Book
collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.
The narrator, whom we quickly learn not to trust too deeply, is an old
man in plague-ravaged Restoration London, tortuously assembling his biography
as he slides "off this mortal coil." As a much younger man, Robert
Reynolds, aka Pickleherring, had been a teen-aged cross-dressing member
of Shakespeare's original band of thespians, and as such seems the perfect
insider to give fresh perspectives to timeless Shakespearean queries:
Did the Bard write his own plays? What was his relationship with
Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe? Who was the celebrated Dark Lady
of the love sonnets?
Yet the reader is constantly challenged to evaluate the nature and
quality of the narrator's insights and motivations, making this Pickleherring
a comic doppelganger of Charles Kinbote, the smarmy footnote-wielding aesthete
in Nabokov's PALE FIRE. But whereas Kinbote may or may not be a murderer,
no such tragic fate awaits our gender-bending narrator. His fate
is comic,
and his gender confusion an artifact of his being compelled to play
all the female roles when he was treading the boards.
This is an audaciously funny novel, one whose primary love is the rich
language and sensitive humanity of Shakespeare's plays. If you want
a bare facts biography, seek out W. H. Rowse, but if your taste runs to
well-imagined re-constructions of emotional realities, this irreverent
novel is truer than its less daring counterparts.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard SeltzerPublished by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
The Readers' Corner and
Writers Showcase
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
Book
collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|