Spectacular!
Another excellent horror anthology by Chrystal Lake Publishing, and this time the contributing authors were asked to write and put their own dark twists into the works of William Shakespeare. Beware before starting to read this, though - a rudimentary knowledge on featured plays would provide an additional level of appreciation for the reader, and I don't think they should be sufficiently enjoyable if you don’t know the source plays. So I definitely recommend to at least read the Wikipedia entries of the original works, it will be so much more rewarding.
There are 42 contributions in total - so the number of highlights in this already wonderful anthology is accordingly high. And so is the number of stories and poems revolving around neglected characters or characters treated unfairly by The Bard, in an attempt to give them redemption or show their own points of view, bringing about a dark but karmic quality. Yes, “REVENGE” in capital letters is the motto for the majority of these writings and that always makes for a good basis, as the horror ensued isn’t completely unprovoked and bears a sense of justice.
It is Brabantio from Othello who finally gets what is coming to him in Geneve Flynn’s To Keep a Corner in the Thing I Loved, and retaliation comes in culinary form.
Malvolio is but a minor character in the Twelfth Night who is being humiliated to generate laughter, but swears vengeance at the end of the play. He finally gets center stage in Thirteenth Night or What You Kill by Ian Doescher: a masterpiece, a mini theater play set in the aftermath of the events in the original play. With a delightfully shocking killer twist in the end!
Lee Murray’s amusing twist on The Winter’s Tale, Showtime, provides redemption for Hermoine, who is falsely accused of having an affair by her husband, Leontes the King of Sicily, with his childhood friend, King of Bohemia Polixenes and was shunned. I especially liked the names in this modern retelling, in which Leon and Xavier are CEOs of multinational corporations in the entertainment business.
Talking about revenge, it is impossible to overlook one Shakespeare character. It is good to see that Lavinia is not forgotten, and her humanity is restored by these authors - poor Lavinia who was ordered by Tamora, the Queen of Goths, to be gang raped by her sons, after which her hands and feet were mutilated and her tongue cut off, so she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. Even though she still finds a way to express herself by writing with a stick that she can hold with difficulty, she is killed by her own insane father, the titular Titus Andronicus on a whim.
Lavinia’s story, although the original play isn’t about her at all, is one that is deeply affecting on many levels and of utmost immediacy – beside representing young girls betrayed by their very own fathers who are supposed to provide support and affection in this life, but harm them willingly, with their own hands, she also stands for violence on women, which, is and will always be of the greatest importance because cases exactly like this still happen today, as they happened four hundred years ago.
So, it was grant to find not one, but two short stories which take up Lavinia’s revenge; Scourge of Rome by Amanda Dier as well as The Body, The Blood, The Woods, The Stage by Lisa Morton. And both were breathtaking.
Although predominant, retaliation and bloody revenge are not the only themes Shakespeare Unleashed deals with. There are amusing retellings or modern twists in age old tropes: In Fortune Philip Fracassi imagines a different life for King Lear and his three daughters. In Soliloquy of Tongues Hailey Piper presents a rather annoying habit the Hamlets sport. We follow the monster Caliban and his life among xenophobes after the events on the island in The Tempest in Steve Rasnic Tem’s X. A time traveling Romeo in JG Faherty’s A Timeless Tragedy. Nothing Like the Sun: Rosaline’s Satisfaction by Donna J. Munro turns Romeo and Juliet upside down by giving the story a fresh point of view, that of Rosaline, with whom Romeo was infatuated before meeting the last love of his life. And finally, another masterpiece by Linda D. Addison, Not from My Heart Do I Your Judgement Pluck, which is a nasty, Hannibal-Lecterish twist on the love poem Sonnet 14 - very hilarious.
This anthology does its title justice and unleashes Shakespeare, it is “da bomb” as one of Lee Murray’s characters would put it, and one can only congratulate the editor as well as the contributors for creating such a bomb. Wonderful!
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