Book Note: A Taste for Death by P. D. James and its Puzzling Use of "Shakespeare"

James, P. D. A Taste for Death. Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

---

As P. D. James novels go, this isn't in my top ten. The mystery is pretty good, but it becomes a not-altogether-successful mashup of the detective genre and the suspense / thriller. It could be reduced by a third and be all the more compelling for it. It's her tenth novel, and it may be that her editors were reluctant to stand up to such an established novelist.

The editors may also have missed something—though that's not certain. And that brings us to the Shakespeare puzzle at the heart of the novel.

A Taste for Death introduces the character of Inspector Kate Miskin, a promising detective intent on rising through the ranks. She was raised by her grandmother after her mother died. Late in the novel [spoiler alert], we learn that her absent father was a policeman who had a wife and two kids (and who was killed in a car accident in the line of duty some time earlier).

As we learn about Inspector Miskin's determination to succeed, we are presented with a Shakespeare quote as something of an origin story (p. 151):

The problem is that Shakespeare didn't write that.

For ease of reference, here's the text of the "Shakespeare" quote:

What matters it what went before or after,

Now with myself I will begin and end. 

When they don't assert that it's a Shakespeare quote, sources on the internet will definitively state that it comes from John Webster's The White Devil, and if they mean that it's a paraphrase of a few lines in that play, they're right. My edition—edited by John Russel Brown, The Revels Plays (Methuen, 1960), gives us this exchange between Vittoria and Flamieno, both fatally wounded by an avenger:

Vittoria
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven I know not whither. 

Flamineo
                            Then cast anchor.
Prosperity doth bewitch men seeming clear,
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.
We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune’s slaves,
Nay cease to die by dying. Art thou gone?
And thou so near the bottom?—false report
Which says that women vie with the nine Muses 
For nine tough durable lives: I do not look
Who went before, nor who shall follow me;
No, at myself I will begin and end:
While we look up to heaven, we confound
Knowledge with knowledge. O I am in a mist!

Vittoria
Oh, happy they that never saw the court,
Nor ever knew great men but by report! [Vittoria dies.]

Flamieno makes a final speech and then dies as well.

That solves the puzzle of the quotation's (really, the paraphrase's) origin. But the puzzle of its misattribution to Shakespeare remains.

P. D. James knew her Shakespeare and her Webster quite well. We just saw her careful use of quotations by both authors in her Skull Beneath the Skin (for which, q.v.). Is this a case of Homer nodding (in which case, Homer's editor also nodded)? Or did James misattribute the quote (and also paraphrase it instead of quoting it directly) on purpose? In that case, the ideal editor would have drawn her attention to it and confirmed that the "mistake" is no mistake at all but a purposeful, intentional slip.

The novel introduces the lines as "Two half-remembered lines of Shakespeare" from Inspector Miskin's perspective. That may point toward the intentionality behind the misattribution. They're half-remembered (i.e., paraphrased), and their author is also misremembered.

I'm at a bit of a loss to understand the reason(s) for doing so, though I am much more inclined to give credit to James for knowing her Shakespeare and Webster (and extending that credit to her editor) than to say that she erred.

Perhaps it's a subtle way of undermining the character of Inspector Miskin. If her life philosophy is based on a misattributed misquotation, perhaps that brings her pursuit of her vocation into question as well.

I haven't found any published scholarship on the issue. In Susan Baker's "Comic Material: 'Shakespeare' in the Classic Detective Story" (in Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare's Plays, ed. Francis Teague (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 164–179), the passage is treated as if it were Shakespeare—the question of its actual origin doesn't arise. We're just told that "Shakespeare is crucial to Kate's upward mobility" (168). 

Let's go back to the other Shakespearean elements in the novel.

One of the murder victims is named Paul Berowne, and the name's connection of Love's Labour's Lost is made clear in the course of the novel itself. Miskin's boyfriend is the one to call our collective attention to it (p. 155):

[Note: Major Spoilers Follow]

Miskin uses this newly-gained information to send a message of distress when she and her grandmother are being held at gunpoint by the murderer. She calls her boyfriend—ostensibly to cancel a dinner engagement for that evening (p. 437):

The murderer does become suspicious, but I'm not sure he has much greater familiarity with Shakespeare than Inspector Miskin (p. 445):

Looking at my bookshelves, it's hard to get in the mindset of "You already have one complete Shakespeare; why would you need an edition of just one of the plays?"

All in all, it's not a terrific novel. Though this final use of Shakespeare is nicely done, I remain confused about the non-Shakespeare non-quote early on.

I'm currently reading (and, in some cases, re-reading) the P. D. James novels, and I may get a better sense of this novel's use of Shakespeare with Kate Miskin's characters as I read on. Stay tuned.

---

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Bonus Images: The Relevant Speeches (and some additional context) from The White Devil:

Bonus Bonus Image: Footnote to "lions i' th' Tower" from the New Mermaids edition

(slightly more relevant if I'd posted this yesterday . . . Groundhog day):

Book Note: The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James

James, P. D. The Skull Beneath the Skin. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982.

---

Since I started teaching my Mystery and Detective Fiction course, I've been slowly making my way through the corpus (ha!) of P. D. James. I had read a few intermittently through the year with varying degrees of enjoyment.

Teaching An Unsuitable Job for a Women, the novel that introduces the Private Investigator Cordelia Gray, in the course gave me a renewed interest in James' novel (though I'm still finding that the quality varies considerably.

All that brings us to the second (and only other) Cordelia Gray novel.

And it's showing up here because of all the Shakespeare.

Like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, James frequently invokes Shakespeare and other authors of the English Renaissance. In The Skull Beneath the Skin, she does so more frequently and to greater effect than elsewhere.

The novel starts with T. S. Eliot's famous line about the playwright John Webster (c. 1578 to c. 1632):

And then the novel takes us straight in to its use of Webster, Shakespeare, and others. On pages 11 to 13, we learn that a well-known actress has been receiving threatening message and that the messages all come from plays in which the actress has played a role:

The quotations are respectively from Measure for Measure, The Tempest, Othello, Hamlet, and Webster's The Devil's Law Case.

The context for that last one may not be known to everyone, but it's interesting, particularly in light of the opening quote from Measure for Measure. In Shakespeare's play, Claudio, condemned to die, is comforted by a Friar (really the Duke of Vienna in disguise), and he seems to take it to heart—and then delivers the speech quoted above to his sister. In The Devil's Law Case, a monk comes to Romelio, who may die in a forthcoming duel, and he offers those lines before presenting a masque with two coffins:

John Webster, The Devil's Law Case, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (Ernest Benn, 1975), V.iv.102–08.

But, instead of being moved to consider his own mortality more seriously, he locks the monk in an inner room to stop the monk pestering him.

Moving ahead in James' novel (though still without major spoilers), we find another set of threatening quotations on pages 52 and 53:

That adds one White Devil (and, according to the New Mermaids edition I have, Cordelia is right about the comma), two Doctors Faustus, an Antony and Cleopatra and a 3 Henry VI.

And there are many more throughout the novel—in addition to the rehearsals for a performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.

Those elements are the fun part of the novel. As to the rest, it's fairly disappointing. The novel could easily be reduced by a third and made all the better and all the more effective for it.

Still, you can safely put this on your gift list for the Early Modern Scholars in your life (or your own list if you happen to be one yourself).

Note: This Book Note will help form the framework for a later post on a Shakespearean puzzle in a different P. D. James novel. Stay tuned!

---

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Book Note: Tales from Shakespeare by Marcia Williams

Williams, Marcia. Tales from Shakespeare: Seven Plays Presented and Illustrated by Marcia Williams. Candlewick Press, 1998.

---

———. More Tales from Shakespeare: Seven Plays Presented and Illustrated by Marcia Williams. Candlewick Press, 2000.

---

I'm occasionally surprised to find that a resource I've used for years has never made its way onto Bardfilm.

Marcia Williams' great takes on Shakespeare are one such example. In my Modern Shakespearean Fiction class, for example, I can't expect (or require—there just isn't enough time) students to have read Hamlet recently, yet they need to know at least the broad strokes of the plot to appreciate the Hamlet-based works we encounter.

I also recommend Tales from Shakespeare, and More Tales from Shakespeare to our English Education majors as an entrée for teaching Shakespeare. It provides the plot and some key lines from the play, but it also can be a starting point for deeper discussion.

Each illustrated play has four parts. First, there's the illustration, which is clever and whimsical and detailed. Next, the setup provides actors putting on the play and audience members reacting to it. Finally, we have narration that fills in the gaps. That gives us the basic plot, some of the key lines from the play, and some possible areas to explore.

Following Bardfilm's Fair Use Policy, I'm not providing any play in full, but I will give you a few sample pages to encourage you to seek out the books themselves. To start, here's the opening of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

And here's a bit of Hamlet. It's a bit light on Ophelia, but strong on ghosts and the play-within-the-play.

More Tales from Shakespeare is more of the same, but it also provides this interesting playbill to show what's on offer and to explain a bit of the methodology:

You've already gotten the hang of all that, but here's the opening of Richard III as a sample:

Marcia William's Tales are terrific for kids, college students, and professors alike. Do everyone a favor a track down a copy!

---

Click below to purchase the books from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

 

Book Note: The Devil and his Boy

Horowitz, Anthony. The Devil and his Boy. Philomel Books, 1998.

---

We're just finishing up Studies in the Novel: Mystery and Detective Fiction, and one of the last books we read for the course was Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. In preparing to talk about that magnificent metaliterary mystery, I came to realize just how prolific an author Horowitz is, with dozens of Young Adult (and younger) books to his credit before the three novels in the series that starts with Magpie Murders.

I decided to try a few—starting with The Falcon's Malteaser, a YA novel that plays with the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel (as in Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcom).

Other books being a bit harder to track down, I headed to The Devil and His Boy, not knowing anything about it.

Imagine my delight when I found it was set in Elizabethan England with a boy protagonist who sees a play and determines (or circumstances determine for him) that he wants to become an actor.

The plot is pleasantly absurd, but the historical detail is accurate.

"But," I hear you eagerly ask, "is there any Shakespeare in it?"

As a matter of fact, there is. But it's more as a cameo than an integral part of the plot—which is fine. We get plenty of Shakespeare in Susan Cooper's King of Shadows (for which, q.v.).

Here's the relevant section where our hero goes to audition for a part in what turns out to be Shakespeare's company:

The novel, which could fit fairly easily in my YA Literature class, my Modern Shakespearean Fiction class, or even in my Mystery and Detective Fiction class, is well worth reading. Give it a try!

---

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Book Note: ShakesFear and How to Cure It

Cohen, Ralph Alan. ShakesFear and How to Cure It: The Complete Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare, 2016.

---

I chanced upon this book and started to dismiss it as another "You can't read Shakespeare unless it's been modernized and simplified and enervated" volume.

But a brief glance was all it took to let me know how wrong I was.

ShakesFear and How to Cure It is a thoughtful guide for teachers of all grades to what to do when the Shakespeare unit comes up in the curriculum. 

Not infrequently, students will tell me that they didn't realize how wonderful Shakespeare was until they took my class. Although I'd like to take that as a compliment on my teaching methods, it's actually that they've had a bad experience with Shakespeare somewhere in the past. Sometimes, that experience had to do with the was Shakespeare was taught.

The title of the book is directed that the fear some students feel at the thought of reading Shakespeare; however, the book itself is enormously useful in alleviating the fear that teachers have at the thought of teaching Shakespeare. This is the book for those teachers out there who are flummoxed with where to begin or how to teach or what to do with Shakespeare in the classroom.

I'm tempted to provide huge extracts from the book because it's such a good resource—even though I disagree with a lot of the recommendations. But that would be neither fair use nor fair play.

But I will provide the list of "Seven Deadly Preconceptions of Teaching Shakespeare" and the way Ralph Alan Cohen addresses the first two:

I'll also provide a list of Cohen's eight things not to do as a teacher of Shakespeare (thank heavens he says that we can do most of them sometimes) and what he makes of the first of them.

By way of contrast, I'm also providing the list of nine things you should do with Shakespeare:

Most teachers will find most of this advice sound and helpful; most students will learn more and have a better time doing so. I highly recommend reading through the whole book—and then determining what will work for you and your classroom.

---

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Shakespeare and Hathaway: Private Investigators

“O Brave New World.” By Paul Matthew Thompson and Jude Tindall. Perf. Mark Benton, Jo Joyner, and Patrick Walshe McBride. Dir. Piotr Szkopiak. Shakespeare and Hathaway. Season 1, episode 1. BBC. 25 February 2018. DVD. BBC, 2019.

---

I'm pretty sure I discovered this series in the early days of the pandemic, watched them somewhat lackadaisically, saw there wasn't too much Shakespeare in them, and put them to the side.

But I'm teaching a new course under the heading Studies in the Novel. We're focusing on Mystery and Detective fiction, and I always like to take things a Shakespearean direction when it's possible to do so.

Accordingly, the class recently watched the first episode of the series Shakespeare and Hathaway, a cosy mystery series set in Stratford-on-Avon.

The first episode establishes the Private Investigation team of Louella Shakespeare and Frank Hathaway—the origin of a partnership that is now filming its sixth season.

Warning: Spoilers Follow.

The show starts with the down-and-out (though hardly hard-boiled) detective Frank Hathaway trying to keep his business together. He's approached by Louella Shakespeare, a bride-shortly-to-be who suspects her fiancé of infidelity.

Frank takes photos of the fiancé at a fancy luncheon with his secretary, but Louella is satisfied with the fiancé's explanations, and the wedding goes forward.

But not without a last-minute attempt by Frank to convince Louella that there's something shady and suspicious going on.

That leads us to the first part of our clip—and one that gives us both the faux-Shakespearean kitsch of Stratford and a bit of Shakespeare. The second part of the clip has one more Shakespeare quote; the final clip will be explained in due course.

This episode has more Shakespeare than most (though I may be mis-remembering my earlier experience of the show—I haven't re-watched the entire series). We first get the almost-route Sonnet 116: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediment" (1–2). I appreciated how the show itself zones out at that point.

And I appreciate (though I don't fully understand) the unusual choices the bride and groom made for their vows. Did you recognize them? I had to look them up. They're from Venus and Adonis. The bride says

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain. (801)

And the groom replies

Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies. (804)

The context is a very lengthy speech by Adonis. The stanza in question contrasts love and lust:

William Shakespeare,The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (Arden, 2000)

It's an interesting choice for wedding vows. I imagine the show is going for the "forged lies" part—which is exactly what the fiancé has been doing.

We then get a quote from 3 Henry VI when Frank and his assistant are discussing the motives and suspects for the fiancé's murder (I did warn you that there would be spoilers):  ". . . wet my cheeks with artificial tears" (III.ii.184).

The last part of the clip sets the new firm of Shakespeare and Hathaway on its way. I'm including it because we also read The Maltese Falcon in my Mystery and Detective Fiction class. In that Dashiell Hammett novel, the detective orders that the name of his just-murdered partner be taken off the signage; here, we have that reversed as Louella Shakespeare's name joins Frank Hathaway's.

The show is quite good—a fine example of the genre. It just needs more Shakespeare. 

[Note: If I find the time, I'll try more episodes of the show to see if we're given any more Shakespeare. In other words, further bulletins as events warrant.]

---

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the season from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Book Note: Hamlet Off Stage

Berry, D. C . Hamlet Off Stage. Texas Review Press, 2009.

---

Longtime readers will know that I try to keep my finger on the pulse of modern literature that relates to Shakespeare.

Sometimes, that takes the form of poetry, as in the volume In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (q.v. for a representative example).

I don't remember where in my vast and copious reading this book came up, but I do know that I requested it, waited for it, checked it out, and put it in the pile for later. While it sat there, my mind placed it in the "plays to read" category.

But it's a collection of poems written from Hamlet's point of view.

And this Hamlet is a very angry one.

The collection as a whole doesn't altogether work. It's a bit too one-note, and that note is an uncomfortable one to hear. That's likely the intention, but it does get fairly old fairly quickly.

Nonetheless, I'd like to call our collective attention to three poems that stand out. The first is highly critical of the 1990 Zeffirelli film version of Hamlet—the one with Mel Gibson in the title role:

I like the play of sounds there, and the final line is good (though I don't know that I agree with its sentiment).

Next, we have a play on the character T. S. Eliot created who said, "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be":

The advice is clear: Don't be like Prufrock. Whether Hamlet is able to follow that advice is uncertain.

Last, we have one where the poet uses all the different names for Hamlet that have been developing throughout the series:

That one is of primary interest in the way the multitude of names reflects the variety of perspectives on Hamlet.

One of these three may make its way into the syllabus when next I teach my Modern Shakespearean Fiction course, but the entirely collection won't.

---

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).