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Summary
Summary
Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor called Pickleherring, who asserts that as a boy he was an original member of Shakespeare's acting troupe. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London--a half century after Shakespeare has departed the stage--Pickleherring, now an old man, sits down to write the full story of his former friend, mentor, and master. Fond, faithful Pickleherring has forgotten nothing over the years, and using sources both firsthand and far-fetched he means to set the record straight. Was Shakespeare ever actually "in love"? Did he write his own plays? Who was the Dark Lady of the Sonnets? Brilliantly in tune with today's Shakespeare renaissance, Robert Nye gives us an outrageous, language-loving, and edifying romp through the life and times of the greatest writer who ever lived.
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Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
The latest of poet-novelist Nye's mellifluous revisionist looks at celebrated literary and historical figures (Falstaff, 1981; etc.): a high-spirited, sexy, and only occasionally tedious collection of riffs on topics suggested by the life, literary legacy, and reputation of the greatest of all writers. The story's putative author, an octogenarian acquaintance writing several decades after the death of ``WS,'' is Robert Reynolds, a.k.a. ``Pickleherring,'' who was a boy actor enlisted to perform women's roles (and, as Pickleherring proudly declares, did act all Shakespeare's ``nine Muses,'' or great female roles). He approaches his task in a manner both ginger and dilatory, distractedly assembling the contents of 92 boxes filled with data in his humble workroom on the top floor of a particularly lively whorehouse. The story takes its time (WS isn't born until Chapter IX) and is repeatedly sidetracked by Pickleherring's weakness for temporizing digressions (the proper spelling of his subject's name'), lists (of common childhood diseases, Elizabethan grammar-school curricula), and other kindred hilarities. Pickleherring considers such questions as whether WS was begotten by his father upon a lusty Queen Elizabeth (a riotously obscene chapter), whether he wrote Bacon's essays, went to sea with Sir Francis Drake, or suffered imprisonment for selling fireworks and insulting a constable. And, in a fine frenzy of climactic speculation, Pickleherring also sorts out possible originals for the Dark Lady of the sonnets, confesses his own intimacies with WS (``on occasion . . . I . . . was the master-mistress of the great man's passion''), and reveals not only the autobiographical dimensions of The Tempest but his own role as the sprite Ariel: ``at the play's end, he set me free, even as he freed himself in the person of Prospero.'' A book to rival Anthony Burgess's wonderful Nothing Like the Sun. Pure entertainment.
