Bethink Yourself of Any Crime by Mary Dutta

A recent outing to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival got me thinking about William Shakespeare. The Bard is having a bit of a cultural moment given the multiple Oscar nominations for Hamnet, the film about Shakespeare and his wife coping with the death of their son. It was adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name.

Of course, Shakespeare never goes out of fashion. The ASF is just one of many Shakespeare theaters and festivals spanning the United States, from Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. When I lived in Virginia we had season tickets to the American Shakespeare Center, which performs under the original staging conditions in a recreation of the Blackfriars Playhouse.

Given his undisputed status as a giant of English literature, it might sound presumptuous to say “I’m a writer like Shakespeare.” But crime writers genuinely are. Think of the many different motives that underlie the stories we tell. Envy. Ambition. Grief. Love. Shakespeare explores them all.

I realized how many of those same themes appear in my own work. My latest story involves three siblings and a contested legacy from their father. Shades of King Lear. My first published story was about a woman who envies another writer’s success. Echoes of Julius Caesar’s Cassius. I published a story about a woman whose grief over her husband’s death leads to drama at the senior center. Hamlet would relate. One of my characters would do anything to join a local country club. Macbeth could give him some pointers. And Romeo and Juliet could chime in on the lengths people will go to for love in more than one of my stories.

Shakespeare’s work retains its power more than 400 years after his death because it explores universal human experiences. Granted, while the actions in crime fiction might be slightly less universal, what with all the murder, blackmail, theft, etc., the human emotions and motivations behind those actions are as authentic today as they were in Elizabethan times.

Ben Jonson said Shakespeare “was not of an age but for all time.” I’m not claiming the same for myself, but I do hope that the stories I tell can stand the test of time in the ways they engage readers and reflect the complicated human world around them.