Book Note: The Wimsey Family

Scott-Giles, C. W. The Wimsey Family: A Fragmentary History Compiled from Correspondence With Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Avon, 1979.

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I've been on something of a Dorothy L. Sayers kick recently.

All right, I'll admit what is known to most who know me and all careful Bardfilm readers: I'm on a multiple-decade Sayers kick. Part of that is, naturally enough, the notion that a great deal of Shakespeare makes its way into Sayers' novels (for which, q.v.). And part of is a Shakespearean approach to her characters. Even her villains (most of them, at any rate) are multi-faceted, three-dimensional, and deeply imagined.

Part of the most recent kick has been reading ancillary material that I hadn't encountered before. And part of that has been The Wimsey Family, an imagined but authentically-constructed partial history of the entire Wimsey family by C. W. Scott-Giles. Scott-Giles exchanged letters with Dorothy L. Sayers, proposing that she write a volume so that future generations of scholars would have a reference to turn to when the question "Lord Peter Wimsey: Man or Myth?" arose. The correspondence led to a friendship and then to collaboration—Scott-Giles illustrated D. L. Sayers' translation of The Divine Comedy.

It also led to The Wimsey Family. In reading through the volume, I found two places that are relevant to Shakespeare. In the first, we are (all to briefly) invited to consider whether one of the Dukes of Denver contemporary to Shakespeare was involved with the Earl of Oxford in writing the plays attributed to Shakespeare (Note: This extract comes from pages 21 and 22, here conflated for your reading convenience):

I would love the details of Miss Byrne's paper; I imagine them to be bitingly sarcastic about the Duke and the Earl and the Bard and the ridiculous notion that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays.

A bit later in the book (on pages 47 and 48, for those of you keeping score), we're told about a disagreement between the fourth Duke of Denver and John and William Shakespeare. This passage comes right after a section where the Duke, to make peace with Queen Elizabeth I, gives her an estate in Warwickshire:

A perpetual literary revenge sounds sweet indeed—and much less messy than a literal revenge in the form of a duel or the like.

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