Book Review: King of Shadows

[osprey_archer]

littlerhymes and I have finished our Susan Cooper journey with King of Shadows, a Child Meets Shakespeare novel which was one of my favorite books in my youth. It is, perhaps, a book that is best met when you're about eleven, as littlerhymes was not so enamored with it as I am, but so it goes.

Our hero, Nat Field, is an actor who has been hired to play Puck at the new Globe theater in London as part of the Company of Boys. However, soon after he arrives, he time travels into the past, changing place with a Nat Field who is spending a week acting Puck with Shakespeare's own company... which means that Nat meets the Bard himself.

The nice thing about a historical figure like Shakespeare, about whom we have only a few verifiable facts, is that you can make him pretty much anything you want, and Cooper wants him to be not only the greatest playwright of all time but also just the nicest guy ever, who takes orphan players under his wing at the drop of a hat. Fatherless Nat, playing Puck to Shakespeare's Oberon, falls headlong into Baby's First Crush, "a spirit in love with his master" - and here his own emotions are sliding into his memories of the performance, for during the actual play, Nat plays Puck as an irrepressible spirit of mischief who "didn't give a darn about real human emotions." It's only in retrospect that Nat imbues Puck with feelings for Oberon.

Reading it as an adult, the interplay between Nat's father-figure feelings for Shakespeare and his crush feelings is maybe a little uncomfortable. As an eleven-year-old, I was just digging the intensity. Susan Cooper had a vision for this book and this vision was "What if you actually MET Shakespeare and you were in LOVE with Shakespeare and Shakespeare loved you too but in, like, a father-son sort of way," and she went all in. Like, "when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest years later, Ariel was inspired by his memory of Nat's Puck" all in. Because why not! To be honest, I think Victory would have been much improved if the hero had had closer and more emotional relationship with Nelson.

***

In an amusing coincidence, as we were reading King of Shadows I was also reading John Bennett's Master Skylark, (a gift from asakiyume last time that I visited), a Child Meets Shakespeare book from 1898. The genre is venerable! And indeed I wouldn't be at all surprised if it goes back further than that.

In Master Skylark, Stratford tanner's son Nicholas Atwood skips school to see a play in the next town over. However, while he's there, the master player discovers that Nick has a voice like a skylark, and kidnaps him to be part of the troupe! Once they arrive in London, Nicholas's only hope to return hope is to find William Shakspere, conveniently married to Nick's mother's cousin Anne Hathaway, who would surely help him get home...

Nick doesn't meet Wm. Shakspere until near the end of the book, and then - I love this - when Nicholas sees the man who kidnapped his friend Cicely (daughter of the man who kidnapped Nick! lots of kidnapping in this book), Shakspere is too engrossed in a proof to notice when Nick begs him to come help. Nick must run off and save Cicely himself! The two children travel overland to Stratford together, singing for their supper, and arrive just in time to join the festal dinner at which Shakspere celebrates buying the fanciest house in Stratford. Shakspere isn't even the one who reconciles Nick with his angry father! (Nick's father doesn't know he was kidnapped; he thinks the boy ran off with the players.)

Two Child Meets Shakespeare stories with two completely different approaches. Is Shakespeare the sun around which the story revolves, or the incidental side character who fails to be the deus ex machina your protagonist devoutly hopes he will prove?

Comments

[landofnowhere]

I read King of Shadows just after I turned 14 (I could have sworn I read it when I was 12 or 13, it would have suited me then, but I went back and looked in my journal, I was 14) and it was an excellent age to read it. (Elsewhere on dreamwidth I was commenting that Twelfth Night is the sort of play that's best met when one is about 12, and I think that's a similar thing.)

Master Skylark sounds charming -- my brain kept on insisting on reading "1898" as "1988", but of course there's no reason why the Victorians wouldn't have written a Child Meets Shakespeare book!

[osprey_archer]

I would be unsurprised if the Victorians invented Child Meets Shakespeare. There was a big boom in children's publishing, and the Victorians were just nuts about Shakespeare!

[asakiyume]

What left an indelible impression on me from Master Skylark were the illustrations--that, and the phrase "the bandy-legged man." Brrrrr! I didn't know at the time what a bandy-legged man was. I figured he had stripped stockings. Hearing your summary of the plot, I'm charmed by the agency the story bestows on the hero--Shakespeare's no help, so Master Skylark does it himself. Awesome!

Who is the Nelson character you mention in the other story?

[osprey_archer]

Have you read the book? Now I have a vague memory that this was *your* book that you read years ago as a child... Do you want me to bring it back?

Nelson in Victory is Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar! He is a side character in the book who shows up a couple times, but not nearly as integral as Shakespeare in King of Shadows.

[asakiyume]

No no! I meant you to keep it or pass it on💛 I did read it—but not recently.

[osprey_archer]

I will find it a new home!

[asakiyume]

Perfect--be free and journey, Master Skylark!

[ethelmay]

I wonder if Antonia Forest's The Player's Boy was inspired by Master Skylark?

[sovay]

I wonder if Antonia Forest's The Player's Boy was inspired by Master Skylark?

I had a double-take at this comment because Bryher also wrote an Elizabethan theater novel called The Player's Boy (1953).

[ethelmay]

Huh! Turns out my library has a 1953 edition. Have put it on hold to see what it's like.

[conuly]

Well, I know which Shakespeare I'd rather meet, that's for sure.

[osprey_archer]

World's nicest Shakespeare or Shakespeare who is nice but also so absent-minded you literally cannot get his attention when a kidnapper goes past?

[kore]

Heh, clearly a demonstration of two opposing cultural views, Shakespeare as an empathy god vs. Shakespeare the detached Olympian. Or something.

[osprey_archer]

Shakespeare here is not so much a detached Olympian as an absent-minded professor. Simply SO engaged with his proofs that Nick CANNOT get his attention as Cicely's kidnapper walks past! Thus forcing Nick to be the hero himself, which may indeed have been the whole point of making Shakespeare so absent-minded, so Nick who has spent most of the book being kidnapped and unable to escape can do something a bit more active and heroic in the end.

[littlerhymes]

Time for a third version, Child goes back in time to meet another child, they have many Shakespeare-esquare adventures together, Child returns to future and realises damn they met Shakespeare as a child and they helped originate some of his most important/well known ideas or scenes.

[osprey_archer]

Oh my GOD that is BRILLIANT clearly the next big thing in Child Meets Shakespeare.

Child I imagine is a girl in what Shakespeare takes for boy's clothes (jeans, t-shirt), inspiring his many cross-dressing adventures.

[littlerhymes]

We must take the next leap in the genre!

Little Will Shakespeare grows up and sees all the boys dressed as girls on stage and says "wait, I know how to make this even better."

[asakiyume]

I love this idea too ^_^

[littlerhymes]

Ahahaha well let's hope someone writes this novel for our edification :)