A shrewd-faced lad who might have made something of himself in the glove trade

Book Review: The Spy of Venice, by Benet Brandreth
I always struggle to define what kind of fiction I like, so I try to be open-minded when I come across things that look potentially interesting in the work book sale. In an unusual fragment of preconditioning, I recall that my parents didn't have good things to say about their school recollections of Shakespeare or Dickens; I think my mother may also have had to read Chaucer. In turn, I had a mixed bag when it came to English teachers, and although I found I could tolerate Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities (also discovering that it is considered fairly uncharacteristic of him) I was distinctly uninterested in Henry V or Macbeth, which were what school and the GCSE syllabus of the time conspired to offer me.

Nonetheless, I found the prospect of a Venetian setting appealing, and felt this book would be worth trying. I'm glad I did, because although I wouldn't say I enjoyed it unreservedly, I did find it enjoyable for the most part and quite entertaining. In one sense it's a counterfactual story, making use of missing years in Shakespeare's chronology; but on the other, it's speculative fiction on how those years might have been filled. Twenty-year old William Shakespeare ("A shrewd-faced lad who might have made something of himself in the glove trade were it not that his mind wandered", as his biography in the list of characters has it) finds himself on the wrong end of the local steward's ire and decides to set forth for London, following a company of players who have just recently supplied entertainment at Stratford on Avon. By the kind of coincidence that only occurs in books he becomes entangled in a plot ultimately controlled (as all such things of the period must be) by Sir Francis Walsingham, concerning an exchange, commercial and intelligencial, with the Republic of Venice. The story is constructed in a structure similar to a play, in five acts, with bite-sized chapters in each; and also the various plot twists and turns seem to fit the theatrical scheme too. I found a few hints to works and quotations of the Bard, and the character of Oldcastle made me think of Falstaff straight away; I'm sure someone more familiar with Shakespeare would recognise far more references. I did find the pace of the book a little uneven - in particular the journey to Venice, and the drawn-out scheming that goes on within that city progressed slowly but with bursts of action - but overall this worked well, and it was frequently clever and witty.