osprey_archer | Book Review: King of Shadows

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.

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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?