Shakespeare and Young Adult Novels by Melanie Hundley

4/3/2019

Some people impact your life everyday. Melanie Hundley is one of those people. We shared office space in graduate school. She cheered me up when times were tough. She could poke fun just enough that I felt good about my efforts. And boy, is she a reader. I just wish I could keep pace with her efforts. Later, when we both had jobs, Jackie Bach and I recruited Melanie to be part of an editorial team. Together, we made naive plans to apply as editors of The ALAN Review. I just knew that Melanie's attention to detail and her subtle, but appropriate prompting to do everything just a little bit better would help. Well, strange forces prevailed--we got the gig. We spend five wonderful years learning how to do the job and getting to know a host of wonderful people.

In graduate school I loved hearing about Melanie's experiences as a teacher. I especially loved hearing about how she taught Shakespeare. In this posts she gives us just a hint of her expertise. Do Shakespeare and YA belong together? You bet.

Shakespeare and Young Adult Novels

...we know what we are, but not what we may be.
Hamlet 4.5

The room is crowded with students on couches, in chairs, in bean bags. They each have a copy of Gareth Hind’s Macbeth. Caleb says, “So the witches, they look and kinda act evil but really it’s Macbeth. He makes the choices to do what he does.” Kim nods and adds, “The witches get blamed for a lot because they are ugly and not part of the town but Macbeth makes the choice to kill his king.”

The discussion continues for a while as the students try to figure out who is really evil in Macbeth. Finally, Marcus asks, “So this graphic novel is based on a play by Shakespeare, right?” I nod. Marcus continues, “I thought it would be harder to understand. I don’t know if it was that it was a graphic novel or whatever but this made sense.” Another student said, “This story sounds like something my grandma would tell me. Like ‘don’t talk to bad people or you’ll be tempted to do wrong.’”

Other students nod and agree and Mikel says, “It’s like we are getting this play sideways. I think that it’ll help us when we get to it in school so we won’t be scared of it.” This conversation makes me think of my own introduction to Shakespeare. Like these students, I came to Shakespeare “sideways.”

My formal, academic introduction to Shakespeare happened in eighth grade when my class read Romeo and Juliet. My informal introduction to Shakespeare occurred long before that. I met him in my grandfather’s appropriated stories, my grandmother’s gentle retellings, and the off-hand quotes and allusions of family members. It didn’t dawn on me that my grandfather couldn’t have actually known Shakespeare or that my uncles hadn’t met him for a drink the night before. He was quoted in daily settings and general conversations. I heard stories, lines, phrases, that as my exposure to Shakespeare grew, I recognized. The rhythms of the lines of his plays or sonnets did not stand out as different from the drawling rhythms of my family’s speech. So when I came to Shakespeare as a high school student and as an English major in college, it was like greeting an old friend met first on my family’s porch.

The students in the afterschool reading group are like me, coming to Shakespeare a bit sideways, through stories and quotes and young adult novels. Young adult authors have embraced Shakespeare and his plays—from appropriations to retellings, Shakespeare is alive and well in contemporary young adult literature. Marsden’s Hamlet (2009) and Lester’s Othello (1998) retell the plays in prose form, adhering closely to the original plot. North’s (2016) To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and Juliet take Shakespeare’s plays and turn them into choose-your-own-adventure stories. Shakespeare’s plays have not escaped the incorporation of vampires and zombies as seen in Gabel’s (2010) Romeo & Juliet & Vampires, Jay’s (2011) Juliet Immortal, and Marion’s (2010) Warm Bodies, a zombie retelling of Romeo and Juliet. These novels can serve as introductions to Shakespeare, companion texts to the classroom teaching of Shakespeare’s plays, or as stand-alone novels. They are similar to the storytelling that happened on the porch of my childhood, a way for contemporary adolescent readers to be exposed to one of the great playwrights.

Ophelia says in act four of Hamlet that “we know what we are, but not what we may be.” This line stands out to me as I think about the multiple ways in which young adult authors have appropriated, retold, and reimagined Shakespeare plays for contemporary adolescents. We know, as English teachers what these plays are but we don’t know what they can become in the hands of talented writers. Some authors choose to focus on characters who are marginalized or misunderstood; for example, Klein (2007) reimagines Hamlet but from Ophelia’s point of view in Ophelia. Ophelia is the central character, acting instead of reacting. Will she choose to continue her relationship with Hamlet? Will she choose to leave Elsinore? This shift empowers Ophelia and provides opportunity for her character to grow and develop. Ray (2011) reimagines Hamlet and Ophelia in Falling for Hamlet set in an exclusive high school for the rich and famous; all the same deaths and problems but add the paparazzi to really make events vivid.

Two of my favorite reimaginings of Shakespeare’s work are Exit, Pursued by a Bear and The Steep and Thorny Way. These novels take the plays they are based on and provide contemporary settings in order to develop a story that incorporates elements from the play but also critiques issues of gender and power. Johnston’s (2016) Exit Pursued by a Bear is a retelling of A Winter’s Tale. Hermione is raped at cheerleading camp, and what is genuinely powerful about this text is the ways in which she is supported by her parents, her church, her friends, and the police. Her best friend Polly is the best friend we all want—funny, sarcastic, strong, caring, and supportive. Her parallel in the play, Paulina, plays this role as well as she tries to convince Leontes that Hermione is innocent of the charges against her. Polly is a vocal advocate for Hermione, pushing against victim-shaming, and challenging those who would try to condemn Hermione for her choices when she learns she is pregnant. The friendship between the two characters, Hermione and Polly, is the backbone of the book, pulling the focus of the story from the king who wrongly accused his wife of infidelity to the women whose friendship will help them survive violence and sexual assault.

Winter’s (2016) The Steep and Thorny Way is a contemporary retelling of Hamlet. In this version, Hamlet is now a young woman, Hanalee Denney, who loses her father Hank and watches her mother remarry. Initially, Hanalee believes her father died in an accident caused by a drunk teenager. She then learns that he may have been poisoned by the doctor taking care of him—the same doctor who is now her stepfather. One of the powerful components of this novel are the questions raised around race, identity, and prejudice. Because Hanalee is the daughter of a white woman and an African American man, she is confronted by daily prejudices, the lack of legal support or rights, and the dangers of the KKK. Hanalee must ask the ghost of her dead father for clues and help and negotiate the challenging issues around race and prejudice in the 1920s. The gender shift and the change in setting provide a different way of looking at the play and provide insights into the decisions a grieving child makes when searching for answers about the death of a parent.

The young adult authors who create narratives that connect to and reimagine Shakespeare’s plays provide them access to the stories that have shaped so much of Western literary culture. Allowing adolescents to take a sideways path to Shakespeare by reading texts that build on, connect to, or retell Shakespeare’s plays provide multiple entry points to these cultural texts. I look at the students in the book group. They know who they are as readers now but they do not yet know who they may become. Hopefully, these novels help them become the readers they want to be.

Bibliography

Jay, S. (2011). Juliet immortal. New York: Delacorte Press.
Johnston, E. K. (2016). Exit, pursued by a bear. New York: Dutton Books for Young Readers.
Klein, L. (2007). Ophelia. New York: Bloomsbury USA Children’s Books.
Lester, J. (1998) Othello. New York: Scholastic Paperbacks.
Marion, I. (2010). Warm bodies. New York; Atria/Emily Bestler Books.
Marsden, J. (2009). Hamlet: a novel. Summerville, MA: Candlewick Press.
North, R. (2016). Romeo and Juliet. New York: Riverhead Books.
North, R. (2016). To be or not to be. New York: Riverhead Books.
Ray, M. (2011). Falling for Hamlet. Lebanon, IN. Poppy, an imprint of Hatchette Book Group.
Shakespeare, W., & Gabel, C. (2010). Romeo & Juliet & vampires. New York; Harper Teen.
Winters, C. (2016). The steep and thorny way. New York: Amulet Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams.

Until Next time.