Antonia Forest fans

Part of the Arden Shakespeare series, this fascinating study argues that although Shakespeare rarely wrote about London – none of his plays is set in the city of his own day – it played a central role in shaping his imagination: “The size, diversity, noise, smell, chaos, anarchy and sheer excitement of London can be felt in all that Shakespeare writes.” The exact date when the playwright moved to London is not known, but it’s clear that by 1592 he was living and working in the capital and would remain there for the next 20 years. The eight chapters (each on a separate play) explore the symbolic power of key locations, beginning in the west of the city and moving east. The first tackles Tyburn – the city’s place of execution where as many as 60,000 died – using London’s bloodiest site to frame his most violent play: Titus Andronicus. Later chapters move to Whitehall, then along the Strand, and finish at the Tower. It is an evocative journey that places Shakespeare’s plays in a revealing urban context.

Sweeping forward some three thousand years to 1590 Antonia Forest in The Player's Boy plunges into the uncertainties of England in the reign of Elizabeth the First. Her eleven year-old hero moves into a world of intrigue and secret plotting via the death of Kit Marlowe, an encounter with Lord Southampton and a place with Will Shakespeare's company of players. He works his way through the girl's parts and we leave him as a promising Hotspur. The background to the story is skilfully laid in. Antonia Forest catches the atmosphere of the players in a society totally dependant upon the patronage of the powerful and succeeds in conveying a wholly satisfactory impression of day to day living in a world of conflicting loyalties and uncertain futures which both lives vividly in the mind of the reader and satisfies the most demanding historian.There is a moving chapter in which we see through the eyes of our young actor hero a Tyburn execution of three Papists, one of whom he recognises.

Miss Antonia Forest's The Marlows and the Traitor (Faber, 10s. 6d.) is one of those novels for young people of which the standard seems to get higher every year. She has taken one of the most baffling problems of today, the psychology of treachery, and deals with it in terms of the experience of children none of whom are out of their teens, and though there are, of course, grown-ups in the story, and the traitor himself is one, yet the whole story turns on the attitude of the children to their discovery that the naval officer whom their brother thinks wonderful is, in fact, on the wrong side : the algebraical equation of The Heat of the Day, in other terms. The dialogue is vivid and assured, the plot integrated and the characterization is neatly defined, and we really care about the nice Marlows and their friends ; one even cares about the traitor, which of course would happen in real life.