Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

A treasure trove of Shakespeare papers thrills Mary Lamb -- and tests her sanity.

THE LAMBS OF LONDON

A Novel

By Peter Ackroyd

Doubleday. 213 pp. $23

"The seeds of Love in madness stretch their roots."

-- "Othello," Act III

If anyone understands that problem better than Shakespeare, it may be his most ardent fans. For 400 years, they've scoured London and excavated Stratford in a desperate search for clues about their beloved Bard. They've fought off the claims of competing authors, from Francis Bacon to the earl of Oxford to Mary Sidney. And yet for all their devotion, archaeology, brilliant interpretation and arcane computer analysis, the Holy Grail eludes them: Where are the manuscripts? Why do we have 35,000-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux but nothing in the handwriting of a man who wrote more than 35 plays and 200 sonnets -- nothing except half a dozen stray signatures using different spellings? It's enough to drive a scholar crazy.

Enter Peter Ackroyd, stage left. The author of a marvelous biography of Shakespeare that appeared last year, he's already back with a delicately cut historical novel about the Bard's greatest, boldest, maddest fans. He disavows any fidelity to actual events, but he's preserved the skeleton of history and fleshed out the characters to produce a story that's oddly affecting and thoroughly entertaining. I can't remember a novel that wears its erudition so graciously, so lightly -- unless it would be his previous short novel, The Clerkenwell Tales (2004), a mystery about religious terrorism in late 14th-century London.

If it's hard to imagine that the son of a common glove-maker could write such sublime works as "Hamlet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," it's just as difficult to fathom how, 200 years later, the sweet woman who popularized his plays for children could hack her mother to death with a kitchen knife. The Lambs of London opens a few months before Mary Lamb committed that shocking murder and a full decade before she and her brother, Charles, published Tales from Shakespeare , 20 tragedies and comedies translated for "the apprehension of a very young mind."

With his signature efficiency and wit, Ackroyd quickly lays out the Lamb home as a place of gentility, intelligence and smothered despair. Charles is a clever writer who's drinking away his frustration every night after clerking in the East India House, while his devoted sister endures the full burden of caring for their elderly parents. Shy by nature, Mary has been left badly scarred by smallpox and more reclusive than ever, thoroughly dependent on her errant brother for entertainment and affection. "He enjoyed her company," Ackroyd writes. "But there were times when her attention to him, intense and sensitive, repelled him." Believing her to be contented with her sewing and reading, he remains willfully ignorant of the effects of abandoning her again and again to the company of their joyless mother and senile father. "When you see me in this house I am sleep-walking. I have no real -- no genuine -- life here at all," she tells him one night in a rare moment of candor. "Whose propriety is it that I should be pressed to death? Whose convention is it that I am already lying in the family grave?"

Into this unstable situation, comes William Ireland, the 17-year-old son of a local bookseller. Ambitious and precocious, William chafes at the limitations of his class and craves the approval of his father. But a remarkable discovery of old papers in the home of a secret patron promises to improve his station dramatically. Hoping to ingratiate himself with Charles Lamb and thereby gain access to the literary journal that publishes Charles's essays, William sells him a book allegedly once owned by Shakespeare. That transaction leads to an introduction to Mary, who immediately grows infatuated with this fellow admirer of her favorite playwright.

How delicately, how cleverly Ackroyd follows the acceleration of William's scheme and its energizing effect on him and Mary. Desperate to impress his father, William soon finds a deed witnessed by Shakespeare, then a testament of his Protestant faith, a new poem, a love letter to Anne Hathaway and even a manuscript copy of "Lear." All this might have been much ado about nothing if William's father had been able to resist broadcasting his son's discoveries and using them to advertise their bookshop. With the announcement of each new treasure, William attains greater fame, and Mary, living through him, finds "a refuge from her misery. To dwell in another time -- if only for a moment -- offered her proof that she need not be confined or constricted."

Finally, in a climax that would sound over-the-top if it weren't historically true, William produces a document that promises to revolutionize literary history and push Mary's faith -- and sanity -- to the limit. Despite haunting intimations of the various disasters about to consume these people, Ackroyd never drops his steely wit. After all, he seems to suggest, the warnings are obvious, but everyone invents some reason to look away, "covering discretion with a coat of folly," to quote the Bard. In this strangely blended comedy and tragedy, Ackroyd's characters -- like most of us -- believe what they hope will make them loved or important or rich.

Which reminds me, if that opening quote from "Othello" doesn't sound familiar, you're right: I made it up. ?

Ron Charles is a senior editor at Book World.