D.J. Nix's entertaining debut novel, The Shakespeare Secret, explores the possibility that Shakespeare was a woman--or, in this case, three women who jointly write several groundbreaking plays and hire an actor to publish them as his own.
On the surface, court musician Emilia Bassano has little in common with Mary Herbert, poet and Countess of Pembroke, and barely literate seamstress Jane Daggett. But all three women share a passion for stories and a distaste for the hackneyed plays often presented at court. Meeting regularly to write in secret, the women draft the play that will become The Taming of the Shrew and hire Will Shakespeare, an actor and acquaintance of Jane's, to claim authorship of the play and get it onto the stage.
Nix's narrative shifts among the three women's perspectives, providing details of women's lives, court intrigue, and theatrical productions in Elizabethan England (plus a few gruesome plague scenes). The queen herself makes several key appearances, as do her spymaster Robert Cecil and other courtiers real and fictional. When one of Cecil's men spies on the women and becomes convinced they are plotting to kill Queen Elizabeth, they must keep their wits about them to refute the rumor, even as they race to finish their latest play. Their eventual triumph, though partially anonymous, is still quite satisfying.
Compelling, witty, and sprinkled with lines from the Bard of Avon's work and sharp social commentary, The Shakespeare Secret is an enjoyable historical what-if for Anglophiles and Shakespeare lovers. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams