The Senseless Counterfeit: An idle frippery or play

In this third volume of the Bristolian Chronicles-and his only work for the stage-Richard Craven delivers a full-length revenge tragedy in verse, complete with masques, murder, and a cast of the most biblically sordid reprobates ever to grace the theatrical page. At its centre stands Squalor: prologue-speaker, filth-savant, and gleeful herald of the action's descent. Around him swarm tantrically deluded gurus, demented Tolstoyans, vengeful daughters, and moral pariahs locked in a spiral of ritual humiliation and baroque retribution.

The play is rendered in Craven's signature iambic bile: a toxic brew of Jacobean intensity, Restoration excess, and Bristolian derangement. Satirical, obscene, and formally virtuosic, The Senseless Counterfeit is a theatrical artefact from a world that has abandoned redemption-and replaced it with performance.

Richard Craven is a British-Canadian former academic philosopher who has spent the last twenty years in Bristol. Since leaving academia, he has dedicated himself to writing mordantly satirical literary fiction and the resurrection of formal verse for a 21st century readership. The Senseless Counterfeit is his fourth book, following Bile, Amoeba Dick, and Pretty Poli.