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Two novels from the perspective of Hamlet’s Ophelia—the first set before the events of the play, the second after—written entirely by remixing and repurposing the character’s dialogue from Shakespeare’s original text.
“So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know.” Ophelia’s story is told in her own words in Let Me Tell You and Let Me Go On, two starkly evocative novels by writer and music critic Paul Griffiths. Not only is Ophelia brought out of the wings of Hamlet to reclaim her narrative, but her vocabulary is also literally made up of the words—a scant 481 in total—assigned to her by Shakespeare. Melodic and incantatory, Ophelia’s voice attains remarkable directness and passion under such Oulipan constraint.
Set before the events of the play, Let Me Tell You follows Ophelia as she contemplates her love for her father Polonius, her anger towards her absent mother, her perplexity at the prince, and her growing desperation to escape the fate that awaits her. Let Me Go On, on the other hand, is set after the play: Ophelia finds herself wandering the afterlife, where she encounters a phantasmagorical cast of Shakespearean players, all in search of their author, from her brother Laertes to Juliet’s nurse to Mistress Quickly.
At once an audaciously empathetic reimagination and an ambitious formal experiment, Let Me Tell You and Let Me Go On are sure to create haunting new resonances for readers of Shakespeare old and new alike.
