Pay attention 007 aficionados.
It’s Shakespeare shaken not stirred in Jacapo Della Quercia’s LICENSE TO QUILL, an origin story of the Double O section that combines the creation of the stage play Macbeth amid the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot and the evil genius, Guy Fawkes.
Before there was Bond, there was the Bard, before there was M, there was W, and before there was Q there was the Double O section, the Ordnance Office, presided over by Francis Bacon.
According to this Jacobean caper, the ordnance office was tasked by King Henry VIII in 1543 to serve as quartermaster to all the arms and wares in his military.In the transitory time of Elizabethan into Jacobean, Francis Bacon as Q dispensing His Majesty’s Secret Servant a rapier with firearm capability, exploding playing cards and a steed called Aston.
Not to mention some ingenious gadgets proto typed by Leonardo da Vinci!
Shaking and stirring both the Bond of literature and film, Shakespeare’s first meeting with Bacon reads like a delicious variation of the snaky and prickly Q and Bond repartee from Goldfinger.
The Fleming Shakespeare binary is brilliantly double O in this sensationally funny and thrilling quilling memorandum.
With a A View to A Quill, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators, perhaps a Jacobean prototype of SPECTRE, press gang William Shakespeare into writing a tragedy set in Scotland, a play so powerful, it will prove once and for all the pen is mightier than the sword.
Joining in the plot is contemporary playwright and seasoned secret agent, Christopher Marlowe. In a clever conceit, Shakespeare stage manages Marlowe’s death – a nod and a wink the You Only Live Twice ruse- and Kit finds himself incognito in Venice: “beneath all it’s splendour, Venice was also a city of ghosts. Spies, exiles and assassins lurked beneath its shadows. Shades, spectres, sleepers ….”
In amongst the moonrakers, muckrakers, and spear shakers, is head of his majesty’s secret service, W, his secretary, Penny, Lady Percy, and the Dark Lady.
There’s a henchman called Hobgoblin who is a hoot and black hearts are joined by the black arts with three weird sisters keeping the cloak and dagger, “is this a dagger I see before me” cauldron a bubbling.
Like a sonnet backed by a Smith & Wesson, LICENSE TO QUILL is a master mash of thrilling adventure and intrigue.
Live and let dice with death, Shakespeare and Marlowe, cavort and kick arse in an exciting, violent, sadistic and sexy piece of reading matter with the mayhem outstandingly good.
A quantum of soliloquise.
Shakespeare in Love meets The Spy Who Loved Me, Goldfinger meets the Gunpowder Plot, it’s bard and beyond, a Bond-fire of the vanities, a whip- cracking, ribald, robust and rapier witted riposte to classic storytelling.
A fun and frolicsome way to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare shuffling off his mortal coil, LICENSE TO QUILL is published in first folio by St. Martin’s Griffin.