Susan Cooper's King of Shadows: Ever wished Shakespeare was your dad?

What’s the plot?

Nat is a young actor with a tragic past who’s on the trip of a lifetime: playing Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the brand-new reconstruction of the Globe Theatre. But before the performance, Nat wakes up several centuries in the past - where Shakespeare is looking for a kid to play Puck at his brand-new Globe ...

Where’s it from?

English author Susan Cooper (of The Dark is Rising fame) penned this on the brink of the millenium, in 1999.

The vibe in three words: Angsty, 90s, wholesome

Re-readable? For big Bard fans, perchance.

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Welcome back to your definitely-irregularly-scheduled review from the stacks! 

2025 was an odd reading year; none of the books old enough to qualify for this blog were amazing enough or awful enough to inspire immediate reviews. But not all reviews need be 2000-word essays! (I say, and promptly write 1500 words ...) Anyway, here’s looking forward to catching up and reflecting on some of them in a less intense fashion - maybe a ‘didn't finish’ compilation is on the cards one day.

One of the old books I read last year was King of Shadows, which despite the name isn’t a dark romantasy. 

The titular king is none other than Willy Shakes, ‘King of Shadows’ referring to his mastery of the mysterious powers of imagination. It’s also in reference to the fairy-king Oberon, the role played in the play-within-the-book by Mister Shakes himself.

The version I read had a new cover that leans into the fantasy vibe, with generic ‘medieval’ font and the Globe in a tunelling spiral - but the original cover has this great illustration of a boy, split in two by the title, in Elizabethan garb on the top half and sneakered feet resting on a skateboard in the bottom, which I just love. Both the cover and the atmosphere of the story are extremely utopian scholastic (the name for that colourful aesthetic of 90s/2000s kids’ encyclopedias and ‘edutainment’ - just think those DK cross-section books).

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Our time-travelling thespian, Nathan Fields, is introduced to us at a performing arts camp (a comfortingly cliche setting reminiscent of the start of any Goosebumps book), as his youth theatre crew get ready to fly to London for the big show. The kids are American, probably to appeal to readers that side of the Atlantic, but it also comes in handy plot-wise; apparently some American accents have similarities to Elizabethan English. 

I appreciated that we get to spend a decent amount of time getting to know Nat and his new friends, establishing his relationships and dreams in the present rather than whisking him straight to the past. Nat is a real likeable kid with a penchant for acrobatics and a love of acting as a form of escape from real life (he’s an orphan, of course, but more on that later). 

Woven into all of this is a gentle crash-course in Shakespeare and the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - you can see why this book scooped a bunch of honours and was a Carnegie finalist. I can’t quite recall what Cooper says in the acknowledgements, but I have the faint idea that it may have even been commissioned specially to coincide with the opening of the modern Globe.

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Things get really fun when Nat goes to bed sick one night and wakes up circa 1600. 

It appears he’s taken the place of another Nat (a real person, by the way) who’s come to lodge with actor Richard Burbage while they put on the Dream play. The stakes are high - Queen Elizabeth I is going to be in attendance - and Nat has to try his best to blend in to the times while rehearsing alongside every theatre nerd’s idol. 

Elizabethan London is very well described and easy to picture, from the candlelit cosiness of a thatched-roof house to the blood and ale of the bear-baiting pit. Bringing history to life, indeed - I bet there are schools that still use this book today. Some bits made me scratch my head, historical-accuracy wise, but it’s probably because there are things we know now about Shakespeare’s time that they didn’t know in the 90s.

The plot really cracks along - Nat gets into a classic dangerous-bully scenario with a rival actor, and rouses suspicions of witchcraft with his weirdness. He’s homesick for the future, he’s in love with the past. The play is in jeopardy, the play is saved. And there’s the existential threat of what will happen once the play is over; will he have to go back to the real Nat’s home and family, to be recognised as an imposter?

There are hints of a sub-plot to do with rebels, which doesn’t lead to much, but that’s hardly the point of the book; the true heart is Nat’s bond with Shakespeare as a mentor and father figure.

It’s another great example of the double-fantasy trope. Sure, Nat has to live through the horrors of an era where criminals’ heads decorate London Bridge, but he also gets to take acting tips from the Bard, ends up staying at his house, and becomes almost like an adopted son. It’s nice for W Shakes too, whose children are back in Stratford ‘pon Avon. 

Nat’s backstory is also slowly revealed, involving the fresh trauma of a dead dad who Nat feels he wasn’t ‘good enough’ for. The book’s sweetest moments are where he opens up to Shakespeare, who comforts Nat and even gifts him a copy of his “ever-fixed mark” sonnet. 

I’m often surprised, reading older books, at how dark they can be - there’s no shy skimming over descriptions of death here. Kids’ books from yesteryear are just as starkly serious as the edgiest YA novels of today.

Even though he can’t stay trapped in the past forever, it’s quite a blow when Nat is spirited back to 1999, leaving his newfound friends and the precious sonnet copy behind. 

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All that said, King of Shadows is not without its flaws. Throughout the book, we get jarring interludes showing what the historical Nat (swapped out with 90s Nat) is up to - aka. disoriented as heck and suffering with the plague in an isolation ward, to the confusion of the doctors. 

I wasn’t keen on these bits with their odd third-person narration, and thought we could have just stuck with Nat in the past, wondering what’s going on in his time without him. That way you could have the intrigue of him returning to discover there’d been a swap-over, Charlotte Sometimes style, and regretting even more that he’ll never get to meet the boy whose life he briefly took over. (We do get a cool scene where Nat finds a portrait of the historical Nathan Fields and ponders the life he could have had if he’d somehow stayed, hoping historical Nat kept up the friendship he started with Shakes.)

Time travel, unless facilitated by a sci-fi machine, is usually best left unexplained, but frustratingly Cooper spends the end of the book retrospectively justifying Nat’s adventure. 

It’s good to see Nat struggle to readjust to modern London and getting annoyed at inaccurate representations of the old days, but then the plot drags out into an investigation of why it all happened to him. Can’t a guy just have a character-building time-slip for the sake of it, cos the universe saw he needed it? Not here. 

Turns out (spoiler!) Nat’s drama teacher, Arby, is secretly R.B. - Richard Burbage, hah hah (sigh). He’s some kind of ... immortal wizard? and has been searching through time for another Puck actor called Nat to replace the Nat who has the plague ... all so that Shakespeare can have his play without perishing to the Black Death along with all his literary genius. Couldn’t wizard Burbage have, I dunno, just killed the plague-ridden Nat and found an understudy? Does he have to find future doppelganger replacements every time an infectious person comes into Shakespeare’s life? Does this mean Christopher Marlowe had a mystical protector who just stuffed up real bad? At least plague-Nat gets to be treated in a modern hospital instead of succumbing to the buboes, I guess.

Whatever the case, it made the whole plot seem manufactured, Nat all along a pawn in a grander plan instead of the hero of his own story. Despite enjoying the bulk of the book, it was the ending that ultimately made me rate it 3.5 stars.

Overall a well-written historical romp that gives you pretty much everything you’d expect - if you know or are a young ‘un with an interest in Shakespeare, I’d say it’s worth the read.

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And shout-out to the awesome booklists on the Wellington Library website - algorithms could never. 

I came across King of Shadows here, probably in the ‘adventures through time’ list - the librarians update them with new recommendations every once in a while. I've been wanting to read Antonia Forest’s The Player's Boy for ages, which has a very similar setup of a boy running away to be apprenticed by Shakespeare, so King of Shadows seemed right up my alley while I waited to afford one of the crazily-priced second-hand Forest books (except wow, just looked it up and it seems they’ve finally done a reprint, so look forward to that review!).