Double Falsehood: A Shakespearean Thriller
In the White Hart Inn near Marlborough, England, Double Falsehood, a long-lost play by William Shakespeare, falls into the hands of present-day inn proprietor Harvey Braithwaite. In 1597, William Shakespeare and the Stratford Players book rooms in the White Hart Inn, a welcome stopping point after they are sideswiped on the Great West Road by a caped and muddied rider, and soon after encounter a ghostly figure in the forest.
Braithwaite is threatened, shot, and pursued by thieves as well as Shakespeare scholars and aficionados. Shakespeare himself becomes embroiled in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I.
Author Entwistle bases his thriller on the tragicomedy Double Falsehood or, The Distressed Lovers, a play first performed in 1613 but not included in Shakespeare’s collected works until 2010. In his fictional version of the play’s creation, Entwistle revels in thriller devices: assumed identities, hidden doors, secret passages, peep holes. He fleshes out historical figures, such as Queen Elizabeth’s inquisitor and torturer Richard Topcliffe; details, down to the cooking tent and drive vs. pursuit game hunting, a Royal Progress visit by the queen and Privy Council to a manor house in the kingdom; and reveals Catholic plots against the Protestant Tudors.
Characterizations are penetrating: Queen Elizabeth is earthy; Shakespeare’s players are bawdy. Dialogue and scenes are true to character: Braithwaite is witty and sharp-tongued; the ghostly figure is heartbreaking in silence. Rogues in past and present time spare foes little mercy with their trenchant and colorful epithets. God’s blood, ‘tis a hoot, forsooth.
