carolyn kellogg

Manga-like editions of Shakespeare’s greatest hits are on the way. Cause for celebration, or the end of the world as we know it?

I do think part of the value in reading Shakespeare is READING SHAKESPEARE. As in, becoming immersed in his language and meter. There’s something exhilarating about getting a dirty joke, not because a footnote explains it, but because it’s there in the text. To think, He’s not saying that, is he? He is! The past comes alive in a whole new way when a reader finds that Shakespeare wrote salacious puns and the audience got them. I think discovering this through the words on the page is genuine, and valuable.

But, as I recently discovered while reading the Arden Shakespeare version of As You Like It for a grad class, the text of Shakespeare is not a pure, direct experience. There are 141 pages of introduction before the play starts; 200 pages of play, bifurcated by footnotes; then 80+ pages of appendices. I just wanted to read and think about the play, but first I had to wade through the scholarship that’s emerged after 400 years of reprinting, performing, misinterpretation and restoration. (Or would that be Restoration misinterpretation?) Anyway, I understand that my ideal — of coming fresh to Shakespeare — doesn’t happen when you pick up the text.

It might just, though, when you pick up the manga version. So maybe it’s the kind of bold reworking that I’ll dig. (ooh, what’ll drowned Ophelia look like?)