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A weekly look at creativity, arts, and culture in southwest Michigan, hosted by Zinta Aistars.Fridays in Morning Edition at 7:50am and at 4:20pm during All Things Considered.

Art Beat: Another Shakespeare

Author Grace Tiffany
Grace Tiffany
Author Grace Tiffany

Grace Tiffany is a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama at Western Michigan University. She is the author of seven novels, dealing with themes surrounding William Shakespeare and others in his circle. Her new novel, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (Harper, 2025), explores the life of his daughter Judith and the painful fracturing of a family caught up in the political and religious struggles of the English Civil War.

A conversation with Grace Tiffany

“Because Shakespeare seemed like the consummate English author, it seemed to me that if you were going through the trouble of getting a doctorate in English literature, it might as well be in Shakespeare,” Tiffany says. “My enthusiasm came more from having decided to focus on him and write about him, then I began to discover all kinds of interesting facts having to do with his dramatic creations. That’s what we know about; we don’t know an awful lot about his personal life. We know a lot about his influence in the theatre, so that’s been my focus for three decades now.”

With that focus, Tiffany has edited Shakespeare's The Tempest and written articles and nonfiction books about Renaissance literature, as well as seven novels, including Will (Berkley 2004), My Father Had a Daughter (Berkley 2003), Ariel (HarperCollins 2005), The Turquoise Ring (Berkley 2005), Paint (Bagwyn Books 2013), Gunpowder Percy (Bagwyn, 2016), and The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (forthcoming from Harper in 2025).

In this newest novel, Tiffany has written about Judith, Shakespeare’s daughter.

“I chose Judith partly because there is very little that we know about her,” Tiffany says. “That presents a nice, blank canvas that, if you are writing fiction, you can embellish and make things up. That doesn’t make her an unusual person of her time period—we don’t know a lot about people who lived at that time. This is over 400 years ago.”

The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter is the sequel to Tiffany’s My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth. In the sequel, Judith is a mature woman, an apothecary or medicine woman, who must leave her home in Stratford to escape arrest for witchcraft. She travels with a Puritan woman and her child for company, encountering past romantic partners and a civil war between Royalists and Roundheads.

Tiffany’s book launch will be at Kazoo Books, 2413 Parkview Avenue, on Saturday, February 8, at 1 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Listen to WMUK's Art Beat every Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 4:20 p.m.

Zinta Aistars is our resident book expert. She started interviewing authors and artists for our Arts & More program in 2011.