The London launch event is on Tuesday 29 May at the British Library.  The fabulous Will Self and Dr Bill Leahy will be joining me to discuss the book and the wider issues of Shakespeare, authorship and identity.  This is a public event, anyone can book a ticket, so do grab yours now if you’d like to coming along.  More here.

I’m typing this from a farmhouse in Norfolk waiting with baited breath for The Marlowe Papers to be reviewed on BBC Radio 4′s Saturday Review.  I’m a little nervous, especially given that I’m here with 15 members of my family who are insisting I listen to it with then, gathered round the wireless, rather than driving off on my own to listen to it in the car at the end of a country lane.   Added later:  very favourable, and a lively discussion. If you missed it live, you can listen to a recording of this programme via this link (13 mins in).

I’m going up to Salford next week in order to appear on Radio 3′s The Verb. One of the other confirmed guests is musical hero of my childhood, Gary Numan.  The programme will be broadcast on Friday 18 May at 10pm.  Listen to it live here or on BBC iPlayer for seven days afterwards here.

Critical response is one (nerve-wracking) thing, but reader response means a great deal to me.  I’ve been very heartened by reviews recently posted on the New Books Magazine website.   That something so dear to my heart for so long is now being treasured by others is a wonderful feeling.

Various literary festival appearances are in the pipeline and I’ll more details as soon as I have a moment.  They can be located easily by clicking the ‘Events’ tab below, or on the red dates on the calendar in the sidebar.   If you want more timely notification, do join the mailing list (click on the link, top right).

Finally, thank you everyone who has contributed to the excitement by spreading the word to friends and family, and posting reviews.  Your enthusiasm makes me very happy.

It is perhaps somewhat of a cliche that writers and wine have a special relationship. Like Reagan and Thatcher, like a sprain and brace, one provides appropriate support for the other.  If you want to have a successful book launch, and you’d like lots of writers to attend, you’d better provide wine.  Preferably free wine.  Writers appreciate free wine most of all because, contrary to public perceptions, many writers (unless they also have Proper Jobs) are strapped for cash.  Thus, understandably, all charitable contributions to the writerly gullet (both solid and liquid) are gratefully received.  Wine is perceived as more sophisticated than beer, and writers like to feel sophisticated.  I prefer a good still cider to a glass of wine any day of the week, but am considered an oddity among my writing colleagues.  In any case, my affinity for cider is largely explained by a previous affinity for wine.

The key to good writing is not to struggle, but to relax and allow it to flow.    A little wine can help.  Sometimes a lot of wine.   When the children were very small, by the end of the day (the only time I’d have left for writing), thanks to the antics of said small children, I’d often find myself at the very tense end of the relaxation spectrum.  By bedtime (or often, by teatime) I’d be rather wound up.  Wine seemed the fastest, easiest way to wind down, and I’d sometimes start my preparations ahead of time.  (Six isn’t too early to open a bottle, surely?)    After a glass or two, one is less hung up out getting it perfect (the enemy of creativity) and happier just to pour whatever comes out of the brain on to the page or screen.  Quality control would come the next day in a window of sobriety, but to loosen up the brain sufficiently that I could write anything, wine was a great catalyst.  Not that I’m advocating drunkenness.  But for me, at that rather unhappy time of my life and like many better writers before me, drunkenness was often the result.

Eventually I became happy, and started drinking more tea than wine.  For a couple of years, since, as Tolstoy observed, happiness writes white, the writing and drinking dried up in unison.  I was, however, left with one lasting memento of my drunk writing life.  For a couple of years, even the smallest sip of wine would create an instantaneous, banging headache.  My body wasn’t going to let me go down that particular road again.  Thus, it had helpfully developed a wine allergy.  I had to give up red wine completely, but after a few months I found I could drink a glass or two of white and only get the headache the next day.  Alright, so that headache would be a right-eye-focused migraine and last four 48 hours, but it was an improvement, and at launches where wine was the only tipple it would give me a small window of enjoyment.   Although they became milder over time, I  accepted them as an inevitable consequence to the consumption of wine.  Until, that is, a recent evening at Brighton’s Catalyst Club.

I’ve learnt many entertaining but useless facts at the Catalyst Club.   That the British postal system is still in a class of its own, and you can stamp and address almost anything – a pair of pants, an apple, a five pound note – and expect it to arrive.  That there is delightful Japanese woman who makes a living as a bum-reader (like a palm-reader, only with bums).  That the inventor of socks-with-sandals hailed from Brighton.  But at January’s Catalyst Club I learnt something incredibly useful: my wine allergy (which apparently is very common) is completely eliminated by taking the natural extract Quercetin an hour before imbibing.

The speaker was a wine lecturer from Brighton University.  She explained that it’s the histamine and tyramine in wines that people like me are allergic to.   Sparkling wines and champagnes are high in histamines.  (That’ll be right. Champagne and other sparklies are irresistible to me.)  She advised avoiding South African wines (which have the highest levels of histamines) and any bulk-shipped wines (these will be from far-flung places but have “bottled in the UK” on the label) because they have higher methanol levels… and it’s the methanol that will have you waking up in the middle of the night and find yourself unable to go back to sleep.   She explained it’s a myth that you shouldn’t mix red and white, but true that you shouldn’t mix grape and grain – distilled spirits have large amounts of methanol in them, and the ethanol in the wine delays the breakdown of methanol, leading you to be more badly affected.

All good advice, but the real miracle from my perspective was the Quercetin.  Quercetin is extracted from grape skins, so essentially it’s like putting the grapes back together again (I’m not allergic to grapes).  It’s also in the skins of all red and black fruit: cranberries, redcurrents and blueberries.  You can get Quercetin capsules from most health food shops – she advised those with wine allergies to take one an hour before drinking.   I haven’t remembered to do that yet, and have, on three occasions now, taken one with the first glass of wine.   And despite one of those occasions being my birthday, a time of considerable sparkling-alcohol indulgence, I haven’t had a headache since.

So bless you, Catalyst Club!  And if you’re a writer with a wine allergy, but hate drinking orange juice or water at book launches, I advise you pop down to Holland & Barrett right away.

Perhaps it’s an antidote. I like my Kindle and have nothing at all against e-books (unlike an author friend of mine who says the ‘e’ in ‘e-book’ stands for ‘evil’). Nevertheless I love books as objects, almost to the point of fetishism. I know I would want to own this one, even if it wasn’t mine.

How thrilling, after such a long time researching and writing something I wasn’t always convinced would see the light of day, let alone snare the interest of a major publisher, that the words are so appreciated that my publisher has created something truly exceptional to hold them.  So thank you, Carole and the design team at Sceptre, thank you Jon Contino, for creating this thing of extraordinary beauty.  It almost made me cry.

Some weeks had gone by and I’d twice e-mailed my agent with ideas of editors who might, nevertheless, be interested in taking a glance at it. No response. This was the engine cutting out and the vehicle coasting to a stop on the hard shoulder. Agents, I’m told, never ‘sack’ their authors. They just ignore them until they go away. So there I was with four-years’ worth of passion-project in my lap and no way forward. How did I turn things around so spectacularly?

Simply speaking, I changed my mind.

I have come to understand that the world reflects back to us what we are thinking/feeling, and what we expect. I have tested it repeatedly and found it to be true. You’ll probably have experienced it yourself on some level or other.

If you go into a party, for example, feeling nervous and worried that you won’t pass muster, people tend to pick up on it. Your nervousness means you commit a faux pas, get someone’s name wrong, over-laugh when someone makes a joke, drink too much to steady your nerves, speak out of turn, generally start looking like a bit of a tit. You’ll make several bad impressions and go home to torture yourself few a few days (weeks or month in some cases); it all panned out just as you feared. Maybe worse.

But walk into the same party feeling good about yourself, happy and confident. People pick up on this, too, and respond to this positive you very differently. This feeds your confidence further and conversations flow smoothly. Your timing is spot-on. The more successful you feel, the more people treat you as a successful person. They want to be associated with you. They make you offers. And you get invited to other parties.

Our minds are considerably more powerful then most people credit. The electro-magnetic waves of both heart and brain can be measured at distance with sensitive-enough equipment (and other sentient beings are certainly that). Our thoughts and feelings do not recognise the boundaries of our skulls; they are transmitted outward, and picked up on by others. Anyone who has done a few poetry readings will know you can ‘read’ the energy of a room; read whether it is warm and friendly or flat and cold: the combined effect of the thoughts and feelings of all those present. Just as you can feel eyes on the back of your head, turn round and pinpoint the starer with great accuracy, you can “feel” a person’s positive or negative expectations.

And if someone (let’s say, for point of argument, an author) has negative expectations, even though they are verbally expressing the most hopeful and positive language, others (including agents and publishers) will *feel* those expectations. And you know how it is when someone has the whiff of failure about them (even the expectation of failure). Another human, picking up that whiff, will conclude there must be good reason for it, and steer clear. As dogs are with smells, so human beings are with brainwaves.

My big issue was “being overlooked”. All my writing life I’d been runner-up, highly commended, bridesmaid-not-bride. I had numerous tales to tell of my near-misses. Being overlooked was both my most common professional experience and my greatest fear. Becoming conscious of this was key to changing it; and change it I would have to, if The Marlowe Papers was going to see the light of day in book form. I realised I was transmitting “I will be overlooked” very loudly, and (as always) the universe was obliging. Once upon a time changing a belief like “I am always overlooked” (which I rated as 100% true) would be so tough as to be impossible, but in recent years, brilliant tools for reprogramming the mind have emerged, and the one I have found the most powerful is EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique, sometimes called ‘tapping’).

Working on it in daily half-hour sessions over a week or so, I found “I am always overlooked” was programmed into me (as so many things are) during early childhood. My parents divorced when I was rather young, and were too involved in their own dramas to pay much attention to me at certain times. Memories that arose (things I had long buried) included my Mum forgetting to pick me up after a drama lesson (age 9) or crying alone in the garden (age 6) after the cattery ‘lost’ our cat. These would have seemed relatively unimportant things to adults going through a marriage breakup, but to a child, they were huge, and they taught me (along with around a dozen other incidents) “I am always overlooked”. This the message I had been transmitting to others all my adult life. And just the first of several limiting beliefs that had held my writing career permanently in the starting blocks.

A week or so after I’d started clearing this belief I went to someone else’s book launch and – it made me laugh – I’ve never had so much recognition in my life. A stranger in front of me turned around and said “You’re Ros Barber and you wrote the Embassy Court poems. I love those poems”. At the bar someone else I failed to recognise (an editor) reminded me we had met years previously and then recounted to me the name, year, and first line of a poem that was Highly Commended in the 1986 National Poetry competition. And two more people came up to prove conclusively that I was no longer the person that was overlooked.

I changed not just this, but everything about my mindset that was keeping success at bay. With EFT, I was able to do it faster than you can probably imagine. And then … and only then… I found a new agent.

I have pledged to divulge further secrets to success over the coming weeks and months. I blog irregularly now (so many projects on the go!) but promise I will be back with more shortly. In the meantime, check out what EFT can do for you at BeTheWriterYouDreamOfBeing.com I agree it’s an weird-looking procedure, but if you want to remove limiting beliefs, there is really nothing more powerful.

Here we are at the end of another year.  But not any old year.  For me, 2011 was exceptional. In March, I landed the major book deal I had dreamt about since I was 9 year years old.  In May, I was awarded the doctorate I had worked solidly towards for four years and wanted since my early twenties.  In November,  Olivier- and Tony- winning actor Mark Rylance (currently wowing critics and audiences in Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre) rang me up; when we met, he offered to look at my play script.  Three weeks ago I was announced joint winner of the Calvin and Rose G Hoffmann Prize for a distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe.  And to round the year off nicely, I received the bound proof of The Marlowe Papers just before Christmas.    Full of typesetter’s errors it may be, but it is still utterly beautiful. 2012 looks very promising indeed.

Anyone who has known me (or of me) for a while will appreciate that something very different is happening.  Up to this point I was the author of three collections of poetry, selling only a few hundred copies each;  a University of  Sussex tutor in creative writing for 12 years for the now (sadly defunct) CCE and, despite some prizes and readings now and again, very much a minor figure on the British literary scene.   But in 2012  my verse novel  is being launched by Sceptre (the literary arm of Hodder and Stoughton) in the UK and St Martin’s Press (part of Macmillan) in the US.   On the back of Sceptre’s proof copy it says, ‘Discover the literary debut of the year’.   So what happened?

Hard work happened, of course, long hours at the desk doing (blessedly) something I love. But my dedication to writing hasn’t changed in over a decade.   And this time last year the picture didn’t look at all rosy.   There was no money coming in to this household of seven, and the credit facility I had utilised in order to write the book was coming to an end.  I calculated that  in six months, if nothing changed, we’d be homeless.   My marriage had broken under the strain of my obsessive dedication to the book; my husband and I had agreed to separate.  And if anything could be worse than that, my agent of ten years was ignoring my e-mails.  ‘It’s beautiful, and like nothing I’ve ever read before,’ she said of The Marlowe Papers ms.  But she couldn’t see any commercial potential in it.    I knew I had to turn everything around, and I didn’t have much time.  I did, however, have some very powerful tools at my disposal, and in January, I engaged them fully – with, as is now obvious, spectacular results.

I have very good friends that are struggling right now; creatively, financially, and relationship-wise, just as I did for many years.  And here’s me, with every part of my life (including my marriage) not only back  on track but heading for something rather incredible.    So this morning I thought to myself, I’ll share what I know.   Rather than start handing out fish (when the fish come in), I’ll see if I can’t teach a few people to fish so they can do for themselves what I’ve done for myself this year, by sharing my story.

But not now.  Now is simply the moment for champagne.

enclosing his teacher, enclosing the autumn air.
She blames no-one, knowing she cannot blame
a boy that isn’t really anywhere.

He is more than alone.  While other children pair
off by the fence and a penalty kicker takes aim,
he is walking a line.  His footsteps mark a square

like the edge of a board, a game of solitaire.
He doesn’t seem to know another game.
A boy that isn’t really anywhere

is on the perimeter.  You’d think he doesn’t care
about being different.  But still, and just the same,
he is walking a line; his footsteps mark a square,
a boy, that isn’t really anywhere.

Previously published in Poetry Review and The School Year (MacMillan)

Why does this woman waste her time on a 400-year-old dead bloke?

The photo?  I want to draw you in against your better nature.  Even though you fundamentally disagree with where I’m coming from, or can’t for the life of you understand why I’m spending my time on this rubbish.   Because I appreciate most of my friends, and the visitors to this website, are orthodox in their Shakespeare leanings, and I entirely respect that, so rather than frighten you off with a more conventional ‘Who is Shakespeare?’  kind of image I thought I’d give you a rather arty naked lady.

But it’s interesting, isn’t it?  The whole Shakespeare authorship controversy has been hotting up over the last month.  And I’ve been keeping (relatively) quiet.  Not because I’ve nothing to say on the matter, but because internet forums, blogs, online newspaper comments sections, are rarely the place to make good arguments.  People feel very strongly on this matter, are often ill-informed and full of bluster, and I’d rather lay out my thinking in book form.  It can’t be done in a blog post, or an online retort.

The cause of all the recent excitement was the release of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous.  The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust acted angrily to this piece of Hollywood hokum (which has not yet reached Brighton after a scaled back release, and possibly may not do so until in DVD form) by blacking out Shakespeare’s name on pub and road signs across Warwickshire, covering up his statue, taking out 1/6 page colour ads in the Daily Telegraph (spotted over someone’s shoulder on a plane) and releasing a new website where 61 people, including Stephen Fry, Prince Charles, and the two people whom others might hold responsible for the fact that I have a PhD – supposedly speak up for the traditional candidate.

I say supposedly, because not every response actually does that, even if they don’t realise it.   Anyone who believes Shakespeare of Stratford was the same man as the author William Shakespeare naturally conflates the two, so items offered as evidence supporting the Stratford man’s authorship are often only evidence that there was an author known to world as William Shakespeare… which no Shakespeare sceptic disputes.   Our future king, for example, speaks about the author’s interest in royalty, and how he therefore must have met both Elizabeth and James – without pointing to any primary source evidence that the author was the man from Stratford.  As you might expect (he is heir to the throne, not a professional academic) and because there isn’t any (the whole reason the Shakespeare Authorship Question exists in the first place).   A piece of embargoed news will soon be added HERE…

This month also sees the release of Richard Paul Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide To Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels (Harper Collins), the product of twenty year’s research.  The paperback’s not out in the UK until next month, but I’m already reading it on my Kindle, and it makes fascinating reading. I was aware of previous research on the Italian content of the plays, specifically Ernest Grillo’s and Roger Prior’s. But up until now, when it came to demonstrating to the lay person why sceptics claim there is ‘reasonable doubt‘ about the traditional authorship attribution, there has been nothing so comprehensive or accessible as this book.   Did the person who wrote these plays have first person knowledge of the Italian cities he wrote about?  The kind of knowledge one could only get through being there, rather than gleaning from tavern conversation or book?  Read Roe’s book and make up your own mind.

As a result of the recent kerfuffle I’ve received a few interesting invitations, not least of which is to speak on the Shakespeare authorship question at Sussex tomorrow in a lunchtime debate organised for English PostGrads  (B274, 1pm, if you qualify).  I am speaking for ten minutes on ‘Why we should ask the question’.  Then Dr Peter Langman will speak for the same length of time on “Why we shouldn’t”.   This is where we’re at in academia right now, and I must say, I find it rather heartening.  To question the authorship of Shakespeare has long been an academic taboo, and the whole thrust of my research has been to argue that it is a taboo that needs to be broken.    To debate it at all is a step in the right direction.

Though a great deal is going on in my life right now, much of it is of an embargoed nature, so my communications for now will remain sporadic.  But one piece of news I can share is that after four car-free years I am finally back behind the wheel of an old Ford Escort convertible.   I really couldn’t be happier.

As I originally conceived it, The Marlowe Papers was supposed to have been a stash of papers written by Marlowe in Elizabethan cipher which I ‘translated’ into contemporary English.  I didn’t want the language to be mock-Tudor, but nor did I want it to be anachronistic.  Nothing, I hoped, would leap out as being too modern.   Of course, I couldn’t stay in the poetic flow while looking up every word, and the work of telling the story effectively in blank verse was work enough, so very often I’d plain forget to consult the OED (online access to which was one of the happiest benefits of my being a student at the time).  But after my own editing passes and those of five writer friends willing to offer opinions in return for an early glimpse of the book I’d been banging on about for four years, I didn’t think there’d be many linguistic wristwatch-equivalents left.

How wrong I was!

And how blessed I find myself in having an editor of Carole’s calibre, who can scent out a word from the mid-17th century (or later) from ten paces.  Of course, now that they’re pencilled to my attention, I can’t understand how so many slipped past me (and my writer friends) without notice.

Let’s start with camouflage (1917), twice.  (Clearly a word that was key to the English winning the First World War.)  The excellent Evolving English exhibition, which I visited at the British Library earlier this year, had already alerted me to my error but I suppose I made a note in a notebook and, not being a person who submits easily to systems, forgot afterwards to read through my notes and thus change the text.

But Carole had found dozens and dozens of others,  some of them embarrassingly obvious, others strangely illuminating.  No-one could be befuddled or flummoxed until the 19th century, nor could a person complain of boredom until 1852.  (Victorian industrialisation and suddenly a few wealthy folk have time on their hands like never before, I guess.)  But who would have thought that 16th century folk couldn’t “sober up”; indeed, that no-one could do so until 1820?   I wonder if that phrase was coined only with improved sanitation; for Elizabethan town water not being safe to drink, many Elizabethans – young and old, day and night, drank only beer.

We can tell something about a culture from its language,  and though apparently it is untrue that eskimos have a larger number of words for snow than the rest of us, it struck me that pretty much every interesting way of saying something is ‘easy’ has etymological roots in the 20th century.   A cinch, a snap, a breeze, a piece of cake – all come from the primary era of “labour-saving devices”.  We didn’t even call a light wind ‘a breeze’ until the early 17th Century.  I guess Elizabethan life just wasn’t that easy.  They probably had half a dozen words for difficult that we can no longer find a use for.  At several points in The Marlowe Papers I had characters give snappy 20th century phrases for ease, and every one of them had to be cut.  Shame. But exactly as it should be.

There was some difficulty in the alcohol department too.  Brandy existed (thanks to Dutch merchants) but was referred to as brandwine or brandwijn.   Stick that in the text and watch your reader get thrown as if from a lively colt.   Sherry also might be drunk, but as sherris.  We let that stand as close enough.    Elizabethans would refer to ‘spirits’ only in the sense of ghostly apparitions.  So every drop of the harder stuff has become ‘liquor’.  Which sounds strangely modern and American (but the excellent Searchable Shakespeare gives 22 occurences of it).

The first 100 or so pages of these edits were terribly hard going.  Only a couple of words or phrases needed changing every page or so, yet I found even with online thesaurus, OED, and searchable Shakespeare to hand, I could still take 20-30 minutes finding a workable substitute (that also scanned – sometimes a line or two needed a rewrite in order to maintain the iambic pentameter).  I wasn’t making my target of 35 pages a day, and was beginning to wonder if I would make my expected delivery date.  But gradually the pencil marks thinned out, until I celebrated a run of 20 spotless pages.  It became clear that the deeper I had gone into my Elizabethan world, the more I had become naturally imbued in the appropriate vocabulary.

Yes, no doubt, there will still be anomalies, and I expect people will want to write to me about them when the book is published.  But I think we’re at the point now where only the most exquisite pedant is likely to be jarred.  And I don’t mind that, truly.   Everyone needs a hobby.     But as I slide these tatty pages unto their jiffy bag to return the typescript for its next round of edits (copy editing) I breathe thanks to the incredible team at Sceptre – and most especially to Carole – who are helping me to make this book as good as it can possibly be.

During the fifty years from its writing to the closure of the theatres in 1642, there was no play more popular than Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.  No Shakespeare play could compete with it. No play of the period was more often revived, or proved more consistent box office.  This season’s spectacular production of  Doctor Faustus at The Globe helps you understand why.  Spectacular, you ask?  Have I not seen the mixed reviews?  Indeed I have, and I was prepared to be disappointed.  I can only conclude that the authors of one or two sniffy reviews in the broadsheets got the posh seats (too distant from the action) and were expecting this tragicomic confection to come out a shade darker.

Marlowe, deeply scholarly and fascinated by questions of theology, nevertheless understood theatre like no other dramatist of his era, and in Doctor Faustus, fused depth and spectacle into the most profound theatrical magic.     The magic of this production – in a play centred on the pursuit of magic – is most magnificently experienced as a groundling, where misdirection combined with a more limited perspective means the ample use of trapdoors is easily missed.  We are as shocked as Faustus to find Mephistopheles calmly standing at the front of a stage that was previously empty.

The stage is rarely empty; this production is a fine ensemble piece, and whereas the text opens with Faustus alone in his study, director Matthew Dunston fills it with devilish dark-goggled scholars, choreographed bearers of the classical tomes that Faustus consults and rejects.  From this opening onwards, the play foregrounds the considerable comedy available in this play to both director and actors.     It is often said – quite wrongly – that Marlowe couldn’t write comedy; indeed this is one of the common arguments against his authorship of the Shakespeare plays.  But this misapprehension may stem largely from the fact that we meet Marlowe mostly on the page, and through the mist of the Marlowe myth: a troubled, intense, perhaps violent youth.    Marlowe’s plays, when staged are invariably much funnier – wittier – than the text makes apparent.     Neither is the comedy contained only within the clown scenes as some scholars imagine (and some of them so convinced of Marlowe’s inability to write comedy that they assume the comic scenes in Faustus were inserted by some other writer, usually Nashe).    This production ensures the wit of Marlowe’s pen is apparent from the outset.

Paul Hilton is an engaging and likeable Faustus whose energy, hunger for knowledge, and sense of fun run are exhausted over the twenty-four years from contract to soul delivery. But it is the patient, comradely evil of Arthur Darvill’s Mephistopheles that truly captivates.     Felix Scott makes a meaty role of Wagner who, doubling as the chorus, tops, tails, and guides us through this reinvented morality play.  Pearce Quigley is a superb Robin.  And tell me his Robin isn’t utterly Shakespearean.  But as I said before, this was truly an ensemble piece; every member of the cast a significant contributor to the pleasurable whole. Never have Marlowe’s words been more vividly alive than in the staging of the Seven Sins; the essence of each sin so magnificently and grotesquely embodied that it proves contagious.  And the scene much funnier, of course, than it reads from the page.

I’ve seen more than half a dozen  Shakespeare plays at The Globe in the last few years – all excellent – but have not experienced one so start-to-finish entertaining, so captivating, as their Doctor Faustus. I attended this time with an experienced theatre practitioner (director/actor) who was blown away by it too, so I feel reassured this is not merely a symptom of my Marlowe obsession.  Needless to say I shall be going again, dragging friends if possible.

No question:  forget those sniffy reviews and give yourself a treat. if you haven’t seen it, do so before it ends on October 2nd.  In fact go now, before the September chill sets in.  Go with a friend. Go as a groundling; it’s a fiver, and you’ll be in the thick of the magic.  Pray it doesn’t rain, but take a mackintosh.  And make sure you avoid the horse courser’s socks.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t spend much time on it, but every now and then I have a curious glance and it’s usually so disturbing that I don’t look again for a few weeks (and then the urge strikes me and I can’t help myself. A bit like the urge to take the dressing off every now and then to peek at the festering wound.)

The search terms are illuminating.  ’When did the poet Ros Barber die?’ was a bit of a shock at first.  And then I figured that, coming from someone without much connection to the fairground goldfish stall of living  poets,  it was logical:

1. she’s a poet
2. I’ve heard of her
3. the only other poets I’ve heard of are dead
4. ergo, she is dead.

Maybe without the ergo bit, as I assume the searcher was young and without Latin.    It seems the idea that I’m dead is reasonably widespread, because certain other search terms are in the past tense: ‘how many children did Ros Barber have?’ and ‘did Ros Barber have children?’.  The children question comes up in the present tense too.  Why are my child-bearing activities relevant, I wonder.  Do people ask this question of Simon Armitage or Roger McGough?

I particularly liked ‘is Ros Barber creative?’   Presumably anyone asking a question about me has knocked into poem or two.  Yet they had to ask.  I guess it’s a subjective thing.

And I end up asking my own questions. Why would three people search for ‘information about ros barber’, but two of them leave instantly and one stay only seven seconds?  Did they not see the About or Books or Public Art or Research links?  Am I not the Ros Barber they’re looking for?  (Could be. There’s a mathematician in Warwick and a photographer in Coalville).

Someone wants to know if I have Aspergers.  (No, I don’t).   Did I win any awards (when I was alive).  What was my childhood like?  Am I Scottish?    (No, that’ll be Ross Barber, the other photographer). What is my goal in life?  (I’m alive. Hooray!  But can I have more than one goal, please?)

‘What are Ros Barber’s poems about’?    No idea.  Read a few and find out?

Then we have ‘ros barber personal life’, ‘ros barber family background’,  ’who is ros barber’s husband’, ”names of ros barber’s children’, ”ros barber phone number brighton’ and ‘what is ros barber’s address’.  Okay, I’m calling the police.  Only kidding.  But people, can you be a little bit less …. creepy?

‘What does Ros Barber do today’? / ‘What is Ros Barber currently doing’ –  Generally, see Twitter and Facebook.  Specifically, I’m reflecting on the fact that, though I adore the internet and everything it can bring me, it remains a bizarre, nosey, and occasionally rude-seeming place.  I have very mixed feelings about being open here:  I shut down the original Shallowlands blogs because I felt over-exposed and bombarded.    My fault, I know. I was over-sharing. There was a time I’d tell my life story to a stranger at a bus stop.

It’s an age-old story: the writer who wants to put their writing out into the world, the public who wants to know all the sordid personal details behind the writing.  Previous generations of writers – before the internet – could be a lot more oblivious to the curiosity of strangers.  Of course, I could choose not to have a website, but the fact is I’m happy to engage with people who like what I’m doing (or what I’ve done).  I don’t mind interacting a bit (so long as it doesn’t turn disturbing or time-consuming).  But odd search activity has definitely hotted up in recent weeks and part of me is thinking of retreating to the burrow and pulling the shutters down.  I’ve already deleted a few posts.

So play nicely, people.  When this writer does die – should you still be interested then (and aren’t dead poets the bomb?) – you can pick over the bones at your leisure.  Until then, I hope you’ll simply enjoy what I write.