"Faint and imperfect stamps": the problem with adaptations of Shakespeare for children.

Despite the numerous reasons against adapting Shakespeare's works for young children--including the difficult language and mature subject matter of the plays--many authors have done so over the past two hundred years. Why is this? How do authors deal with the difficulties of Shakespeare's texts? What is lost and gained by these adaptations? This article examines the various justifications for presenting Shakespeare to children, from the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare to the present. It points to the problems inherent in some of these explanations, and suggests that adults must be critical of their motives for, and methods of, presenting Shakespeare to children. To illustrate this claim, the article provides a comparative analysis of a selection of Hamlets for children.

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Murder, revenge, adultery, suicide--these are hardly the subjects discussed in an elementary school classroom. In fact, often when young children ask adults questions touching on any of these topics, 'grown ups' do their best to avoid directly responding to the inquiry. This is the stuff, however, of which Hamlet, one of the most commonly adapted of Shakespeare's plays for children, is made.

Hamlet is an odd choice of text for young people, not only due to its lofty subject matter, but also because of its ostensible lack of interest in children. The play does, admittedly, include one brief discussion of the young, but in it they do not come out looking very good. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstem announce to Hamlet that the Players are coming to Elisnore, the prince asks if the troupe is held in "the same estimation they did when I was in the city" (2.2.321-22). Rosencrantz informs Hamlet that the feud between adult actors and children's companies has harmed the players' reputation: "[T]here is," explains Rosencrantz, "... an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of the question and are most tyrannically clapped for't" (326-27). In response, Hamlet sharply critiques the youngsters and those who write for them:

   What, are they children? Who maintains 'em? How are they
   escoted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they
   can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow
   themselves to common players--as it is like most will, if
   their means are not better--their writers do them wrong to
   make them exclaim against their own succession? (331-36)

Here, Hamlet makes reference to the condition of players, both young and old, in the early modern theatre. At the time, playwrights were using child actors, who are here referred to as "eyases" or young hawks, in private theaters, as ventriloquists use dolls, to voice their discontent with adult actors in public theaters. Though an interesting commentary on the theater of the period, this exchange seems to reveal yet another reason why Hamlet should not be adapted for a young audience. Although Hamlet displays some degree of empathy with the child actors, he is ultimately critical of them and, even more so, of the adults who use them as pawns in a battle over cultural supremacy. The children in these companies are pitied perhaps, but ultimately they are deemed foolish creatures, destined only for a sour end.

One might guess that this negativity regarding children and the theater, accompanied by the play's mature subject matter and, as the Folger Shakespeare Library notes, the fact that, at 4,042 lines, Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, children's authors would want to avoid it (Folger n. pag.). They do not, however; nor are they discouraged by Shakespeare's other works, many of which are equally, if not more, ideologically disturbing than Hamlet. Why is it the case, since there seem to be so many reasons against adapting Shakespeare for young people, that doing so has been popular for the last two hundred years?

The answer lies, in part, in the varied visions of children, Shakespeare, and his work over the years. Throughout history, the child's position in society has changed. The Bard has also been viewed in various ways over the centuries, as everything from a good moralist to a good entertainer, and from an icon of high culture to a writer available to all. Somehow, though, no matter which view adapters take of children or the Bard, they are able to justify the need for creating versions of Shakespeare's work for young people. Below I would first like to compare briefly some of the justifications given, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, for rewriting Shakespeare for young children. I present this section in order to provide a sense of the variety of justifications for using 'adult' texts like Hamlet with children, and to point out the inherent contradictions in some of the justifications. Then, by analyzing a selection of adaptations of Hamlet for young children, I reveal the further complications that arise in the texts themselves, ranging from issues of language to censorship and interpretation. This analysis will lead us to back to ask the original question: Why adapt Shakespeare for young children? It will also force us to reevaluate how we present Shakespeare to young children. In light of these problems arising from adaptations, ultimately I conclude that if Shakespeare is to be presented to young people, then it should not be through a mediated form like adaptation, but rather through direct contact with the poet's texts themselves.

I. Why Shakespeare for Kids?

Since the early modern period, young children have been closely associated with William Shakespeare's plays, though their relationship to these texts has changed dramatically over the years. During the playwright's lifetime, children--young males--actively engaged with early modem plays: Boy actors were on the stage in London, playing female characters in adult companies, or taking on a broader range of roles in children's companies. (1) Since the late sixteenth century, children have moved, we might say, from being actively involved with Shakespeare's texts to being passive listeners/readers of it, to occupying now a hybrid of the two roles. Additionally, adults, who were once envisioned to be experts when it came to teaching children about Shakespeare, are now often considered to be in need of training themselves before they can introduce young people to the Bard. These shifts in the positions of children and adults are perhaps best understood in relation to changing notions of childhood over time, as well as the various reasons adults have found Shakespeare to be so beneficial to children--including the ways they have handled the challenges posed by the yoking together of complex literature and young readers.

Since Philippe Aries's book, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime, was published in 1960, the status of children in the history of Western society has been taken up as a very serious issue. Aries argues that there was no notion of childhood as a distinct category in the medieval period, rather, the concept was not firmly established until the mid-eighteenth century. Although some, like Linda Pollock, for instance, have taken issue with Aries, many others have supported his claim, and have gone on to develop it further. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore these debates and details of the development of the concept of childhood, but I mention it here, in part, to provide an explanation for the parameters of this study. In light of Aries's thesis, it is no surprise that by the late eighteenth century, children's grammar books cited the Bard's words as examples of good speech and good morals. Young people's status as beings who were different from adults, and who needed to be taught many things, was reinforced in the classroom where young people were trained to memorize passages from the plays, no longer to act them out as they had done on the early modem stage (Bottoms, "Familiar Shakespeare" 13). As the position of the child as distinct and subordinate became more a part of the culture, Shakespeare's texts were, for the first time, radically adapted for children. By the early nineteenth century, accordingly, young people's status as passive listeners to Shakespeare's texts was firmly secured with Mary and Charles Lamb's publication: Tales from Shakespeare.

In 1807, when the Lambs introduced their collection, they modestly admitted that its stories, based on the poet's plays, were "faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespeare's matchless image" (x). The text, say the Lambs, is only a taste of the real thing, or "the true Plays of Shakespeare," which children would presumably read once they became adults (xi). The Lambs' work, in other words, is a sign that points to, but can never be, the Author's Original Text. Why, if they considered their work to be "faint and imperfect," compared to Shakespeare's, would they have published the Tales? Perhaps it is because they found Shakespeare's plays to be "enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions [and useful for] teach[ing] courtesy, benignity, generosity, [and] humanity" (xi). Seeing Shakespeare as a moralist, and believing him to be a useful tool to reform society, the Lambs offered their censored, condensed, prose versions of twenty of Shakespeare's texts. An introduction to Shakespeare was, believed the authors, an introduction to morals and an inducement to reading his work and continuing on a moral path into adulthood. (2)

About one hundred years after the Tales were published, Edith Nesbit penned The Children's Shakespeare, a text not quite as ambitious as the Lambs' book and with a rather different motivation. In the Introduction to her twelve short stories, Nesbit explains how she found her own children frustrated by the complexity of Shakespeare's plays and endeavored to help them understand it. After encouragement from Nesbit to read Shakespeare's works, one of her children complained, "I can't understand a word of it," and another contemptuously accused his mother of lying to them when she had claimed that the plays were like fairytales--beautiful and enjoyable (5). Nesbit notes that the youngsters had trouble with much of the vocabulary, and says that this led her to tell them the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream in language she believed they could understand. Nesbit, however, recalls the difficulty in doing this: "In truth it was not easy to arrange the story simply. Even with the recollection of Lamb's [sic] tales to help me I found it hard to tell the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' in words that these little ones could understand" (6). The children very much enjoyed their mother's story, and, although Nesbit explained to them that when they become adults they would understand "that the stories are the least part of Shakespeare" (6), they implored her, nonetheless, to compose children's versions of all of the plays.

As Nesbit implicitly critiques her predecessors, the Lambs, whose style is admittedly opaque, and notes her children's desire to hear more stories of Shakespeare's plays, she makes apparent the reasons she feels she must rewrite Shakespeare for children. Nesbit's motives for composing The Children's Shakespeare center on her desire to please and entertain children, rather than to instruct them in morality, which is the central aim of the Lambs' text. Like the Lambs, however, Nesbit suggests that there is more to Shakespeare's texts than she is giving the children, but this is because some of Shakespeare, most specifically his language, is best left for adulthood.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the reasons and methods used for teaching Shakespeare to young children have become more varied. In many cases, educators experience resistance to using the early modern writer's work with young children, and, thus, find it useful to articulate why they have chosen Shakespeare as a fit topic of study. However, often when they give their reasons for using Shakespeare with young people, some rather disturbing contradictions become clear. In Todd Daubert and Pauline Nelson's book aimed at elementary school teachers, Starting with Shakespeare: Successfully Introducing Shakespeare to Children, for instance, the authors include a section entitled "Top 20 Answers to the Question 'Why on Earth Would You Want to Teach Shakespeare to Children?'" They explain in reason number four: "Shakespeare empowers the child--puts the child in a position of teaching their parents something that is valued" (xi). Children who have studied Shakespeare, in other words, will be in possession of cultural capital and feel powerful, armed with this new-found knowledge. However, another reason (number eleven) given by Daubert and Nelson is that "Studying Shakespeare with children frees Shakespeare from the high-brow ties that have sanctified his plays and taken all the fun out of them" (xi). So while in the former reason Shakespeare's high-brow status is embraced as children became little professors, in the latter reason, allowing children access to the Bard's work destabilizes his ivory-tower status. This, in turn, enables both the teacher and the students to enjoy what was once perceived to belong to old, stuffy academics.

Among the other reasons provided by Daubert and Nelson, we see another contradiction--this time regarding universality and historicity, a binary that plagues adult scholars of the Bard as well. (3) In reason number nine, we are told that Shakespeare's characters are "timeless," and, thus, even young students will immediately identify with them without any difficulty (xi). (Earlier in the Introduction, the authors echo this statement, saying, for example, that the "plots are timeless" and that the "characters portray traits all too human" [x].) Reasons number ten, sixteen, and eighteen, however, argue quite the opposite, since they emphasize the difference between Shakespeare's world and our own. Studying the plays, the authors explain, reveals the history of language, provokes students to take an interest in geography and history, and opens up "a whole new world for many students" (xi).

The Shakespeare 'of an age' is often at odds with the Shakespeare 'for all time,' as is also clear in Lois Burdett's work on children and Shakespeare. In "'All the Colours of the Wind': Shakespeare and the Primary Student," Burdett explains that she began teaching Shakespeare to second graders when she discovered that they knew little about the author, something especially disturbing to her given the fact that the elementary school in which she taught is located in Stratford, Ontario. To remedy the situation, she created, as she describes it, a study of Shakespeare that was truly interdisciplinary, with lessons spilling over from English, to Science, to History. Though she may still take this approach with her students, her essay is clearly not interested in explicating how one teaches seven-year olds about the correspondences or seventeenth-century theories of politics. Rather, Burdett's aim is to "share the excitement of exploring with young children the timeless emotions and ideas of Shakespeare" (45; emphasis mine).

Another reason, often implicit in children's versions of Shakespeare, young people are exposed to Shakespeare is because it serves the cause(s) of adults. Combining Shakespeare and children has become a way for adults to receive praise. To be able to say that one is teaching Shakespeare to small children gives as much, if not more, attention to the adult teaching as to the children learning. Although Daubert and Nelson, for instance, truly believe that Shakespeare does kids good, they also admit that "The study of Shakespeare in elementary school is a great exercise in public relations" (215). They encourage educators to use Shakespeare with young children thus: "As we all know, appreciation for teachers is often slow in coming, unlike criticism, and education has a tarnished image in the public's eye. It has been our experience that the study of Shakespeare with young children makes parents sit up and take notice in a very positive way" (211). While one certainly does not want to slight teachers who have the courage to tackle Shakespeare with students of any age, it is worth pointing out that Shakespeare works to a variety of ends when his audience is children.

II. Hamlet and "[L]ittle [E]yases"

A. The Lambs' Hamlet

Recently, there has been an outpouring of adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet for young people, and at least as many guides to teaching the play to children directed toward parents and educators. Perhaps one reason for the substantial number of recent versions of the play is that older adaptations are thought to have long since passed their expiration date. Looking at Mary and Charles Lamb's Tales, for instance, we see that the prose is dense and rather difficult even for adults to follow. A passage from the Lambs' Hamlet illustrates this critique:

   Not that the prospect of exclusion from the throne, his
   lawful inheritance, weighted so much upon his [Hamlet's]
   spirits, though that to a young and high-minded prince was
   a bitter wound and a sore indignity; but what so galled
   him, and took away all his cheerful spirits, was, that his
   mother had shown herself so forgetful to his father's
   memory: and such a father! who had been to her so loving
   and so gentle a husband! and then she always appeared as
   loving and obedient a wife to him, and would hang upon
   him as if her affection grew to him: and now within two
   months, or as it seemed to young Hamlet, less than two
   months, she had married again, married his uncle, her dear
   husband's brother, in itself a highly improper and unlawful
   marriage, from the nearness of relationship, but made
   much more so by the indecent haste with which it was
   included, and the unkindly character of the man whom she
   had chosen to be the partner of her throne and bed. (306)

Indeed, this single sentence is likely to exhaust an adult reader, and twenty-first century children, we would expect, might be confused or bored by such verbiage.

The Lambs are, however, quite concerned with the language they use to present Shakespeare to their young readers. They feel that although they successfully captured the plots, and even perhaps the emotions, of the plays, their Tales could not compete with Shakespeare's poetry as they remark in the Introduction:

   The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young
   reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for
   which purpose his words are used whenever it seemed possible
   to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to
   give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent
   care has been taken to select such words as might least
   interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which
   he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language
   since his time have been as far as possible avoided. (ix)

In the Tales, children get a taste of Shakespeare's language, thoughtfully filtered by Mary and Charles Lamb, presumably because young people cannot penetrate the archaic and complex language of the plays. (4) The Lambs also hint here that linear stories are better understood by children than are other modes of explicating a plot. Later, they are even more specific: "young people," they write, "[are] not accustomed to the dramatic form of writing" (ix). For these reasons, the Lambs simplify Shakespeare's often convoluted plots by ordering the events in what they believe is a logical, straightforward manner.

In rearranging and rewording Hamlet, the Lambs take great liberties with Shakespeare's text. For one thing, when it comes to the relationship between prose and dialogue in the Lambs' Hamlet, we find that their text is almost entirely lacking in conversation between characters. Although the authors incorporate some of Shakespeare's language into their prose (e.g. "[Hamlet] at first called upon angels and heavenly ministers to defend them for he knew not whether it were a good spirit or bad; whether it came for good or evil" [308-09]), they avoid allowing characters to speak directly to each other. The only scene in the Lambs' Hamlet that includes dialogue is the closet scene, where Shakespeare's language is again used, albeit sparingly.

Perhaps most especially, though, this scene is notable in the Lambs' rendering of Shakespeare's play because of the way it is tempered for its young audience. In all twenty plays the Lambs rewrote, they report that they encountered difficulty when it came to retelling stories involving mature issues and events. The authors believed that young boys were more well prepared to handle weighty, "adult," matters since they were admitted regularly to their fathers' libraries and, thus, were exposed to the original texts. Young girls, however, were at a disadvantage since this was not part of their upbringing, something Mary Lamb understood personally. (5) The Lambs, then, in opening a new literary world to young girls, presented a kinder, gentler Shakespeare for their primary readership, and, as Jean I. Marsden argues in "Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare," a Shakespeare that taught young females how to become proper nineteenth-century women. (6)

We can see an example of this softening in Hamlet, most especially in the closet scene, which is undoubtedly one of the more disturbing moments in Hamlet. A sexually-charged confrontation between son and mother that reveals Hamlet's desire to control what he sees as his mother's unbridled sexual desire, it is a scene that is, for many psychoanalytic critics, crucial in understanding Hamlet's disturbances. (7) While I am not interested in debating the kinds of issues to which children of a certain age should or should not be exposed, I do wish to point out here that children's authors who retell Shakespeare's plots routinely make moral judgments for their audiences, censoring material they feel is too 'adult' for young people. The Lambs, for instance, are quick to shield children from the violent and sexual aspects of the closet scene. Shakespeare's Hamlet tells his mother that she "cannot call it [her feelings toward Claudius] love, for at your age/The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble /And waits upon the judgment" (3.4.67-69). Furthermore, Hamlet says that if his mother loves her son and the memory of her dead husband, she will no longer "Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed, /Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse" (3.4.165-66). The Lambs' Hamlet, on the other hand, only covertly points to his mother's sexuality, suggesting politely that "for the future [she] avoid the company of the king, and be no more as wife to him" (319). In the minds of children, this perhaps means that Gertrude not spend so much time with Claudius, behave meanly toward him, and even possibly divorce him. There is the suggestion of sexuality, of being a wife to a husband, but only to adult readers of this children's text.

Both adults and children will, however, notice that up to this point in the play only parents instruct their children: Polonius gives both his children advice; Claudius and Gertrude demand that Hamlet cheer up and stay in Denmark; and the Ghost insists on the course of action his son must take. In the closet scene, though, a son confronts, chides, and instructs his mother. The Lambs include this part of the scene but are quick to advise the young readers of their story how to interpret the moody prince's actions:

   And though the faults of parents are to be tenderly treated
   by their children, yet in the case of great crimes the son
   may have leave to speak even to his own mother with
   some harshness, so that harshness is meant for her good,
   and to turn her from her wicked ways, and is not done for
   the purpose of upbraiding. (318)

In order to rescue Shakespeare, the great ethical teacher the Lambs find him to be, from promoting domestic disorder, and to prevent their young readers from interpreting Hamlet's actions as justification for their own ill-treatment of their elders, the authors add this bit of moralizing to their tale.

In addition to inserting didacticism in the Tales, the Lambs fill in the gaps left by the play the way an actor might by inventing a character's motivation and history. Rather than leaving their readers to speculate on why a character behaves in a particular manner, the Lambs provide answers. For instance, although it is not clear in the play if Hamlet's madness is feigned or genuine (or both), in the Lambs' story, Hamlet pretends to be mad, but occasionally thoughts of his beloved Ophelia creep into his mind. These thoughts linger and his bad behavior toward her makes him, the Lambs tell their young audience, feel rather bad about himself. This, then, provokes Hamlet to write Ophelia a passionate letter. Here, the Lambs provide causality; they do so because they can present a linear Hamlet only by filling in the gaps. Their readers are not left to wonder about Hamlet' s state of mind or his true feelings for Ophelia. Instead, the answers are provided for them before they even realize there are questions to be asked. (8)

B. Nesbit's Hamlet

Likewise, in Edith Nesbit's prose version of Hamlet, questions that remain for readers of the original text to answer are solved definitively by the children's author. For instance, Rosencrantz and Guildenstem do not enter into Nesbit's story until they accompany Hamlet to England. And though they are not named in her text, Nesbit passes judgment upon them, and interprets their characters for her readers: They are, she writes, "two wicked courtiers" in league with Claudius (47). Nesbit also settles the matter of Hamlet's madness for her audience, concluding that seeing the Ghost caused Hamlet's insanity, which he attempts to hide by "pretend[ing] madness in other matters [i.e. the Ophelia situation]" (46). Furthermore, Ophelia's death is an accident; there is no debate about this and no contest between Laertes and the clergy about the type of burial the young woman is to receive. Nesbit also provides her readers with the reason Hamlet balks in his duty to avenge his father's death. He was, Nesbit explains, too kind a man to kill anyone, which is why it takes him so long to build up the courage to commit such a horrendous act (46). When Hamlet does finally make a move, it is, she concludes, out of desperation:

   Then Ophelia being dead, and Polonius, and the Queen,
   and Laertes, besides the two courtiers who had been sent
   to England, Hamlet at last got him courage to do the
   ghost's bidding and avenge his father's murder--which,
   if he had found the heart to do long before, all these lives
   had been spared, and none suffered but the wicked King,
   who well deserved to die. (48)

Nesbit, as is clear in the last section of this passage, justifies Hamlet's act for her readers. She blames him somewhat by saying that had he only acted sooner, many lives would have been spared. However, Nesbit ultimately exonerates the prince, suggesting that 'an eye for an eye' is a good philosophy by which to live.

One way of getting her child audience to accept the story she tells and the lesson she extracts from it is to establish a firm connection between the world of children and the texts of adults. The 1900-edition of The Children's Shakespeare does this perhaps most obviously by providing eleven illustrations, primarily of children, throughout the text. In Hamlet, the effect of these sketches is somewhat unsettling, as round-faced, cherubic youngsters pose as Ophelia and Hamlet in the scene in which Hamlet refuses to admit his past affection for Ophelia and demands that she hide herself from the world in a nunnery (3.1). The appeal of the illustrations, one guesses, is that children might identify with the characters if they think about them as made in their own image. However, we might wonder: Do adults really want children to think of their lives as riddled with adult topics like adultery, murder, and revenge?

Apparently not, for Nesbit does her best to soften Shakespeare's play for her young listeners. Never does her Hamlet contemplate suicide, nor does Polonius treat his daughter roughly, advising her how to behave so as to spare his reputation. There is no mention of Hamlet laying his head in Ophelia's lap, nor a word about getting to a nunnery, which is odd, perhaps, since the illustration is clearly meant to correspond with this scene. As for the closet confrontation, it is glossed over with kinder words than Shakespeare's Hamlet uses and even more opaqueness than the Lambs' prince: "[Hamlet] begged her [Gertrude], at least, to have no more friendship or kindness of the base Claudius, who had killed the good king" (47).

Although Nesbit keeps certain parts of Shakespeare's play from her young audience, she does pepper her short version of Hamlet with lines from the play. For instance, "Oh what a rash and bloody deed is this" (47) and "I loved her more than forty thousand brothers" (48) remain in her text. The author's goal here seems to be to give her young audience a sample of Shakespeare' s language, the aspect of his work she finds so compelling, but not to overwhelm them with vocabulary or prose that is beyond their capabilities.

C. Burdett's Hamlet

By the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, children's Hamlets begin to look quite different from their predecessors. Not only is there an outpouring of adaptations for children, but we fred numerous texts that guide adults in helping children understand Shakespeare. Some of the same troubling aspects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hamlets for children persist in contemporary adaptations of the play, as I will discuss below, but other unique complications spring up, partly due to (adults') theories about authorship and postmodernity.

Lois Burdett does a commendable job in attempting to preserve Shakespeare's language in her verse version of Hamlet. In the "Shakespeare Can Be Fun!" series, Burdett retells the plots of a number of Shakespeare's plays in rhyming couplets, often including much more of the original language than do the Lambs or Nesbit. Compare, for instance, Shakespeare's and Burdett's versions of the scene in Hamlet where Horatio has his first conversation with the Prince. First, Shakespeare:

   Hamlet: But what is your affair in Elisnore?
   We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.
   Horatio: My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.

   Hamlet: I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student;
   I think it was to see my mother's wedding. (1.2.173-77)

   And, now Burdett:

   He questioned Horatio, "What brings you here?"
   "The king's funeral," he replied, his eyes starting to tear.
   "I prithee, do not mock me," Hamlet bitterly said,
   "I think it was to see my mother's wedding instead." (14)

Quoting from Shakespeare's text, Burdett exposes children to the language of the play. However, it is notable that in Burdett's version, Horatio is emotional at the mention of the dead King Hamlet. There is no indication in the original text that Hamlet's friend's "eyes [start] to tear." A minor point, perhaps, but it is worth pointing out as this moment, like many others in the text, is not merely an act of adaptation or translation, but one of interpretation.

As Burdett strives to preserve Shakespeare's language, as she does in all of her versions of the plays, readers lose the poetic verse of Shakespeare. They receive, instead, rhyming couplets that perhaps carry them along, but simultaneously distort the graceful iambic pentameter of the original. This approach also discourages students from seeing the difference between characters in terms of the way they speak. Shakespeare's lower-class characters (Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, for instance) are often found communicating in prose, whereas his powerful leaders and members of the upper class (Henry V, for instance) are permitted lengthy, eloquent poetic speeches. Instead, in Burdett's versions, subtleties like this are absent and the plays read smoothly, without overtly provoking thought about class inequity in the period or in the students' own lives.

In trying to balance incorporating Shakespeare's text into her own verse and creating rhyming lines, Burdett alters Shakespeare's language in ways that have profound ramifications on children's knowledge of Shakespeare. For instance, after discovering that Ophelia is mad, Shakespeare's Claudius says to Horatio:

   Follow her close. Give her good watch, I pray you.
   O, this is the poison of deep grief! It springs
   All from her father's death. O Gertrude, Gertrude,
   When sorrows come they come not single spies,
   But in battalions. (4.5.71-75)

In Burdett's version, the moment reads like this:

   He called to his servant, as Ophelia withdrew,
   "Keep good watch over her, I pray of you."
   He turned to his wife, who was looking glum,
   "Sorrows appear not singly, but in battalions come." (49)

As anyone who has read a child's favorite book to him or her knows, rhyming couplets are attractive to children and often easy for them to commit to memory. (9) Perhaps, then, we should ask in the case of rewriting Shakespeare if we really want young people to memorize what are, in essence, the wrong words.

Burdett manages, however, to keep many of the original lines from Hamlet in her version of the closet scene. And, in fact, this is the most extended treatment of the closet scene in the children's Hamlets I examine here. Burdett addresses Hamlet's intensity and rashness and his dislike of his uncle, Claudius; she makes a great effort to maintain the spirit of the original scene. Burdett does not overtly add any moral to the scene, as do the Lambs, but works to get her audience to see that Hamlet is rather disturbed, which seems to explain, and perhaps even justify, his conduct with his mother. Burdett, like the Lambs and Nesbit, glosses over the sexual aspects of the scene by avoiding any suggestion of Hamlet's desire for attention from his mother and by including some lines that suggest that Gertrude ignore Claudius in the most benign way. The closet scene, for all its passion, ends with more of a whimper than a bang: "Hamlet sighed, 'Repent what you have done./Confess yourself to heaven, and my uncle shun'" (47).

In the "To be, or not to be" speech in Burdett's text, again, we find some of Shakespeare's language rendered faithfully intermingled with other bits creatively rewritten. The children's author abbreviates Hamlet's musings while trying to incorporate his most famous lines:

   His need for revenge continued to persist,
   If only he could cease to exist.
   "To be, or not to be, that is the question," he mused.
   For the meaning of life had become confused.
   The world for Hamlet had become a chore,
   "To die is to sleep and nothing more.
   And yet," the Prince mourned, "I do refrain
   From the one final act that could end my pain.
   The dread of something after death inhibits the will.
   'Tis the uncertainty that keeps me still.
    To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream,
    Aye, there's the rub. It's not as easy as it may seem." (32)

Here Burdett preserves some of the original language, and on the same page includes a student's rephrasing of this moment. The child, age eight, writes this first-person account of the "To be, or not to be" speech:

   To live in harmony on this planet or to die the pangs of
   death, that is the question. Why live in a world with
   grudge and scalawags? It could all be settled with a mere
   rapier. But to die is to fall into an everlasting slumber. My
   life is full of unwanted memories. But to decide it with the
   blow of a dagger....  Is that the answer to my misery? (32)

Any reader might perhaps be impressed by the vocabulary of this eight-year-old. However, we should not let ourselves be so pleased with his knowledge of a rapier or a scalawag that we do not see the potentially more troubling aspect of this young boy's work. As concerned adults, we might wonder, does the boy believe that dying is like "an everlasting slumber"? Maybe Burdett has discussed the matter of suicide with her students, but there is no evidence of this in the text meant for children outside of that classroom, nor are there suggestions about how to talk to children about the issue.

D. Daubert and Nelson's Hamlet

In their text, Daubert and Nelson are attentive to the concern that adults should monitor how children think about death and self-destruction. They find the "To be, or not to be" monologue full of serious business, which must be explained to children lest they interpret it as an invitation to thinking about the futility of life. After directly quoting the first nine lines from the soliloquy, Daubert and Nelson provide a gloss on difficult terms. They give brief definitions of "soliloquy," "natural shocks," and "consummation" in a section entitled "Say What?" Following this is an effort to paraphrase the quotation in language children can understand. This, for instance, is the explanation of the "To be, or not to be" speech found in the section called "Kidspeak":

   Hamlet's spirits are so low at this point that he cannot
   decide whether to live or die. Should he be noble and
   good and accept his fate, or should he fight against the
   cruel world and try to change things? He tells himself that
   dying is just like being asleep (--pssst, Hamlet! Read my
   lips--Dead people do not wake up! Think again!) He
   thinks that if he is dead, he will be freed from all of his
   problems. There is one small problem with suicide as a
   problem-solving strategy--You're dead! (38)

Here, the authors explain, to some extent, the meaning of the text. But, more than just an objective paraphrase of the original, this explanation includes interpretation. The authors do not make the claim, as do the Lambs, that Shakespeare is a great purveyor of morality; rather, they provide their own moral guidance to young students, making it clear that here Hamlet is considering doing something rather stupid.

Further guarding children from 'touchy' subjects, Daubert and Nelson take care not to get into too much detail when it comes to Hamlet and Ophelia. They quote from Shakespeare's play and then provide rather sanitized explanation of it:

   If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for
   thy dowry; be though as chaste as ice, as pure as
   snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a
   nunnery, go: farewell. Or if thou wilt needs
   marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough
   what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery go,
   and quickly too. Farewell. (3.1.135-40)

   Hamlet is giving poor Ophelia a real "tongue lashing."
   His verbal attack on her is very cruel. He is wishing bad
   things for her and tells her to get to a convent. He is acting
   like a cruel madman with the girl he is supposed to be
   in love with. (39)

Perhaps it is because this confrontation between Hamlet and Ophelia is so full of mature matters that children's authors, like Nelson and Daubert above, choose to gloss over it as quickly and vaguely as possible. Burdett shortens the moment as well, avoiding getting into too much detail:

   Hamlet now suspected spies everywhere.
   He felt betrayed, and Ophelia was the snare.
   "Where's your father?" Hamlet snarled in disgust.
   "Get thee to a nunnery! Women I distrust."
   As he departed, she let out a groan,
   "Oh what a noble mind is here overthrown!" (33)

Misogyny is touched upon briefly in Burdett's version ("Women I distrust"), but the complexities of the scene in relation to sexuality and marriage are dismissed in both adaptations. Even in Nelson and Daubert's text, where Shakespeare's language is printed on the page, Hamlet's bad behavior is explained no more clearly than in Burdett's text.

While at some moments Burdett withholds information from her readers, at other times she adds it. It is clear in this moment in Burdett's Hamlet, for instance, that she has interpreted the play for her young audience. Hamlet, she says, "suspected spies everywhere" and then, feeling betrayed, yells at Ophelia (33). There is no room, it seems, for the children to see the scene in the larger context of the play and decide for themselves which is the more compelling argument: Is Hamlet truly mad? Truly a misogynist? Or, is he putting on an act for the sake of Claudius and Polonius? Or, is he in fact feeling betrayed and so acts out? As in any adaptation, there is interpretation, but in these children's versions, from the Lambs onward, the acts of interpretation, whether they are overt or covert, are not discussed, even though what is at stake here is immensely important. Children are left to read an adaptation and call it Hamlet, not to consider the many possibilities in a play that begins with a question ("Who's there?") and proceeds to provoke a plethora of other questions: Was Ophelia's death a suicide? Is Hamlet truly mad? Is the ghost real? How complicit was Gertrude in Claudius' crime?, etc. In order to discover that these are some of the puzzles in the play, children must read a number of versions of Hamlet for children. If they do this, they will get different stories and then perhaps begin to wonder which one is correct. A more direct way of getting to this point, however, seems to be to read Shakespeare's text itself. After completing Hamlet, the reader is required to engage actively with the text in order to find the most persuasive answers to the text's questions. Children, however, seem to be rendered somewhat complacent by these adaptations. For although some of these texts, like Daubert and Nelson's, for instance, encourage children to complete worksheets and, like Burdett's, to write journal entries from different characters' points of view, it is clear that children are simultaneously being asked by these adaptations to accept a Hamlet not so much discovered by them as interpreted by adults for them.

E. Critical Approaches to Children's Shakespeare

In "'Familiar Shakespeare,'" Janet Bottoms ends her article with a plea for the active engagement of young people with Shakespeare. She argues that "if children are to experience for themselves anything like the mental and emotional excitement felt by those Shakespeare enthusiasts whose claims for his greatness were and are the foundation of 'Shakespeare for children,'" they must be more than passive receivers of knowledge (22). One way of keeping children involved in their learning of Shakespeare is to avoid linear retellings of the plays, suggests Alison H. Prindle. Prindle prefers dramatic adaptations which, she says, allow more of the original plot to remain, and make children active participants. She explains that Shakespeare's plays naturally encourage collaboration. They certainly did in the seventeenth century and, as Prindle writes in her article "'The Play's the Thing': Genre and Adaptations of Shakespeare for Children.", they do now as well: "As plays, Shakespeare's texts have an openness that requires interaction. No narrator guides the through-line.... As plays, Shakespeare's texts say you must join in this project before it can come alive: this is collaborative" (43).

Genre, as referred to in Prindle's article, is certainly an important consideration when it comes to keeping children actively engaged and allowing them to become makers of meaning. (10) The further complication, however, is what meaning we believe they should be making. Howard Marchitello, for one, argues that telling children that they are getting an adaptation of the Original (a la the Lambs and Nesbit) is not useful given the status of Shakespeare and his texts today. Since contemporary theory has troubled the Bard's identity and his texts' stability, there is no more Original and no more Author, suggests Marchitello. He explains further: "[W]hat becomes primary is the child's relation to Shakespeare and not Shakespeare as such: Shakespeare not as pedagogical object but rather as pedagogical site for the stories we would like to help others tell" (186). In other words, the preferable adaptation of Shakespeare is, for Marchitello, one that gestures not toward the Original, but toward something else.

Why, we might wonder at this point, use Shakespeare as a subject of study if this is the objective? Why not Hemingway or Swirl or Borges? In other words, if the goal is to get children actively involved in their experience with literature by pointing them away from the Author and his Original text, does it really matter which texts we use to do this? Although Marchitello advocates moving beyond Shakespeare's texts, via adaptations for children, there is still an argument, it seems, being made for using Shakespeare. Shakespeare, in other words, and his stories, which have become so intrinsic a part of Western culture, are valued implicitly even in postmodern analyses like Marchitello's. There is a desire to move away from the Original Author and His Text, and yet, simultaneously, a wish to hold on to Shakespeare because there is something inherently valuable about him.

By presenting young people with adaptations of Shakespeare's work and ignoring the discrepancies between those adaptations and the Original Text, we encounter a host of difficulties, some of which I have discussed above, and we no longer see the forest for the trees. We do not notice, for instance, that Hamlet itself is full of questions and leaves spaces for readers to create meaning, to tell other stories (as Marchitello would have it); instead, we look to adaptations of his work to do, in essence, what Shakespeare's work already does. Perhaps at this point we seem to have come full circle. After having illustrated the many problems inherent in adaptations of Hamlet, a text modified for young children because writers assume they need a simplified version of it, we are back to Shakespeare's text. But, how are we to present such difficult material to young people? Is this problem not the precise reason these adaptations were written?

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC has developed a way to introduce children to Shakespeare's texts that answers many of the dilemmas raised by the adaptations discussed above. The Folger is an institution at once devoted to institutional scholarly pursuits and to exposing a larger audience to the early modern period. Not only does their mission statement bear this out, but so do the methods they use to introduce Shakespeare to young people. The Folger provides a solid historical-cultural foundation to children learning about the early modern period and invites them to engage in exercises that certainly keep them active. Shakespeare is presented by the Folger as a creative and important writer, but children also learn that he was a product of his time, not a universal genius. When children go to the Folger website, they can read about aspects of early modern English life, from the monarchy to the theater, and how they relate to Shakespeare. There are puzzles young people can work on in the "Words, Words, Words" section, where they can create insults using early modern language, figure out the meaning of "weird words" like "hurly burly" or "truepenny," or examine sketches from early modern texts and describe them in their own words.

Children can access small sections of Shakespeare's texts on the website, and they are encouraged to act out these scenes, which often come with suggestions about staging or sound effects. With the exception of a few small introductory notes provided by the Folger, the text is Shakespeare's. Furthermore, at the "Children's Shakespeare Festival," an event held annually at the library, children are encouraged to put on productions of scenes from Shakespeare, with a stipulation: "cuts are permitted; modern language adaptations are not. Shakespeare's own words must be used" (Folger n. pag.). Additionally, the "Shakespeare Steps Out" program the library has developed introduces public school children in the Washington, DC area to Shakespeare and early modern culture. Interactive and interdisciplinary, the program introduces children to Shakespeare's language, and, as Janet Field-Pickering has made clear, children much prefer this method to having Shakespeare interpreted for them. Many of the children Field-Pickering has interacted with in the program suggest that engaging with the text itself, rather than mediated versions of it, allows them creative freedom--they are free to imagine what characters look like and speculate on why they do what they do. The conclusion Field-Pickering comes to in "Shakespeare Steps Out: The Primacy of Language in Inner-City Classrooms," that using Shakespeare's language is best, is supported both by her direct experience with children in the classroom, and, I think, by my examination above regarding the various problems that arise in the adaptations themselves.

There are a plethora of other events and activities the Folger has invented in order to get children to engage actively with Shakespeare, while learning about the importance of the culture in which he lived, but those mentioned above serve as a good sample of the kind of work that is, I believe, responsible when it comes to teaching Shakespeare to children. The library is able to get students to be active participants in their education, and to appeal to children's natural tendencies to play and to be inquisitive. Additionally, the Folger is able to present the early modem period in a way that children can grasp and that is simultaneously attentive to detail and intellectually rigorous. With the help of the Folger, young children are encouraged to think about differences and similarities in their introduction to texts that are at once both quite foreign and quite familiar to us.

III. To Be or Not to Be Adapted?

The Folger Library is not the panacea for the problems of adapting Shakespeare for children. There is still the issue of censorship to attend to, for instance. Although the Folger does not rephrase or gloss over difficult bits of Shakespeare, it does select which words are in its "Weird Words" and which scenes are posted on the website for children to access. This is, of course, responsible, and I do not wish to dispute about which issues children should or should not be exposed to generally. However, the question again arises: If at the heart of Shakespeare's work are such mature subjects, why is it that we want to push him onto children we deem too young to handle such matters?

Janet Bottoms is concerned with a similar issue. She asks: "What are we trying to do when we offer him [i.e., Shakespeare] to children? What do we value in his plays that we believe may be of value, also, to them?" (Bottoms "'To Read Aright'" 22).

One possible response to this inquiry is that we value Shakespeare because he is all (or several) of those things writers have found him to be over the years: a good entertainer, a window into Renaissance culture, an artist who speaks to everybody, yet who possesses a poetic skill unmatched by other writers, etc. Perhaps also, we assume, much like the Lambs, that there is value even in these censored, inferior versions of Shakespeare since they will help indoctrinate children into our culture. (Whether or not children return to the Original Texts as adults is, perhaps, another matter.) These are only a few reasons why we continue to present Shakespeare's 'adult' texts to children, and I think we must continue to discuss Bottoms's questions, so that we might develop a better rationale for using Shakespeare with young people. As we develop that rationale, we must also think about how we present Shakespeare to children, and take seriously the ramifications of the "faint and imperfect" adaptations like those examined above. For if we do not, children will resemble the young actors in early modern England, the "little eayses," pawns in an adult's game where there was more at stake for them than they could possibly foresee.

Notes

(1) See Andrew Gurr's The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 and Michael Shapiro's Children of the Revels for more on child actors in the period.

(2) Some other interesting versions of Shakespeare aimed at youth (and often young women as well) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries include William Dodd's The Beauties of Shakespeare (1752), Thomas Bowdler's The Family Shakespeare (1818), and D. Mathias's The Prince's Shakespeare: A Selection of the Plays of Shakespeare Carefully Expurged and Annotated for the Use of Families and Schools (1867), to name only a few. These adaptations are good examples of the kinds of sanitizing adults felt Shakespeare's work required before it was presented to young people.

(3) Perhaps the best example of this is the battle between new historicists, who find the historical/cultural moment in which Shakespeare lived to be of primary importance to analyzing the plays, and psychoanalytic critics, who favor a rather less historically-based theoretical apparatus to interpret Shakespeare's works. Elizabeth Bellamy's article "Desires and Disavowals: Speculations on the Aftermath of Stephen Greenblatt's 'Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture'" is best at articulating the shape this debate has taken over the past twenty years.

(4) This is an assumption often made about adults as well. The most recent example of this, as of the time of this writing, is the BBC's "Shakespeare Re-Told," which sets the plays in twenty-first-century Britain, uses contemporary speech, and adds scenes in order to provide justification for characters' beliefs and behavior with which a modern-day audience might identify and agree.

(5) In "Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare," Jean I. Marsden emphasizes that this morality is directed primarily toward young girls. She points out that many of the Lambs' stories "emphasize humility, modesty, and gentleness, the virtues traditionally assigned to women" (55). Although this is an excellent point, in Hamlet we see that one of the moments where a moral is added--the closet scene--seems to be generally tied to preventing children from scolding their parents, and more specifically, to controlling male aggression.

(6) See Marsden's article for an extended discussion of both Mary's role in writing the Tales and the technique she and Charles used to soften Shakespeare's texts for young female readers.

(7) Hamlet has interested psychoanalytic critics since Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where he suggests that "Shakespeare's Hamlet has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex.... [However,] [i]n Oedipus the child's wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and--as in the case of neurosis--we learn only about its existence from its inhibiting consequences" (298). Additionally, as Freud is quick to point out, "Hamlet is able to do anything--except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized" (299; emphasis mine).

(8) Hamlet's madness has been viewed as an issue worthy of debate among adult readers of the text, certainly. The critical body of material on this issue is astounding, as Andre Green succinctly puts it: "Rivers of ink have been flowing now for centuries on the subject of Hamlet's madness. Those who believe in it and those who don't have by turns deployed the arsenal of their arguments and quibbles, which range from the most convincing to the most conjectural, the best-supported to the most fragile" (166).

(9) In "Shakespeare Steps Out," Janet Field-Pickering describes the effective ness of a lesson plan in which lines from Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham are used to get students to internalize iambic pentameter. The children happily marched around the classroom chanting lines from the book, and quickly caught on to the idea of rhythm. This is an excellent tool, I think, for getting children to understand poetics, and also reinforces my point about children's attraction to rhyming lines.

(10) See Helen Nicholson's "Drama, Literacies and Difference" for a discussion of the ways drama can help students to develop not only different kinds of literacies, but also different kinds of meaning.

Works Cited

Aries, Philippe. L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime. NY: Vintage Books, 1962.

Bellamy, Elizabeth. "Desires and Disavowals: Speculations on the Aftermath of Stephen Greenblatt's 'Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.'" CLIO 34 (Spring 2005): 297-315.

Bottoms, Janet. "'Familiar Shakespeare'." Where Texts and Children Meet. Eds. Eve Bearne and Victor Watson. London and NY: Routledge, 2000. 11-25.

--."'To Read Aright': Representations of Shakespeare for Children." Children's Literature 32 (2004): 1-14.

Bowdler, Thomas. The Family Shakespeare. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818.

Burdett, Lois. Hamlet for Kids. Ontario: Firefly Books, 2000.

--. "'All the Colours of the Wind': Shakespeare and the Primary Student." Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults. Ed. Naomi Miller. NY: Routledge, 2000. 44-55.

Daubert, Todd and Pauline Nelson. Starting with Shakespeare: Successfully Introducing Shakespeare to Children. Englewood, CO: Teacher Ideas Press, 2000.

Dodd, William. The Beauties of Shakespear[e]: Regularly Selected from Each Play, With a General Index, Digesting Them Under Proper Heads. London: Printed for T. Waller, 1752.

Field-Pickering, Janet. "Shakespeare Steps Out: The Primacy of Language in Inner-City Classrooms." Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults. Ed. Naomi Miller. NY: Routledge, 2000. 207-16.

Folger Shakespeare Library. 25 September 2006. <http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=862>.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. NY: Avon, 1965.

Green, Andre. "Hamlet's Madness and the Unsaid." Freud and Forbidden Knowledge. Eds. Ellen Spitz and Peter Rudnytsky. NY: New York UP, 1994. 164-82.

Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642. CA: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Lamb, Charles and Mary. Tales from Shakespeare. 1807. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1979.

Marchitello, Howard. "Descending Shakespeare: Toward a Theory of Adaptation for Children." Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults. Ed. Naomi Miller. NY: Routledge, 2000. 180-89.

Marsden, Jean I. "Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare." Children's Literature 17 (1989): 47-63.

Mathias, D. The Prince's Shakespeare: A Selection of the Plays of Shakespeare Carefully Expurged and Annotated for the Use of Families and Schools. London: Richard Bentley, 1867.

Nesbit, Edith. The Children's Shakespeare. PA: Henry Altemus Company, 1900.

Nicholson, Helen. "Drama, Literacies and Difference." Where Texts and Children Meet. Eds. Eve Bearne and Victor Watson. London and NY: Routledge, 2000. 113-22.

Pollock, Linda. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900. CA: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Prindle, Alison H. "'The Play's the Thing': Genre and Adaptations of Shakespeare for Children." Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults. Ed. Naomi Miller. NY: Routledge, 2000. 138-46.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. NY: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Shapiro, Michael. Children of the Revels: The Boys' Companies of Shakespeare's Time and Their Plays. NY: Columbia UP, 1977.