This paper reads a recent wordless picture book by Australian illustrator Gregory Rogers, The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (2004), in order to consider how “Shakespeare” is produced as a complex object of consumption for the implied child reader. Even as the book depends on an existing cultural lexicon of Shakespearean images for meaning and coherence, it does so in order to revise boy-meets-Shakespeare plots that are prevalent in contemporary children’s literature. Unfortunately, Rogers intervenes in dominant understandings of children’s Shakespeare but ultimately affirms gendered logics of agency and power. For the child reader, then, this book both rewards and withholds agency in keeping with tensions between postcolonial agency and colonial subjection. Even as dominant meanings of “Shakespeare” are challenged, conservative understandings of gendered agency are reinforced.