Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis (born December 31, 1945) writes science fiction and fantasy stories under the name Connie Willis. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards—more major SF awards than any other writer. But who’s counting? (She probably is.) (Every other SF writer probably is as well.)

She wrote some time travel stories where Oxford students were sent back in time to England of the Middle Ages. This required some fairly extensive research on her part to get her facts correct. Somewhere along the line she must have realized that she now knew enough about the Elizabethan Period to write convincingly about it. And perhaps she was intrigued by Shakespeare’s bequest of his “second best bed” to his wife Anne in his will and thought that she might be able to come up with an explanation for it. An explanation that has eluded Shakespearean scholars for centuries.

The result was her story “Winter’s Tale”, first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in December 1987.

As it happens, I’ve been going through my back issues of IAsfm recently and I came across that story. A few issues later I came across this letter in the letters column:

Dear Dr. Asimov;

The real difference between detectives and the rest of us is well illustrated by Connie Willis’s “Winter’s Tale.” As an undergraduate English major I was once given the odious task of writing a research paper on “the second-best bed.” I was  surprised to find any academic material on such a subject but there was actually quite a bit of serious speculation and research into why Will left his wife that bed. I wrote my paper and collected my A never realizing that I had overlooked all those clues to the real story. Thank goodness Ms. Willis did not. That’s why she is an author and I am a reader. Fantastic! Keep publishing stories as good as this and, I promise, I’ll keep reading.

Sincerely,
Shelley Barber
Stuttgart, AZ

So I went back and read the story and I loved it. 

Willis wrote it from the point of view of Anne, Will’s wife, and it reads like a simple piece of historical fiction. Really, the only reason that it was published in IAsfm is that Connie Willis typically writes science fiction and/or fantasy stories. Well, that and she does assume some facts that are not in evidence. Presumably your standard English prof would not accept this explanation in a regular Shakespeare course. But it’s still a crackling good story, and quite plausible.

And truth be told, I got a bit of a lump in my throat when I reached the end of it. So I kind of wish it were the true story.

When I began this two part blog post, I had every intention of linking to the Connie Willis story at this point so my faithful readers would have the opportunity to read the story for themselves.

However— 

Although the Internet Archive does have a very extensive collection of IAsfm issues, including almost every issue from the year 1987, sadly it is missing the December issue. So I cannot link to an archive of “Winter’s Tale”.

Furthermore, although I don’t have a cut and dried policy of what stories I will or will not publish on my site, in general, I only publish those stories that are a) out of copyright, b) no longer in print, c) relatively short, and/or d) by dead authors, with that last criterion being the most important. Preferably at least three out of those four.

“Winter’s Tale” by Connie Willis does not meet any of those criteria.

But “Winter’s Tale” is available in Impossible Things, a collection of her shorter stories, which can be gotten at a reasonable price and as a bonus contains several of her other wonderful concoctions.

It also contains Willis’s introduction to “Winter’s Tale”, which I have no problem reproducing in full below:

I DON’T HAVE A LOT OF PATIENCE WITH SHAKESPEARE conspiracy theories. They all, with the exception of the Bacon theory, seem to be based on an inability to accept the obvious: that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. (The Bacon theory seems to be based on a decoder ring.) They’ve concluded Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford or Queen Elizabeth or a committee (A committee!? Who are they trying to kid?) because he couldn’t have been an Ordinary Person.

Well, of course he wasn’t an Ordinary Person. He was Shakespeare. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have come from Ordinary Circumstances. Say, a log cabin in Illinois. Or a small town in upstate England.

The theories about Anne Hathaway are even worse. Out of a handful of facts—she was six years older, she couldn’t read, she was pregnant when they got married—the theorists concoct an aged, ignorant peasant, deservedly abandoned by Queen Elizabeth or the committee or whoever it was.

Honestly. Illiterate doesn’t mean stupid, and where do they think Shakespeare got all those wonderful, witty, intelligent women for his plays—Beatrice and Rosalind and Cordelia and Kate—if not from his wife and daughters?

If I were concocting a Shakespeare conspiracy theory, it would have to take Anne into account. And it wouldn’t have any codes or committees. It would have all the things Shakespeare liked so well: secrets and murder and romance. And mistaken identities.

Of course, I do have the actual issue of IAsfm which is where I read the story, so I could lend it out to anyone who would like—but nope! I’ve been burned too many times by lending out my things in the past. Books come back with the pages all dog-eared, tapes come back without their covers, that’s when they even come back at all. So no, I can’t possibly lend out my copy of Asimov’s. If you want to read the story, you’ll have to find it some other way.

 

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