This disappointing novel is another book I can bury in my “not very good, but at least I got the e-book free” file.
I was drawn to Stewart Buettner’s The Shakespeare Manuscript because of the remarkable (though surely coincidental) parallels between it and my own novel, Blood and Judgment.
Both books deal with the discovery of a lost Hamlet manuscript—in my story an original draft, in this one an original of a lost prequel, “Hamlet Part I”.
Both involve the relationships and frictions involved in the production of a play—in my case an amateur company, in this case a professional one.
My book, however, was a fantasy. This book is… I’m not sure. It seems to be a sort of mystery, but the stakes are never raised high enough to build much tension, and the only death that occurs turns out to be natural.
And that’s the problem with The Shakespeare Manuscript. A lot of people run about doing things and irritating each other, but there’s no real dramatic arc.
The book starts with a New York rare books dealer, Miles Oliphant, on a trip to England, being mugged. While he’s unconscious in hospital and still unidentified by the police, a box of manuscripts he sent home is opened by his daughter, April. She finds a manuscript among the papers which, she soon realizes, looks very like a lost play of Shakespeare’s, in his own hand. Continue reading The Shakespeare Manuscript, by Stewart Buettner