Nye is a poet and novelist who has written a number of works of historical fiction, including two related to William Shakespeare. This bawdy yet erudite tale proports to be a biography of the playwright by one of the actors in his troupe of players, written some decades after the master’s passing. Robert Reynolds (aka Pickleherring, apparently stage names weren’t what they would become once studios and press agents took charge) is an entertaining story teller whose notion of biography (and history) includes facts and documents, eyewitness accounts, rumors, legends, slanders, inference, myths, fancy, lies, and truth in its most generous and inclusive sense. Like the Bard, Reynolds is from the country and prefers country history to town history. “Country history is faithful and open-ended. It is a tale told by various idiots on the village green, all busy contradicting themselves in the name of a common truth. It exagerrates and enflames what it talks about. It delights in lies and gossip. It is unwise. Wild and mystical and passionate, it is ruled by the heart. Beginning by the glow of the hearth, at the end of the night your country history tends to pass into balladry and legend—it becomes poetic. Country history is fanciful and maggoty. Easy to mock, it always strains belief. But sometimes it catches the ghostly coat-tails of what is otherwise ungraspable.” By contrast, town history is “cynical and exact. It is written by wits and it orders and limits what it talks about. It relies on facts and figures. It is knowing… [it:] rests on the premise that the facts tell the truth.” Nye’s narrator/biographer insists country history is the only way to capture someone like William Shakespeare and he is pretty convincing, though sometimes digressively wearying, on the point. I liked the book much more in the early going, when it was freshest, than over time as its premise wore a little of its welcome out. But it remained brisk (nice short chapters), witty, unseemly and oddly reliable despite all the tall tales, lies, and gossip, fictional and nonfictional—that is, stuff that was truly gossiped about and stuff Pickleherring introduces on his own. It also motivated me to consider reading The Complete Plays, a nice reading project I thank Pickleherring and Nye for prompting me to undertake.
This is one of those books that I have a hard time assessing after I've read it. Undoubtedly, TLMS is brilliantly written. It revels in puns and word-smithery. I acknowledge all of this. It's a great book, clever and well-constructed. But I didn't like reading it for the same reasons I dislike books like Catch-22. Eventually, novels as extended jokes wear me out, and I ultimately find them dull. meh. But I did enjoy the bawdy narrator's literary criticism of Shakespeare's plays. Most of his readings had a nice ring of truth about them, found in the best "real" criticism.
What do You think about The Late Mr. Shakespeare (2001)?
I am a great fan of Shakespeare. I read this book strictly on the strength of the enthusiastic reviews on the back cover. It is very different. I'm no prude and I don't mind "bawdy" terminology, especially if it is descriptive of the times (as in Elizabethan England)...but I must say, it goes beyond bawdy in a few parts- especially in the chapter about Shakespeare's mother, where the playful tone of conjecture becomes outright revolting. It is true that the scholarship involved is amazing at times; there was obviously a lot of effort put into the research- yet, at times, the author's decision to make this a fictitional work almost seems to debase the value of the material. Yes, I comprehended early on that this entire tome was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, lyrical, nonsensical and full of literary devices- and that it was meant to bring the iconic worship of Shakespeare down to a more earthy level- an exploration of the experiences and ambiance of the time that shaped the man. BUT, gossip and innuendo have never been anything anyone should judge another human being by- and I would say that half of the book could have been torched and it would have done the reader a great service. I endured it to the end because I cannot stop reading something I started...I gave this book every opportunity to redeem itself and it failed. Entire paragraphs dedicated to demonstrating the author's comprehension of Shakespeare's literary devices seemed loose and out of context and incredibly boring. The phrase that kept coming to mind was "intellectual drivel"- and I suspected that this book was highly praised because intellectuals were afraid to call it a waste of scholarship and be accused of "not getting it".
—Kimberly Lewis
Finding myself at a store (the excellent Mercer Street books), that did not have Nye's 1976 Falstaff (from the Burgess Ninety-Nine Novels list), I settled for this (plainly) similarly-themed book. This might be called historical fiction, but it very freely adapts anything resembling fact, starting with the narrator, an actor known as Pickleherring, who is writing many years after Shakespeare's death from the perspective of an old man who had joined the troupe as a boy. Hence enough years had passed that he could already start reporting on how Shakespeare's posthumous reputation was shaping up, including the many myths and rumors that evolved. There is no pretense at verisimilitude, so I don't even know which of the stories were current in the late 17th century, but every question of authorship, speculation about where and how he spent the undocumented years, every interpretation of his will and so forth, is present - plus a good deal more; retellings of stories from The Mabinogion with Shakespeare's mother as a witch, clever nods to Dylan Thomas - a Joycean farrago, one might say!
—Bob
