Reimagining Shakespeare

As a reader from the get-go, an English major even before I knew I was one, I always had my idea of what William Shakespeare looked like, kind of a dark version of Ben Franklin. Sort of a literary Quaker Oats guy. This solemn, imposing figure is the man on the back of all the Shakespeare readers and the countless anthologies of all his works. The fellow on the playbills and posters at the Shakespeare festivals.

You know the painting. His hairline past receding. One ear rakishly pierced, but that’s about all the rakishness in him. Soulful, almost Spanish eyes. a mustache, a scanty beard. He looks a little puffy. Maybe stout. Hardly the stuff of romance.

His looks have never affected me one way or another because I always had his words and stories and poems that conjured up great swells of feeling. I’d fall in love with a rock who wrote all that. So maybe Will Shakespeare wasn’t the Bradley Cooper of his time, but he was keen, smart, a flat-out genius. But my troubles with his looks came when I decided to write a rompy, time-travel Shakespeare romance, my main character part of a love triangle (rectangle) with Shakespeare and an assorted cast of characters.

“Gross,” my friend — a novelist — said. “Shakespeare as a love interest?”

“What about Shakespeare in Love?”

“That’s Joseph Fiennes. He makes whoever he plays sexy. But you’ve got to present a sexy Shakespeare for three hundred pages! The moment he takes of his shirt, I’m out!”

Good point. Hard to imagine the Quaker Oats guy falling head over heels in love with a woman from four hundred years in the future.

But the good news for me is that recent studies have uncovered a “hot young Shakespeare” that isn’t just created in a novelist’s mind. A painting discovered a decade ago presents a younger, thinner, better-kempt Shakespeare, with soft brain hair and clear eyes. His collar is also pretty fantastic, too.

Here was my inspiration for my Will Shakespeare, a down-on-his-luck playwright ready to change his life forever.

Lucky me.