Al the World's a Stage  

My many years of involvement with theater, as a spectator and sometime performer, have directly influenced my career in picture books. I’ve always treated texts as if they were little staged dramas in need of scenery and costumes, populated with characters who gesture and amuse as if they were actors on the stage.

How perfect, then, to have the chance to create paintings for this narrative about some plays and players from the works of Shakespeare. I loved designing costumes and masks, marble painted columns, backdrops with images of stormy seas and night skies, and draperies on a string that and invisible hand might pull across the back of the stage for a change of scene.

When I considered the paintings for All the World’s a Stage , I wanted to open the book by formally introducing young William Shakespeare and his muse with individual portraits. From there the cumulative rhyming text led me to present on the left-hand pages the many characters springing from William’s mind and quill. On the right hand pages I staged a kind of group portrait of characters from each play. These pictures are not to represent actual scenes. Rather, they are composites that highlight key dramatic moments from the plays.

(This is my after word as it appears at the end of the book.) Anita Lobel,