The Shakespeare Stealer

The Shakespeare Stealer, originally published in 1998, is a young-adult novel by Gary Blackwood. It follows the story of Widge, an orphaned apprentice, in England during the 1600s. Dr. Timothy Bright, Widge’s first master, teaches the young boy a form of scriptography that he calls charactery, a type of shorthand designed to help the listener transcribe spoken words quickly and accurately. Eventually, a mysterious stranger named Falconer offers to buy Widge from Dr. Bright, who agrees to the deal. Falconer leads Widge on a perilous horseback journey, and the pair arrive in a town where Widge meets Simon Bass, his new master. Bass informs Widge that he will be using his scriptography skills to copy an unpublished play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, written by a man named William Shakespeare. Bass hopes to use the illegally copied manuscript to stage his own version of the play with his theatre troupe, thus undermining Shakespeare’s profits as well as those of the players at the Globe Theatre.

Widge’s first attempt at copying the play is a failure because he becomes engrossed in the plot of the play and forgets to write down portions of the script. As a result, Falconer sends Widge back to the Globe Theatre for another showing of the play. Widge copies down the missing portions of the script, but the theatre catches fire near the end of the performance. In the crush of theatregoers exiting the building, someone steals Widge’s scriptography pad from his back pocket. Widge reasons that whoever stole the pad will likely discard it because the coded writing is useless without a translator. He returns to the theatre to search for it. Once there, a player named Thomas Pope apprehends him and asks him why he is lurking around the theatre’s backstage, which is off limits to the general public. Widge pretends to be an aspiring player, which inspires the troupe to invite him to stay on as an apprentice. He obliges when he realizes that this may be his last chance to copy Hamlet for Falconer and Bass.

Widge soon becomes enmeshed in theatre life, and he develops friendships with the Globe Theatre’s players. He faces a crisis of conscious when he cannot decide whether he should continue his dishonest mission to copy Shakespeare’s play, thus betraying his new friends, or if he should divulge the truth to the players, risking their anger and guaranteeing his expulsion from the company. The decision is made for him when Falconer recruits another apprentice, Nick, to attempt the mission. When this happens, Widge comes clean to his closest friend, Sander, and his fencing master, Mr. Armin. After Nick steals Shakespeare’s playbook, Mr. Armin and Widge start looking for Nick and Falconer. When they find Falconer, Widge discovers the stolen playbook in Falconer’s saddlebag. Mr. Armin duels with Falconer and kills him. After hearing Widge’s story, the company accepts him back as an apprentice. The books ends with Widge living happily with his new, chosen family: Sander and Mr. Pope.