Shakespeare Stories

How to introduce kids to Shakespeare—not just to the stories behind the plays but to the richness of his language and the depth of his characters. That’s the challenge that Leon Garfield, a wonderful children’s book writer, undertook to meet in his monumental and delightful Shakespeare Stories. Here are twenty-one of the Bard’s plays, presented in what is not a series of dry retellings, but rather a refashioning of the dramas as stories, in a way that remains true to the essential spirit of the original versions. Garfield has captured all the richness of character, plot, mood, and setting in Shakespeare’s works without resorting to simplification. Indeed, he deliberately retains much of Shakespeare’s language, skillfully weaving it into his own prose so that the reader is introduced to the flavor of the verse, as well as to the incidents of plot and the spectacle of the drama.Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories is an essential distillation—a celebration and a reminder of Shakespeare’s genius as a poet and dramatist.

Leon Garfield (1921–1996) was born and raised in the seaside town of Brighton, England. His father owned a series of businesses, and the family’s fortunes fluctuated wildly. Garfield enrolled in art school, left to work in an office, and in 1940 was drafted into the army, serving in the medical corps. After the war, he returned to London and worked as a biochemical technician. In 1948 he married Vivian Alcock, an artist who would later become a successful writer of children’s books, and it was she who encouraged him to write his first novel, Jack Holborn, which was published in 1964. In all, Garfield would write some fifty books, including a continuation of Charles Dickens’sMystery of Edwin Drood and retellings of biblical and Shakespearian stories. Among his best-known books areDevil-in-the-Fog (1966, winner of The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize),The God Beneath the Sea (1970, winner of the Carnegie Medal), Bostock and Harris; or, The Night of the Comet (1979), andJohn Diamond (1980, winner of the Whitbread Award). The New York Review Children’s Collection publishesThe Complete Bostock and Harris.

Michael Foreman is one of Britain’s best-known writer-illustrators and has published more than three hundred works for adults and children.