Title: Stealing Shakespeare: Detective Fiction and Cultural Value
Abstract: In this final chapter, I want to talk about a small but suggestive subgenre of detective fiction in which either a lost play by Shakespeare, or on one occasion a lost object associated with him, is found. Four of these texts, Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book, Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Shakespeare Secret, M. R. Carroll's Dead False and Jean Rae Baxter's Looking for Cardenio, imagine the possible or actual finding of Cardenio, co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher and not known to have been seen since 1613. A further three, Edmund Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding, A. J. Hartley's What Time Devours and the Doctor Who episode 'The Shakespeare Code', centre on the idea that Love's Labour's Won, included by Francis Meres in a 1598 list of plays by Shakespeare although possibly just an alternative name for Much Ado About Nothing, really existed and might be recovered. In addition, Susan Hill's The Small Hand imagines the surfacing of a previously unknown First Folio, Ngaio Marsh's Death at the Dolphin features a glove made by Shakespeare's father John for the young Hamnet Shakespeare, and Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Shakespeare Curse, the sequel to The Shakespeare Secret, posits an original, long-forgotten version of Macbeth. The film Shakespeare in Love even plays with the idea that Shakespeare's first conception of Romeo and Juliet was called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, while Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier offers part of the 'lost' Shakespeare play Faerie's Fortunes Founded (Brataas, 2015). Texts which imagine any of these lost works being found raise a number of questions about what exactly has been lost and whether in fact we wish it to be found, and also about what we are reading, for each of these texts is in a sense a metatext, a book which purports to be less about itself than it is about another text, but which never discloses that other text, offering at best a faint glimpse or perfume of the lost play at its heart, but never more than that.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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