The sunlight spilling onto author Marina Fiorato’s auburn locks and porcelain skin gives her a pre-Raphaelite air. I feel momentarily as though I am in Italy, speaking to one of the Renaissance heroines of her historical fiction novels. Marina’s books are steeped in Italian history and art, and her eyes light up as she tells me how, “all that burgeoning of art, and poetry, and every medium” that characterised Renaissance communities “seemed to have their moment.” She speaks of all the contemporary bloodletting, too, as well as the erudition and culture. “I think that’s what’s interesting. The juxtaposition of the culture and the savagery. That’s what the Renaissance is for me.” Marina’s latest novel, Beatrice and Benedick, narrates the past love aff air of Much Ado about Nothing’s well-loved pair in an homage to Shakespeare (who turned 450 this April).
Even this Shakespeare buff , who specialised in Shakespeare at the University of Venice after completing her History degree here at St. Peter’s college, tells me how the weight of Shakespeare’s genius was “very outfacing to start with”. Trying to take on his characters, she says, “felt like a very cheeky, audacious thing to do, because obviously they’re so wellestablished, and so well-written”.
Ditching her first draft because it sounded “too much like Blackadder”, she allowed herself, and the characters, a freer reign. A turbulent sea voyage in the middle act leads Beatrice and Benedick to realise their mutual love. “I think you have to have that sort of darkness”, she explains. “We all get tested. I mean a lot of people seem to be blessed and have a lot of luck, but everyone has a little bit of something or setback, so it felt true to write it that way.”
The stubborn nature and wit of Shakespeare’s Beatrice is seamlessly sustained, and we see just how tough and resilient she is. “She decided to stand up for Hero rather than take everything she’d ever wanted, and I liked that about her.” The motif of ink has a crucial importance in the lives of all the characters, but especially for Beatrice; she is encaged bythe lines of marriage contracts and certificates of virginity, yet liberated by the exchange of sonnets with Benedick.
Whilst I was reading the book, I wondered whether this signifi cance resonates with Marina’s own life. “Ink’s been my friend,” she tells me, “but for women in the past, ink has been a prison”. When writing about the marriage contract, she thought about the suppression of female agency in legal documents, which gets us both thinking about the interesting dichotomy even today. “Legally I’m Marina Bennett but when I
write, I am Marina Fiorato, so my freedom, my identity, is my maiden name.”
I ask Marina whether she thinks Beatrice would choose to change her name. “Not in a million years”, she says, like one would of a friend. It is this emotional investment in her characters’ lives that leaves her “feeling sad” having completed a book. The play’s Sicilian setting took the half-Venetian author out of her comfort zone, and drew her into the heart of the “very strange”cultural divide between North and South Italy. In Sicily, a woman’s reputation, “is and always has been extremely based around her chastity and her appearance,” she explains. “Women are much more emancipated now, but there are still behavioural codes that are placed upon them, and all of Hero’s tribulations in the book really feed into those Sicilian social codes,” which she says contrasts with a Northern play like Romeo and Juliet, “which is not really about Juliet’s chastity, but about rivalry and rival families.”When Marina did her research into clandestine marriages for her dissertation, she discovered the ordeals and public examinations that women like Beatrice underwent, to have their virginity checked. “You might even be in front of a court room and have somebody just stick their fingers in you, so it’s essentially an attack on your own personal space.”
I ask Marina whether as a writer of Renaissance Italy she found her time at Oxford formative, or whether the course was particularly parochial. “Well, it was both those things weirdly”, she says. “I was working on clandestine marriage with Martin Ingram at Brasenose, who was fantastic, but in a way, it was quite parochial and anglocentric, because I was dealing with particularly narrow bands of source material. But I was also working on Shakespeare as a historical source to see whether we could extrapolate any social codes from there, and Italy really spoke to Shakespeare, so he was sort of my conduit to the Italian Renaissance.”
She tells me how there has been a strong lobby in Sicily to name the Italian Michelangelo Crollalanza as the author of Shakespeare’s plays, having allegedly written the source material for Much Ado about Nothing before coming to England and anglicising his name. I press her for her own view. “I do like these authorship debates”, she tells me. “There’s so much evidence permeating all his Italian plays that he knew so much about Italy – things that you wouldn’t really know from hearsay…. although I wouldn’t really like to take Shakespeare away from England because I feel like he is such a massive part of us.” Her vivid and sensory descriptions of the Italian settings make me wonder whether she’d ever try her hand at poetry, after illustrating and reviewing films. “I’ve never really felt the call, but maybe one day” she says doubtfully. “But I think if I look back on any of my earlier eff orts it would be a bit embarrassing, so I’ll stick to books for now!”
