It’s been a long time since I blazed through 500 pages so fast. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing in the case of Seven Shakespeares.
Everyone has some familiarity with William Shakespeare’s works, but how much do you really know about the man? Heck, even scholars have lots of questions about Shakespeare’s life.
Enter Seven Shakespeares, an imagined account of Shakespeare’s life.
The opening chapter shows Shakespeare in his prime, getting a standing ovation from the Queen Majesty herself. A thief cries out that Shakespeare is “the ill-bred churlish swindler”, and then the story jumps back in time. It’s in the second chapter that we meet Li, a Chinese immigrant with an incredible sixth sense. Whether Li can really see the future thanks to some mystical power or if she just has strong hunches is currently up to readers’ interpretation, but it leans more towards the former. Regardless, the people in Chinatown decide to sacrifice her, and she eventually ends up meeting Shakespeare (known as Lance Carter) and his associates Mil and Worth. Worth thinks Li would be a liability, but Mil is smitten (in a non-romantic way) and takes it upon himself to teach Li English. Shakespeare himself senses something about her, and she quickly becomes fluent to the point she can create beautiful imagery with her words.
As you may have guessed, a lot of those diary entries and random speeches are what would later be attributed to Shakespeare. Considering how the three men and Li become a pseudo-family, I doubt “Lance” coldly steals Li’s writings and publishes them as Shakespeare. But considering there are seven lost years and, according to the title, seven Shakespeares, perhaps Shakespeare changes during his struggles to become famous?
Reading this, it’s easy to see why Seven Shakespeares was released in a two-in-one format. This is very much centered around Li, covering her time in her village and her adjustment to being an English girl. The village sequence goes on a little too long in my opinion, so I was going a little fast there. The other characters are likable, but I wanted to focus on the Bard himself! Even other subplots like Worth trying to figure out why he keeps losing money on sugar all come back to Li.
So far, everything is so tied to Li’s gifts I kind of wonder why Sakuishi didn’t just go down the route that Shakespeare met some kind of fairy. Even the way they met was mystical: he thought he saw a drop come down from the moon, as if it were the goddess Diana’s tear. If you’re hoping for a super-realistic, very historically accurate look at the lost years, this isn’t it.
But if you take the historically accurate aspects of the series, is it entertaining? As I mentioned, it’s pretty fast-paced considering this is an omnibus. Sakuishi doesn’t spend a lot of time going over Elizabethan life, but instead focuses on Li’s struggle to live and be loved. The art is also amazing. Shakespeare has a wide range of grins from his determined passion to familial joy to his pure love of words. The fish “swimming” in the candle shadows or the moon’s tears are just as lyrical as the best sonnets, but we also see cruelty like Li getting branded. The dialogue only shows a bit of Middle English, keeping the story accessible to most readers.
Shakespeare-ophiles might be slightly let down by the heavy focus on a fictional character. But there’s something addicting about a Chinese girl with a gift meeting perhaps the most famous author in history.