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Customer Reviews: Average Rating:  Rating :  - A truly enjoyable historical read for young and old alike
To me, the true mark of good juvenile or young-adult fiction is if it can appeal to adult readers as well, and Gary Blackwood's The Shakespeare Stealer most definitely succeeds on that account. The basic plot is familiar enough: poor orphan boy is thrown into circumstances where he has a chance at truly having something of his own for the first time, but not without risks and having to make difficult decisions. But Blackwood does a superb job of giving his characters real depth, which makes the reader genuinely care about them and about what happens to them. The story is told from the point of view of Widge, the orphan boy who ends up by a combination of luck and mishap working with Shakespeare's theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It is there that he finds both a calling and, for the first time in his young life, friends and a sense of belonging. But he must also deal with the reason he is there: he has been sent to steal Shakespeare's newest play, Hamlet, by a mysterious rival whose hold on Widge is reinforced by threats of what he'll do if Widge should fail.
What Blackwood excels at, though, is showing us, through Widge's eyes, the life of the theatre in Elizabethan England. Blackwood makes it truly come alive, from the moment Widge first passes through the entrance of the Globe Theatre to when he gets unexpectedly involved in the theatrical company itself, learning everything that goes into the production of a play. Blackwood does an excellent job into revealing what goes on behind the scenes, where boys work their way up the ladder from "young hopeful" to "apprentice" to "hired-man", where boys must play the female roles because women are not allowed to be actors, where they are trained in everything from projecting to be heard over the noisy crowds to giving convincing performances in sword-play and death scenes, and the lengths to which theatrical companies went to keep their work from being stolen by competitors. You can see and feel what it was all like and what it means to Widge as he is torn by the choices he is called upon to make.
About the only reason I didn't give the book a full five stars was that while Blackwood's descriptions of theatre life were quite vivid and detailed, he didn't do quite as good a job with details outside of that sphere, particularly when it came to what some of the characters look like and to giving visual detail to how things were in Elizabethan era life in general. I found the beginning a bit slow, but once Widge enters the world of the theatre, the story really does come rapidly into full flower.
Blackwood also does a good job in showing how differently people talked even within Shakespeare's England, with words and phrases marking the speaker as from the city or the country, or from one part of the country or the other. He also does an excellent job at showing how word-play and puns were very much a part of Elizabethan culture, a verbal form of the literal sword-play that was also very much an aspect of the life of the period.
All in all, I found this book a very enjoyable read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a good historical or theatrical read that can appeal to readers of any age. + See Full Customer Review |  |
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