King of Shadows

King of shadows / Susan Cooper.-- New York : Margaret K. McElderry Books, 1999.
186 p. ; 22 cm.
ISBN: 0689828179

1. Time travel -- fiction. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Fiction. 3. Actors and actresses -- Fiction. 4. Globe Theater (Southwark, London, England) – Fiction.

813.54

Nat Field is one of the two dozen in the American Company of Boys, all of them actors under the age of eighteen and all of them hand picked by producer and director Arby to travel to London to put on two of Shakespeare’s plays at the newly reconstructed Globe theater in 1999. Nat is excited when they arrive in England. He just wishes Arby wasn’t so driven and didn’t drive his actors so hard. But the night before he’s set to debut as Puck in "A Midsummer's Night Dream" disaster strikes. He gets sick, really, really sick. He goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning about four centuries earlier. He’s still in London, and a strange new fellow named Harry greets him by name, and says he’s glad he’s better, he was afraid that he’d had the plague. Nat still has his part in the play. Harry’s glad he didn’t forget his lines. But the production is not at the new Globe, it’s at the original, and Nat finds himself working for the play's author.