This latest telling of the Shakespeare story is a collaboration between a popular communicator who knows instinctively how to talk to children on the page and a gifted illustrator who has colourfully recreated the Elizabethan world.

Michael Rosen is the chatty, informed tour guide, leading young readers around London and Stratford, and through the “house of Shakespeare”, where in each room we find a different play going on and overhear a bold-type soundbite from one of its speeches. He brings the Bard to contemporary life (his and ours), speculates about his biography and makes suggestions as to how his circumstances and attitudes may be inferred from key scenes in the plays. Thought-provoking textual statistics also remind readers that Shakespeare is no different to any other great writer when it comes to recurrent preoccupations - “The story of Cain, who kills his brother Abel, is mentioned in the plays more than 25 times!” All this is done with engaging relish. “But let’s face it, we don’t really know very much about how Shakespeare spent his childhood and teenage years,” says Rosen. This is characteristic of the tone and approach of the whole enterprise: “Here’s part of the Roman book by someone called Plutarch”; “it’s a ghastly mess but very funny”. Rosen’s easy-going, conversational approach and his paraphrases of some of the more knotty quotations (“This is a way of saying that theatres tempted people into all kinds of sin: overeating, drunkenness and the wrong kind of sex”) are accurate, plain-speaking and helpful.

In addition, there is a closer look at four plays - A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest - and an even closer examination of the scene from Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet is yelled at by her father and abandoned by her terrified mother. Rosen gets the balance right between storytelling and analysis, although I take issue with his claim that “only the kindness of Juliet’s nanny, the Nurse, relieves the situation”. Surely, “the chill horror of Juliet’s mother turning on her daughter” is matched by the Nurse’s betrayal. To suggest otherwise is misleading.

John Mole is visiting poet at the University of Hertfordshire. His new collection for children, Cuckoo Jones, will be published next year by Oxford University Press