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Summary
Act 1, Prologue and Scenes 1–4
Prologue
The book begins with the narrator and protagonist Oliver Marks handcuffed to a table, mentally reciting a line from the first act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Joseph Colborne enters and congratulates Oliver on his successful parole hearing. After ten years, Oliver is about to be freed. Colborne, the arresting detective, visited Oliver regularly during his imprisonment because he neither believes Oliver to be guilty nor wholly innocent. Now retired from policing, he convinces Oliver to tell the whole story as the truth can no longer be used against him. He urges Oliver to unburden himself of his secrets, noting how weighty they can be. At the end of the prologue, Oliver agrees.
Act 1, Scene 1
Oliver’s story begins in 1997 at Dellecher Classical Conservatory in Broadwater, IL. There are seven main characters. Oliver, Meredith, Richard, Filippa, Alexander, Wren, and James are all fourth-year drama students. They sit in the library of the Castle, their “dorm,” discussing the year to come and what they will perform for their upcoming auditions. Alexander complains that auditioning is silly because they are always cast in the same roles. James is always the good guy, while Alexander is the villain. Richard is inevitably the king or the tyrant. Meredith is given the roles appropriate to a femme fatale, while Wren is repeatedly cast as the ingenue. Filippa is often asked to cross dress and take male parts, while Oliver is invariably the good guy’s sidekick. Roommates James and Oliver go to their room and discuss the year to come. As they prepare for bed, James suggests to Oliver that the spring may provide him the chance to be the tragic hero.
Act 1, Scene 2
Richard and Oliver head to the FAB (Fine Arts Building) to audition for the fall play, Julius Caesar. Dellecher has a grueling academic program and each year, students are cut from the school if they fail to meet the school’s standards. The seven have survived three rounds of cuts, which Oliver explains is evidence of either talent or luck, attributing his own success to the latter. Yet he also notes that they work well as a dramatic troupe. Oliver watches Richard’s audition, a soliloquy from Henry V, before giving his own, taken from Pericles.
Act 1, Scene 3
Auditions completed, the group waits for the cast list at their usual table at the Bore’s Head, their local bar. Wren bursts in with their assignments, most of which confirm Alexander’s predictions. The only surprise is that Filippa has three parts and Oliver two. Some tension is evident, though, as Richard crows loudly over his role as Caesar.
Act 1, Scene 4
Later at the lake, Meredith suggests skinny-dipping. James snipes at her with a line from Hamlet. Richard predicts it will be a good year, and they marvel that they’ll graduate at its end. Oliver recalls his father’s furious objections to Dellecher, while Alexander wishes his mother cared enough to be mad, and James laments that his father, a professor, had hoped he’d become a poet. Too busy making money, Meredith’s parents were disinterested in her choice, but Richard and Wren, cousins from an acting family, were supported enthusiastically. Filippa says nothing.
Analysis
The Prologue introduces the frame tale for If We Were Villains. A frame tale is a narrative device that creates a story within a story. In this case, the story of the frame concerns Oliver Marks’s relationship with Detective Colborne. Even though the detective arrested Oliver, he never fully accepted Oliver as Richard’s murderer and has come to ask Oliver to share the full story. This device establishes Oliver as the narrator in two time periods, when he is being released from prison and ten years earlier, when the crime was committed. The frame also specifies Detective Colborne as the audience for Oliver’s story. Temporal dislocation is common in crime stories, which typically begin after the action has occurred and proceed to uncover what happened in fragments. M. L. Rio’s use of this frame device means that the story of the events unfolds continuously.
The novel’s action takes place at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, making this work a mature coming of age story set in academia. But Dellecher is an unusual school. Although there are other courses of study offered by the institution, the acting students only study acting, and they only read the works of one dramatist, William Shakespeare. Each year, the students who are judged insufficiently talented are cut from their cohort. The untraditional curriculum, limited staff, non-existent extracurricular activities, and heightened competition all contribute to the fraught and claustrophobic environment depicted in the book. The seven main characters, all students in their final year, are scheduled to graduate at the end of the year. In terms of their studies, this is the year of tragedy, when they read and perform Shakespeare’s tragedies, but in their lives, it should be a year of comedy, as they complete the preparation for their futures and graduate into it. In other words, it is a year that should end happily. As the prologue has already established, however, it will not.
Shakespeare’s works are central to the book’s content, and they are equally important to its structure. In the place of chapters, If We Were Villains is organized by Act and Scene, as if it were a play. While the narrative is usually written in prose, sometimes it will slip into dialogue, with lines attributed to characters without any narrative frame. In addition, lines from Shakespeare’s plays are often included, inserted as dialogue. In Act 1, Scene 4, Meredith enthuses about the late summer evening with a line from The Merchant of Venice and James replies with a passage from Hamlet. Individual also characters become associated with specific plays. Oliver cites Hamlet regularly, for example. Although, the group often relies on the play they are rehearsing. In each instance, the citations deepen the meaning of the novel and double the implications of what is said.
Because some of the plot is already established before the story begins, the opening chapters create tension between what’s clear or established and what’s secret or unknown. It is established at the outset that a crime will be committed and Oliver will be found guilty of it, but what really happened is unknown and Oliver is good at keeping secrets, as Colborne notes. The seven main characters are usually given the same roles, so that they know what the cast list, which should be a secret, will say before it is posted. But that does not mean there aren’t secrets associated with casting. Not only is Oliver “secretly” not jealous of his very talented peers who are required to work twice as hard, but James hopes to expand his resume by playing different roles. When he promises Oliver that he will eventually get to play a tragic hero, Oliver asks if Frederick has been telling him secrets again. Although this is a tight-knit group of friends, they keep many secrets from one another.
