<span style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)">This fascinating novel prompts many unusual questions about the most famous play in the world.</span>
<span style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)">It explores the mind of the quizzical Hamlet himself, and of Shakespeare - if he was indeed, the author.</span>
<span style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)">The novel poses critical literary and cultural questions.</span>
<span style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)">Can Hamlet be saved from himself and can William Shakespeare be proved to be the author of the play and of others attributed to him?</span>
<span style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)">The novel features a 21st-century Psychotherapist of mixed race, Jacob Fortune, who doesn't like the age-old classic play - especially its conclusion. Nor does he believe that the name 'William Shakespeare' was anything other than a 'commercial marketing ploy' for the Elizabethan theatre.</span>
<span style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)">In detective style, through virtual reality, he travels back to try to get into the mind of Hamlet, in order to change the narrative of the play and also to prove himself right about the false claim of authorship. Jacob's story takes us on a light-heated journey through the England of Elizabeth I, but is intertwined with his own experience of love and relationships in the reign of Elizabeth II. He and his colleagues in </span><em style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)">4 Psychotherapists for U<span style="color: rgba(85, 85, 85, 1)"> have troubles of their own, regarding what it means to be male/female/non-binary in their gender identity. The novel has surprising twists and turns along the way.</span>
Michael Scott is a noted theatre critic, and a widely published authority on Shakespeare and on Elizabethan drama. His books include John Marston's Plays: Theme, Structure and Performance (Macmillan 1978); Renaissance Drama & A Modern Audience (Palgrave Macmillan, 1982); Shakespeare & The Modern Dramatist (St. Martin's Press, 1989); Shakespeare, A Complete introduction (John Murray Press, 2017). He has previously published fiction as Michael Kerr Scott: Arthur, Legends of the King (Albert Bridge Books, 2017).He is currently Fellow and Senior Dean at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and Director of the Future of the Humanities Project with Georgetown University, Washington, DC.