THE GREENWOOD TREE

Highly colored and almost wholly fictionized biography of the Bard of Avon, this bodiless creation- bereft, for this reader, of not only entertainment value but common sense and scholarships, snacking only of strange imagination. Armed with ""facts""-garnered from thin air, the authors have fabricated a busily detailed life, despite the accepted fact that Shakespearian scholars have issued many volumes in an attempt to substantiate the very existence of the man as playwright. Little William has a joyous Christmas at Great Uncle Arden's. Later he fences with robbers to protect the proceeds from the latest edition of Lucrece. He even meets James of Scotland while strolling with Burbage in that country. Apparently there's no limit to events or conversation (Ex.- ""Crispian told me there was not an empty seat in the house"" or, the landlady speaking, ""they say 'tis homelike""). Much of the writing belongs to the Gadzooks style of formula writing, and there's no excuse for deliberate falsification in juvenile books which should encourage reliable sources of biography.