The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes

A book review

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet is a bawdy, madcap riff on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Not a retelling of the play, it imagines what might have happened before the play begins: how Hamlet and Horatio became friends and more than friends in Wittenberg while enrolled in the university there.

Horatio is on the brink of losing his heart to an unstylishly dark lady, the wife of a patron who has hired him to make a play out of "an overwritten pastoral ... freighted with Latin epigrams and odd forays into poetry." Hamlet is on the brink of a stream, hidden "by a drape of willow branches that trailed their leaves like fingers in the glassy stream," so Horatio sees only the reflection of his face in the water, "incandescent as a candle," suggesting to him "some angel or an airy sprite."

Not just Hamlet but other plays of Shakespeare and especially his sonnets are whipped like meringue into this soufflé of a novel: As-You-Like-It-like disguises and misidentifications, Falstaffian tavern-keepers, larks (not nightingales) driving lovers apart at daybreak, and just a hint of tragedy. "Everyone hears something different in the cliffs of Elsinore, and even those skeptics who claim it is merely the breeze playing panpipes at the mouths of sea caves and underground tunnels will turn pale and admit it is an eerie music. No one who has heard the sound ever forgets it, and everyone arriving in Elsinore over the sea spends his first few nights tossing and turning with nightmares of the approach."

Even Shakespeare might have approved. The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet is an homage to him, although (or perhaps because) the playwright himself is dissolved into a mist of his characters. (2010; 365 pages)