Cue For Treason

My friends know what I like! Thank you, Pam, for scooping up this one for me -- this Puffin edition dates from 1982, but Cue For Treason was first published in 1940. I have heard of Geoffrey Trease but never read any of his books for children, but having read this, I can see why he was so popular and why there are so many editions of his work.

Cue For Treason is a pacy, exciting, historical adventure, set in Elizabethan England. There is hardly time to breathe as thirteen year old Peter is harried from his home by our villain, Sir Philip Morton, falls in with a troupe of actors and another mysterious boy on the run (the reader realises much sooner than Peter that Kit is a girl in disguise), travels to London and of course meets Shakespeare, and soon becomes entangled in foiling a treasonous plot. We meet Shakespeare, Burbage and eventually the Queen herself. It's a wonder that William Shakespeare found time to write any of his plays, given all the extraneous adventures that various authors have inserted him into over the years -- has there ever been an Elizabethan novel that doesn't feature at least a cameo from the Bard?

Cue For Treason slotted in nicely with my (slow) reading of Peter Ackroyd's enormous volume, London: A Biography, which I've been crawling through in stages. But more of that book later.