Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators is a British mystery television series set in Stratford-upon-Avon and produced by the BBC Birmingham from 2018 to the present. The many writers draw on Shakespeare’s plays for characters and situations but give every show a contemporary twist and use humor to lighten up tense situations.
The main characters are private investigator Frank Hathaway (played by Mark Benton) and Luella Shakespeare (played by Jo Joyner). Luella is a former hairdresser who joins Frank’s firm after he solves the mystery of who killed her fiancé. They work together to solve various crimes in Stratford-upon-Avon, ably assisted by their employee Sebastian Brudenell (played by Patrick Walshe McBride), a young RADA-trained actor who uses his impersonation skill for their undercover investigations. Detective Inspector Christina Marlowe (played by Amber Aga), who had been Frank’s subordinate at the local police department, sometimes helps and sometimes hinders Shakespeare and Hathaway. Of course, Christopher Marlowe was a contemporary playwright competing with William Shakespeare. The actors do a wonderful job in their roles.
Most of the television programs are mash-ups of different dramas by Shakespeare. For example, No More Cakes and Ale draws on both The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing. Portia Montgomery (Portia is an important character in The Merchant of Venice) is a young woman lawyer representing a man falsely accused of assaulting Dogberry (a comic night watchman in Much Ado about Nothing). The television program’s Dogberry mixes up words, much like his Shakespearean counterpart, and also cannot see well enough to correctly identify the culprit in court. Frank and Luella help Portia to successfully defend her client and convict the real murderer. Also, the detectives reunite Portia with her alcoholic mother. Another mash-up show is Thy Fury Spent. This program features a character named Lady Athena Forbes-Allen who resembles Lady Macbeth in her ferocity. However, Lady Forbes-Allen does not murder a king but instead kills her own husband because he has fallen in love with a younger man and plans to leave her. Also, another woman character in Thy Fury Spent named Kate spearheads a militant feminist group called the Herstorians who want to make sure that the local museum devoted to Shakespeare fairly represents women’s history. She resembles Katherine Minola in Taming of the Shrew, but no one succeeds in taming Kate in the television adaptation.
However, some shows focus on updating particular tragedies or comedies. For example, The Offered Fallacy adapts The Comedy of Errors plot, in which two sets of identical twins cause confusion. Luella and Frank discover that another man and woman disguised as the private investigators are roaming Stratford and cheating people. The swindlers are giving Luella and Frank a bad name, and Christina arrests the real investigators. However, Frank persuades Christina to free them to enable them to catch the real culprits.
Similarly, Best Beware My Sting updates Taming of the Shrew. Both dramas concern two sisters: the older one seems out-of-control, but the younger sister seems docile. In the television series, Kate belongs to an environmental group called Mortal Coil (a phrase from Hamlet’s soliloquy) that has a protest in her father’s Minola Energy factory. Her sister Bianca seems normal, but she turns out have staged a fake kidnapping, demanded a fake ransom, and murdered her fiancé.
Another Shakespeare and Hathaway show about sisters is Beware the Ides of March, which portrays two competing sibling psychics who collaborate in helping people get in touch with departed relatives on a popular television show. Someone keeps trying to kill the two sisters Julienne and Marcia Fortby. The plot resembles that of Julius Caesar in which politicians murder Caesar, and then two different coalitions of men compete for power in Rome. The modern twist is that the television program focuses on powerful women rather than on men. The older sister, Julienne Fortby, hires Frank and Luella to figure out who is trying to kill her. Note the similarity of Julienne’s first name to that of Julius Caesar. Frank and Luella discover that Bruce Porter, one of the Fortby’s employees, is the adopted son of a woman named Enid Kascar (resembles the name of the conspirator Casca in Julius Caesar), who sued the psychics for swindling her family and creating stress that caused her husband to die from a stroke.
Ill Met by Moonlight takes situations and characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lady Tania Bede in the television program resembles Titania, the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s comedy. Both characters are feuding with the men who love them. In one scene, Frank, in a disguise for a costume party, winds up in Lady Tania’s bedroom, much like Bottom the weaver in the older play. In both dramas, these lovers resolve their quarrels. There are also young women friends in both dramas who love the same man and battle to win him.
All that Glisters adapts The Winter’s Tale. In both dramas, a wife disappears. But the television program twists the plot because the daughter, Emily Belmont, kills her father, incorrectly suspecting him of having murdered her mother, who had simply abandoned her family. Another program based on The Winter’s Tale is The Fairest Show Means Most Deceit. Just as characters in Shakespeare’s play assume false identities, Martin Mariner claims to be Frank’s uncle, and Sebastian goes undercover as a gas man and as a transvestite at a bar.
This Promised End is loosely based on Hamlet. The main character, Peter Quintus, is a funeral director who gets forced to contemplate his own death when Mr. R (white) and Mr. G (black), modeled on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, threaten to kill Peter within the next twenty-four hours on orders from an unnamed criminal organization. Frank and Lu discover that Peter has battered both his current wife Anne and his former wife, whom he also cheated out of money owed to her after their divorce. Anne has asked two drama professors at her college to impersonate Mr. R and Mr. G to get revenge on her husband. As in Hamlet, we have a play within a play. The plot of This Promised End reflects Hamlet’s harshness toward Ophelia in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Peter has also killed a local warden who scolds him for his abuse of his wife. The television program ends with Anne’s leaving Peter to join her lover Mr. R. The Chameleon’s Dish also has elements of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Hamlet, young Hamish has stepparents and a murderous relative. Both protagonists also suffer from mental illness. Another adaptation of Hamlet is Teach Me, Dear Creature. Jessica Duke hires Frank and Luella because, like Gertrude in Hamlet, she obsessively worries that her son Charlie has gotten himself into trouble. Duke’s daughter Isabella seems very capable, but the detectives discover that she has cheated on tests to get into Oxford University. Cassie Dorcas, a woman tutor at the Syracusetution Centre, gets killed because she confronted a male tutor named Amit Aziz who profits from the test cheating scheme. Aziz resembles Claudius in Hamlet.
In My Memory Lock’d updates Measure for Measure. Just as the Duke disguises himself in Shakespeare’s play, a wealthy hotel owner pretends to be an employee to uncover problems at his Duke Vincent Hotel. Also, Angelo’s attempt to blackmail Isabella into having sex with him in Measure for Measure resembles the hotel owner’s similar attempt to force his employee Izzy to have sex with him. The main difference is that the television program has Afro-British actors in major roles, such as those of Izzy and her mother. I like the show’s commitment to diversify the cast and situations.
Similarly, A Serpent’s Tooth changes King Lear into a study of the South Asian Raja family that owns a carpet business in Stratford established by the father, who now suffers from dementia. Parthi and Pia Raja, the two oldest daughters, have removed Poonam Raja, the youngest and her father’s favorite child, from the business and prevented Poonam from seeing her father. This is punishment for Poonam’s criticism of the questionable way that her siblings are managing the carpet firm. The two older sisters both love the same man named Haroon Malik, but Parthi, the eldest daughter, kills him due to unrequited passion. Instead of the sad ending of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the television program reunites Poonam with her father and lets her take over the company from her corrupt siblings, who are now in jail. South Asian Police Constable Viola Deacon (Yasmin Kaur Barn), a good friend of Poonam, helps Frank, Lu, and Sebastian to solve this mystery.
The Shakespeare and Hathaway mysteries also adapt Shakespeare’s history plays. For example, How the Rogue Roar’d has elements of Henry IV, Part 1, including a character named Eddie Monmouth who resembles Sir John Falstaff. “Bolingbroke” is one name for King Henry IV. In the television program, a woman named Henrietta Bolingbroke hires Lu and Frank to close down an old bingo hall that she wants to redevelop. Many of the characters in both dramas are lowlifes, such as Eddie Monmouth in the television program, whom Frank had helped convict and send to prison eight years earlier. Another lowlife in Shakespeare’s play is Ned Poins, who becomes the devious Megan Poins, the assistant manager of the bingo hall, in the mystery.
O Thou Invisible Spirit of Wine draws on Romeo and Juliet. In both cases, young people from rival families fall in love. However, the television program features homosexual lovers, which is a very clever way to transform a Renaissance plot into a twenty-first-century story.
