James Sands anticipates a glorious career as apprentice to an Elizabethan theater troupe. He plays Bellario in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, and in this cherished role, experiences the fusion of his passion and his art. But when Sands' masters die, the young player loses his home and his job, and must fight to maintain his loyalty in an atmosphere of plague, Puritanism, and political unrest. After one small act of kindness threatens to engulf Sands in violence, the hope of his former life spirals into a horror that contemporary readers will find disturbingly familiar.

"An English novelist and patron of artists such as H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) first published this beautifully realized story of a young Elizabethan actor's apprentice in 1953. After the death of James Sands's beloved Master Awsten, one of the Queen's Players who has taught Sands the rudiments of acting, Sands travels from Southwark, London and passes through a succession of employers. At a house in the country, he meets the summering playwright Frances Beaumont, in the process of writing his play Philaster. James wins the part of Bellario, the girl page disguised as a boy for love of Philaster, who in a curious royal ménage-a-trois sends Bellario to serve his beloved Arethusa; James duly falls in love, unrequitedly, with Beaumont's virginal fiancée, Ursula. History intrudes offstage in the form of Sir Walter Ralegh's execution and the ascent of the Puritans, and James, now a clerk, becomes a kind of poignant anachronism, too delicate for the coarsening new age. Theatrical and romantically lyrical, Bryher's novel is a forgotten gem, channeling the servant boy's first person flawlessly."
— Publishers Weekly (July 10, 2006)

"A striking and beautifully written narrative … Bryher is a fine artist with words, extraordinarily skillful in her magical ability to capture the essence of an individual emotion and the quality of a national mood."
— The New York Times