See, here’s the thing. In Thirteenth Night, Alan Gordon took a Shakespeare play and turned it inside-out. He took Feste the fool from Twelfth Night and made him the hero, and took Malvolio and made him something clever and sinister, and gives us interesting takes on Viola and Olivia and Sebastian and even Aguenose.
In the rest of the series (or at least in the two that I have read, Jester Leaps In and my most recent read, A Death in the Venetian Quarter, he takes abandons Shakespeare and puts his Fools (primarily Feste and Viola, who has become a Fool and his wife, and an excellent character in her own right) into, well, just another Medieval Mystery series. I mean, it’s a good series, sure. Better than most. The whole idea of the Fools Guild (The Fools Guild is an organization of spies, collecting information on behalf of the foreign office of—aargh) allows the action to plausibly include kings and high-level machinations as well as gritty(ish) portrayals of life outside the palaces. And he writes well. It’s just that… there are lots of series of Medieval Mystery novels. Ho hum.
Now, if the second book in the series were to take As You Like It inside out with Touchstone as the representative of the Guild, and the third one was about Lancelot Gobbo and The Merchant of Venice, and the fourth one about Dogberry and Much Ado About Nothing and then by the fifth one we’ve worked up to Costard and Love’s Labors Lost, well, see, I understand why Mr. Gordon isn’t doing that, but those are the books I want, and the actual books are bound to be a disappointment, aren’t they?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
In my universe, Alan Gordon took Shakespeare’s fools, and he made them all Feste under different names with Viola in disguise as the female leads, and they worked together off-stage to make things come out right. The romantic parts Viola assumed only added to the frisson of romance that was a constant undercurrent in her relationship with Feste, and Lear’s belief that she was in fact his daughter only made the tragedy more poignant in that final volume.
Man, them’s some good books. Pity they’re written in Mattbrainian.
peace
Matt