Book Review: The Manga Shakespeare Series

Hate Shakespeare? Love manga? Consider Manga Shakespeare

by Alison

If you’ve ever had to yawn your way through a Shakespeare play, you’re not alone. It can be difficult to get through for multiple reasons, reading aloud in English class in dead monotone being a chief killer. Besides that is the language, which is not only 400 years old but also mostly in rhyming, metered poetry to boot. But the biggest hurdle is that most readers don’t feel connected to Shakespeare plays because they are so old and lack descriptive visual elements of popular prose. Getting worried? Never fear! A new series solves all these problems by putting Shakespeare to manga.

Manga Shakespeare is a series put out by Self Made Hero, a publishing company in the UK. They’ve put out 14 renditions so far, with six tragedies, six comedies and two histories. The Arlington Public Library system currently carries ten of them, including The Tempest, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; I read all ten. Each book includes an introduction to the characters and setting in full color with key lines from the play, as well as a plot summary and short biography of the Bard. Most books have different illustrators, and the text is abbreviated, making for short but substantial reading – each takes about an hour to finish.

The series is obviously meant as an introduction to Shakespeare, blending original Shakespeare with a new, young art form aimed directly at teens. It’s reminiscent of the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, which has a thoroughly modern setting with original text as the dialogue. The graphic novels are less disconcerting, though, as they take multiple invented settings. Some, such as Much Ado about Nothing in 19th-century Italy, would be familiar to Shakespeare. Others are truly manga fare, edging toward fantastical history or post-apocalypse future. The styles also vary somewhat. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has the dreamiest illustrations, while Hamlet, with its bold black and white contrast, is edgy even to look at. Julius Caesar has the roughest style, while Othello wins the strange award, as many of it characters are furries.

Though I don’t usually read graphic novels, let alone manga, I enjoyed most of the series. I found manga a truly fitting art form for expressing the emotion and drama of the plays, especially for witty scenes with verbal dueling. But the illustrations also detracted sometimes – the Julius Caesar style was especially confusing, while Othello’s furries were thoroughly distracting. Some of the settings were also distracting, if not completely irrelevant; as someone who knew the plot of most of the adaptations I read, the futuristic settings were unnecessary and seemed like a blatant attempt at garnering interest. The texts were easier to read than the full plays, though rather less adequate for the tragedies, which proved dense and confusing.

Overall, though, the books were alternately delightful and riveting. The adaptations made the plays more understandable and enjoyable by adding emotion, actions and faces for the characters. I can’t speak for manga fans, but Shakespeare die-hards should find this series a wonderful blend of the Bard’s brilliance and manga’s intensity of expression.