Shakespeare and the Countess:The Battle That Gave Birth to the Globe

by Chris Laoutaris

Pegasus Books, 2015

The season's big mainstream Shakespeare book comes from Pegasus Books (about the sub-mainstream Shakespeare books of this or any other season, even the stoutest reader should fear to inquire – Freemasonry isn't the half of it), Shakespeare and the Countess by Chris Laoutaris, a Lecturer at Stratford-Upon-Avon's Shakespeare Institute. It's a plump production, almost 600 pages, and it opens with some downright Shakespearean flourishes:

In November 1596 William Shakespeare was engulfed by a catastrophe. The force which stormed into his life and shook it to the core was a woman named Elizabeth Russell. That winter she began a campaign which would nearly destroy the dramatist's career and leave him facing financial ruin. She would lead an uprising against his theatrical troupe and business partners, managing to turn even his closest friends and allies against him. In the process she would spark one of the most baffling mysteries of Shakespeare's life, for Lady Russell's personal army would include two men who stood to gain the most from his continuing success: his patron, George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, and his boyhood comrade and publisher, Richard Field.

There's a great but marginally permissible amount of melodrama in all that, and it centers around the fact that in 1596, the lease on the theater used by the Lord Chamberlain's Men was about to expire and the company was planning a move to the state of the art new Blackfriars Theatre being planned for the Blackfriars neighborhood in the center of London. But the construction was opposed by Blackfriars poo-bah Elizabeth Russell, who styled herself a dowager countess and who was sister-in-law to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and aunt to Robert Cecil, and sometime-friend to Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth Russell was a formidable woman, a rail-thumping Puritan termagant who clearly relished being in the thick of things. Indeed, as Laoutaris tells us, “the Cambridge scholar Walter Haddon, who would fall in love with the young Elizabeth, summed up her character best when he compared her to a warrior woman who 'marched in battle-gear.'

”Elizabeth Russell is a terrific subject for a biography, and Laoutaris is a hugely energetic narrator who brings every detail of his story to life, as in his description of the Blackfriars of the day:

Walking through the Blackfriars was like passing a succession of theatrical sets, where one could survey the latest styles of dress and marvel at the mechanical astrolabes and armillary spheres, nautical devices, gilt standing-cups sharped like stags' heads, and fantastical automata. The latter were becoming de rigueur in the cabinets of the most discerning collectors across Europe, who rushed to purchase twittering robotic birds, arrow-shooting centaurs, music boxes, cittern-playing maidens and diminutive silver cows from which mechanical maids drew real milk. For the engineers who made clockwork curiosities and mathematical devices for royalty, the Blackfriars was the district of choice.

Laoutaris takes readers through all the heated, tangled details of Elizabeth Russell's life, and it's all so entertaining that it takes the reader well over a hundred pages to realize how much of it is served up under benignly false pretenses. From the book's title and premise and ample verbiage, those readers might be tempted to think Shakespeare and the Countess is about Shakespeare and the Countess, but no. No, we still have the same sixteen facts about Shakespeare that we had in 1808. This is a big, rambunctious biography of Elizabeth Russell – with about a hundred pages of Shakespeare supposition woven in. The book could just as easily have been called The Queen and the Countess and had a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I on the cover alongside a sexy young neck-ruffed Shakespeare. The whole thing is carried off with storytelling aplomb and deep, sometimes groundbreaking research regardless of the three-card-monte game being played in the title.