RS The Corisco Conspiracy. It is subtitled A Memoir of William Shakespeare.
AW That sounds intriguing! What first got you into writing and why?
RS I’ve always enjoyed learning languages and reading about them. It was a short step from that attraction to falling in love with literature, particularly English literature, and ultimately dreaming of becoming an author.
AW Your book is historical fiction, but it features the namesakes of real people from history. Was all of your story imagination?
RS Far from it. My novel is a sub-sub-genre: biographical historical fiction. (One reviewer has called it “fanfiction.”) The narrator and protagonist is William Shakespeare. Naturally, most of my other characters are his real-life contemporaries.
The speculations that the Bard might have been a crypto-Catholic are well-founded. Hence, my novel is fiction only in so far as I imagined him to be a Jesuit secret agent in the employ of the Spanish navy. He lived in turbulent times and produced some of the greatest works in world literature. Yet virtually nothing is known about his private life. Picturing him in the Catholic underground of Elizabethan and Jacobean England isn’t a far-fetched idea. Chris Marlowe was a government spy. Will Shakespeare could very well have been a “counterintelligence operative.”
AW Fascinating. Have you tried your hand at, or dabbled in, other genres or writing for other forms of media?
RS Yes. I wrote published poems and one award-winning play as a pastime in my salad days.
AW Ah. 'Salad Days, when I was green in judgement'. A quote from Antony and Cleopatra, I think! Famous authors such as Roald Dahl and Dylan Thomas had special spaces for writing. Do you have a writing ‘shed’ of your own?
RS No. No writing nook for me. My muse is a gypsy. That fact and my having done some acting as a young man are reflected in the way I write. Actually, what I do would be better described as composing. I “compose” on the go – wherever and whenever the spirit moves me. When I sit at my desk, it is not to think, but merely to type whole passages or dialogues that I have already “written” in my mind. To me, writing is a series of daydreaming seizures. And I am as likely to have one in a rowdy sports arena as in the hermetic silence of a cell in a monastery.
AW And finally, what would your eight-year-old self think and say about you and your achievements today?
RS Better late than never. But it would have been wiser of you to answer your true calling from the time, around the age of six, that you discovered the pleasure of curling up with a book.
AW I guess eight-year-old you was a tough little guy back then!
about the book ... When Spain invaded Protestant England in 1588, William Shakespeare, then aged 24, was a Catholic spy employed as a recruitment officer by the Spanish navy. The Corisco Conspiracy is his riveting firsthand account of the chain of misadventures that led him from the Spanish Armada, by way of West Africa, to the Gunpowder Plot (the conspiracy of the title), of which, it turns out, he was the mastermind. In her review of the Bard’s memoir in Oxford Prospect Arts, author and historian Doctor Julia Gasper says it is “Bold and inventive far beyond any other version of Shakespeare’s life.”
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You can get the book on Amazon and from the publisher Austin Macauley and other online booksellers.
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