The Shakespeare Secret
J.L.Carrell’s New Thriller Takes on the Da Vinci Code
Who exactly was William Shakespeare? And what became of his lost plays? This new novel blends fact and fiction in pursuit of the Bard.
Carrell’s new novel, just released in paperback in the UK, is tipped to be the biggest thriller since Dan Brown’s multi-million selling Da Vinci Code. Comparisons between the two are inevitable, but Carrell’s credentials as a Shakespeare scholar add an important layer of interest to what is a fairly ridiculous plot.
Hamlet at The Globe
The action centres around Kate Stanley, an American academic who is making her directorial debut by staging Hamlet at The Globe theatre in London. All is going well – she even has a big-name actor starring as the ghost of Hamlet’s father – when she receives an unexpected visit from her former mentor Rosalind Howard. Roz has come to ask for Kate’s help in solving a mystery, and before Kate has time to accept the plot lurches away into a breathless sequence of fires, murders and thefts.
In this particular aspect, the story reads much like Dan Brown’s: the heroine and her male sidekick race across Britain and America following clues which must be solved before they can move on to their next location, encountering a string of extraordinarily violent deaths that are all staged to replicate some of Shakespeare’s most famous death scenes: Ophelia drowning, Caesar’s assassination.
Shakespeare’s Lost Plays
What they are seeking is two-fold, and it is in this aspect that Carrell proves herself Brown’s superior. It has long been acknowledged that Shakespeare wrote two plays that have been lost to us over the years: Love’s Labour’s Won, about which little is known, and Cardenio, a play which we know was based on Don Quixote. Carrell has her heroine seek the lost manuscript of Cardenio, and although many elements of this chase require us to suspend our disbelief, we do learn much about the play along the way.
Who Was Shakespeare?
In seeking this play, Kate must also pursue perhaps the greatest Shakespearean problem of them all – did William Shakespeare, an ordinary individual from Stratford, really write all that is attributed to him? Some would argue not, suggesting that such a prolific output was beyond the reach of one man, or that a man of Shakespeare’s low birth could not have known about all the ideas included in the plays.
Whilst Carrell’s novel remains inconclusive on this point, she does allow Kate to examine the main contenders for Shakespeare’s alter ego: Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) and Francis Bacon. Such is her skill that she weaves the narrative with genuine scholarly discussion without it sitting awkwardly with the non-stop action of the plot, and whilst this book is unlikely to please Shakespearean academics it should be applauded for allowing its audience to learn a great deal about Jacobean England. What really shines through is Carrell’s love of the wonderful plays, an enthusiasm shared by many of her characters, and which will hopefully convert many readers to the beauty of the Bard.
The Shakespeare Secret is published in the UK by Sphere (2008), 467 pages, ISBN 978-0-7515-4035-2
