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

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

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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!

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Book Note: Tales from Shakespeare by Marcia Williams

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

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

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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!

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