Diversion Books asked Seth Margolis:

The Semper Sonnet begins with a rather startling scene: the great Queen Elizabeth the First giving birth to a son. How did you come up with this idea?

Seth Margolis There's always been some debate about why Elizabeth never married and never had a child. Was it political? Personal? Some at the time even thought it was medical. It's also been a source of frustration as well as debate that England's greatest monarch never passed on her gifts -- in fact, the Tudor dynasty died with her. So I thought it would be interesting to relieve the frustration by beginning my novel with one hypothetical (very hypothetical) explanation: she did have a child, prior to becoming queen, and the childbirth experience was so awful she vowed never to risk it again. Because I was writing a thriller, set half in the present day, half in Elizabethan England, I had to come up with a way to tie the birth to both eras. The answer was a long-long Shakespeare sonnet that hints at Elizabeth's secret ... and even darker secrets with serious implications for the present day.

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