Read A Stage Full of Shakespeare Stories free in the Little Reads app.
Angela McAllister's A Stage Full of Shakespeare Stories retells Shakespeare's best-known plays as stories for 8 year olds to read one at a time.
Each one opens with a famous line and a little cast list, so you know who everybody is before you start. Then the play is simply told, start to finish, the way you'd tell it to somebody on a long car journey.
Macbeth meets three witches on a foggy moor and is told he'll be king. Romeo goes to a party he hasn't been invited to. Hamlet waits on a freezing castle roof for the ghost of his father. Two couples run off into a wood outside Athens and the fairies make an absolute mess of them.
The retelling keeps the good lines and lets them do their work. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. What's in a name? To be or not to be. Your reader will meet those sentences again one day and already know where they come from, which is a quietly lovely thing.
Now, the bit to think about. These are the actual plots, not softened ones. Macbeth stabs a sleeping king and later orders a man's whole family killed. Romeo drinks poison and Juliet picks up his dagger, and both deaths are described in a sentence or two on the page. Nobody lingers over any of it and there's no gore, but the deaths are there and for a lot of readers this will be a first.
So this one probably wants a grown-up nearby, at least for the tragedies. The comedies and The Tempest are a different mood altogether, full of mischief and enchanted islands, and a child could happily graze on those alone. Would it be so bad to save Hamlet for later?
What I like is that it doesn't talk down. Nobody explains why the stories matter or asks any questions at the end. They're just good stories, told well, which is exactly how they started out.
If your reader takes to famous old tales told properly, Hilary McKay's Fairy Tales is here too. Ten of them, Rapunzel and Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin among them, and the Rapunzel begins with two children trying to buy a caged bird its freedom with a silver coin.
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