No Boys Play Here: A Story of Shakespeare and My Family’s Missing Men

Sally Bayley, MA 1995

No Boys Play Here is the second part of a coming of age story and tells of a teenage girl in search of her lost father and uncle through the characters and plots of Shakespeare’s plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV. Illustrated with drawings by Arizona Smith, the story unfolds as a series of strange theatrical scenes in the mind of a young girl intent on finding the missing men in her history. Part English family saga, part Medieval and Tudor history learned from school, No Boys Play Here is a re-imagining of English myth and folklore from the point of view of a serving boy — Francis, a girl in disguise — who waits upon the king. Moving back and forth between family life and Shakespearean scenes, the author asks some hard questions about how it is some children grow up poor and what happens to make them so.

ISBN: 9780008318888