Stratford Boys

While several children’s novelists have drawn on Shakespeare’s life and times as a starting point for their fictions, it is difficult to think of an example which does so with quite the combination of earthiness, exuberance and wit which Mark achieves here. Her re-creation of a bustling Stratford where one William Shakespeare, aged 16, undertakes to provide the script for a Whitsun play is utterly convincing and has moments of total hilarity, both in the preparations for the play and its eventual staging. There is some delightful Shakespearean pastiche and some clever prefiguring of the Shakespeare which is to come. And, more seriously, there are some reflective moments which touch on the whole business of creativity, its origins and manifestations. Warmly recommended.