Shakespeare wormed his way into my manuscript. I already had a connection with the Bard and chances that he would knock on my novel’s door were big, if only because one of my main sparring partners for this project is the playwright George Isherwood, who wrote Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits back in the 70s, and recently the one-man version of Othello and the hilarious one-man-and-a-rope version of King Lear, which I saw in tryout before I left for San Francisco.   The knock came and there he was. The Bard. With Hamlet in his hand, no less. Or rather, Ophelia. Of course we all know about Ophelia’s fate. Not pretty. Not pretty at all and when she slipped into the novel, my initial thought was: couldn’t you’ve dealt me a more uplifting…