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Shakespeare & Beyond

Making Shakespeare Pop

Pop-Up Shakespeare
Pop-Up Shakespeare

Pop-Up ShakespeareIt turns out that the tricks of a pop-up book — the secret flaps, the dramatic pops, and the almost-three-dimensional reveals — are a perfect way to express the theatricality of Shakespeare’s plays, which are lively, fun, colorful, and surprising.

In our new book, Pop-Up Shakespeare, the drawings by Jennie Maizels are all that and more, and we wanted our text to match her visual style. We think we’ve just about gotten away with it.

Reducing Shakespeare onstage (in William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged), which we premiered at the Folger in 2016) and on the radio (in The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show for the BBC World Service) turned out to be excellent practice for cramming the entire life and work of William Shakespeare into the pages of a pop-up book.

Finding the perfect images to convey the essence of each of Shakespeare’s plays was a challenge not unlike finding the right way to stage his scenes, and the limited space (five double-page spreads) made the work of describing Shakespeare’s life and sometimes-problematic plays in a clear and concise and (most importantly) child-friendly way extra tricky.

To give you a sense of the width and breadth of knowledge that can be gleaned from our literary masterpiece, here are the Top 10 things we learned in the process of writing this book: