I remember when I spotted my first Manga Shakespeare, in the RSC shop during the interval of Twelfth Night, November 2009. I was with my older sister, who will attest to the fact that I had a full on freak-out upon witnessing the beautiful baby created by the melding of two of the most awesome things I can imagine. The shop had sadly sold out of Twelfth Night, my favourite, so I bought Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet instead. I ogled them all the way home.
My younger sister recently came in from school, informing us that they would be studying Romeo and Juliet as an exam text. She’s a regular Matilda and asked if I owned it. If we can skim over the hilarious stupidity of this question, I was able to offer the play to her in three formats: a Penguin edition of the play, Baz Luhrman’s gorgeous adaptation and my Manga Shakespeare version. She snapped up the latter. She loved it, and proceeded to watch the film and read the play text in its original, not-illustrated form.
When approached correctly, Shakespeare doesn’t have to be the daunting heavyweight some of you might remember from your school days. Tackling the original text without much assistance in terms of setting and visualisation can be disorienting, but beginning with the adaptation is the lazy solution and may actually end up being detrimental to opinions of the play (anybody else here totally put off by Mel Gibson?). So where do you start if you’re trying to get your kids to enjoy Shakespeare? Or if you’re now trying independently to approach some of the plays you didn’t get around to at school? Well, I suggest these Manga Shakespeares.
Whilst they offer a slightly abridged version of the text, the remaining text is unaltered, allowing readers to quickly immerse themselves in Shakespeare’s language and the storyline. The visual element of these books encourages the sense of setting sometimes lacking when grappling with the play text. Once the basics have been grasped, reading the original text in its entirety can be more enjoyable and less challenging for students. Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet is so popular because it enables people who thought they would never enjoy Shakespeare to do exactly that. My boyfriend – who is so very not a book person – said that he’d stopped even noticing that they weren’t speaking modern English. I think these Manga Shakespeares have a similar effect, they’re enchanting.
Better still, they’re only about a fiver each from Amazon: not the £8 each I paid for mine at the RSC, but as I was quickly amending the Twelfth Night-shaped gap in my Manga Shakespeare library, I discovered how cheaply I could have purchased the others had I known of their existence.
As my little sister’s enthusiasm for the idea seemed to confirm, they’re a fun way of approaching new Shakeys, well worth considering if you’re a student, a parent, or a simply fan of all things William.
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