The Tutor takes place in the sixteenth century, but what connections do you see between the society Katharine and Shakespeare live in and our modern world?

Andrea Chapin Hi Michelle,

I see quite a few connections between the Elizabethan era (when my novel THE TUTOR takes place) and the world we live in today—I’ll mention three here. In terms of technology, the printing press arrived in England less than a hundred years before Shakespeare was born, and the result was a huge transformation in how books were made and who wrote them and that is comparable to how the Internet has changed our daily life. Before the printing press, books in England were written by hand, by monks and scribes, and most often in Latin. After William Claxton introduced the printing press in 1476, more people started to write, to read and to publish in English. There were cheap little books called penny pamphlets and just as any one can write a blog today, many people during Shakespeare’s time (mostly men) started to write poetry and criticism and get their writing out into the world in these inexpensive publications. Were they all good writers? Well, no.

A major theme in my novel is the struggle between the Catholics and the Protestants: the Protestants religion, under the Church of England, was the national religion at that time, and the Catholics were persecuted. Religious strife was around long before the Elizabethan period and it is certainly around now.

In my novel, my fictional character Katharine helps Shakespeare create the first piece of writing he ever published, the erotic narrative poem “Venus and Adonis.” I believe that the impulse to express what one sees and feels, how one channels that creativity and creates art hasn’t changed much since the beginning of time.

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