Picture of Nobody (Paperback or Softback)

“Truly unlike any other book I have read. Shakespeare and AntiShakespeare, a time-slipping tragicomedy of errors, grim and gorgeous, sparkling and sliding with wit and melancholy . . . Picture of Nobody is a masterpiece, and a very strange one too.” —David Tibet, Current 93

Transposed into the early twentieth century, a nonentity named Shakespeare rails against poverty, mediocrity, and misunderstanding, in forgotten modernist Philip Owens’s brilliant, one-of-a-kind satire.

Every year, there’s a new crop of sad, dirty poet boys coming up to the city without a penny to their names. In six months’ time, who on earth will remember these nobodies, with their so-called blank verse and their extravagant plots—this Marlowe, Kyd, and Will “Shakespere”? (A pseudonym, surely!)Better that they write thrillers, or advertising copy, or speeches for the media baron John Falstaff, who looks to be running for office. Now there’s a man with a strong hand, who’ll keep us out of any nasty foreign wars!

Published in 1936 and soon forgotten in the chaos of World War II, Picture of Nobody is one of the strangest, most accomplished, and most remarkable one-offs in English fiction. A comic yet credible reimagining of the milieu of Elizabethan London in modernist dress, it transcends its premise to provide a poignant portrait, of a Shakespearean mind coming to grips with the twentieth century. Populated by an assortment of characters familiar from Will’s life and writing both, it is as much a loving parody as a grim prophecy regarding the fate of genius in “interesting times.”

Philip Owens (1900–1945) was a poet, translator, and editor. He published one novella, Hobohemians, in 1929, as well as several verse plays and poems over the succeeding decade. He translated two novels by Hans Fallada, and his poetry appears in the 1930 Samuel Putnam-edited anthology European Caravan, which also introduced the world to Samuel Beckett and William Empson. In the penultimate year of his life, Owens edited the collection Bed and Sometimes Breakfast: An Anthology of Landladies (1944). He died in an accident in Greece―where he was serving with British Intelligence―just three months before the end of the Second World War.

Allen Bratton is the author of the novel Henry Henry. His short stories have appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He holds an MA in English Language and Literatures, having written a thesis on medieval English kingship. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.