Primrose Road

When I saw The Shakespeare Stealer in the window at Barnes and Noble last week, I went to the store's children's section, picked up the book, sat down in the cafe with a grande vanilla-brewed coffee and started to read, believing I'd found a new "authorship" novel to make fun of on this blog.

Disappointingly (or not), I was pleasantly (that's more like it) surprised to read an historical novel about a young orphan who, because he's talented in shorthand, is forced by his master to transcribe the Globe's performance of Hamlet. Despite a few anachronisms here and there, the author seems to know his stuff about the relationship between printers and playwrights in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and actually presents what can be read as a (fictional) possibility for how the First Quarto of Hamlet came about. Apparently, Gary Blackwood has written a pair of sequels as well.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so quick to jump to conclusions about this young adult novel. There is, after all, only one "authorship"-related kids' book that I know of, Lynne Kositsky's A Question of Will, which, despite its (positive) "laugh-out-loudness", portrays Will Shakespeare as a drunken lowlife slob.

My favorite Shakespeare book for kids, by the way, remains Hamlet for Kids, which even boasts an introduction by Kenneth Branagh. Everyone I know with a child (which is a good number of people these days) now owns a copy.