The Lambs of London is based on the Shakespeare Forgeries by William Ireland.

In the late 18th century, a young man, William Ireland, “discovers” a number of deeds, letters and manuscripts belonging to Shakespeare. He claims that he has a patroness who wants to remain completely anonymous; this patroness had these documents in her possession, but had no need for them. While at first the public embraces these documents (including a “lost” Shakespearian play – Vortigern), they soon begin to doubt the authenticity of them.

Charles and Mary Lamb are two people who get into the middle of the events going on. They are introduced when Charles buys a book from the shop William works in that has Shakespeare’s signature in it. Mary forms an immediate attachment to William, and is quite enamored with all his talk and knowledge of Shakespeare. William quickly takes Mary into his confidence by telling her all about his “patroness.” Things soon start going downhill – Mary starts suffering from bipolar depression, and William is trying to keep up the pretense that the documents he has forged are real.

This really was the perfect time for me to read this book. It’s been sitting on my stack for a couple of years, since my aunt (or was it my grandmother?) handed it to me and told me I’d enjoy it. I don’t think I even read the back of the book until a few days ago, so had no clue whatsoever what this book was about. Otherwise, I would have read it much sooner. (I have to admit that I was totally turned off by the cover art.) But I’m happy I kept it until now – I’ve seen a couple of Shakespearian plays recently, and it’s almost time to pull out A Midsummer Night’s Dream to read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, so it was good to immerse myself in a world where the characters love his works so much.

This was quite an easy read, and had some of the most wonderful passages in it, that just rang so true. My favourite was:

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

And of course, when the characters started talking about how wonderful Shakespeare is, I couldn’t help but smile.

“He is our true parent. Chaucer is the father of our poetry, but Shakespeare is the father of our stage. No one truly fell in love before Romeo and Juliet. No one understood jealousy before Othello. Hamlet, too, is a great original. . . Yet the people of his uncultivated time never understood his genius.”

So of course, this book gets cool points for talking of Shakespeare like that.

I had a hard time liking any of the characters at the beginning of the book. Actually, as the book went on, I didn’t like any of them any more than I had started out, but at least I understood them by the end. What motivated them, why they ended up how they ended up…

I had wondered exactly how much of this book was true to fact, and so have spent a bit of time on Wikipedia, reading up on Mary Lamb, Charles Lamb, and William Ireland. I am rather disappointed by one of the things that the author changed; I suppose it makes the ending of the book a little bit more poetic than if he had stuck to what had really happened, so I guess it makes sense, but it’s still a bit of a disappointment.