Product Description

Murder most foul... An action-packed retelling of Shakespeare's dark tale of revenge and murder. With notes on Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, and Revenge in Hamlet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32366 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Review

Short, brisk, highly readable retellings which make good sense as stories in their own right. As such, they will readily persuade the junior school age-group that Shakespeare himself has lively stories to tell. These little books can be warmly recommended as a first introduction to Shakespeare.

About the Author
Andrew Matthews has written numerous books for children and teenagers, and is an internationally renowned author. He wrote King Arthur and Wolf Summer for the Orchard list, as well as a series of retellings of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. Andrew has been short-listed twice for the Smarties Award. He lives in Berkshire. Tony Ross is one of the most highly regarded children's book creators/illustrators in Britain. For Orchard he illustrated the Greek and Roman Myths books in the Orchard Myths range, and the hilarious One and Only series by Laurence Anholt, as well as the poetry collection Balloon Lagoon. Tony lives in Wales.

Customer Reviews

Excellent condensation for younger readers
This is a terrific product, and the kids will love having it read to them or, for the over eights, reading it themselves. It's a tragedy, of course, and while the complexity is simplified for younger readers, it's no less gruesome than the original, but as with all the brief novelisations from this Shakespeare Stories series it offers plenty of bang for buck.

It's about a twenty minute read so is perfectly feasible to get through in a single sitting, and is expertly paced, elegantly written, the dialogue has a pleasingly hammable air (I found myself adopting accents and being quite the dramatist as I read it to my boys), and it succeeds very well in accentuating the major dramatic and figurative themes of the play, and includes a couple of pages of summary and context at the end. So much so that it's really not a bad encapsulation of the story for any reader without the inclination to wade through the bard's own iambic pentameter.

It is typeset in nice big text and there are (Quentin) Blake-esque pen and ink illustrations dotted liberally thoughout, so this would be a pretty good self-reader too, for the eight to twelve bracket.

Olly Buxton

BLOODY!!!
This was a good story if you are
going to read this book
you would have to like BLOOD!!!