William Shakespeare & the Globe [Hardcover]

Aliki (Author, Illustrator)

Book Description

Age Level: 5 and up | Grade Level: K and up

From Hamlet to Romeo and Juliet to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's celebrated works have touched people around the world.

Aliki combines literature, history, biography, archaeology, and architecture in this richly detailed and meticulously researched introduction to Shakespeare's world-his life in Elizabethan times, the theater world, and the Globe, for which he wrote his plays. Then she brings history full circle to the present-day reconstruction of the Globe theater.

Aliki has created an animated tableau for Shakespeare lovers of all ages to savor!

2000 Notable Children's Books (ALA), Notable Children's Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies 2000, National Council for SS & Child. Book Council , NCTE List of Notable Children's Books in Lang. Arts 00, Horn Book Fanfare 2000 and Teacher's Choices for 2000 (IRA)

01-02 Young Hoosier Book Award Masterlist (Gr 4-6), 00-01 Utah Book Award (Informational Books), and 00-01 Texas Bluebonnet Award Masterlist

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"How many ages hence/ Shall this our lofty scene be acted over/ In states unborn and accents yet unknown!" In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, he prophesies his own future more accurately than he may ever have dreamed. Although Shakespeare's works have touched people everywhere, very little is known of his life. Well-loved author and illustrator Aliki pulls together clues from writings, drawings, history, birth, marriage, and death records, and from Shakespeare's own plays, in this vibrant introduction to one of the greatest writers of all time.

Cleverly arranged as a play, with an aside and acts one through five, the book features a quotation from one of Shakespeare's plays on every spread. Bite-sized chunks of text are interspersed with the lovely detailed illustrations Aliki is famous for, making what might be a difficult subject very accessible. In addition, there are charts listing Shakespeare's plays, a chronology of his life, sidebars with mini-biographies of significant people in his life, and a partial list of words and expressions he invented (gloomy, moonbeam, mountaineer, zany, and bated breath, among 2,000 others!). Aliki also devotes a special section to Sam Wanamaker, a 20th-century man with a dream to reopen Shakespeare's Globe playhouse in London. (Ages 7 and older) --Emilie Coulter

From Publishers Weekly

William Shakespeare may get top billing in the title of this picture book, but the emphasis within is less certain. Aliki (Mummies Made in Egypt) doesn't investigate Shakespeare as a personality; dividing her work into five "acts," she focuses more on Elizabethan culture, dramatic conventions and living conditions, then shifts to Sam Wanamaker and the process of renovating the Globe in the 20th century. Aliki employs serviceable, almost pedestrian statements to convey the history, stretching occasionally toward cleverness. Of the open-ceilinged Globe, she comments, "When it rained, [the audience] knew it." The material on Wanamaker's restoration sheds light on the process by which the new Globe was built ("The first and only thatched roof in London since 1666"), although the character of Sam, with whom readers are meant to identify, remains bland. Pages are loaded with small panel illustrations of characters and historic figures in exaggerated poses. They capture a jolly theatrical spirit (nearly everyone in the quaint colored-pencil pictures wears a gentle smile), yet the many crowd scenes do not repay scrutiny. Unlike Diane Stanley's work in Bard of Avon, these pictures give only a broad idea of the historical context. Quotations from the bard populate the margins, and numerous appendixes provide facts. The wide range of information here makes this book a useful introduction to Elizabethan theater, despite its disparate themes and generalized pictures. All ages. (May)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 5 and up
  
• Hardcover: 48 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; 1st edition (April 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006027820X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060278205
• Product Dimensions: 12.3 x 9.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Aliki is the author and illustrator of more than fifty books for children that are treasured by readers all over the world. Her many well-loved titles include My Visit to the Zoo, My Visit to the Aquarium, My Visit to the Dinosaurs, Wild and Woolly Mammoths, Tabby, and Those Summers. Aliki lives near the Globe theater, in London, England.

In Her Own Words..."Aliki grew up in Philadelphia in a big Greek family where everyone was busy creating and sharing their activities. She knew from the time she was in kindergarten that she wanted to bean artist, although music was also a natural talent. She was encouraged throughout her early life by her parents and by teachers she will never forget."She graduated from the Philadelphia Collegeof Art and started a career in advertising art. After she married Franz Brandenberg, Aliki continued her career in his country, Switzerland, where they lived for three years. It was there that she wrote and illustrated her first book, The Story of William Tell, which was published in England. When they moved to New York, Aliki wrote and illustrated My Five Senses--the book that changed the direction of her career and her life.

Although she had never thought of being a writer, Aliki has been making books ever since. Children's books, she says, are a combination of two things I love: words and pictures. I also love the privacy of books--both reading them and making them. Aliki writes fiction, in which she can express her feelings, and nonfiction research books about subjects she's interested in and wants to know more about. Each book is a new challenge; each is different, she says. The subject directs the way I illustrate a book, the same way friends bring out different parts of us. The challenge is to get the words right and then to make pictures that expand and enhance their meaning.""Besides her own books, Aliki has illustrated many written by Franz Brandenberg and other authors. Her two children are also in the arts. Jason is a filmmaker and Alexa is a children's book author-illustrator. They appear in almost all of her books as cats, mice, or themselves.

Aliki loves music, theater, cinema, museums, children, her cat, Nefertiti, and working in her garden in London, where she lives. She travels frequently to the U.S., Greece, Switzerland, and other parts of the world, though most of the time she is alone in her studio with the books she is working on--and Mozart."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another winner by Aliki!, April 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: William Shakespeare & the Globe (Hardcover)

Aliki's gift for clarity, humor and cleverness shine through this wonderful book. It is, like all Aliki's books, loaded with information, but manages not to overwhelm. You will find yourself coming back to this book again and again, examining the pictures and finding details you hadn't noticed before. A marvelous introduction to Shakespeare for mid- to older elementary children (and a visual delight for even younger readers!).

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Play's the Thing, April 29, 2007

By 

Tracy "tmk" (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: William Shakespeare & the Globe (Trophy Picture Books) (Paperback)

I bought this book for my 1st grader as an intro to Shakespeare. For my purposes this book contains too much extraneous information about Sam Wanamaker. His accomplishment of having the new Globe theatre built is amazing, but pales in comparison to Shakespeare's accomplishments, which I would rather hear about. We get to know details about "Will," but not anything about his plays except for some excellent representative drawings of representative characters. What my daughter has taken away from this book so far is that London Bridge really did fall down, Shakespeare died at age 52 and Marlowe at age 29, Cleopatra is associated with a snake, London had city walls, and Queen Elizabeth I came before the current queen, Elizabeth II. That's all useful foundation material, but we'll need another book to really sample Shakespeare.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Introduction to the Globe, May 7, 2006

By 

Christina Connell "Bibliocat" (Easley, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: William Shakespeare & the Globe (Trophy Picture Books) (Paperback)

The presentation is clever. Aliki has organized her information into Acts, Scenes, and Asides, with Act Five being the work of Sam Wanamaker to recreate the Globe Theater. She has also laid out her prose text as if it were lines of poetry, furthering the playbook effect. I often checked the text to see if it was written in iambic pentameter (it isn't). The illustrations are lively and highly detailed.

The pages are very busy. Here are the contents of a typical page, from top to bottom: four lines from As You Like It; a drawing of Christopher Marlowe; an information box about the Rose Playhouse and builder Philip Henslowe's diaries; seven lines of text about the Admiral's Men and Marlowe; a drawing of three actors on a stage, surrounded by groundlings; the titles of sixteen Shakespeare plays superimposed in wavy lines over the drawing of the actors; a caption beneath; and a line from The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Aliki's efforts to squeeze as much as possible into this book sometimes become distracting. All of the illustrations have their own text boxes, with additional information provided in up to five sentences. Readers may have to keep backtracking in order to follow the narrative, and I sometimes wonder if texts like this are the best way to format nonfiction material.