Restyling Shakespeare for Children

You won't get away with tinkering with his plays for an adult audience – but some bracing liberties are being taken for kids.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Animating and enlivening Shakespeare for young readers is uniquely challenging – the plays are dense and allusive, frequently featuring X-rated storylines of violence and sexual desire, but they also represent a treasure chest most teachers would like their students to begin plundering at as early an age as possible. So sugaring the pill by taking liberties, whether in retellings, through imaginative departures or by dramatising Shakespeare's own temptingly undocumented life, are rather encouraged than frowned upon.

Straightforwardly retelling Shakespeare for children, however, does present authors with the dismaying prospect of bowdlerising or Tateification, especially if they feel the need to apply tactful fig-leaves according to the envisaged age of their readership. Recently rereading Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare , I was amused by the injunction to the better-lettered boys of the 19th century to select "what is proper for a young sister's ear" if they start reading chunks of the originals to their adoring siblings. Although the Lambs do a splendid job of potting Shakespeare's plots (I wish I'd remembered them when doing undergraduate revision), there's no room in their orderly, highly moral universe for ambiguity, or for the "problematic" – Isabella, for instance, is delighted to marry the Duke at the end of Measure for Measure, accepting him "with grateful joy" rather than silence and setting such an "excellent example" as a virtuous Duchess thereafter that sex before marriage, the sin that drives the play, becomes all but unknown. Unfortunately, too, the language of the Lambs' own time now presents almost as many barriers to the young 21st-century reader as Shakespeare's does.