So left with nothing to expand the story, I came back to where I started with the inspiration in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck, Bottom, and the Rude Mechanicals. See, Pocket himself, although he first appears in the context of King Lear in Fool, was born of Puck and Nick Bottom. His name, in fact, is a fusion of Puck and Bottom. Like the Puck, he is a rascal, a servant with more presence than his masters, a catalyst for the action, and, like Nick Bottom, he is rather inexplicably used and abused by powerful females, and not entirely against his will. The Mechanicals, the ragtag group of well-intentioned working-class dolts, are more or less the team that Pocket has to put together to accomplish his mission. His Seven Samurai, his Dirty Dozen, his Impossible Mission Force. With a monkey. The key, then, was to give them a mission to accomplish. So, as one does, I murdered the Puck.
He’s everywhere, at warp speed, with unimaginable magical powers, yet beyond seducing the odd joiner’s wife or shagging the odd marmot, he seems rather humble and subservient. It could not stand, and leaving Puck and Pocket too long in the same story is one rascal too many, so down goes Puck. So everyone has a mission: find the killer.
I am always drawn to Shakespeare’s subservient characters: Emilia, Iago’s wife in Othello; Nerissa, Portia’s maid in The Merchant of Venice; Shylock’s daughter, Jessica; even Kent, in King Lear (and Oswald in Lear makes for a terrific minor villain). They’re more often than not more clever and more noble than those they serve, and often, they are the only speakers of truth in a play, yet they function as foils, sometimes little more than placeholders. And there’s no more interesting group of foils to me than the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I brought them into Pocket’s mission force to sort of explore their own agendas.
I sense you thinking, “What about the squirrels?”
The squirrels are mine, not Shakespeare’s. These days I do my writing at a small getaway hovel in the redwoods, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco, a place I affectionately call the Squirrel Ranch. The room where I write is three stories up and surrounded by redwood trees, so I quite literally work among the squirrels. I started feeding them a few years ago, so now at any given time there are one or two fluffy-tailed rodents out on the deck crunching away on peanuts or walnuts or sometimes pizza, pretending they don’t see me or the other squirrel sitting right there. (Gray squirrels are solitary feeders, but they know a good deal when they see it, so even if it’s against their nature, they’ll put up with each other if there’s a free lunch. Authors are like that as well.) I guess they sort of worked their way into the story, because it occurred to me that there would be some fun possibilities if the fairies changed into squirrels during the day. So there you have it. The elements that went into making Shakespeare for Squirrels.
In addition to the characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I also modelled Blacktooth and Burke on Dogberry and Verges, the men of the watch from Much Ado About Nothing, but upon rereading Much Ado in preparation, I found I quite liked Dogberry, and although a nitwit, he endeavored to be virtuous, so I changed the names to allow Blacktooth and Burke to fall on the more villainous side of the fence. Rumour, Painted Full of Tongues, the narrator, is drawn from Henry IV, Part 2, where he is, indeed, described as being “painted full of tongues” but exhibits none of the supernatural powers nor hubris with which I have endowed him. There have been lines and phrases drawn from the other plays as well, but as I forgot to make note of them, you may bask in your own cleverness if you recognized a line.