The narrator, whom we quickly learn not to trust too deeply, is
an old man in plague-ravaged Restoration London, tortuously
assembling his biography as he slides "off this mortal
coil." As a much younger man, Robert Reynolds, aka
Pickleherring, had been a teen-aged cross-dressing member of
Shakespeare's original band of thespians, and as such seems the
perfect
insider to give fresh perspectives to timeless Shakespearean
queries: Did the Bard write his own plays? What was
his relationship with Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe?
Who was the celebrated Dark Lady of the love sonnets?
Yet the reader is constantly challenged to evaluate the nature and
quality of the narrator's insights and motivations, making this
Pickleherring a comic doppelganger of Charles Kinbote, the smarmy
footnote-wielding aesthete in Nabokov's PALE FIRE. But
whereas Kinbote may or may not be a murderer, no such tragic fate
awaits our gender-bending narrator. His fate is comic,
and his gender confusion an artifact of his being compelled to
play all the female roles when he was treading the boards.
This is an audaciously funny novel, one whose primary love is the
rich language and sensitive humanity of Shakespeare's plays.
If you want a bare facts biography, seek out W. H. Rowse, but if
your taste runs to well-imagined re-constructions of emotional
realities, this irreverent novel is truer than its less daring
counterparts.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer