The Pale Companion (Nick Revill series #3) - Philip Gooden

Midsummer 1601. Nick Revill and his fellow actors in the Chamberlain's Men are journeying across the Wiltshire Downs for a country-house presentation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It should be a pleasant, well-paid jaunt to celebrate a noble marriage, but when the actors arrive at their destination, Instede House, they enter a tense atmosphere. Lord Elcombe is pushing his older son into a marriage that the son seems set against, while in the nearby woods a wild man called Robin talks in riddles of long-hidden family secrets. In another quarter of the great estate lodges a travelling band of fire-and-brimstone morality players called the Paradise Brothers. The first death, when it occurs, looks like suicide, but Nick isn't so sure . . . Then a second murder happens right under his nose . . . and turns the Dream into a nightmare.

The third Shakespearean murder mystery in the Nick Revill series, set during the reign of the formidable Elizabeth I.