Tales from Shakespeare (review)

Tina Packer's Tales from Shakespeare is the latest entry in a literary tradition that began almost two hundred years ago with Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (1807). Packer skillfully combines narrative and dialogue in her "retellings" of ten of the best-known and most frequently performed plays. Scholastic Press has produced a large, colorful, and beautifully designed book, with distinctive graphics and stunning illustrations by twelve well-known artists. Each play begins with a full-page image and ends with a smaller one, leaving plenty of space for the words, roughly 3,000 per tale. Packer addresses the challenge of reducing 3,000 lines to 3,000 words by using lots of described action: characters "sigh," "demand," "reply haughtily," "laugh heartily," "sputter in anger"; they throw their arms around one another's necks, sprint after one another, collapse on the ground, scramble to their feet, seize one another's arms; their lips twitch in merriment or curl in a sneer (these examples are from A Midsummer Night's Dream). Unlike her predecessors, Packer makes a point of using Shakespeare's language whenever the characters speak, and they speak frequently, much more so than in the tales of the Lambs and two other well-known adapters for children, Edith Nesbit (1907) and Bernard Miles (1976). Skillfully condensed excerpts from Hamlet's Act 1 conversation with his father's ghost, for example, occupy one full page of the fifteen-page narrative; and the praying and closet scenes, consisting mostly of dialogue, account for another two and a half pages.

It is to Packer's everlasting credit that she trusts her young readers to understand Shakespeare's complex language and themes, and doesn't limit herself to the plays' most famous lines. In Romeo and Juliet, she makes room for Lady Capulet's "Read over the volume of young Paris' face. You'll find delight written there with beauty's pen" (142); the Nurse's "Even so lies Juliet, blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering. First for murdered Tybalt calls, and then on Romeo cries" (148), and "O, he's a lovely gentleman! Romeo's a dishcloth compared to him" (149); and Romeo's "Thou art writ with me in sour misfortune's book" (152). You won't find these lines in many full-length film versions of the play.

Tina Packer has presided for twenty-five years over an acting company—Shakespeare & Company—that is deeply committed to arts-in-education. She has introduced countless young people to the plays in schools, and so has earned the right to indulge in a bit of Polonian advice. Exhorting her readers to see Shakespeare's plays as "handbooks for living," she tells them that if they "use them to see parallels in your own world, to awaken your imagination, and open your mind and body to commit yourself to action, then your life will begin to shift. . . . Be generous and assume other people are also generous. Express yourself, speak out, know when you are being manipulated" (13). This teacherly impulse is evident elsewhere in the collection: King Lear "explores a chilling family truth: The deepest wounds can be inflicted by the dearest hands" (175); Macbeth demonstrates that "evil deeds have a way of revealing themselves" (67); Prospero faces a difficult choice: he can use magic "just to regain his title. . . . Or should he seek sweet revenge?" (85).

Radically reduced Shakespeare will almost always disappoint readers who know the original plays well, but on the whole, Packer's choices are intelligent, and she makes every word count. For Othello she chose to omit the witty banter of 2.1, most of the dialogue between Iago and Roderigo, the willow song, and Emilia's reflections on men. Packer draws selectively on the soliloquies and asides to explain Iago's motives. Lest her young readers become confused by his strategy, she pauses to explain: "Iago was far too shrewd to directly accuse Cassio and Desdemona. Othello's first instinct would be to defend his...