Button books 9.99
ISBN: 978-1-78708-051-5
This is a bright and breezy look at all things Shakespeare, Tudor and stage related. There ar eloads of fun facts on each colourful page and you don’t have to learn soliloquies off by heart. What you will learn is how special effects like thunder were created and even the strict school time (only latin once inside at the risk of being thrashed). There is also a lively explanation of what games of football were like (dozens of players, broken limbs and the whole town as a pitch) and all thes snippets make up a colorful background to Elizabethan life, and death if you take into account he pages on the plague!
Want to speak Elizabethan try a few thous and wherefores and add eth to verbs and also a few put downs with an insult generator. What about all the moons of Uranus with 25 of them being named after Skakespeare characters (no brownie points if you can name them).
Since the tragedies and histories often were quite bloody affairs there is a body count and a breakdown i.e Polonius stabbed through a curtain and not surprisingly Titus Andronicus comes out on top.
Apparently Macbeth has plenty of subtle references to the gunpowder plot in it and we are told that King James who had written about witches would have been pleased to discover that witches had been written into the play to please him.
Each double page spread can be read individually as it isn’t a biography, just a fun introduction to the most influential writer of all time.