Loving Shakespeare

PW: How did you happen to write Chasing Shakespeares [see review, p. 52]?

Sarah Smith: My real life contribution to the Shakespeare authorship controversy was finding a good, Shakespearean-sounding poem probably written by the Earl of Oxford. One contradiction of Oxford being "the true Shakespeare," the real author of the canon, is that there is very little poetry that has been identified as his. I think we can say that this poem is Oxford's, and it's good, it's "Shakespearean."

PW: You've written historical fiction. Were you tempted to set this mystery in Elizabethan times?

SS: No, because the narrator's story, Joe Roper's story, is too important. The most fundamental thing about the whole Shakespeare mythos is that everyone likes him. Shakespeare is the man from the countryside who was struck by the muses. There's the feeling that "if he can do it, anyone can."

PW: How did you take what some people might consider to be an esoteric subject and make it so compelling?

SS: I had fun planning how I would tell this story, giving a little bit of fact then a little bit of devastation, a little bit of fact then a little bit of devastation.... Joe is trying to protect Shakespeare against people like Posy Gould, a rival scholar and love interest, who thinks that Oxford wrote all the plays. Joe gets interested in the authorship controversy because it's the greatest mystery ever.

PW: You and Posy both went to Harvard. What was that experience like for you?

SS: I was very much a scholarship student at Harvard. I was born in Boston, but my father was in the Air Force, so we moved around a lot. I lived for quite a long time in Japan, and then I went to high school outside New York. I saw the whole idea of Harvard privilege definitely from the outside.

PW: Didn't you study Shakespeare with Robert Lowell?

SS: In fact, the voice that I think of as Joe's, telling this whole book through—that New England "ayuh"—is Robert Lowell's voice. I realized that after I'd finished the book. I'd been thinking about the connection between working-class rowdiness and real intellectual brilliance—Robert Lowell really hit that for me.

PW: Would you classify this novel as a mystery?

SS: We never know whether I'm a mystery writer or not. All my previous books have been published as mainstream novels in hardback and as mysteries in paperback. But this is a mystery because it concerns this enormous question. It doesn't have a battered corpse in it. The only thing I can compare it with is Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time.

PW: What parts of your life have you not used in your writing that you think you'll use in the future?

SS: That's a good question. I'm a feminist and a pacifist, a Quaker. I want to go back to the pre–World War I era and that war that destroyed civilization. But I like to be told by my books where I'm going. While working on a recent project, this amazing character came to me and said, "I'm black, and I'm passing for white." This is not something I've had personal experience with.

PW: Who do you think will like this book?

SS: Lots of people—mystery lovers, people who love Shakespeare, people who love England. Chasing Shakespeares has major factual revelations about the authorship controversy. Some people have told me that this is a book lover's dream because it's about reading great literature that you think you know and then finding all sorts of new things inside it, things that become more and more personal. Joe finds new things in Shakespeare and they change him.... I love to write and read "sloppy mysteries," with people who have resolved the immediate problem at the end but are marked by what's happened to them—they've learned and suffered and changed.