Stars: 4
Review by: Mandy Apgar
This book
almost got me kicked out of elementary school, so I feel I owe it a
slight debt. A few people who saw me reading this thought Macbeth was
too violent for a 6 year old, the gits. It has also
gotten my sisters through a few of Shakespeare's - that "abominable
bard" as I call him - most insidious plays. Because let us face it, he
is pretty much crammed down the throats of kids of a certain age. But if
you give them something like this when they're
younger they might A. understand it a lot better (although I still think Cymbeline is completely idiotic), and thusly B. not find the classes
so tedious. What the book does is take a good portion of his plays (the
ones on actual royalty for some reason are
excluded - so no hunchbacked nephew killers or Tudor shenanigans in
this) and retell them in basic English. None of the "thee" and "thou"
and endless, endless flowery speeches, but just simple retellings like
they are any other story. And for the most part
one doesn't miss anything - hence my sister borrowing this for King Lear
(I think) when she couldn't understand it and found this a lot better
constructed than anything else.
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