Also available in paperback
($15.99) and as a
downloadable e-book ($1.50)
A novel that is part literary mystery, part historical detective story, built around an obsessive search for the true author of Shakespeare's works.
Stanley Quandary is a professor of English and a very ordinary man. But then he starts to have the strangest, most realistic dreams, dreams that seem to solve one of the greatest mysteries of all time, to expose a conspiracy of silence that is over 400 years old. They even suggest a way to win back his estranged wife. Of course, he might be going insane... .
James Boyle is a law professor at Duke University, and a columnist for the Financial Times online. His articles have also been published in The New York Times, Newsweek and the Guardian.
You must be logged in to post a review.
Please log in
1
Person Reviewed This Item
By Robert Salvin
Oct 15, 2009
"Beautifully-written literary mystery" James Boyle's The Shakespeare Chronicles is a witty examination of Ivy League professor Stanley Quandary's crack-up as he attempts to prove the 'true' authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The college scenes ring true (unsurprisingly as Boyle is himself a professor at Duke), and Quandary's renunciation of his unfulfilled lot in life and surrender to his alter-ego, 'Q', is every bit as funny as Lester Burnham's transformation from put-upon husband to pumped-up alpha male in American Beauty. Boyle cleverly draws the reader into the Oxford-Stratford debate through Quandary's split-personality as his world collapses in on itself, and the gradual undermining of Q's contentions as Quandary attempts to reassert himself is cleverly realised. Highly recommended.
