The Play's the Thing: A Story about William Shakespeare

The year was 1569 and the place was Stratford-on-Avon, just ninety miles from London. A little boy watched a company of traveling actors perform on a makeshift stage. No one could have known that the child, whose name was William Shakespeare, would one day become the most famous playwright in history. This is the story of the man who wrote Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and many other plays that have been performed and enjoyed again and again for more than four hundred years. Anticipated month of publication.Children's LiteratureChaplin's finest films-his Mutual period of The Immigrant and One A.M.-are fantastic dances to grace and light with just a touch of the sentiment that would weigh down his later features. Both this grace and this sentiment are part and parcel of his childhood in late Victorian London. Turk's biography explains these roots in the Chaplin family's theatrical background, his mother's mental illness, his years of poverty before making a name for himself on first the London comedy stage, and then with Mack Sennett in Hollywood. The marriages, the exile, the later honors are irrelevant to what Chaplin achieved in his best work. Turk lays out his life carefully in terms middle readers can understand. What's missing is the work itself. What a pity a DVD of these films couldn't be attached so kids could see!