Antonia Forest fans

Having read on, Shakespeare was lucky to have Nicholas playing girl parts for so long. By the end of the book he's had his sixteenth birthday and his voice still hasn't broken. That's very late for it not to have broken, although I gather teenagers reach puberty earlier now than in the past. Really AF could have started the book when Nicholas was even younger, but then he would have been too young to believably cope with the events at the beginning of the book.