Susan Cooper
New York: Penguin, 1999
Twentieth-century Nathan Field, who also shares a name with an actor from the First Folio’s list of “Principall Actors,” travels through time to find himself a boy actor directed by the Bard himself. Elizabethan theater culture bubbles forth with all its chaotic disorder and flashes of brilliance. Shakespeare wins our hearts as a wise and caring father figure to the orphaned Nat. In return, Nat unwittingly protects Shakespeare from the bubonic plague. Nat sadly returns to his own times, enabling Shakespeare to live and to continue writing.