Hear, Hear, Mr. Shakespeare: Story, Illustrations, and Selections

""The reader is invited to make a fanciful visit with Shakespeare at his Stratford house and garden and to savor the rich texture of his words,"" writes Koscielniak (Geoffrey Groundhog Predicts the Weather) at the start of this breezy if slightly fragmented roundup of brief quotations from the Bard. As Shakespeare tends his garden, neighbors and a troupe of traveling players address him with questions or comments, answered with a surfeit of snippets from the scribe's plays. The appealingly hand-lettered responses, loosely connected to the subject at hand, appear in cartoon-style balloons, which playfully attribute the words to rabbits, mice and other animals while a silent Shakespeare stands by. When the actors, en route to London to perform for the queen, discover that the rain has washed away the words of their script, they ask the obliging Shakespeare to ""write for us some jolly new play."" Impressively, the dialogue balloons don't interrupt the story line; rather, they act as a sort of chorus. The work accordingly lends itself to reading aloud, so that Shakespeare's musicality shines through. Definitions of words that might baffle kids (e.g., ""airs,"" ""mirth,"" ""masque"") and notes on Elizabethan theatrical customs are also set into the sunny, full-bleed ink-and-watercolor art. To borrow a quip the author quotes from Love's Labour's Lost, ""Tu-who! a merry note..."" that Koscielniak strikes. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)