The Bedside, Bathtub, & Armchair Companion to Shakespeare

I picked this up at the library after a fruitless attempt to find the Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Jane Austen. The Bedside... books are in a series of companion books on such authors/literary figures as Agatha Christie, Lewis Carroll, and Sherlock Holmes. Since I've attended several performances of Shakespeare's plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I thought this book would be fun. It is. Talk about informative. Dick Riley and Pam McAllister give a sort of Cliff Notes version of the Cliff Notes on several plays and poems. But what's the most fun are (is?) the sidebar tidbits at the end of the description of each play. These include likely sources of the plots, notable features (where it was first performed, etc.), notable productions and performances, and other uses of the basic plots (operas, musical pieces, movies, and so on). Plus there are essays peppered throughout the book on various aspects of Shakespeare's life, Elizabethan culture and current political events, etc., such as "What if Shakespeare had been Born a Girl? Women in the Queen's England." A really fun chapter is "Thou Knave! Thou Plague-sore! Shakespearean Insults." All of these stories, sidebars, etc., are quite entertaining. The book is written much like the Dummies... series, but it doesn't insult the reader. I recommend it.