Project Gutenberg<\/a> how old it actually is. Wikipedia calls it “one of the most successful children’s stories ever published,” and\u00a0 since that’s my wheelhouse, I was surprised never to have heard of it. It’s a good evocation of Elizabethan theater, with Thomas Heywood and Ben Johnson featured much more heavily than Shakespeare, who shows up at the very end as a sort of living saint everyone loves. Young Nick Atwood, the protagonist, is kidnapped for his angelic voice (“Well sung, Master Skylark… thou hast a very fortune in thy throat!”) and spends the book trying to get home to mother. The “villain,” Gaston Carew, is surprisingly complex, and the ending is thoroughly heartwarming, including Johnson’s toast “to all kind hearts!” and Michael Drayton quoting “Jack shall have Jill\/Nought shall go ill,” to which Shakespeare replies: “It is a good place to end.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I picked up a paperback copy printed by Airmont Publishing Co., who gave the copyright as 1965–I didn’t realize until finding it on Project Gutenberg how old it actually is. Wikipedia calls it “one of the most successful children’s stories ever published,” and\u00a0 since that’s my wheelhouse, I was surprised never to have heard of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}