MY FATHER HAD A DAUGHTER

Shakespeare is hot, a fact shown not long ago by the success of Shakespeare In Love. Now Tiffany debuts with a strange little fantasy spotlighting the Bard’s daughter Judith.

Shakespeare had three children by Anne Hathaway: first Susanna, then the twins Judith and Hamnet, Hamnet dying, from unknown causes, while a child. Author Tiffany, English professor and Shakespearean specialist, has invented a drowning for him to launch her tale. The boy is Judith’s ideal playmate in their wildly imaginative games, while in the background is their volatile mother, chafing at William’s long absences in London, which so distress Hamnet that Judith casts a spell to bring her father home. The spell calls for dunking themselves in the Avon, which causes Hamnet’s accidental drowning. Judith is overwhelmed by guilt, then by rage at her father after finding a discarded scroll of Twelfth Night. She concludes he’s exploiting Hamnet’s death: and this calls for his exposure, and for her public atonement. So, at 14, Judith steals away to London. Still flat-chested, she changes into boy’s clothes, finds a job at a tavern, and lands a bit part with her father’s company. All this happens with a dreamlike ease, a fast pace and a jaunty tone helping mask the many improbabilities. When the older boy actor Nathan Field threatens to expose her as a girl, she buys his silence by sacrificing her virginity, all in a day’s work for this bold lass. She then tricks Nathan out of the part of Viola and has her moment of glory at the Globe before her father recognizes her and returns her to Stratford. The great adventure of Judith’s life now over, the story runs out of steam: Its final third covers her quiet life back home and marriage, years later, to a local vintner.

Engaging enough to whet the appetite of those readers unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s family life and times, but there’s no meat here for the more sophisticated.