Mr William Shakespeare's Plays

Those of us who are interested in how children 'read' the complex interrelationships of word and picture will have plenty to speculate about with this totally hilarious large format picture book. Williams takes seven Shakespeare plays and re-stages them (in either four or six pages) in the Globe Theatre, in a comic-strip production style which manages to incorporate quotations from the original texts, her own linking narration and - most inventively, in the border and margins of the pages - the usually irreverent and sceptical commentaries of members of the audience. Inevitably, there is some linguistic simplification and some sanitisation: we lose Autolycus, for example, in The Winter's Tale and, by way of depicting some of Leontes' violent sexual jealousy in the same play, we are told that 'he thought that Hermione and Polixenes must be in love' - even though, incidentally, his suspicion that 'my wife is slippery?' is retained. But these are minor matters in an enterprise which speaks of life, laughter and creativity and conveys the essence of the Elizabethan theatrical experience.