King of Shadows (Oxford Playscripts) - Softcover

Cooper, Susan; Mitchell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198310730 ISBN 13: 9780198310730

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2011

Synopsis

An engaging classroom playscript. Nat is a young actor performing as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As the rehearsals intensify, Nat's health begins to fail and the cast is horrified to hear that he has been rushed to hospital with bubonic plague.

New, innovative activities specifically tailored to support the KS3 Framework for Teaching English and help students to fulfil the Framework objectives. Activities include work on Speaking and Listening, close text analysis, and the structure of playscripts, and act as a springboard for personal writing.

About this title

Review:

King of Shadows is an exceptional work by Susan Cooper, bestselling author of

The Dark is Rising, Over Sea Under Stone, Silver on the Tree and many other magical and atmospheric books, and will not disappoint those who already wallow in the author's startling ability to conjure up clear images of place and time with the stroke of a pen.

Here we meet young Nat Field, a boy actor visiting London to perform at The Globe Theatre. Nat soon falls ill, and much to the amazement of the doctors looking after him, he has contracted the Bubonic Plague. As one young actor lies in isolation in Guy's Hospital, another wakes up in Elizabethan London and is drawn into rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream alongside William Shakespeare himself and the two form a bond that can never be broken, even through time.

King of Shadows is a daring and complex novel, set against the backdrop of the life of an unhappy child who, by travelling unwittingly through time, learns how to face his real life troubles. As ever, Cooper's delicious descriptive prose combine with her elegant dialogue to bring her characters vividly to life, never taking the easy option, but allowing her players to develop and come to terms with their lives in their own time.

A remarkable book that is as intriguing as it is entertaining, King of Shadows could well be the best Susan Cooper yet. (Age 10 and over) --Susan Harrison

Review:

"A dramatic and sensory feast."--"Kirkus Reviews"

*"Readers will be swept up in Nat's detailed, sensory-filled observations of life in Shakespeare's time...[The] overall shape of the novel, with its finely drawn connections between Nat's story and "A Midsummer Night's Dream, "is superb."

*"[A] masterful novel."

*"Part historical fiction, part fantasy, wholly entertaining."

*"Readers...will revel in the hurly-burly of rehearsals and the performance before the queen, the near discoveries, the company rivalries, and some neatly drawn parallels."

"A dramatic and sensory feast."

"A dramatic and sensory feast."--Kirkus Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0198310730
• ISBN 13: 9780198310730
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120