The Book Report — The Evil That Men Do
Howdy, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.
A couple weeks ago I did a three part study focusing on three candidates in the Shakespeare authorship question. Today, I’d like to write about a great thrill-ride of a book that features the authorship issue as one of its plot points. The book is Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell.
Cover courtesy of Dalton Books
The title comes from a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do live after them; The Good is oft interred with their bones.” The book is pretty standard thriller fare, actually. It’s starts with a death of a Person-With-A-Secret. A friend of the PWAS (the hero of the novel) gets a clue about that secret, and before you can spell conpiracy…conspriacy…conspiracy, the hero is off on a wild hunt for more clues, eluding the machinations of a deranged killer in the process. The book doesn’t deviate from the formula any more or less than The Da Vinci Code (or any of the other Dan Brown novels) did, so what helps these sorts of books stand out is the content of the Secrets.
The secrets covered in Interred With Their Bones deal with the three big mysteries of Shakespeare: 1) Did someone other than Shakespeare write the plays? 2) Who was the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets? 3) What happened to Cardenio?
The History of Cardenio is one of Shakespeare’s lost plays (along with Love’s Labours Won), known to have been performed by the King’s Men in 1613. Most scholars speculate that the play was based around the character of Cardenio in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. There are no (that we know about) surviving manuscripts of the play, unfortunately, and finding a copy of the play could very well be the literary equivalent of archeologists digging up the city of Troy in the mid 1800s.
But the question that begs to be asked is, “Are these secrets worth killing someone over?“
A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required when reading Interred With Their Bones, but then, I suppose a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required when reading any novel. Like The Da Vinci Code, the heroine visits many real places and deals with real questions that have plagued Shakespearean scholars for more than a hundred years. The facts help lend a certain amount of credence to the rest of the book, and as long as you don’t look to carefully and just hang on for the ride, Interred With Their Bones will take you on a wild roller-coaster of a thriller and may just help you learn a little more about one of the best authors of the English Language at the same time.
A short post from me today, folks. Hope you’re not too disappointed. I also hope all of you have pre-ordered a copy of the Mythoi: Birth graphic novel by now.
Have a fun (and safe) Independence day this weekend!
Until next time…
Still paddlin’ the old knew.
_-Akatzen-_