Master Shakespeare, Strolling Player

Summary

A fractious Edwardian parlour becomes the crucible for a combustible quarrel over authorship: Miss Gray, ardent Baconian, and Lieutenant Stanton, devout Stratfordian, sunder their betrothal amid flying folios. Banished to the baking chaos of the Mexican frontier, the soldier is pierced by rebel steel; news of his peril knocks the maiden cold. In the liminal hush of her swoon she tumbles through four centuries, alighting in a Thames-side tavern thick with rosin and conspiracy. There Bacon’s hawk-eyed adoration curdles into covetous wrath; he slips black coin to a powdered courtier, forging a charge of theft against the upstart player from Avon. Yet as the rack tightens and the dream-darkness gathers, Gray apprehends the monstrous error of her idolatry. Awake, she races to the bedside of the maimed but living Stanton, her contrition sealing a love resurrected.

Synopsis

Unable to agree on the man responsible for the plays commonly attributed to William Shakespeare, Miss Gray, who favors Francis Bacon, and Lieutenant Stanton, who accepts Shakespeare as the author, break off their engagement. Stanton then arranges to be transferred to the Mexican border, and while fighting there is badly wounded. When she hears the news about Stanton's condition, Miss Gray faints, and then dreams that she has been transported to Elizabethan times. Then, after Bacon falls in love with her, she discovers his obsessive jealousy of Shakespeare, and learns that he has bribed a courtier to accuse him of stealing Bacon's plays. As a result, when Miss Gray wakes up, she realizes that she has championed the wrong poet, and so she immediately is reconciled with Stanton, who soon recovers from his wound.