Born into the cathedral town of Canterbury in the last years of the sixteenth century, young Nicholas Cooke is brilliant and curious. Naturally though sometimes irreverently spiritual, by the age of thirteen he has known more difficulties than he can comprehend. His father is hanged for thievery, his mother spends her days wandering as a prostitute, and Nicholas is expelled from school for brawling and made apprentice to a craftsman. Badly treated by his master, the boy stabs him in self-defense and runs off to London in terror of his life. The year is 1593.Knocking about the streets of the city, Nicholas meets the playwright Kit Morley, who seduces him. Soon tiring of him, Morley hands the boy over to John Heminges who has formed a theater company with several other idealistic and near-penniless men, including Will Shagspere from Stratford. In the years of his adolescence Nicholas flees between loyalties: to Morley whose murder he will try to avenge; to Will Shagspere whose wry, sympathetic nature comforts the boy; to his passion for science and longing for God, whom Nicholas feels is calling him as priest and doctor; and to John Heminges, who will seem to Nicholas throughout his life to be both liberator and despot. At eighteen, Nicholas seduces Heminges's wife, half from devoted childish love for her and half to spite his master, then runs off in shame and idealism to fight for Lord Essex in the disastrous Irish wars. Upon his return, he weds Heminges's daughter Susan and becomes a dutiful member of the theater company until the outbreak of plague and the terror of the city pull him from his player's life once more.Nicholas moves through his stormy world of betrayal and loyalty, always a loving, although imperfect man. How he eventually becomes what he knows he must be, what he loses in that pursuit, and who can and cannot forgive him bring his story to its moving conclusion. Read Less