Agatha Christie and Shakespeare

Agatha Christie had a deep knowledge and love of Shakespeare.

Christie, like Shakespeare, was also a very successful playwright; The Mousetrap has been the longest continuous run of any play, vanquished by Covid-19 in 2020. This was something else they have in common; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was closed in 1608, except then it was from the bubonic plague pandemic.

Many readers will recognise in the titles of Christie novels and plays phrases taken from Shakespeare. Quotes and plot details imbedded in Christie’s works taken from The Bard are a continuous thread throughout her fifty years of writing.

In Curtain, Christie gained her inspiration of the perfect criminal from the character of Iago. Christie saw the 1942 production of Othello at the New Theatre, in London during the War. Curtain also has quotes from Hamlet and Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare and Christie wrote good thrillers. It is not surprising that they both hit upon various similar stratagems for misdirecting the audience of a play, or the reader of a novel. Often in a Shakespeare play, some of the characters on stage are deceived when the audience is in the know, which makes a comedy: a ‘gulling scene’. The audience laugh at the character being made to look ridiculous. Christie uses identical ‘gulling scenes’ of false letters, or mistaken identities to hoodwink the reader, until all is revealed in a final dénouement. Christie and her detective have the last laugh. The possible way Shakespeare plays inspired Christie misdirections and plots have not been acknowledged previously.

For Curtain POIROT SCORE, REVIEW and a discussion of Othello in TRIVIA please press here