Once a boy player in Shakespeare's company, Sander Cooke is now a hired man playing female roles. When Frances Field reveals she is pregnant by Sander's brother, Johnny, a fellow actor and aspiring playwright, Johnny makes it clear that marriage is not in his plans. But if Frances gives birth to a bastard, she'll lose her shop on London Bridge and her position as one of Queen Elizabeth's silkwomen. Sander would like to come to Frances' rescue: only Sander has a secret, kept both onstage and off - she is actually a woman. Even their friend Moll Frith, who goes around blatantly as a man, wouldn't marry a woman, but she does find Sander and Frances a wayward, short-sighted priest to solemnize the union. It is a marriage of convenience, but can these two women make a true union of it? Winding around this unconventional marriage, the London stage of the period comes alive, alongside political anxieties and rebellion, threats from the Spanish, troubles in Ireland, the plague, and the aging Queen Elizabeth's failure to name a successor.