Bard of Avon

William Shakespeare was the son of a glovemaker, a small-town boy with a grammar school education. Yet he grew up to become the greatest English-speaking playwright in the world. Bard of Avon: The Story of William Shakespeare is both his story and that of a great art rediscovered in the modern world.

Drama had been forgotten since the days of ancient Greece, but it reemerged in Elizabethan London with the building of the first modern theater. Its impact can still be imagined today. There were the theaters, open to the weather and featuring neither sets nor curtains, but equipped with dramatic special effects. There were the companies of actors--the leading men, the comedians, the boys who played women's roles--and the playwrights who gave them all lines to say.

Best of all, there was William Shakespeare, who rubbed shoulders with noblemen and royalty as well as with the rowdy crowds at the foot of the stage. He was suspected of involvement in a treasonous rebellion, and his last play literally brought down the house when cannon effects set fire to the famous Globe theater and it burned to the ground.

Award-winning collaborators Diane Stanley and Peter Vennema have once again created a feast of words and pictures to celebrate the life of a remarkable person from the pages of history: William Shakespeare, a man for all time."

How did a man from an unremarkable family create a legacy of plays that are performed today in every part of the world? "Bard of Avon" presents "a remarkably rounded picture of Shakespeare's life and the period in which he lived" ("The Horn Book", starred review). Full color.

How did a man from an unremarkable family create a legacy of plays that are performed today in every part of the world? "Bard of Avon" presents "a remarkably rounded picture of Shakespeare's life and the period in which he lived" ("The Horn Book", starred review). Full color.

Diane Stanley is the author and illustrator of beloved books for young readers, including Saving Sky, which ALA Booklist, in a starred review, called "beautifully written" and noted that "parallels to our contemporary times appear on every page. . . . The young people manifest a courage few can emulate"; Bella at Midnight, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and an ALA Booklist Editor's Choice; The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy; The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine; and A Time Apart. Well known as the author and illustrator of award-winning picture-book biographies, she is the recipient of the Washington Post-Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award for the body of her work.

Ms. Stanley has also written and illustrated numerous picture books, including three creatively reimagined fairy tales: The Giant and the Beanstalk, Goldie and the Three Bears, and Rumpelstiltskin's Saughter. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.