The Players: A Novel of the Young Shakespeare

Having established herself as an historical novelist of the first rank with Nicholas Cooke and The Physician of London, Cowell returns to Elizabethan England with a beautifully nuanced portrait of the young William Shakespeare. Beginning her narrative in 1564 in Stratford, she depicts him as a country lad, as apprentice to his father, a glover, and as hastily married husband, the prelude to his flight to London in search of a job as an actor and playwright. His impoverished years as a walk-on player and a fledgling writer unfold against a vibrantly visualized background of historical events. The narrative is solidly grounded in robust descriptions of daily life, from noisome taverns, alleys and markets to the interiors of courtly mansions and the early theaters themselves. A disciple of the celebrated English critic A.L. Rowse, Cowell subscribes to his theory that Shakespeare's sonnets were written to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, and that the intimacy expressed therein was one of friendship and close association rather than homosexual relations. The mysterious Dark Lady of the Sonnets is here capricious musician Emilia Bassano, and the sexual triangle that ensues when the Earl beds the poet's mistress is the crucible in which Shakespeare suffers and matures. Throughout, Cowell portrays Shakespeare in great agitation as he ponders his talent and ambitions, very much aware, at the age of 31, when the book ends, of his deserted wife and three children and his lack thus far of a permanent career. Part of the pleasure of reading this book is Cowell's measured, graceful language, easily reproducing the cadences of 17th-century English. Because the narrative is a leisurely account of a genius finding himself, there is less action here than some readers may expect. For those who long to become engrossed in another time, however, it will be a treat. (Apr.)