The Apothecary of Mantua
Available Formats:
Kindle Edition · Paperback · Free Composer's PDF
A new musical. Now available as a reading edition with full libretto, production bible, composer's reference, and four scholarly essays on Renaissance Italy and the Shakespeare source.
About This Musical
Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text.
Romeo, banished to Mantua, walks into a shop in Act Five and asks a starving man to sell him poison. The apothecary refuses. The apothecary cites the law. Mantua punishes the sale of such drugs with death. Romeo counters that the world affords no law to make him rich. Forty ducats change hands. A vial changes hands. Romeo leaves. Shakespeare's attention returns to Verona, to the tomb, to the reconciliation of the feuding houses.
The apothecary remains in his shop. He has forty ducats on the counter. He has just committed a capital crime. Nobody has ever asked him what happened next.
The Apothecary of Mantua is the musical that asks. Set in Mantua in the autumn of 1537, the piece imagines the unnamed apothecary as Tommaso Vesperi, a Paduan-trained physician stripped of his guild license for Paracelsian sympathies. Behind the public shop where Romeo made his purchase, Tommaso runs a clandestine clinic for the poor of the city's eastern quarters. His dead wife Fiammetta, a folk healer who died in the plague of 1527, returns in the second scene as an orchestral theme. His young apprentice Nerezza keeps the back door open after dark. The Watch Captain is on his way to the piazza, and the statute on the books punishes the sale of mortal drugs with death.
Four hundred and twenty-nine years of silence. A light still inside the jar.
A New Old Musical
The Apothecary of Mantua is both new and old. The story it tells happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote its central character in 1595 and dismissed him in the same scene that introduced him. The piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. It is the most ancient kind of thing a playwright can write, and it was written in 2026, and it is new because that is what it is.
The published reading edition contains the full libretto across two acts and twenty scenes. Act One runs nine scenes, Act Two runs eleven. Tommaso Vesperi wakes on a Tuesday morning in early autumn 1537, opens his shop on Via del Cigno, and by that evening has sold a vial of poison to a young Veronese nobleman who leaves forty ducats on the counter and disappears into a plague of his own making. Act Two is the day after. Everything arrives at once. A morning Watch presence crosses the piazza. A sixteenth-century statute punishes the sale of mortal drugs with death. Tommaso has a decision to make about whether to run, and if he does not run, what to do with the forty ducats before the Watch Captain crosses his threshold.
What the Reading Edition Contains
The libretto itself runs about a hundred pages of the paperback. The remaining two hundred thirty pages are scholarly and production apparatus designed to make the piece fully useful to composers, directors, performers, and readers of dramatic literature.
Libretto · Full two-act dramatic text in open verse with song cues, stage directions, and scene-by-scene dramatic structure.
Production Bible · Historical setting for Mantua in 1537, character backstory, relationships, timeline, world-building, scene-by-scene structural outline, and production notes.
Composer's Reference · Meter assignments per character, rhyme family inventory, scene-by-scene musical specifications, voice-and-orchestra split architecture, musical motif register, and a duration summary.
Production and Staging · Physical staging anchors, lighting cues and mode changes, costume notes, prop inventory, scene-by-scene production checklist, and staging principles.
Scholarly Appendices · Four essays on Mantua in 1537, on the apothecary trade and Paracelsian medicine, on the Mantuan Jewish community in the early Cinquecento, and on Shakespeare's source text and the minor apothecary character.
A typical acting edition of a musical libretto is sixty to ninety pages, cue script dimensions, cheap paper, minimal apparatus. The Apothecary of Mantua takes a different posture. It is a scholarly reading edition that happens to contain a performable musical, or, depending on how you squint at it, a performable musical that happens to travel with two hundred thirty pages of supporting scholarship.
The Five Characters Who Carry the Piece
Tommaso Vesperi · Baritone. Nearly fifty. Paduan-trained physician stripped of his guild license for Paracelsian sympathies. Runs the public apothecary shop on Via del Cigno and the clandestine clinic behind its concealed door. Author of an unpublished manuscript, De Morbis et Seminariis, written by candle at night.
Nerezza Baldi · Mezzo-soprano. Sixteen years old. Tommaso's apprentice and the operational manager of the back-door clinic. Literate, observant, and dangerous in a way Tommaso has not yet recognized.
Fiammetta Vesperi · Soprano. Tommaso's dead wife, a folk healer and midwife who died in the plague of 1527 at age thirty-two. Seen once in Act One Scene Five's gallery appearance; otherwise returns as an orchestral theme threading through both acts.
Benedetto Serravalle · Bass-baritone. Watch Captain. The enforcement arm of the statute Tommaso has just violated. Also the son of a woman whose life Tommaso saved in the plague of 1527.
Menahem ben Shlomo · Tenor. Scribe and bookbinder in Mantua's Jewish quarter. The man Tommaso will trust with the manuscript if the forty ducats are not enough to save him.
From the Text
The tortoise hangs from the rafters. The alligator keeps its eye. I set the empty boxes out to give the passing watch no doubt.
Mantua's law is death to any he that utters them, and I have uttered them, and the morning knows my face.
Tommaso, watch. The petals wait. You take them early, not too late. The morning sun has dried the dew; the heat of noon has not come through.
If You Are a Composer
If you are a composer looking for a new musical to score, this one wants you. Four hundred and twenty-nine years of silence is a long tuning note, and Tommaso Vesperi has been waiting all this time for someone with a score in their head to walk into the shop and ask him what the apothecary of Mantua sounds like in the key of their own voice.
The libretto is ready. Every character has been waiting for a composer's ear. A production bible, a composer's reference with meter assignments and motif register, scene-by-scene musical specifications, and the voice-and-orchestra split architecture are all yours to read before you commit a single note.
I would be delighted to talk with you about setting it. Let's find an hour to talk about what you hear when you read the first scene.
Author Interview
Related Reading
On the Musical
The Long Way from Lincoln to Mantua · Prairie Voice
A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form · BolesBlogs
On Musical Theatre, the Stage, and the Publishing of Dramatic Work
The Broadway Machine: Forty-One Houses and the Architecture of an Art Form
Why the American Musical Theatre Must Have an Aesthetic Morality
The Metropolitan Opera Is Dying Because It Wants to Die
Related Boles Properties
About the Author
David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. His titles include The Broadway Machine, Miscast, The Claimed Body, Carceral Nation, Selling Saturday Morning, the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, The Borrowed Saint, Beautiful Numbness, and many other works. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at Prairie Voice, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.
Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City.
See Also
The Broadway Machine · Miscast · Beautiful Numbness · Fractional Fiction Series · EleMenTs Trilogy · About David Boles