in the morning and perform another in the afternoon — typically six different plays a week. And yet he somehow found the time to write new plays at a torrid pace, some of the finest plays ever written.

As my book began to take shape, I imagined a scenario by which twins could be separated at birth. The twins would not know about the origins of their birth, nor would their parents. In my story, Will’s twin sister, Kate, was raised by a wealthy cousin, who thought he was her father. He had her pose as a boy, so she could get an education. When the twins met at school, they were drawn to one another. Without knowing their relationship, they had an inexplicable love-hate connection.

Later in life, Kate relished the freedom and independence of being a boy. As a teenager in Paris, she attended university and dueled to the death with a captain of the King’s musketeers. Kate and Will met again as young adults and discovered the secret of their birth and of their mutual attraction. They were pulled apart when Will was tricked into marriage with Anne Hathaway, and then reunited when he realized that not just the first child, but Anne’s twins, as well, were not his. They ran off together and spent Shakespeare’s “lost years” in Italy at university and in street theater before tackling the London stage, which was brand new and chaotic, like Hollywood in the 1920s.

I was as surprised as readers will be, as one scene flowed naturally from another. It was a complete book. It worked.

Then, I realized that I wasn’t done. I couldn’t expect readers today to suddenly immerse themselves in the world of Elizabethan England. I needed a bridge from here to there. I needed a frame.

So I imagined that Kate woke up in the body of a 99-year-old woman in a nursing home in 1987. She had no idea how it happened. Though she was disoriented, she had a hell of a story to tell.

And I had met such a woman nearly fifty years before in a nursing home in Penticton, British Columbia. She was an impoverished Russian princess in exile, the sister of a historical figure I was writing a novel about. The historical figure had been an officer of the Czar’s Life-Guard Regiment in St. Petersburg, an explorer in Ethiopia, and a cavalry officer fighting in Manchuria. He then became a monk and moved to Mount Athos in Greece. There he got caught up in a heresy dispute that led to Russian troops besieging his monastery and exiling 880 monks to Siberia for practicing the Jesus Prayer, which you may remember from Salinger’s Frannie and Zoey.

The man I was writing about was murdered in 1919 after the Russian Revolution. His sister was alive and active in 1987. Though her hands were too arthritic to unwrap a piece of candy, she could play Chopin on the piano, flawlessly by heart. She also painted watercolors — remembered landscapes of the Dalmatian coast where she had first fled after the Revolution.

Having interviewed this feisty and unforgettable woman for 30 hours over the course of three days, it was easy for me to imagine someone similar, another princess on welfare, who somehow had the soul of Kate Shakespeare and wanted to tell her tale.

This novel is available at Amazon