“Keep thee warm”: The cozy mysteries of Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators

Because I love mysteries and Shakespeare, I’m surprised it took me as long as it did to discover the charming British TV series Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators, which features former police detective Frank Hathaway teaming up with amateur sleuth Luella Shakespeare to solve crimes in—where else?—Stratford-upon-Avon.

The show’s gentle and mildly comic tone defines it as a “cozy mystery,” a literary and dramatic sub-genre that “combine[s] crime with comfort” and features a typically amateur sleuth investigating a robbery or murder (or both) in which the grisly or titillating details are discussed politely (and sometimes glibly) but the overt sex and violence are kept offstage. Cozy detectives are never emotionally traumatized by the surprising number of dead bodies that keep popping up in their quaint or picturesque setting, which, in the case of Shakespeare & Hathaway, Stratford-upon-Avon perfectly embodies.

As an ex-cop, Frank Hathaway doesn’t technically qualify as amateur, but whatever professionalism and glory he might have once possessed is lost, like Sir John Falstaff’s, in a portly and disheveled fog of alcohol and debt. His partner Luella Shakespeare is a former client who’s arrested for the murder of her new husband at their wedding reception. When they discover the groom was a con man trying to swindle Lu’s life savings (and was killed by a previous victim), Luella uses her recovered money to buy into Frank’s struggling detective agency. Thus, Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators is born.

The biggest fun in Shakespeare & Hathaway is playing “Spot the Reference,” beginning with the first names of the title characters, which are virtual homonyms of their namesakes: FrANNEk Hathaway and LuWILLa Shakespeare. Their assistant Sebastian (a character from both The Tempest and Twelfth Night), is an aspiring RADA-trained actor who frequently goes undercover using disguises from “All The World’s a Stage,” the costume shop he fortuitously lives over. Their local pub is called the Mucky Mallard, a clear play on Stratford’s Black Swan pub, known affectionately as the Dirty Duck and a frequent hangout of actors and audience members alike from the Royal Shakespeare Company. And for the first two seasons, Frank’s former colleague on the force, who’s portrayed as a sometime rival and grudging accomplice, is named (of course!) Christina Marlowe.

The title of every episode is drawn from Shakespeare’s plays and gives clues to the themes and characters appearing in that week’s installment, though the writers enjoy mixing it up. For example, the third episode is titled “This Promised End,” which is a quote from King Lear, but features a mysterious pair named “Mr. R and Mr. G” (drawn from Hamlet) and a funeral directed named Peter Quintus (riffing on the similarly-named character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Even the episode “Toil and Trouble” (a quote from Macbeth) features a queer-friendly pub named Illyria (from Twelfth Night) where a disguised Sebastian mutters nervously to himself the slightly re-ordered line from Richard III “So wise so young, they say, do never live long.” The rest of the episode (credited to writer Kit Lambert) cleverly delivers the promised Macbeth easter eggs, starting with the murder victim being King Duncan — sorry, Stratford Mayor Duncan — and the chief suspect being a man named Porter; three environmental protestors who call themselves HAGs (short for the Hillbsury Action Group), one of whom calls to her dog “Spot! Out, out, out, I say!;” and another character who asks of a strutting peacock of a man, “Is this Mick Jagger I see before me?”

While Shakespeare & Hathaway is the most blatant and obvious mystery to reference the Bard, “Shakespeare is a pervasive presence in detective fiction,” writes Lisa Hopkins in the introduction to her book Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare. Not only is “Shakespeare an unimpeachable source of cultural capital,” according to Hopkins, “but he “denote[s] a quintessential Britishness” to such mystery series as the Oxford-set Inspector Morse franchise. Hopkins also cites G. K. Chesterton, the creator of the fictional priest-detective Father Brown (another exemplar, in both novels and on TV, of the cozy mystery), who wrote in “The Ideal Detective Story” that:

Adrian Scarborough played the Fool opposite Simon Russell Beale’s King Lear at Britain’s National Theatre, and has played multiple Shakespeare roles onstage while appearing on such cozy mystery series as Midsomer Murders and Father Brown, as well as playing the title role of his own series The Chelsea Detective. The Olivier Award-winning actor says that jumping from Shakespeare to mysteries (and back) is a kind of rite-of-passage for a British actor, citing David Tennant (Broadchurch and Hamlet) as an example. “Because the murder mystery is such a prevalent genre on UK TV, most acting grads cut their teeth on these shows,” Scarborough told me in an email. “They are in fact a great training ground for young actors and directors.” Scarborough also approaches his job differently depending on whether he’s guest-starring on a “whimsical and eccentric” series like Death in Paradise or his “much darker and grimmer” turn as Villanelle’s handler Raymond on Killing Eve. Like the difference between Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, some TV mysteries, he says, are “much more tragic than comic and an actor would approach each job very differently.”

The most compelling mystery in Shakespeare & Hathaway might be why nobody ever does a double-take when the two detectives introduce themselves, or asks Luella if she’s related to the great poet, playwright, and secular saint of Stratford-upon-Avon. The crimes that bedevil the two detectives are easygoing Shakespeare-infused confections that won’t add to the stress of your day, and might be just the thing to “keep thee warm” and cozy on a midwinter’s night.