A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

The piece is called The Apothecary of Mantua: A Musical Drama in Two Acts. It is now available as a book.

Let me sit with that sentence for a moment, because the marketing copy people at every other publishing house would tell me to cut it. “A musical now available as a book” is a paradox. Musicals are performed. Books are read. A musical that is a book is either a cast recording liner notes expanded to absurdity or it is something else entirely, which is what this is.

This is a reading edition of a complete dramatic work. Book and lyrics by me. Score to be written by someone else. The someone else is, for the moment, a hypothetical someone whose name I do not yet know, but whose phone number I hope to be given in the next six months. More on that in a moment.

What is in the book

The published volume 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. In Act Two, everything arrives at once. A morning Watch presence crosses the piazza. A sixteenth-century statute on the books 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.

The libretto itself runs about a hundred pages of the paperback. The rest of the volume is apparatus. There is a production bible covering historical setting, character backstory, relationships, timeline, world-building, and scene-by-scene structural outline. Following that, a composer’s reference with meter assignments per character, a rhyme family inventory, scene-by-scene musical specifications, voice-and-orchestra split architecture, and a duration summary. Then a production and staging section for directors and designers. And four scholarly 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 minor source character.

The total is 338 pages. I am saying this because the scope matters to how you should think about the piece. 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 four hundred pages of scholarship.

Why publish a musical as a book

The practical answer is that the piece needs to exist in a durable form before a composer sets it, and books are the most durable form we have invented. Composers who want to score the work need a physical copy to read, mark up, argue with, and carry to the piano. Directors who want to produce it need the production bible. Conservatories that want to assign it as a teaching text for dramatic writing or for scholarly research on the source and period need the essays. The book form serves all three audiences.

The philosophical answer is that I have been running David Boles Books Writing & Publishing since 1975, when I was ten years old and got paid for an article in a Lincoln newspaper, and the house was founded on the premise that writers should own the means of production. I do not wait for permission to publish the things I write. The Apothecary of Mantua is the latest demonstration of that premise and it will not be the last.

Critics outside the operation sometimes push on the 1975 founding date. They say a ten-year-old with a check from a newspaper is not a publishing house. My response is that a publishing house is what you do next after your first check. What I did next was decide that my writing would continue, that it would be paid for, and that the infrastructure to deliver it to readers would be mine rather than rented from someone else’s imagination. Fifty-one years later, David Boles Books has published a catalog I can barely track on a good day, and the Apothecary is the newest title on the list.

What happens now

The book is on Amazon in paperback for $19.99. The Kindle edition is $9.99. There is a letter-size download edition for composers who want to print it at home and mark it up with a pencil. All three editions are available through BolesBooks.com.

And here is where I would like to address any composers who may be reading this. You exist. I know you exist because BolesBooks.com gets traffic from music conservatories and I know what kind of person goes looking for a 338-page scholarly reading edition of a musical drama at two in the morning on a Tuesday. That person is a composer between commissions who is restless and scrolling and wondering whether the next project might have already been written and might be waiting to be found.

If you are that composer, 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 his own voice. I would be delighted to talk with you about setting it. Reach out through BolesBooks.com and we will find an hour to talk about what you hear when you read the first scene.

A new old musical. Now available in book form. The composer seat is still open. A tortoise still hangs from the rafters of the shop. Forty ducats still sit on the counter. And somewhere in the plague rolls of 1527 there is a woman named Fiammetta whose orchestral theme is waiting for the first chord that will make her real again.

Come and write it.