Harry Turtledove's Ruled Britannia: A Few Thoughts

For quite a number of years I was an avid reader of Harry Turtledove's alternate histories--running out and grabbing the latest installment in his Timeline-191 series when it became available year in, year out. I enjoyed his rigorous working out of his scenarios, which, in contrast with so much alternate history, made the basis of his story a genuinely compelling counterfactual, in contrast with the flimsy "What ifs?" on which so many of his colleagues have relied. I also enjoyed the "big picture" emphasis of his narratives, presented through his large but still manageable and strategically arranged casts of viewpoint characters, and the briskness of his narratives, which seemed to have been worked out mathematically but effectually (Turtledove cutting among twenty viewpoint characters, each of whom got six four-page scenes by the end of the volume).

Turtledove's Ruled Britannia was a very differently structured book, less oriented to the big picture, and more narrowly focused on a mere two characters rather than twenty--in this case, William Shakespeare and Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega, brought face to face by a successful Spanish conquest of Britain in 1588 that had de Vega a soldier of the occupying Spanish army who, because of his predilection for the theater, is tasked with keeping an eye on a Shakespeare who has become drawn into a plot by old Elizabethan loyalists to stage a rebellion which will drive the Spanish out. The comparatively original premise (neither Civil War nor World War II!) intrigued me, as did the promise to depict these actual historical figures in this altered timeline, an approach which has always appealed to me. (Of the Timeline-191 novels my favorite was and remains How Few Remain, precisely because of its stress on actual personages.) Still, I wondered if Turtledove would manage to hold my interest with this approach through the nearly five hundred page narrative.

For my part I thought the book longer than it had to be, and I could have done without a good many bits. (I think we saw more of de Vega the self-satisfied womanizer than we needed to, for instance, and did not care for the usage of Christopher Marlowe either, or for that matter the final confrontation between these two figures, which seemed to me entirely pointless.) Still, in spite of the unnecessary or bothersome patches Turtledove pleasantly surprised me by carrying this more focused narrative. In doing that it helped not only that Turtledove displayed some adroitness in developing the cat and mouse game between Shakespeare and the Spanish occupiers, but that Turtledove presents Shakespeare, and de Vega, as both human beings rather than pedestal-placed literary titans--Shakespeare in particular a man whose talent may have marked him out for greater things but in the here and now a jobbing actor and writer trying to make a living and thrust less than willingly into high intrigue. Particularly commendable was Turtledove's not shying away from the difficult task his own plot presented him--taking seriously Shakespeare's enlistment to produce a propaganda play in aid of the rebellion (about the life of Iceni queen Boudicca), and letting us see just enough of it dramatized at the climax to give the project on which the whole plot rests some solidity. The closing lines of the play ("No epilogue here, unless you make it/If you want freedom go and take it") struck me as a bit more Brecht than Bard, but on the whole the pastiche worked, with that close entirely logical in the circumstances, and all this to the good of a climax, and denouement, that drew all the narrative strands together in very satisfying fashion.