My thanks to my friends in the South Shore Writers Group, who patiently and insightfully reviewed this book at the speed it emerged, and especially to the group’s founder Maureen Amaturo and my fellow founding member Suki Van Dijk.
Thanks to Linell Nash Smith and Frances Smith, daughter and granddaughter of the extraordinary Ogden Nash, for their kind permission to use his limerick as an epigraph.
Special thanks, too, to Dr. Thomas MacDonald, associate professor in the Environmental Management department of the University of San Francisco, for advice on the challenges of tunneling under rivers. If the scene rings true, it’s because of Tom’s generous help; if there are errors, they’re where I blatantly ignored his expert suggestions.
Of the many books about Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon that I read in researching this story, I particularly want to express my indebtedness to the late Samuel Schoenbaum’s masterly and fascinating William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, published by Oxford University Press.
At the time of writing this novel, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford is undergoing major reconstruction. Since we can’t have Hamlet performed on a building site—although Humfrey Fingerhood has undoubtedly considered it—the reader is asked to imagine the story taking place in a parallel universe in which the old theater was allowed to stay up a little longer.
Every piece of information that Toby presents to support his Two Shakespeares theory is true, but I held back one fact. The written-in bequest to Heminges, Condell, and Burbage was certainly a puzzlingly late addition to Will’s final will, which was drawn up about a month before his death—probably not, at age fifty-two, because of any fatal premonition, but to add specific protection for his daughter, Judith, who’d just married a complete rotter; but the annotation was already in place when the will was transcribed for probate, a matter of days after his death. If Toby is right, any attempt to forge a posthumous connection between the two Wills must have begun much earlier than he implies. There have been other interpretations of these oddities, of course—many of them leading to even more unlikely claims about the true identity of the author of Hamlet, a play that has enriched our language like no other.