A dark academia novel steeped in Shakespeare’s language and structure. Seven acting students live and breathe the Bard until art and life begin to blur, and tragedy takes centre stage.
As the tension rises, M. L. Rio mirrors Shakespeare’s five-act form — ambition, betrayal, guilt, and catharsis unfold like scenes from Macbeth or King Lear.
A haunting exploration of identity and performance, it’s a story for anyone who’s ever wondered whether we play our parts — or if our parts play us.
Book cover © Titan Books, used here for review purposes.
M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains unfolds like a Shakespearean tragedy disguised as a campus novel. Seven young actors live and breathe the Bard — until the performance turns deadly. Through its five-act structure and its deep ties to Macbeth, Lear, and Romeo and Juliet, Rio’s debut examines obsession, guilt, and the peril of mistaking art for life.
Act I: A Modern Tragedy in Five Acts
Rio structures her novel deliberately like a Shakespearean play — Prologue, five acts, Epilogue — mirroring the arc of classical tragedy. The rising tension, moral conflict, and final catharsis evoke the timeless rhythm of Macbeth and King Lear.
Each act peels away another layer of performance until all that remains is truth. Like Shakespeare’s players, the students live by archetypes — the lover, the villain, the fool, the tragic hero — and ultimately become trapped by them.
Act II: Characters as Archetypes
Each character reflects a Shakespearean type:
James — the tragic hero (Macbeth, Lear), noble but doomed by inner flaw.
Richard — the villain, equal parts Iago and Edmund.
Wren & Meredith — the lovers, torn between intimacy and self-preservation.
Oliver — our Horatio, the watchful narrator who survives to tell the tale.
Rio’s brilliance lies in her casting: the students don’t just play their roles — they become them.
Act III: Hubris, Hamartia, Catharsis
At its heart, this is a tragedy built on pride and silence with the classic tragic trio thrown in for good measure — hubris (excessive pride), hamartia (fatal flaw), and catharsis (emotional release).
Rio’s characters believe they can control their own tragedies because they understand them — but in true Shakespearean irony, that knowledge only seals their fate.
Act IV: When the Quoting Stops
One of the most striking features of Rio’s prose is her deliberate use of Shakespearean quotation as a linguistic barometer for the characters’ emotional and moral states. At the beginning of the novel, the students speak in almost theatrical bursts of verse — quoting Shakespeare not only in jest but as a shared language that binds them. The Bard’s words become shorthand for love, rivalry, and identity; their conversations are peppered with fragments of Macbeth, Lear, and Caesar, each line a mask or a performance.
Yet as the story darkens and the group’s unity fractures, this theatricality begins to erode. The more tension rises — as guilt, jealousy, and grief corrode the roles they’ve constructed — the less the characters rely on Shakespeare’s words. The ornate, performative quoting gives way to raw, stripped prose. This shift mirrors both the collapse of artifice and the psychological unraveling of the players themselves.
In Shakespearean tragedy, moments of madness or revelation often break the rhythm of verse — think of Lear’s fragmented speech in the storm, or Macbeth’s fevered prose before his fall. Rio mirrors this technique: as the façade of performance shatters, language itself becomes fractured, exposing the naked truth beneath the role.
This stylistic choice deepens the novel’s tragic rhythm — moving from performance (verse) to confession (prose), echoing the five-act arc of a Shakespearean downfall. The students begin as actors lost in words, and end as broken people who can no longer hide behind them.
Act V: The Play Within the Play
If We Were Villains is a love letter to performance — and a warning about living inside it.
Rio invites us to be both spectator and accomplice, watching tragedy unfold exactly as scripted.
It’s Shakespeare for a new century: fierce, self-aware, and devastatingly human.
It asks: how much of who we are is performance? And can we ever truly step out of character?
Like Lear or Macbeth, the novel leaves us with catharsis — not answers.
“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
Coffee Campfires Verdict:
A lyrical, intelligent novel that captures the emotional gravity of Shakespeare’s tragedies through modern voices.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — A must for teachers, theatre lovers, and dark academia fans.
Have you read If We Were Villains?
Which Shakespearean play do you think it echoes most? Let me know in the comments — and don’t forget to grab your free Macbeth: 5 Key Quotes study PDF below!
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