Two minor characters from Hamlet offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane.

The same kind of biting wit and madcap humor which have helped make Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Jumpers two of the most celebrated stage works of our time are in evidence again in this, the first novel so far, of the famous English playwright. Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon is set in contemporary London; however, its cast includes not only the eighteenth-century figure of the dandified Malquist and his ineffectual Boswell, Moon, but also a couple of cowboys with live bullets in their sixshooters, a lion, and a donkey-borne Irishman claiming to be the Risen Christ. The novel matter-of-factly accommodates absurd and comic visions familiar from the author’s stage works in which a series of misadventures offer a hilarious but ominous commentary on the manners and morals of contemporary society.