Written by Canadians Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col, with art by Andy Belanger, this book collects the first six issues of the comic book.
It begins in Denmark, after Hamlet has mistakenly killed Polonius. As in Act IV of the play, he is sent on a ship to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In this version, Rosencrantz reveals the treacherous letter to Hamlet, but it saves him not since he is killed when the pirates attack and sink the ship. Hamlet washes up in the kingdom of Richard III, who declares him the Shadow King, meant to fulfill a great prophecy. He is supposedly to free all these characters from the tyranny of William Shakespeare, their writer and god, by stealing his quill. In truth, Richard III and his allies – including Iago, Lady Macbeth and the witches – want the bard dead.
I found this quite hard going, with dialogue that never felt as natural as it does in Shakespeare’s plays. And the premise didn’t work for me. Fables drew on timeless fairytale characters, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen used characters from the appropriate time period for each adventure. The smushing together of stories and historical figures here makes much less sense. Who are these people when you take them out of time and context? And it got my goat up immediately with a foreword suggesting that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. I liked the chunky art style, though, and Falstaff was good fun. Wasn’t keen on wife-murdering Othello as a hero, but Juliet made a good resistance leader. Stephen Theaker ***
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