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A William Shakespeare Mystery
by Benet Brandreth
Book Reviewed by:Shakespeare in Love meets C. J. Sansom in a historical thriller with a swashbuckling twist - and a hero as you've never seen him before.
August, 1585. England needs its greatest hero to step forward ...
When he is caught by his wife in one ill-advised seduction too many, young William Shakespeare flees Stratford to seek his fortune. Cast adrift in London, Will falls in with a band of players, but greater men have their eye on this talented young wordsmith. England's very survival hangs in the balance and Will finds himself dispatched to Venice on a crucial assignment.
Dazzled by the city's masques and its beauties, he little realizes the peril in which he finds himself. Catholic assassins would stop at nothing to end his mission on the point of their sharpened knives - and lurking in the shadows is a killer as clever as he is cruel.
Suspenseful, seductive, and as sharp as an assassin's blade, The Spy of Venice introduces a major new literary talent to the genre - thrilling if you've never read a word of Shakespeare and sublime if you have.
From the very structure of this book – as a play in five acts with interludes, prologue and epilogue – to the prose and dialogue so true to the Sixteenth Century, to The Spy of Venice's intricate plot, I believe that Brandreth does Shakespeare proud...continued
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(Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
In Benet Brandreth's The Spy of Venice, William Shakespeare is a brilliant wordsmith but still a young man with all of a young man's appetite for adventure and women. He's witty with a rapier-like pen and rakish sense of humor. But wait. Many people reading Shakespeare's plays might doubt that the Bard of Avon had much of a sense of humor at all. Even the so-called comedies, they might argue, are only moderately humorous.
So is Brandreth's characterization of a brilliantly witty Shakespeare total fabrication? Or is it conceivable that old Will might have been the Stephen Colbert of his time? Very much so the latter. The operative word to consider is "time." As with anything intended to be funny, two of the most ...
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