Kissing Shakespeare at the Tower

Last spring, during my annual pilgrimage to the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I took a break from the program tracks I usually follow (the ones on St. Bede the Venerable, about whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation, and on J. R. R. Tolkien, about whom I've done a certain amount of scholarly writing, in addition to having been active in "fandom" for a few decades) to go to a lecture on Shakespeare. (No, Shakespeare wouldn't ordinarily be considered a medieval writer per se, but the Congress includes a number of tracks about people connected in one way or another with the Middle Ages--like Tolkien, to take an obvious example.)

The lecture itself was interesting enough (though I admit that I have forgotten the specifics of it), but then, during the question and answer period, someone asked about the theory that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic and spent at least some of the decades missing from his biography at Hoghton Tower. This possibility, first put forward, I think, by Prof. E. A. J. Honigman in his Shakespeare: The Lost Years (http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-E-A-J-Honigmann/dp/0719054257), and resulted in Sir Bernard's appearing briefly in Episode Two of  PBS series (description here: http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/theshow/theshow265.html ), as well as in the performance of Twelfth Night on the grounds of the Tower (about which I shall have to write a separate post). Judging from the reaction of the roomful of Shakespeare professors at the Congress, I take it that Prof. Honigman's theory no longer has a lot of traction in the academic world (to say that they were skeptical stretches the limits of understatement).

Whatever the scholars may conclude, however, the idea of Shakespeare's having spent some time in Lancashire is (I find) a fascinating one. I worked a passing reference to it into my fantasy novel Rough Magicke (Amazon best-seller rank #2,526,63!). Now, however, comes Pamela Mingle with a young adult time-travel romance novel, Kissing Shakespeare (http://www.amazon.com/Kissing-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B007DCTXUQ/ref=pd_ybh_1), with its 16th century section actually set at the Tower. It's $11.98 in hardcover and about a dollar less for Kindle.