An Interview with Raphael Sone

by Gordon Nary

Gordon: Raphael, you speak French and Spanish.

Raphael: That’s right.

Gordon: I take it, then, from the accent on the “o”, that your surname comes from either of those languages?

Raphael: Sóne is neither French nor Spanish. It’s Bakossi – that’s the name of the tribe in Cameroon which I come from as well as the language spoken by the tribe. I put an accent on the “o” in order to enable speakers of European languages – who don’t usually pronounce words letter by letter – to say the name correctly. It’s two syllables with the stress on the first one (sów nay). That means it should rhyme with the Japanese Nakasone, and not the word “bone.”

Gordon: So you were born in Cameroon.

Raphael: Yes, I was.

Gordon: But you’re a Canadian citizen. When did you emigrate to Canada?

Raphael: In March 1977 – which I regretted very much.

Gordon: Why?

Raphael: Because I missed the Montreal Summer Olympics by just a few months.

Gordon: Where in Cameroon were you born?

Raphael: Kumba – in the South-West Province.  Kumba is a bustling city now. But when I was growing up in the 1950s, it was an idyllic small town.

Gordon: What was your boyhood like?

Raphael: Very happy, very carefree, especially after I left home to attend Bishop Rogan College. My father, a catechist, was a stricter disciplinarian than any of the priests and nuns who were associated with Birocol, as the college is affectionately known to its students and alumni. It was a joy to find myself in an environment where one didn’t get caned for not toeing the line. Bishop Rogan College, which is actually the equivalent of a secondary school, is in different city. It’s the minor seminary of the Catholic diocese of Buea.

Gordon: Would you say that your religious upbringing influenced your choice of the subject of your historical novel, The Corisco Conspiracy?

Raphael: Very much so. The conspiracy of my title is the Gunpowder Plot, which one can describe as the climax of the history of the Catholic Church in England, and not be accused of exaggerating. Just imagine what would have happened had the plot not been foiled in the nick of time.

Gordon: When you say “Gunpowder Plot,” I think of Jacobean England.  What did Corisco have to do with the plot?

Raphael: In my novel, Corisco (an island similar to Prospero’s in The Tempest) was where the conspirators met for the first time – exactly twenty years before the night on which Guy Fawkes was caught red-handed waiting to light the fuse of the barrels of gunpowder that would have blown up the houses of Parliament with King James the First in attendance. I also wanted to make it obvious from my title that part of the story took place outside of England and that Shakespeare was a world traveller. Incidentally, he marries twice in the novel. His second wife, a native of Corisco, is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. And Corisco is also where the second leading character in the story comes from.

Gordon: You describe yourself as a Shakespeare lover. When did you fall in love with the Bard?

Raphael: During my first year in the seminary. One evening in our refectory I got into a conversation with a senior student who was studying for an English literature examination. He described one of the books he was reading for the exam as a headache because the English sounded like a foreign language. He let me read it for a few minutes and, right away, I was captivated by what our Spanish teacher called “la musica de la lengua.” I had been handed The Merchant of Venice. Ever since that introduction, I’ve been addicted to the music of Shakespeare’s language.

Gordon: So much so that you’ve written a novel in which he is not only the protagonist but the narrator as well. How did that come about?

Raphael: It was a logical step from enjoying his poetry to wanting to know about him as a man. In my quest for information about his private life, I discovered that there was virtually none. Much of what historians and his biographers have written about him is pure conjecture based on fewer than a dozen pieces of authenticated documents and each author’s interpretations of his plays and sonnets. Besides being a dramatist and the co-manager of a theatre company, he did some acting. Compelling evidence exists to show that his father was a recusant – a closet Catholic, as we would say today. Remember that we’re talking about an era in which letting people know that one was English and a practising Roman Catholic was as dangerous as pointing a loaded pistol to one’s own head. What if, as a member of an oppressed religious minority (and that’s what adherents to the old religion were in Elizabethan and Jacobean England), he took his acting career a step farther and played the role of a real-life spy in the Catholic underground? Christopher Marlowe, one of his rivals in the entertainment industry, is known to have been a government secret agent. What if Will kept his private life strictly private because he was, in today’s espionage jargon, a counterintelligence operative. It was in mulling over those questions that I got the idea for my novel.

Gordon: And you cast him as a lieutenant in the Spanish navy.

Raphael: And one of the ringleaders of the Gunpowder Plot.

Gordon: What made you think Shakespeare could have been involved in the plot?

Raphael: The fact that there isn’t a shred of evidence to prove without a doubt where he was or what he was doing between the birth of his first child in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1583 (when he was only 19) and the day, nine years later, that he was accused of plagiarism by Robert Greene, a London-based author. With that thought in the back of my mind, it was easy to picture him being busy in the Catholic underground all those years as a “Jesuit messenger” – that’s my job title in the novel for a Vatican spy. I imagined that he went on secret missions for the crypto-Catholic Anglican bishop of Winchester. He worked as a recruitment officer for the Spanish navy, fought with Catholic Spain against Protestant England in the Armada of 1588, and was privy to several attempts to abduct or assassinate Queen Elizabeth (after Pope Pius the Fifth excommunicated her in 1570). He travelled to Corisco on one of his missions. And that is where he met the men and women with whom he initiated the chain of events which culminated with the famous gunfight in which he and a few of his co-conspirators were literally smoked out of a mansion in Staffordshire by the king’s militia on the 8th of November 1605.

Gordon: You sound as though you were stating historical facts. But most of what you’re saying is fiction, isn’t it?

Raphael: Fiction based on well-known historical events. Records exist to suggest that the Bard might have attended a Jesuit-run “English college” in France and that he was registered twice in a hospice in Rome – all under false names. “English colleges” on the Continent were the Catholic seminaries which trained the young Englishmen who returned home as covert missionaries. I leave it up to the reading public to judge for themselves whether my conjectures are far-fetched; and whether The Corisco Conspiracy, which was originally entitled The War Memoirs of William Shakespeare, and which I wrote for the sole purpose of entertaining my audience, is any less plausible than the guesswork of his biographers.

Gordon: Raphael, thank you for telling us a little bit about yourself and for sharing your thought-provoking perspective on the life and times of your hero, William Shakespeare.

Raphael: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to converse with you, Gordon. I feel honoured.