Inspiration: Miranda's Tempest

'Widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.' That's Shakespeare, obviously, from his Wikipedia entry. I wonder what he'd make of the internet. And I wonder what he'd make of all the reinterpretations of his work today, the movie versions, the feminist versions, the queer versions, the postcolonial versions, the erotic versions... I tend to think that he'd be a Tarantino or a Scorsese if he were around today.

When it comes to gender identities and sexual politics, he did a fair bit of subversion of the norms himself. Lots of cross dressing, lots of cheeky banter, lots of people running off to places where the normal rules of society don't apply, like the forest of Arden in As You Like It.

In my retelling of The Tempest, the first of three short stories in my new ebook, out now from House of Erotica, Miranda has secretly learned her father, Prospero's, magic from his books. And Caliban has taught her the more 'feminine' earth magic of his mother, the witch Sycorax. Uniting the two, she intends to escape the island with Caliban, the forbidden lover to whom she loves to submit. Things get a little more interesting when they find a bedraggled Ferdinand in their path, who is immediately dazzled by Miranda's beauty.

It was Ferdinand who really inspired the story, with passages like this: 
       My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.
       My father's loss, the weakness which I feel, 
       The wreck of all my friends, or this man's threats,
       To whom I am subdued, are but light to me,
       Might I but through my prison once a day
       Behold this maid.

He seems such a sweetie, and naturally submissive apparently. So I took the opportunity afforded by today's somewhat more liberal attitudes to literature to have him render some services to both Caliban and Miranda.

If you're fond of Shakespeare, my story As You Like It, in the Xcite anthologies Past Pleasures and Cherry Ripe, sees the bard submit to the crop of a woman who wants to act in his plays. 

And if you like subverting the bard yourself, there's currently a call for submissions from Storm Moon Press for an anthology called Shakespearotica: Queering the Bard, deadline 1st April 2013.

You can get your hands on Miranda's Tempest: Three Classic Tales with a Kinky Twist at amazon.co.uk or amazon.com, at Barnes & Noble for your Nook, or at kobo, amongst other places.