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):
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.
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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(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
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