 JANUARY 23 • 2020 | 41

Good
Will

Local authors’
 longtime 
 adventure leads 
to a novel about Shakespeare.

SHARI S. COHEN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
S

hakespeare isn’
t every-
one’
s cup of tea but, for 
Barbara and Art Wiggins, 
the man and his work have 
fascinated them for decades. 
“How did a glover’
s son 
with a grammar school edu-
cation become the world’
s 
greatest playwright?” they 
asked themselves 25 years ago. 
Since then, the Bloomfield 
Township couple has been 
looking for answers in librar-
ies and at Shakespearean festi-
vals in three countries.
Barbara, a retired English 
teacher, and Art, a retired 
aerospace engi-
neer and physics 
professor, both 
remember read-
ing Shakespeare 
in high school. 
“It was kind 
of a chore, but 
then we put on a 
(Shakespearean) 
play and it 
changed my 
mind totally. I 
thought ‘
These 
words sound 
really good,’
” Art 
says.
Barbara shared his inter-
est and, in 1992, they began 
thinking about a novel to 
bring Shakespeare to life as an 
actual person of Elizabethan 

times. They found most of the 
books about Shakespeare were 
about his writing. 
Over a period of years, 
they saw all 37 of his plays 
— either in theaters, includ-
ing the Stratford Festival, or 
on video. “We felt we were 
getting to know him better,” 
Barbara says. Then they began 
extensive research in English 
and American libraries, espe-
cially the Folger Library in 
Washington, D.C., which has 
some of Shakespeare’
s earliest 
manuscripts.
In 1995, the couple took 
a bike ride along 
Shakespeare’
s route 
between his home-
town of Stratford 
and London. As 
they studied his 
life and the peo-
ple around him, 
they learned that 
Shakespeare “did 
everything” in the 
theater — not only 
writing plays but 
handling sets and 
taking tickets. 
They wrote an 
initial draft, but 
they were both working full-
time and Art was also writing 
science-related nonfiction 
books, so they put the book 
aside. After Barbara retired, 

“we returned to it seriously in 
June 2018. We kept working 
on it and changed it a lot. It 
was fun rewriting it,” she says.
While Good Will: 
Shakespeare’
s Novel Life is 
based on careful research and 
is “90 percent accurate,” it 
does include some fictional-
ized accounts of Shakespeare’
s 
life, which Art refers to as the 
book’
s “whoppers.” One of 
these was how Shakespeare 
met his wife, Anne Hathaway. 
According to Art, there isn’
t 
a written record so they cre-
ated an accidental encounter 
between Shakespeare and 
Hathaway while she was bath-
ing in a stream, which was 
common during Elizabethan 
times. 
Another imagined incident 
was the couple’
s presence at 
the Globe Theater when it 
was destroyed by fire in 1613. 
Art says there is no written 
account of Anne actually visit-
ing London.
One of Shakespeare’
s 
famous characters is Jewish 
— Shylock, the money lender 
in The Merchant of Venice. 

The pair believe Shakespeare 
depicted Shylock through 
such famous lines as “If you 
prick us do we not bleed? 
If you tickle us do we not 
laugh?” so theater audienc-
es could identify with him. 
Jews had been expelled from 
England several hundred 
years earlier and most written 
descriptions of them were 
very pejorative.
The couple discussed 
Shakespeare with the late 
Rabbi Sherwin Wine when 
they were members of the 
Birmingham Temple. Wine 
described Shakespeare as “a 
humanist.”
Since it came out last year, 
the self-published book 
has garnered good reviews, 
Barbara says.
“We wanted to make 
Shakespeare into a human 
being to help people under-
stand him and have a different 
view of the plays,” she says. 

Good Will: Shakespeare’
s Novel Life 
is available through Amazon and 
Kindle.

Art and Barbara Wiggins 
wrote a novel about 
Shakespeare’
s life that’
s 
90 percent accurate.

Arts&Life

books

COURTESY WIGGINS

