How is the "love of family" presented as a main theme in the novel?

Love of Family is an important theme of the novel. The main character's definition of family has been disrupted from a very early age. When his mother dies of cancer, and his father kills himself shortly afterward out of grief, Nat is left abandoned and moves in with his aunt who continues to raise him. While his aunt is a caring guardian, Nat lacks a father figure on whom he can rely.

When Nat is cast in the Company of Boys, Arby, the company's director, work to instill a trusting bond among all the actors in the company. Arby stresses that for their productions of Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night's Dream to succeed, the boys must trust each other like a family. When one of the boys plays a trick on Nat during one of Arby's trust-building exercises, Arby immediately kicks the boy out of the company for violating the trust of the company as a whole.

When Nat is transported back in time to 1599, he discovers that Shakespeare's acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, follows a similar motto to Arby about family cohesion. Shakespeare emphasizes that The Chamberlain's Men functions as a close-knit family, forgiving the flaws of various family members when need be. Nat also finds a surrogate father figure in Shakespeare, who fills a much-needed void in his young life.

Shakespeare takes him into his home as an apprentice while Nat is on loan to the Chamberlain's Men from St. Paul's School, offering Nat the love and support he desperately seeks. Nat is overjoyed to have the embrace of a family again. When he returns to present day London in 1999, he is devastated to lose Shakespeare's friendship. Nat struggles to understand why twice in his young life he has had to lose his family. Upon returning to the present, Nat and his aunt agree to start talking about Nat's father more, now that Nat is getting older.

Nat receives a poem from Shakespeare while he is in Elizabethan England. The poem, a sonnet, talks about love's unfaltering ability to transcend time, distance, and life itself. Shakespeare tells Nat that the poem represents the love Nat's father will always have for Nat, even though he is no longer alive. Nat struggles to understand the poem's significance at first, but somehow knows that the poem holds the key to eventually healing his emotional wounds. When Nat returns to 1999, his friends find the sonnet in a printed book of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and confirm the meaning of the poem to Nat.