Know It All Shakespeare

I like to know a little about a lot of things. At some point you'll find something that peaks your interest and then you've got a research black hole you can fall into. So when I see books like this I'm always interested to see how they approach a subject.

Know It All Shakespeare: 50 Key Aspects of the Bard's Works, Life & Legacy, Each Explained in Under a Minute by Ros Barber.

The book is set out quite neatly in seven sections that house the 50 key aspects. Each of those sections has a short essay on a specific Shakespeare play as well as a glossary. The pages themselves are set out for multiple factual sections:

• 3-second Prompts - a one/two line summary of the topic
• 3-minute Call - key point about the topic
• 3-second Biographies - profession and timeline of people relating to the topic
• Related Topics - other sections of the book that are relevant
• and the main article

The trouble with a lot of factual books is the sheer volume of heavy text. This little book captures lots of smaller chunks that make each page very readable. With a very modern layout that allowed for your eyes to jump around the page and still get important facts, I can see this being a popular choice to use as an introduction to subjects. Especially with the larger portions of writing being very easy to follow.

That being said, I've got strong reservations about parts of this book too.

Each section has its own glossary - I have only ever seen two ways of doing glossaries in books before, the generally accepted way of having one section at the end of the book, and some plays having definitions at the bottom of the page that the word appears on. Having one at the beginning of a chapter really does not work. If the idea is to make the definitions easily accessible in the relevant section then I feel there is enough blank space on a page to include them there rather than before each set of pages.

3-second Biographies - Some of the names are featured in writing on the page they appear on, and some aren't. When all they list are the dates the person lived between and their profession, I feel it would be more useful if it was put after the name within the text, than out on its own.

Related topics - This frustrated me more than it really should have. Each article is in a section has been put together because they have something in common, it seems a little obvious then that related topics would include ones that are in the same section. On a lot of these sections I was finding that the related topics were either the one two pages before, or the one two pages after.

Image pages - I find historical pictures that accompany Shakespeare books very interesting. But the jumbled pages next to each topic is a very confusing addition to me. If they are relevant to what is on the other page you've got no way of telling because there are no captions, and usually several images incorporated on the page. Yet another accepted, and sensible, book practice that seems to have been ignored. I was also really taken aback by the "Inventor of English" image page that had Shakespeare's image framed with psychedelic wiggly words, that have a completely different format to the pages before it.

Featured plays - It is nice to have a larger page about some of the plays. But when you're covering so many brief topics in the rest of the book it is a shame that there aren't a few additional pages with shorter summaries of the other plays.

I'm having real problems knowing where to classify this book. Reading it I would assume it was meant for children/students, but everywhere I look it is classified under adult categories. A book this short (listed at 160 pages on Amazon) would be difficult to classify in the adult's section. This isn't even taking into account that there are actually only 81 pages of content. At the price of roughly £11 for a paperback, it is on a par with hardback reference titles for libraries similar to those published by Raintree.

I can see what is trying to be achieved with this format, but I don't feel like it achieves that in the best way. There is no denying that it will be a useful resource somewhere, as it is always good to have a variety of books on each topic so that there's a balance, but I unfortunately don't think it would be in my first recommendations to people looking to research Shakespeare.