Overview

A retelling of Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream . It is part of a series of titles which are designed to introduce children to Shakespeare, but can also be used as revision aids. The main characters and key events are brought to life in the simplified story and pictures, and the short extracts from the original play focus on key speeches in Shakespeare's language. Each title in the series is set out into acts in the same way as the original play, although the story is told in narrative text with only key speeches remaining in the original form. A portrait gallery of key characters is included for easy reference.

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9780237524401

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Of late many classic titles - including the Bible - have been turned into manga, in a 21st-century version of the venerable Classics Illustrated comics. This take on the Bard boils his play down to approximately 20 words per page, drastically abridging the text, though keeping intact the original language and meter. A fully colored dramatis personae reduces the characters to sound bites and shines in comparison to the flat, gray-toned images that murkily tell the story itself. As drawn by Brown, the characters are decidedly more Western-looking in their styling than is typical to most manga, and the adaptor's choice of setting is an anachronistic mishmash of quasi-antique and modern, a choice that will leave sophisticated readers knowledgeable with the text slightly puzzled. The Tempest (ISBN: 978-0-8109-9476-8), drawn by Paul Duffield, follows an identical template. These attempts to convert Shakespeare into visual language fall flat, although the slick manga styling alone may attract some new readers to these works. (plot summary, author's biography) (Graphic fiction. 13 & up) (Kirkus Reviews)

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