let me tell you and let me go on [Paperback]

Two novels from the perspective of Hamlet’s Ophelia—the first set before the events of the play, the second after—written entirely by remixing and repurposing the character’s dialogue from Shakespeare’s original text.

“So: now I come to speak.” With this line, Shakespeare’s Ophelia starts telling her story. In let me tell you, this newly revealed woman uses exactly the same words Shakespeare gave her in Hamlet, shifted as in a kaleidoscope to create a very different voice: her own. We hear her personal narrative from childhood to the moments before the start of the play, when she knows she has a fateful decision to make. Along the way, we discover whole new angles on her father, her brother, the prince, and other characters who come out from behind the curtain.

In let me go on, her decision made, she refashions herself. Emerging from her old world, she explores a new one, of magical variety yet coherent. As she goes in search of what she may still become, she meets a new cast of characters, some poignant, some hilarious. Paul Griffiths gives this remarkable protagonist—and us—a play-full of humor, poignancy, passion, adventure, and a great many surprises.“Griffiths, a leading music critic and author of two other novels, here lets Ophelia recount her story in her own words. Literally. His first-person narration uses only the 481-word vocabulary that Shakespeare gives to Ophelia in Hamlet. It sounds bizarre. Yet the result is tender, touching and extremely beautiful.” —Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

“Whereas let me tell you is set before the action of Hamlet, thereby offering Ophelia the chance to dodge the fate that awaits herl3y