Reviews

Gr 7-9ÄThis effort fails miserably as an introduction to the play or as a review tool for high school students. Plenty of well-written treatments exist at a variety of lengths and language levels that present the story with some of the verve it deserves. Given the choice here of short words and sentences and choppy, one-to-three sentence paragraphs, this British import may well have been intended for reluctant readers. If so, any advantage of the extreme simplicity of language is overbalanced by the truly dreadful illustrations. Anyone struggling with Shakespeare would be further turned off by these blurry, careless, unpleasant black-and-white drawings that face every page of text. Random and often inaccurate definitions at the bottoms of a few text pages and equally random-seeming quotations under the illustrations complete this unappealing package.ÄSally Margolis, Barton Public Library, VT

The three individual plays launch the third edition of the venerable "Arden Shakespeare" series, which will see the entire canon reproduced in superior scholarly editions by the year 2000. The First Folio is a facsimile edition of the original 1623 publication of the bard's works.