As I'm sure you also do, I was spending some idle time checking the "Shakespeare" entries in various reference works. While doing so, I came across an entry for a short Shakespeare-releated mystery story that looked interesting. Lillian de la Torre's "The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript" is set during the time of the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 and involves the imagined staging of Caractacus; or, the British Hero, a previously-lost Shakespeare play. And the famous Dr. Johnson serves the role of detective.
"Lead me to it, governor," I said, and requested the 2023 volume Golden Age Bibliomysteries, where it's been anthologized (it was first published in 1946) .
I'm writing this post for two reasons. First, now that classes and grading are nearly over for the semester, I hope to follow the general principle "Write about the Shakespeare you encounter as quickly as possible." Second, I'd like to advise you not to bother with this one.
The story is written with a lot of pseudo-eighteenth-century (and extremely affected) language modeled on James Boswell's Life of Johnson (Boswell here serves as Watson to Johnson's Holmes). I knew I was in trouble two pages in.
And the entire narrative doesn't hold together. The reasons for the manuscript's absence just don't work. And even if it did, it's narrated in such a clunky way as to make it much more tedious than enjoyable.
Here are the first few pages as an example of what we're faced with in this story:
I'm trying to be meticulous in not providing spoilers, but if anyone would like to talk about the details of the story, let's do so in the comments, away from those who would rather not know.
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2 comments:
Caution: The comments may contain spoilers about the short story. Read on at your own risk.
The clever part of the story (though one can clearly see it coming) is that Dr. Johnson knows when various words entered the English language; when he hears words newer than 1616 at the performance of the play, he realizes that the play is more recent and is, therefore a forgery.
But the reason the manuscript is stolen is so that Dr. Johnson won't have a chance of seeing the text and declaring it a forgery. But the play has already been printed—it's going to go on sale after the performance. So even if he doesn't hear the comparative neologisms, they'll be there in print for everyone to see almost immediately. And Dr. Johnson makes such a big deal out of the manuscript being worthless now that its words have been printed.
It just makes no sense.
Thoughts?
kj (Bardfilm)
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