The Shakespeare Secret, the novel…

…was given to me by a friend who had the same idea for another medium and then discovered the book. He read it and his after the first 200 pages or so it got better review it didn’t seem particularly thrilling a thriller. But it is Shakespeare based so I took it and filed it under to be read.

Well, over a two month period i skimmed exasperatedly, half read seriously, and finally cajoled the book to an end. And there are just under 500 pages for the turning.

Any serious scholar of Sh will immediately laugh aloud at the plot. Hell, there was enough foofaffery when the Durham First Folio got stolen in real life a couple of years ago.

But this fictive world contains 2 stolen Folios, the burning and rebuilding of Wanamaker’s Globe, chaos in the libraries at Harvard and the Folger in Washington. And murders in all places named. All this occurs in the summer of 2004.

The Global Media’s Breaking News desks would be buzzing if these events ever really happened. In Storyland though the author is Monarch, so our female protagonist is always a hairs-breadth ahead of Scotland yard and the FBI.

Kate Stanley’s her name and intrepid Shakespearean sleuthing’s her game. As her companions drop like flies, she shuttles back and forth between the UK, the USA and Spain. The Old and the New worlds reunited.

The dramatis personae as they are presented to us have Shakespearean names. This book is redolent of Shs plays and Elizabethan England. We move from Prologue to Acts 1 through 5. We end with the Author’s notes, which of course we all wish we had of the main much-maligned subject. Our Will.

The essential fuffiness of the plot is interspersed with real Shakespearean concerns and this is what makes it successful as a read. I won’t spoil it but the authorship question and the missing play Cardenio hold it together.

There are also about five or six flashbacks or interludes to the Jacobethan period to give some added historical depth to the characters. But did I enjoy it?

Now I love slurping up quick read detectives or westerns or sci-fi or fantasy because the narrative and characters are the thing. Give me a semi-realistic hero or anti-hero figure and I’ll usually forgive any gaping holes in the logic needed to satisfy the plot. This book flies in that respect.

But the Sh Secret disappoints ultimately because I know too much. Therefore as a student of Sh. biography i read it to find what the author had invented and what really is accepted as scholarship.

Madame Carrel doesn’t disappoint on her sources. I love the Jesuit, New world, Frontiersmen and Gold Miners references.The Elizabethan Stage by E.K. Chambers deservedly gets named and highlighted. Stratford doesn’t seem to be too high on her list of Sh bardolater spots though.

I’d like to know exactly where she stands herself on the authorship question. The tone of the narrative appears slightly elitist Ivy League despite Kate’s home on the range philosophy.

An ‘if you know the right people, stuff gets done’ ethos pervades the argument and indeed without her philanthropic buddies this story would go nowhere. All reminiscent of Authorship claimants. whose candidate had something to hide, so let’s use the back channels to make it happen.

The book’s victims all die in the manner of famous characters from the plays. So Lavinia and Ophelia and Gertrude and Polonius join the revue in contrived parallels to the plot started by Roz and finished by Kate.

I did laugh aloud at one character whose vero nihil verius bleatings mark her as an Oxfordian. At chapter’s end she reveals her truer nature and exclaims, ‘She means that I am a heretic’. And cliff-hanger like we move on to chapter 26 of 46.

But no one authorship claimant gets head billing and for this, thanks and much relief. Hamlet gets an outing throughout The Howards are highlighted too. However the book’s conclusion is a happy ever after staple of the genre where all’s well that ends well.

If you go the author’s website you will see Kate Stanley part 2 is already out. I for one won’t be buying it. But if someone lent it to me, i’d skim it. Not to denigrate the author who spent 10 years getting this tale out of her tail. And apparently found her flow to follow it up thus quickly.

Many many readers will enjoy this book for what it is. Maybe I’m just projecting too much of the green eyed monster with this review. Maybe I’m glutted with stories and they really have to be tight to keep my interest. Maybe I should take it for what it is.

What it is?

It’s a Sphere original. The backpage bumpff -line is

A Modern Serial Killer hunting an Ancient secret.

Do Albino monks and a chalice come to mind?

And this book methinks will make a great movie. A female Tom hanks as the lead and we’re off.

Btw, the trailer of the Rhys getting his own back on school job will be out soon. And advance publicity is out already for Anonymous.

The author did write a great paper on Sh and the old West frontier. Particularly interesting is the aural/oral nature of memorising, which is where i’d prefer to see a book arriving from this author.

But then it would be from a scholarly press and more expensive and no one would buy it.