To graduate high school, Gabe must pass one final hurdle: Shakespeare.
Gabe is no fan of poetry. His literary hero, Don Quixote, tilts at windmills. Now English lab sends him to Elizabethan England to experience Shakespeare and the Renaissance firsthand.
Lesson one: William Shakespeare is a pen name. The real author is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Still, Gabe is surprised by an eight-year-old brat. Impervious to verse, instead he is drawn into the rich pageantry of Edward's times. Annoyance grows into friendship while they share the real-life adventures that colored the earl's brilliant plays, from Queen Elizabeth's coronation to the vampires of Venice, and sailing against the Spanish Armada.
As Europe turns from medieval to modern, Gabe comes of age.