Overview

Discovered in a treasure-filled parking lot in Leicester (next to a pile of bones that didn’t look that important), an ancient manuscript proves to be the long-lost first play written by none other than seventeen-year-old William Shakespeare from Stratford. William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) is the literary holy grail: an actual manuscript in Shakespeare’s own hand showing all his most famous characters and familiar speeches in a brand-new story. An ancient grudge pits Puck (from Midsummer Night’s Dream) against Ariel (from The Tempest) and turns Shakespeare’s canon upside-down, creating such strange bedfellows as Hamlet and that master motivator Lady Macbeth, Viola and Richard III, King Lear and the Weird Sisters, and (of course) Dromio and Juliet.

Using questionable scholarship and street-performer smarts, playwrights Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor weave together most of the famous speeches and plot devices of Shakespeare’s thirty-nine plays to create a fast, funny and fictional fortieth, filled with witty wordplay, vaudevillian variety and twins, twins, twins!