Life Without Shakespeare in APT’s 'The Book of Will’

By Michael Muckian, Shepherd Express, August 19, 2019

What would the arts be like if William Shakespeare had never existed? Worse yet, if he had existed but no one in his time thought to preserve his collected brilliance for posterity?

Saving Shakespeare’s legacy lies at the heart of Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will, which played Saturday, Aug. 17, in the Hill Theatre on American Players Theatre’s Spring Green campus. From so heady a theme comes one of the company’s funniest and most poignant plays of the season.

Aging actors Henry Condell (Jim DeVita) and John Heminges (James Ridge), members of the King’s Men acting troupe of which Shakespeare was originally a member, bemoan the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in current productions of their late colleague’s plays. Plagued by little money, no experience and incomplete and missing copies of the plays themselves, the pair set about in 1623 to publish what is now known as “The First Folio,” the first published compendium of Shakespeare’s works.

Read the full review here!