REIMAGINING SHAKESPEARE IN THE YOUNG ADULT CONTEMPORARY

NOVEL

by

Jodi Lyn Turchin

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

December 2017

Copyright by Jodi Lyn Turchin 2017

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to express sincere gratitude to her committee members for all of their guidance and support, and special thanks to my advisor for being with me every step of the way during the writing of this manuscript.

iv ABSTRACT Author: Jodi Lyn Turchin Title: Reimaginging Shakespeare in the Young Adult Contemporary Novel

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Emily Stockard

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2017

This research focuses on how Young Adult (YA) novelists adapt Shakespeare’s plays to address the concerns of a contemporary teenage audience. Through the qualitative method of content analysis, I examined adaptations of the three most commonly read texts in the high school curriculum: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and

Hamlet. The research looked for various patterns in the adaptations and analyzed the choices made by the authors in aligning their texts to or deviating from the original plays.

A final chapter addresses practical classroom application in using adaptations to teach the plays to high school students.

v REIMAGINING SHAKESPEARE IN THE YOUNG ADULT CONTEMPORARY

NOVEL

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1: ROMEO AND JULIET: MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ...... 5

CHAPTER 2: MACBETH: VALUED FRIENDSHIPS ...... 29

CHAPTER 3: HAMLET: DIVIDED LOYALTIES ...... 57

CHAPTER 4: PRACTICAL CLASSROOM APPLICATION ...... 89

APPENDIX ...... 96

WORKS CITED ...... 104

vi INTRODUCTION

As a high school teacher, I am often stymied by the disconnect between my teenage students and the plays by Shakespeare that are typically required reading (Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade, Macbeth in tenth grade, Hamlet or Othello in twelfth). A few years ago, at a conference of the Florida chapter of the Society of Children’s Book

Writers and Illustrators, novelist Chris Crutcher spoke in a workshop about teaching canonical texts in conjunction with similarly-themed young adult (YA) novels. A few days after that, I read a Facebook post by YA author Laurie Halse Anderson on the same topic. This made me wonder how many YA adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays were out there, and how the YA novelists adapt the plays to address the concerns of a contemporary teenage audience.

In my research into these questions, I found at least twenty different novels (not including graphic novels) published between 1999 and 2016 that are inspired by, retell, or reimagine Shakespeare’s plays. I decided to limit my scope to this time frame to narrow down the available adaptations, because if I went back too far, the texts could no longer be considered “contemporary.” Primary sources were easily obtainable either through libraries or online bookstores. I also discovered that while there were many resources dedicated to looking at YA novels and their relationships to various canonical texts, those focused on Shakespeare’s plays were usually limited to Romeo and Juliet. For example,

USF professor Joan Kaywell edited a series of four volumes of essays on the subject

(Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the Classics), and the only reference to

1 Shakespeare was Arthea J.S. Reed’s essay, “Using Young Adult Literature to Modernize the Teaching of Romeo and Juliet.” The tale of the star-crossed lovers is one of

Shakespeare’s most popular and well-known plays, and thus very easily adaptable, especially in film. Examples include West Side Story, Gnomeo and Juliet, and the many film adaptations of the play itself, from Zeffirelli to Luhrmann. One could even claim that Titanic was a loosely adapted Romeo and Juliet story; Rose and Jack were certainly ill-fated, and Rose “died” by hiding her identity after Jack’s death. But Shakespeare’s canon covers a much larger field, and I felt this needed to be explored. This is where I see a gap in the scholarship: there are few academic studies of the correlations between

Shakespeare’s works and contemporary adaptations specifically directed toward a teenage audience. Therefore, my goal in this research is to examine the YA adaptations of

Shakespeare’s plays to establish how these texts take Shakespeare’s works and translate them in order to make them more relevant to contemporary youth culture and issues.

In the context of this research, I looked for various patterns within the

Shakespearean adaptations and analyzed the choices made. Using the qualitative method of content analysis, I examined each adaptation in comparison with the original play, looking at how each addresses the commonly understood themes of the play; noting what plot elements, if any, the adaptations leave out of the texts; and suggesting possible explanations for these omissions. I identified the aspects of Shakespeare’s plays that YA authors see as having particular resonance for contemporary youth culture. My argument is informed by my knowledge of YA fiction, gained over the years by reading this genre extensively as well as being a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and

Illustrators (SCBWI). Through my association with SCBWI, I attend many workshops

2 given by both YA authors and industry personnel such as agents and editors, giving me detailed insight into YA fiction.

I examined these texts in the context of adaptation from The Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn and Adaptation and Appropriation by Julie

Sanders. Hutcheon looks at adaptation as “how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places” (176). Though her text focuses mainly on cross-media adaptation – that is, adaptations that go from book to film, or video game to book – the theoretical analysis can also be applied to play-to-novel adaptation. Sanders looks at finding the pleasure in the adaptation and argues that part of that pleasure is found in “the tension between the familiar and the new, and the recognition of both similarity and differences” (17). Sanders also dedicates an entire chapter of her text to Shakespearean appropriations. In her book, Sanders writes, “Perhaps a useful way of thinking about adaptation is as a form of collaborative writing across time, and sometimes across culture or language” (60). When YA authors select Shakespeare to collaborate with, they are exposing a new generation of readers to the plays and putting them into a modern context to allow readers to overcome difficulties with understanding Shakespeare’s language.

There are two different perspectives within the adaptations I wish to define at this point: retelling versus reimagining. While similar, for the purpose of this study, I define a retelling as an adaptation that stays true to Shakespeare’s original narrative. A reimagining, then, refers to an adaptation that alters Shakespeare’s story, perhaps imagining it from the viewpoint of another character from the play. For example, A

Wounded Name, which tells the story of Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view, would be considered a reimagining rather than simply a retelling. Another version of the

3 reimagining would be taking the overall themes, and perhaps character naming conventions, but not necessarily staying true to the plot structure of the play.

Interestingly, many of the adaptations explored for this thesis showed a strange dichotomy: in adapting Shakespeare’s tragedies, the authors shied away from the typical tragic ending. Rather, most of the adaptations studied gave the main characters an ending more fitting for a comedy. In discussing comedic play structure, the formula entails presenting a blocked love at the beginning, which resolves happily by the end of the play.

This twist in the majority of the adaptations shows that in Young Adult novels, the authors want to present the reader with a positive outcome, or at least one that leaves the reader feeling hopeful for the character’s future happiness.

After reading multiple adaptations of a variety of Shakespeare’s plays, I chose to structure the thesis, and thus, the chapters, in the order in which students read specific

Shakespeare plays during their high school experience: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and

Hamlet. The final chapter looks at practical classroom applications of adaptations. I also include an annotated bibliography of all the adaptations I read in preparation for this thesis, including many of the comedies, to assist teachers in the instruction of

Shakespeare alongside adaptive works (see Appendix). In a sense, this thesis can be used as a handbook for high school teachers, as it not only gives an analytical discussion of various adaptations for the plays typically taught in the high school curriculum but also allows teachers to peruse the appendix for the range of texts available to pair with other

Shakespeare plays they might want to utilize in the classroom.

4 CHAPTER 1: ROMEO AND JULIET: MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

Romeo and Juliet is usually the first of Shakespeare’s plays taught in the high school curriculum. The play is well-suited for YA adaptation because the characters experience many problems common to contemporary teenagers. In the introduction to the text in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, Peter Holland, of the Shakespeare

Institute of the University of Birmingham, observes, “Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy that depends crucially on kinship” (1253). 1 The whole of Verona must choose to side with either the Capulets or the Montagues: “Every character in Verona, except for the friar, is explicitly aligned with social groupings created by the network of kinship and allegiance”

(1253). The prologue tells the audience that what we are to witness is based on a family feud: “Two households, both alike in dignity / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, /

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, / Where civil hand makes civil blood unclean”

(Act I, scene 1, lines 1-4). The Montagues hate the Capulets, and the feeling is mutual.

The play, though focused primarily on the titular characters, involves adults as well.

Juliet has the Nurse as her confidant, and Friar Laurence is Romeo’s confidant and a pivotal character.

Shakespeare establishes Romeo as a lovestruck youth early in the play. Act I, scene 1 brings this conversation between Romeo and his cousin Benvolio:

1 Since the purpose of this study is to analyze the Young Adult adaptations in depth, and not the Shakespeare plays themselves, I chose to use the Complete Pelican Shakespeare because it is a standard edition, readily available to teachers, and the introductions to the plays come from reputable scholars in the field. 5 Benvolio: What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?

Romeo: Not having that which having makes them short.

Benvolio: In love?

Romeo: Out –

Benvolio: Of love?

Romeo: Out of her favor where I am in love. (lines 163-167)

This conversational reference to “her favor” is the favor of Rosaline, a character whose importance all but disappears when Romeo lays eyes on Juliet in Act I, scene 6: “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it sight! / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” (lines

53-54). Though some might see Romeo as fickle for how quickly he tosses aside

Rosaline for Juliet, it could be instead an argument in favor of fate. One of the themes explored in this play is inevitability. Was Romeo fated to fall for a Capulet, and eventually, through his and Juliet’s death, bring a truce between the warring families?

Another theme explored through this play is the passion and power of romantic love, as evidenced by the driving force that makes Juliet renounce her arranged marriage to Count

Paris. Rather than obey her parents, Juliet rebels and instead plots to escape with her secret husband, Romeo. A third theme addressed is the plight of the individual versus society. In Verona, it is necessary to align with one of the warring families. When Juliet realizes she had fallen for a hated Montague, she chooses to follow her heart rather than align with her family. Romeo makes this choice as well.

In Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders quotes author Mark Thornton

Burnett who says “(t)he motive or compulsion behind . . . updatings is fairly self-evident: the ‘movement of proximation’ brings the text closer to the audience’s personal frame of

6 reference” (Sanders 26). This motive is particularly evident in the adaptations by Sharon

M. Draper, Rebecca Serle, Suzanne Selfors, and Stacey Jay, who all use Romeo and

Juliet as a framework for their novels. These authors, and all of the authors who adapt

Shakespeare to a modern young adult audience, bring teen issues (young love, parental pressures, peer pressures, etc.) to the forefront while building on the foundations established by the respective plays.

Romiette and Julio

Draper keeps the elements of the star-crossed lovers and the opposition to their love, placing this theme into the modern context of high school puppy love. In doing this, she narrows the scope of the society involved as well. Romeo and Juliet pits half of

Verona against the other, whereas Romiette and Julio predominantly face opposition from a gang of teens in their high school, the Devildogs. Draper eliminates the Friar

Laurence character and Juliet’s pre-arranged marriage to Count Paris. In modern

American society, arranged marriages are uncommon, and it would not be expected for a fourteen-year-old girl to be betrothed. This makes Draper’s version more palatable to its intended audience. Draper’s omission of the Friar is another feature that marks her work as intended for a teenage audience. In Shakespeare’s work, he’s a pivotal piece of the puzzle that facilitates Romeo and Juliet’s attempt to defy and then escape the pressure of their feuding families. He marries Romeo and Juliet in an attempt to bring the families together. However, in modern YA, it is preferential that the teens solve their problems without adult interference. Therefore, rather than go to their parents when the Devildogs pressure Romiette and Julio, they decide on a plan to expose the gang themselves.

7 Draper gives the main characters knowledge of the play, so as to foreground their love’s fated quality. This self-reflexive awareness is a common feature in many of the

YA adaptations. Romiette Capelle and Julio Montague have a discussion about it. Julio asks in an online chat room, “Romi, did you notice that our names are like the ones in the play, only backwards? Do you think that means something? Are we destined for doom or romance? Or is it just weird?” (106). Romiette thinks it’s “an awesome coincidence”

(106). Toward the end of the book, a police officer also makes note of the similarities of the characters’ names to the Shakespeare play that inspired Draper’s story.

Whereas Romeo’s and Juliet’s opposition comes from a family feud with no political significance, Romiette and Julio face “The Family,” an African-American gang named The Devildogs. Draper makes the divide between Romiette and Julio racial rather than familial. A recent transplant to Cincinnati, Julio is the lone Hispanic in his high school. This makes him a target. Romiette is African-American. The Devildogs don’t want these two together. Neither does Julio’s father, who as a teen himself, developed a prejudice against African-Americans when a group of African-American boys killed his girlfriend. In Draper’s text, the focus is on the star-crossed lovers fighting a society that does not want them to be together because they are of different races, not because their families are engaged in a feud. However, racial distinctions do not bother Julio and

Romiette. Much like their namesakes, Draper’s title characters do not really notice their differences once they have found each other (in an online chat room). When Julio and

Romiette meet in person, sparks fly. Romiette later observes to her best friend, Destiny,

“He’s Hispanic . . . and I’m black. Neither one of us noticed” (76). By making this a racial problem instead of a family feud, Draper structures her text so that the gang’s racial

8 prejudices in the high school environment mirror the larger cultural context. This context is more relatable to a teenage audience than a family feud; many students either have personal or secondhand knowledge of racial prejudice. This helps create Romiette and

Julio as a relatable text to bring Shakespeare’s story to this audience.

Like Shakespeare, but also in accordance with her focus on youth culture, Draper brings in a confidante/best friend for each of her characters. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo has his cousin Benvolio. In what seems to be a nod to the original text, Julio’s first friend at his new school is a character named Ben Olsen. Juliet’s Nurse is replaced by

Romiette’s slightly flaky best friend, appropriately named Destiny, who believes in soul mates and star sign compatibility. Romiette and Julio confide their feelings for one another to their best friends, and it is Ben and Destiny, rather than adults, who are there to stand by them during their conflicts with the Devildogs.

While adults do appear in the text in the form of both sets of parents, they are secondary characters. Both teens have good relationships with their parents, though

Julio’s relationship with his father becomes strained after he takes up with Romiette.

However, the emphasis of this adaptation is on the younger generation; rather than turning to adult characters in their times of difficulty, Romiette and Julio turn to Ben and

Destiny. In fact, although the teens’ parents are represented in the text, they are mostly unaware of what Romiette and Julio are facing. Romiette’s father is a news reporter for the local TV station, and states in a report that there is no gang activity in their city. It takes the disappearance of his daughter for Mr. Capelle to realize just how wrong his report is.

9 Both title characters meet their death in Shakespeare’s version. Draper’s version is not so grim (but she does arrange a narrow escape). Romiette and Julio, with the help of their friends Ben and Destiny, hatch a plan to catch the Devildogs on tape threatening them, which they plan to then bring to the authorities. However, the plan goes awry and

Romiette and Julio end up kidnapped by the gang out of sight of their friends. This leads to a frantic search and the first meeting between the Capelles and the Montagues, which at first mirrors relationships between Capulet and Montague in Shakespeare’s play.

Draper puts her kidnapped title characters into a boat, tied up and pushed out onto a lake.

A storm is brewing, the Devildogs take the oars, and Romiette can’t swim. It seems like an all-is-lost moment when they must jump off the boat. Lightning is striking – and does in fact strike the boat – when Romiette and Julio escape to the water.

One aspect of the typical YA novel, observed through decades of studying YA novels, is that it often tries to leave hope in the heart of the reader. The adaptations are no exception. Keeping to this formula, in Draper’s retelling, Romiette and Julio survive, and this brings their families together. Their survival is a departure from the tragic nature of Shakespeare’s play. In Romeo and Juliet, Capulet makes the first move toward a truce when he says, “O brother Montague, give me thy hand, / This is my daughter’s jointure, for no more / Can I demand” (Act V, scene 3, lines 296-298). Communal healing does not occur, though, until after Romeo and Juliet are dead. While searching for their lost children, Cornell Capelle and Luis Montague are combing the woods together. Montague tells Capelle he misses Texas and has no friends in Ohio. Draper orchestrates the beginning of the end of the parental discord when she writes, “Cornell offered his hand to

Luis. . .. Cornell said clearly, ‘I would be proud if you’d consider me your friend, Luis’”

10 (294-295). It is just after this conversation that the two fathers discover their lost children, huddled together and unconscious beneath a fallen log.

Draper’s adaptation, then, is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet that emphasizes social disharmony along racial lines, with the younger generation setting a new pattern for the older generation to follow. Romiette and Julio have overlooked their differences to find love, and in the end, this encourages their parents to open their minds and hearts to each other as well.

When You Were Mine

In A Theory of Adaptation, Hutcheon states “(a)daptation is repetition, but repetition without replication” (7). This is certainly true of Rebecca Searle’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. As she states in the prologue through the main character, Rose:

Everyone always thinks Romeo and Juliet were so helpless to fate, that they were

at the mercy of their love for each other. Not true. Juliet wasn’t some sweet,

innocent girl torn apart by destiny. She knew exactly what she was doing. The

problem was, Shakespeare didn’t. Romeo didn’t belong with Juliet; he belonged

with me . . . What if the greatest love story ever told was the wrong one? (4)

This is how Searle introduces the reader to the modern-day Rosaline (called Rose by her friends). Rose and her neighbor, Rob Monteg, have been friends forever and are slowly growing into more. That is, until her estranged cousin Juliet Caplet comes back to town.

This is a prime example of a re-imagining. Shakespeare did not give any stage time to the character of Rosaline; she was a faceless character Romeo was seeking out when he spotted Juliet and changed his life’s path. In When You Were Mine, Searle looks at the events from Rosaline’s point of view. Searle doesn’t replicate the storylines of Romeo

11 and Juliet as much as she takes the characters, puts them in a modern context of social stratification, and looks at the devastating impact the older generation has on the younger.

In both Romeo and Juliet and When You Were Mine, the star-crossed lovers end up dead due to the older generation’s rifts. By telling the story through a secondary character’s point of view, Searle puts distance between the reader and the Romeo and Juliet story.

Understandably, Shakespeare’s play puts the emphasis on the actions of his title characters. In selecting a lesser character, one that has a very minimal role in

Shakespeare’s play, Searle allows the story to explore a different angle of the tragedy, one that is less fatalistic.

Searle sets Rosaline up as the main character in the beginning of the story.

During Act I, the author introduces the audience to both main characters, Rosaline and

Rob, and to a plethora of secondary characters that make up their teen social network.

Rose, Rob, and their friends are seniors in high school in San Bellaro. At the close of their first day of school, Rob has asked Rose out on a date, and a complication is introduced: the return of Senator Caplet, his wife, and their only daughter (Juliet).

Rosaline’s reaction? “What’s in a name, Shakespeare? I’ll tell you: everything” (73). It is never a secret in this book that its foundation is Romeo and Juliet.

A key difference here is the importance of the social standings of the main players. In Romeo and Juliet, the Capulets and Montagues have equivalent status under the Prince. In When You Were Mine, Juliet’s father is a senator, and that branch of the family’s social/political standing has a significant impact on the events of the text. Juliet is depicted as a spoiled rich girl, whereas Rob and Rosaline are average, middle-class teenagers.

12 As children, Juliet and Rose were good friends, but something has happened that

Rose doesn’t know about – a rift in the older generation that caused her cousin’s family to move and not speak to hers for many years. This is a departure from Romeo and Juliet because it hides the rift itself, as well as the reasons why the families now hate each other; Shakespeare foregrounds the feud in his play. In this text, Rose has feelings for

Rob, unlike the Rosaline of Shakespeare’s play. Just when things are falling into place for Rose and Rob, Juliet arrives. “This new girl, whoever she is, is definitely competition” is how Rose sizes Juliet up before she realizes that the new girl is her cousin

(118). Searle gives a nod to the original play when Juliet confesses to Rose that back home, her parents think she’s dating one of her father’s interns, a boy named Paris. Her parents approve of him, owing to his political aspirations. Searle also includes a modification of the famous balcony scene in her novel.

Searle continues Shakespeare’s emphasis on kinship, family relations, and rebelling against what is expected. She focuses on the negative aspects of love, its destructive transformations, and also explores the meaning of “family.” Shakespeare’s

Juliet does not come across as calculating and manipulative, but rather is at the mercy of forces beyond her control. Searle’s Juliet is another story altogether. Not only has she deliberately “stolen” Rob from her cousin, their involvement causes rifts within Rob’s family as well as with his friends. Once Rob has entwined himself with Juliet, the people around him start noticing he’s acting differently. Rose’s friend Charlie observes, “Rob has basically stopped hanging out with Ben . . . and I heard he’s fighting with his family”

(209). Mrs. Monteg even tells Rose, “All of a sudden he’s getting in fights and applying to USC. His father thinks we should forbid him from seeing [Juliet]” (228-29). In this

13 way, Searle adds a little bit of the forbidden love theme of the original play, while still staging the story for a modern young audience. A typical teen argument can result when a person pulls away from his/her friends because of a new romantic involvement. But rather than not wanting their son to date Juliet because of who she is, instead, they are afraid of who he is when he is with her. Juliet’s seemingly vindictive nature has turned her society – the high school group of Rob’s friends – against her. But Rose discovers at a family dinner that the vindictiveness was out of pain. Juliet confesses, “You always had what I wanted. This great, loving family. Parents who cared about you. And Rob was always your best friend. I wanted to take something from you. I wanted to get back at you” (253). Once Rose knows what happened to separate her family from her cousin’s, and why her cousin draws Rob’s attention away, she wants to forgive Juliet.

Juliet, after all, is family. But her friends step in. In an attempt to remind Juliet of her loyalties, her friend Olivia declares, “Your family are the people who know you, the people who are there for you. Rose, we’re your family. Not Juliet” (259). This shows that in the YA world, friends hold a prominent place.

Fate also is given its due in this book. Once Rob and Juliet become involved, he confesses to Rosaline, “I didn’t expect to fall for her. But there’s just something about her. It feels right . . . it’s like fate, or destiny, or something” (167-68). Rosaline also discusses the concept of free will/fate: “That’s the thing about free will: Every decision we make is a choice against something as much as it is for something” (258). So whereas in Shakespeare, it seems the lovers are fated to a tragic ending (their deaths),

Searle leaves her audience considering how much of life is fate, and how much comes from the choices we make that lead us to bad consequences. Searle gives her Romeo and

14 Juliet a fate similar to their Shakespearean counterparts. The Monteg/Caplet split in

When You Were Mine happens because Mrs. Monteg had an affair with Senator Caplet.

It was kept secret, but when the truth emerges, Rob tries to come back to Rosaline. This emphasizes the detrimental effect the actions of the older generation have on the next. If the Capulet/Monteg adultery had never occurred, Rob and Juliet might never have gotten involved. Their adultery also brings a particular focus on the negative portrayal of love.

Rob shows up drunk on Rose’s doorstep just as she’s about to have a date with another boy, and she turns him away. That night, Rob and Juliet are killed in a car accident.

Rose immediately feels guilty because she believes if she hadn’t turned Rob away, he and

Juliet might have lived. But Rob made his own choice, and Rose ultimately accepts she was not the cause of their deaths. Again, the story reminds the reader that personal responsibility is a key element here.

Searle stays true to the destructive elements portrayed in Romeo and Juliet. But she also emphasizes the resilience of the young by giving Rosaline, a negligible character in Romeo and Juliet, a hopeful ending. Not only does Rosaline survive, she finds that she is actually in love with a different boy. “I guess Shakespeare didn’t get it wrong, after all,” she muses in the epilogue, “The truth is that there are many different endings to the same story” (334). In this, Searle emphasizes the importance of perspective: events looked at from different points of view can lead to different conclusions. This line also emphasizes the importance of the adaptation process. As Searle does, we can take stories, from Shakespeare especially, to look at how similar tales can have altogether different endings or emphases, depending on the narrative perspective.

15 Saving Juliet

Suzanne Selfors also alters the Romeo and Juliet story a little bit in her novel,

Saving Juliet. In this text, there is more than a nod to the original author. The main character, Mimi Wallingford, is the heir apparent to the Wallingford Theater family, which exclusively perform the works of Shakespeare; her great- grandmother was actually buried in her Lady Macbeth costume. The star-crossed lovers in this story are

Mimi, the unwilling actress portraying Juliet in the family production, and Troy Summer, an imported pop star heartthrob to play opposite her as Romeo. Selfors brings time travel into her novel, allowing Mimi direct interaction with Shakespeare’s Juliet. The themes

Selfors emphasizes most strongly in this text are the importance of kinship and teenage rebellion. Selfors specifically addresses a teenager’s desire to come out from the influence and control of the older generation. In Selfors’ text, the fourth wall is broken as

Mimi addresses her readers; she knows she is conveying information in a book written after the experience and shares that knowledge. It brings the teen audience closer to the story when the character seems to address them as though they are part of the story as it is happening. In the opening chapter Mimi says, “As long as I can remember, these words have followed my name: great-granddaughter of Adelaide Wallingford. . .. Never am I introduced without my superspecial tagline” (4). This sets up Mimi’s need to break out from her family’s reputation and be her own person.

The problem for Mimi is that her mother is adamant that Mimi uphold family tradition and be an actress. Mimi, though, wants to become a doctor. She does not feel she fits in with her family, as she suffers from stage fright. A stagehand is close by wielding a bucket as Mimi prepares to go on as Juliet, and she thinks, “As shameful as a

16 lioness that quivers in fear of a wildebeest, so, too, was my shame as I rocked back and forth. So very un-Wallingford of me” (9). She also believes she is not in charge of her own destiny, something her character Juliet can certainly relate to. “Most of the time,”

Mimi confides in the reader, “I felt like an actor in my own life, walking a path that my family had designed, saying my lines, and following my blocking instructions” (16). The pressure to conform to her family’s desires is one we also see in Romeo and Juliet.

Selfors arranges for the element of time travel to begin the process of righting

Mimi’s world. Events come to a head when she receives an amulet from her aunt, which supposedly contains ashes from a fire that burned Shakespeare’s writing implements.

Wearing the amulet, which, according to her domineering mother, is not “period,” causes a fight between them during the final performance of Romeo and Juliet – one that her mother deems important because representatives from a prestigious theater school are there to see Mimi play Juliet. This parental pressure parallels the pressure put on Juliet by her parents to marry Count Paris. Hustling out the back door of the theater, Mimi finds herself wishing to be somewhere else. Troy, who has followed her out, suggests

Verona, since she’s dressed for it. “Verona is as good a place as any,” Mimi responds

(43). And then she finds herself in a strange world, indeed – Verona, in the time

Shakespeare’s characters live. The time travel aspect of this text allows Mimi to get to know the fictional character she loathes portraying. The similarities she discovers between her own life under her mother’s thumb and Juliet’s parent-led life open Mimi’s eyes to how she could better handle her own parental difficulties.

By transporting Mimi into what seems to be Romeo and Juliet’s story, Selfors allows Mimi to find the similarities between herself and her character. This is another

17 example of the self-reflexive nature of these adaptations – Mimi is aware of the

Shakespeare play that forms the foundation for her own story. While Mimi is convincing herself that she is dreaming, she encounters a love-torn Romeo bemoaning that Rosaline will not love him, finds herself infatuated with Benvolio, and is shepherded to the house of Capulet. She observes when she arrives there that she has not cast herself in the lead, even in her dream, and relates this to loyalty to family over loyalty to self: “I had been taught that the family always came first. Somewhere along the way, I had come to believe that I was secondary” (69). Like Mimi, Juliet has an overbearing mother who is trying to direct her life. In Juliet’s case, it is marriage to an old man (Count Paris, who is old in young Juliet’s eyes) to get the family out of financial difficulties. Mimi can relate, as her mother has been raiding her trust fund to keep the family theater afloat. When

Mimi meets Juliet, she finds not the innocent, insipid girl she has understood her to be from Shakespeare’s play, but a wild young girl whose Nurse refers to her as “beastie.”

Mimi’s opinion of Juliet changes dramatically at that discovery: “I decided then and there that I really liked her. She was the crazy little sister I never had. A rebel at heart. She was my alter ego” (85). Since Juliet is determined not to marry Paris, Mimi decides she must help her new friend, declaring, “Shakespeare may have created this predicament but

I was the one who could change it . . . I was determined not to wake up until Juliet got her happy ending. One of us deserved a happy ending” (87). It is also interesting to note that

Mimi takes a secondary role here as well: it is Juliet who is going to get the happy ending, not Mimi. So even though Mimi believes herself to be in a dream of her own making, she engages with Shakespeare’s creations to change the play’s ending, another

18 instance of a young adult novel opposing fatalism. Mimi does not want Juliet’s story to be a tragedy.

One of the common threads of the adaptations discussed in this chapter is the concept of following different paths than Shakespeare followed, and Selfors is no exception. Once Mimi realizes she is not, in fact, dreaming, mostly because incidents are not occurring the way they do in the play, she muses, “[t]he ashes had sent me somewhere else, just as I had wanted, far away from the Wallingford Theatre. Could this be my story, not Shakespeare’s?” (112). Mimi doesn’t know how to get back to her real world, and has to figure her way through sixteenth century Verona. Fortunately, Troy has come back with her, though he is wounded upon arrival by Tybalt (who has looked at

Troy’s Montague attire and made assumptions). Together, Troy and Mimi do their best to figure out how to get home. Troy believes if they simply follow the play, they will be able to return at its conclusion. However, in this version, Romeo and Juliet never meet at the Capulet party and fall in love, preventing Troy and Mimi from simply sitting back and waiting for Shakespeare’s ending. As often happens, the modern characters in the adaptations will have to find their own way to get back to modern times without dependence on adult assistance, including from Shakespeare himself.

There is also an emphasis on the power of romantic love. Mimi admits she has fallen for Troy, but she believes he doesn’t reciprocate: “I didn’t want to love someone who didn’t love me back” (70). Instead, upon sighting Benvolio, she develops a crush on him. As she, Troy, and Friar Laurence talk about how to get the modern-day star-crossed lovers back home, Mimi thinks, “I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here with you and become Mrs. Montague. I want to go to parties and sleep next to your naked body

19 and never have to act again” (127). Mimi is trying to find an escape from her unsatisfying life in the fantasy of staying in the sixteenth century story with Benvolio.

She wants to control her life, since in the “real world,” her mother refuses to allow her autonomy over her own choices.

Thanks to some scheming by Troy and Mimi, Romeo and Juliet meet and fall in love. However, Romeo is banished for having killed Tybalt, and Juliet is supposed to marry Paris the next day. They use Shakespeare’s plan – the sleeping draught for Juliet – to enable the young lovers to escape. However, Lady Capulet shows up to mourn at her daughter’s tomb and discovers the deception. This is where Mimi realizes the importance of kinship, whatever its difficulties:

Juliet and I shared the same feelings of being trapped, of having our lives directed

by someone else. But even though she ultimately chose her own destiny, she still

considered her family’s reputation. She never wanted to bring them shame or

dishonor. (237)

Because of her experience in the alternate reality, Mimi concludes that she may have, in fact, unconsciously manufactured her stage fright in an attempt to fight her mother’s plans for her future. She and Troy figure out how to return to their present: a quill Mimi used to write a letter to Juliet is presented to her by the Friar, who calls Mimi the author of their story. Quickly, she and Troy burn the quill, blow the ashes around them, and wish to be home. Upon discovering that no time has passed, Mimi and Troy return to the stage for their final performance of the run.

As a result of her experiences during her trip to Verona, Mimi now has the courage to approach her mother to discuss her future. Mimi and her mother have a

20 conversation resulting in her mother’s agreeing to let her pursue medicine instead of theater, and Mimi and Troy make the love scene sing. At the end, Mimi says, “Mr.

Shakespeare once wrote, our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt. In other words, . . . you have to pick up the quill and write your own damn story” (241). There is a sense of teen rebellion in this: don’t let anyone else tell you what you should do and who you should be, you need to figure it out on your own. This is often a theme in YA literature, even in these adaptations of Romeo and

Juliet.

Juliet Immortal

Adaptation and Appropriation scholar Sanders says “adaptation and appropriation, as both procedure and process, are celebratory of the cooperative and collaborative model of creativity” (6). The last two adaptations of Romeo and Juliet discussed herein embrace the cooperative and the collaborative. Selfors incorporated time travel into her adaptation. In Juliet Immortal, Stacey Jay brings something

Shakespeare did not include in Romeo and Juliet but would most likely have approved of

(since he has included supernatural elements in several of his plays): the inclusion of the paranormal. In this novel, Juliet is a supernatural figure, engaged in a battle of wills with a spectral Romeo in the fight for true love. This is a grand-scale battle, with Juliet and

Romeo representing opposite sides in a fight of good versus evil, spanning space and time. In Jay’s novel, Juliet is a servant of the Ambassadors of Light, and her job is to protect soulmates from the interference of the Mercenaries of the Apocalypse. Juliet’s soul is slipped into human bodies in order to thwart the Mercenaries, whose job is to convince a soulmate to kill another in exchange for immortality. This is what Juliet

21 believes Romeo has done to her in 1304, and she’s not completely wrong. Romeo is, in fact, a servant of the Mercenaries. The supposed ending to their story has given Juliet a cynical attitude: “Real love has little to do with falling,” she says. “It’s a climb up the rocky face of a mountain, hard work, and most people are too selfish or scared to bother”

(11).

The idea of soulmates and the power of romantic love is a key factor in this text, though love’s alter ego, hate, plays a big part as well. The supernatural elements in the novel serve to explore the concept of “soulmates,” as Juliet and Romeo are tied together in their competing quests throughout centuries, from their time in fourteenth century

Verona to the modern setting of the novel. In Jay’s story, the modern-day mission of uniting soulmates inserts Juliet’s soul into the body of a girl named Ariel, and through her, Juliet must find the soulmates she is meant to protect. But in this life, she is met with a strong complication: Romeo has inhabited the corpse of Dylan Stroud, the boy with whom Ariel was in a car accident just prior to Juliet sliding into Ariel’s body. (Romeo’s curse includes the ability to take over any corpse, while Juliet shares her host’s body until her job is completed.) Juliet believes that Romeo took her life in exchange for his own immortality; readers do not find out until the end that this was not actually the case. Yet it is this belief that makes Juliet hold onto the hate she feels for Romeo, emphasizing the connection between love and hate. Once upon a time, Juliet looked upon Romeo as her dearest love. When she believes he has put her in the grave, she no longer sees him the same way. Shakespeare himself recognized this connection in his play, when Juliet declares, “My only love, sprung from my only hate! / Too early seen unknown, and

22 known too late” (Act I, scene 5, lines 139-140). In Juliet Immortal, Juliet’s hate springs from her love instead of the other way around.

Jay’s novel is self-reflexive as well. There are a few mentions of Shakespeare during the opening chapters. In yet a more extreme version of the idea that stories can be told from varying perspectives, Juliet has some scathing words to say about the play version of her life. She complains about “[t]hat contemptible, lying play he [Romeo] helped Shakespeare pen all these hundreds of years ago when he first twisted our story to fit his agenda” (17). So according to Juliet, her story didn’t happen the way Shakespeare wrote it or Romeo wanted to tell it. The negativity she feels toward Romeo comes as a result of what she sees as his betrayal of their love.

Juliet Immortal starts in Verona in 1304, where Juliet and Romeo are established as soulmates. “Love for him steals my breath away,” she confesses, “makes me feel I am dying and being reborn every time I look into his eyes or run trembling fingers through his brown curls” (1). But as the reader learns in chapter two, which takes place in modern day Solvang, California, “dying is easy. It’s coming back that hurts like hell”

(4). Juliet is forced to come back over and over again to serve the Ambassadors of Light, fighting Romeo for souls. When Romeo inhabits Dylan’s body, he immediately attempts to strangle Juliet-as-Ariel, and Juliet must escape from him in order to complete her mission.

Jay continues to explore the connection between love and hate. In her attempt to escape from Romeo-as-Dylan, Juliet meets up with a boy named Ben Luna, who then becomes a love interest Juliet knows she cannot have – as an immortal, she has no body, and Ben thinks she’s Ariel. And matters get more complicated when Juliet believes that

23 Ben and Ariel’s best friend Gemma are the soulmates she’s meant to protect. But

Juliet’s continuing hatred makes it difficult for her to successfully move forward in her mission. She declares, “I hate Romeo, I hate stealing other people’s bodies, and sometimes, I even hate Nurse. For finding me on the floor of the tomb before it was too late, for giving a dying girl a chance at ‘life’ that isn’t really life at all” (51). Nurse is a carryover from Shakespeare’s play, and has the role as the mentor Ambassador who is supposed to assist Juliet on her missions. She is notably absent for most of the text, which worries Juliet, though this omission allows Juliet to find her own solutions to the problems at hand. This, as also seen in Romiette and Julio, is typical of the Young Adult genre. The teenage character must find her own way, without reliance on adults in her world to navigate it for her.

Romeo continues to pursue Juliet, claiming there is a spell that can be cast to undo their eternity-long missions. All Juliet must do is love him. He says, “If we love again . .

. then we can take their magic for ourselves. We can heal our souls, make real those spectral bodies, and live forever” (168). But this is not something Juliet is willing to do.

She does not believe anymore that she and Romeo are destined to be together. She resents him for killing her in the first place. Her unwillingness to love Romeo is solidified when she discovers her feelings for Ben. More complications arise when the truth of her death is revealed to Juliet by Nurse, who has been hiding in her friend

Gemma the whole time. Juliet took her own life; Romeo did not murder her after all.

Nurse tells Juliet she is to be released from her mission, that she is not what the

Ambassadors had expected. “Love,” Nurse tells Juliet, “is not an isolated incident. Love is everywhere. It always has been. You just have to choose to see the light in the

24 darkness, the sun shining through the rain” (258). And this is Juliet’s epiphany. She has lost the light by wallowing in the darkness, and from this understanding comes a new realization: “I hated myself for giving everything to a boy who didn’t realize the gift he’d been given. I hated myself for loving him. I hated myself for dying for him” (265).

Once Juliet gives herself the permission to forgive herself, things change. This emphasizes personal responsibility and free will: Juliet is not destined to hate Romeo for all eternity, that is a choice she made based on circumstances and her own misunderstanding of her situation. When she is able to change her way of thinking, she enables circumstances in her life to change for the better as well.

Now that Juliet understands that forgiving herself is necessary, Nurse gives Juliet an out. She can go back in time to the moment she arrived in Ariel’s body, and re-live the experience with a different outcome. This hopeful ending is similar to the message from When You Were Mine, offering more positive possibilities and perspectives than

Shakespeare offers his characters. In a hint of foreshadowing, Nurse says, “There are hundreds of realms where events play out differently than they have here. It is the greatest secret of Ambassador Magic” (256). But Juliet is now free; she no longer feels the need to conform to the society of the Ambassadors. The Ambassador figures represent the older generation’s controlling ways and expectations on a cosmic scale, and

Juliet is ready to make her own choices. Her choice is to save the dying Ben. However, when Nurse tells Juliet there is nothing else she can do to save Ben, that her feelings for

Ben would not serve the purpose of the Ambassadors and they will not allow Ben to live,

Juliet succumbs to her fate. And this fate is death at Romeo’s hands: he kills Juliet-as-

25 Ariel and the dying Ben. This death aligns with Shakespeare’s fated lovers, only in this case, instead of Romeo and Juliet dying together, Jay gives that fate to Ariel and Ben.

But again, this is a teen novel, and the author provides some hope to her audience.

The last chapter brings Juliet full circle – to the original play as we know it. Juliet awakens in her tomb in Verona back in 1304, and Romeo is not there to greet her, nor is

Friar Laurence, who has planned the lovers’ reunion. However, her screams for help are heard by someone else – Benvolio Montague, who has been left a note by the escaped

Romeo. “[Romeo] is run away with Rosaline,” Benvolio tells Juliet, expecting her to be upset at the betrayal of her true love (293). But how can Juliet be upset, when she has been reunited with her beloved Ben in an alternate reality? And this is part of the beauty of the young adult adaptation. It allows for a change in the story, while still giving reference to the original play.

Draper, Searle, Joy, and Selfors use the framework of Shakespeare’s play to create stories that modern young adults can find more relatable. They allow their teenage characters to take some control over the adult forces that would constrain them. Each author takes the most common themes, notably the power and passion of love, the inevitability of fate versus the concept of free will, and the individual versus society, and creates new stories using these themes.

It is important to note that when choosing what to include in the adaptations, the authors also made choices about what aspects of Shakespeare’s play to exclude. In the original text, violence is prevalent. The play opens with fighting; the Prince threatening death to anyone who continues to fight Montague against Capulet. Tybalt is killed, as is

Mercutio and Count Paris, all before the title characters take their own lives in a tragic

26 double suicide. The adaptations analyzed here exclude the violence for the most part.

Draper does include a gang in her text, though the extent of the violence is threats and kidnapping, not death. Only in Searle’s text do the Romeo and Juliet characters die, but they do not deliberately take their own lives. The adaptive authors keep the focus on issues that contemporary youth relate to. For the most part, teenagers are not engaged in to-the-death violence in the streets the way Shakespeare’s characters are. These adaptations choose to pull the threads of the play that would align with modern teenage concerns – things like “my parents just don’t get me,” or “that witch stole my boyfriend.”

Downplaying the violence in the adaptive texts might send a message to modern teens that violence is not the answer to their problems. By minimizing violence, the authors also emphasize a more hopeful view of love. While love’s destructive element is acknowledged, fatalism is discouraged in these texts. Thanks to the notion of alternate realities in Saving Juliet and Juliet Immortal, what is a fatalistic end in Romeo and Juliet turns into a positive outcome in the adaptations.

In the switch from typical tragedy to comic endings, the authors also sometimes extend the harmony into the adult world. In Romiette and Julio, When You Were Mine, and Saving Juliet, for example, the adults have made bad decisions that the young lovers of each story were able to overcome, setting a more positive example for their elders.

It could be said that this goes hand in hand with the aspect of teen rebellion. What is rebellion if not the pushing back against the direction the adults in the world want teens to go? It is more empowering for teens to take control and solve their own problems rather than rely on the adults in their world to do so. While parents and other adult

27 figures exist in all these texts, the plot revolves around the actions of the younger generation.

28 CHAPTER 2: MACBETH: VALUED FRIENDSHIPS

Macbeth is typically taught in sophomore year of high school. As Shakespeare’s plays go, it is a short, fast-paced play that, due to some of its elements (the supernatural, the violence), can hold interest for a teen audience. In the Penguin introduction to the play, Stephen Orgel of Stanford University points out that “women are the ones who prompt this dangerous realization in Macbeth” (Shakespeare 1618). The realization to which he refers is that “the primary characteristic of [King Duncan]’s rule, perhaps of any rule in the world of the play, is not order, but rebellion” (1618). And the rebellion of which he speaks is one led by women. The witches, to start, are all female, and they incite the ambitious streak in Macbeth that was dormant before the prophecies. When he then refuses to act on the prophecies, preferring to allow things to occur naturally, it is his wife who unequivocally pushes him to action to bring forth the endgame. Her methodology is to insult his manhood: “What beast was’t then / that made you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man” (Act 2, scene 1, lines 48-

49). By making him feel less than a man, Lady Macbeth pushes Macbeth to prove that yes, he is indeed a man and can do the job she wants him to do, and that he too wants to profit from. The quest for power – the achievement of not only becoming King but staying King – is Macbeth’s ultimate undoing. And the guilt of her own actions eventually causes Lady Macbeth to descend into madness. Her sleepwalking and hand wringing are observed by her gentlewoman and a doctor: “Look how she rubs her hands”

(Act 5, scene 1, line 28).

29 Lady Macbeth frets: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say! . . . Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (Act 5, scene 1, lines 35-40). Though she had declared herself free of human sympathy, the guilt of her actions not only drives her insane, it drives her to suicide. Macbeth’s desperate need to keep the power he has received by killing Duncan and becoming king causes him to have his own best friend killed, and to revisit the witches to find out if he will keep his seat. Misinterpretation of their prophecies this time results in his own death.

In the adaptations analyzed here, Robin Talley, Allan Gratz, and Kim Askew and

Amy Helmes modernize Macbeth for a young adult audience, while keeping most of the elements that make up the Scottish play’s plot. Talley’s text is a true retelling, shaping the plot and characters parallel to Shakespeare’s work, while Gratz and Askew and

Helmes reimagine Macbeth in their novels. In Adaptation and Appropriation, Sanders says, “[t]he adaptation of Shakespeare invariably makes him ‘fit’ for new cultural contexts and political ideologies different from those of his own age” (58). The adaptive authors who bring forth YA versions of Shakespeare don’t focus on political ideologies – they rather place the plot in the hands of teenagers and focus on the youthful contexts to which Shakespeare’s plots are easily adaptable. The cultural contexts here are the high school environments, and concerns the teens face in their day-to-day lives. American teens aren’t focused on wars or becoming literal royalty; their aperture is narrowed. The characters in the adaptations based on Macbeth are ambitious as well, but they strive for attaining class position, winning scholarships, earning their parents’ approval, or becoming King and Queen of the Prom or Homecoming.

30 As I Descended

Robin Talley very closely follows the plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in her retelling, As I Descended. She structures the text into five acts, with each chapter’s name being a line from the original play. Thematically, Talley emphasizes the treacherous road of unbridled ambition as she follows Maria Lyon (Talley’s Macbeth) through her quest to unseat “Queen” Delilah Dufrey from the top spot at their private coeducational boarding school, Acheron Academy2. Though in Macbeth, King Duncan is well-liked, respected, and treats his subjects well, Delilah is portrayed as a manipulative “mean girl” in this text. For the YA audience, this makes it much easier to support Maria and dislike

Delilah; nobody likes the mean girl. Talley’s Lady Macbeth is Maria’s roommate and girlfriend Lily Borten, a girl who was in a car accident as a child, resulting in her needing to use crutches. As I Descended also provides a Banquo character (Macbeth’s friend and fellow warrior) in the form of Maria’s best friend Brandon, another gay student, and a

Macduff (Macbeth’s killer) represented by Brandon’s boyfriend, Mateo. Though no witches are in the adaptation, Talley replaces them effectively with spirits, released when

Lily, Maria, and Brandon play with a Ouija board in the opening of the book. The three predictions are offered in Spanish by the oracle, first: “Usted conseguira lo que mas desea

Maria,” which Brandon translates in his head as “You will have what you most desire,

Maria” (20). The second prediction tells them, “Lo que es suyo es tuyo,” which translates to “That which is his/hers is yours,” and finally, “Lo que es Segundo sera primero” or

“that which is second will be first” (21).

2 Acheron is the “river of woe” in the Underworld in Greek mythology, and is referenced in Hecate’s speech in Act 3 scene 5 of Macbeth, when she demands the witches meet her there. 31 In a parallel to Macbeth, when Banquo requests a prophecy, Brandon says, “Hey, ghostie, hey, Casper, buddy, what about me? Why does Maria get all the love? I’m doing all this work writing down your fancy foreign poetry. Don’t I get a fortune cookie of my own?” (22). In this case, the spirits do not offer to Brandon what the witches gave to Banquo. The spirits begin getting restless, and a chandelier falls, drawing attention and people to the abandoned dining hall in which the trio are using the board. Belatedly,

Maria remembers, “the board had been destroyed before she could tell it good-bye” (28).

This sets the stage for spiritual interference throughout the novel, as the custom when using a Ouija board is to make sure to send spirits back to their own world when communications are completed.

Talley sets up Delilah as a parallel to Shakespeare’s King Duncan early in the text. The variation from Shakespeare’s Duncan is that Delilah is not liked, nor respected, but feared. This is not an emotion expressed in the play, but one to which teens can relate. “When Delilah Dufrey asked for a favor, you didn’t say no. . . . Delilah could be terrifying when she wanted to be . . . [s]omehow, she’d appointed herself queen of the senior class” (32-33). This helps to set up the power struggle at Acheron. Delilah is class president, captain of the soccer team, has the highest GPA in the school, and is the forerunner for the coveted Cawdor Kingsley Prize, despite the fact that she, as a rich girl, has no need of the scholarship the prize will provide. Delilah has it all, and Lily and

Maria want to take some of her standing away. Talley also gives Delilah a drug habit –

Oxy is her drug of choice, and Lily, because she has a prescription due to her injuries, is

Delilah’s supplier.

32 Lily believes that Maria, second in line for the Cawdor Kingsley prize, should win it. She is the one to push Maria forward, much as Lady Macbeth pushes her husband to make the witches’ predictions come true. “If anyone should win the Kingsley Prize,

Maria was the one. But right now, she was only in second place. A lot of good second place did them. There was no chance of moving up with Delilah in the picture,” Lily muses (39). Lily has her own motivation for wanting Maria to win the prize – with the scholarship, Maria can attend Stanford and the couple can stay together after high school.

Lily also gives the reader a description of Maria that mirrors that of Macbeth as he is in the beginning of the play: “That was the most important difference between Maria and

Delilah: Maria always followed the rules. It was one of Lily’s favorite things about her.

It was Lily’s least favorite thing, too” (40). Developing Maria as a rule-follower serves to emphasize her descent into the pull of ambition as the novel progresses.

As in Shakespeare’s play, the Macduff figure, Mateo in Talley’s text, is suspicious of Maria from the beginning: “Maria knew exactly what she wanted. How much of her was real and how much was her playing at what she thought these people expected from her?” (51). This thought sets up the adversarial relationship that eventually develops between Maria and Mateo. This is homage to Macbeth, as Macduff is one of the first to suspect Macbeth had a hand in Duncan’s murder.

Talley follows Shakespeare in tracking Maria’s moral disintegration. Maria’s moral compass starts twitching when she sees one of the predictions come true, much as happens in the original play when Macbeth finds out he is to be Thane of Cawdor. For

Maria, it occurs when her GPA ties with Delilah’s as a result of extra-credit work: “That which is second shall be first . . . [t]he spirit in the board had been right” (59). Maria,

33 like Macbeth, is hesitant to make things happen to put herself above Delilah. That urging comes from Lily: “Don’t you want to win, Ree? Isn’t that what you’ve wanted your whole life?” (68). Lily tempts her further: “The Kingsley Prize. Homecoming. Soccer.

Maybe there’s a way to do all that” (69). This is another example of how well Talley’s text parallels Shakespeare’s play and also emphasizes the concept of peer pressure.

Without Lily to push her into action, Maria might not have tried to undermine Delilah.

For the YA audience, peer pressure is a very relatable theme, and Talley brings it to the forefront of this relationship.

Instead of a murder plot, however, the plot Lily launches has to do with a surprise drug test. A drug violation would get Delilah removed from her position on the soccer team, not to mention impacting her other scholastic titles. Lily convinces Maria to sneak out with Delilah the night before the drug test, encourage Delilah to take Oxy, and therefore fail the drug test. She also tells Maria that if Delilah won’t take the drug willingly, that Maria should slip it into her drink. Maria balks (at this point, her moral compass is still pointing north), but Lily is persistent. “Lily’s face was so calm it was scary. ‘You’re not doing anything to her she doesn’t do to herself every weekend already.’ Maria closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see that look on Lily’s face anymore” (73). Lily, like Lady Macbeth, is the catalyst. Peer pressure from someone she loves and trusts pushes Maria to do things that are not within her character. Maria then rationalizes to herself, “She wasn’t supposed to think this way. But what Lily was saying made sense. Too much sense to ignore. This might be the last chance she got. The only time she could best Delilah. Lily was right. She always was” (74). The hatching of the

34 plot to remove Delilah from competition is the ending of Talley’s Act I, as the solidification of the plot to kill Duncan is in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Talley puts more emphasis on the friendship between Maria and Brandon than

Shakespeare does on Macbeth’s relationship with Banquo, because a characteristic of the

YA genre is the focus on friendships and peer relationships. In Act II, as Maria becomes more entwined in the plans Lily has to discredit Delilah, her relationship with Brandon begins to suffer. Brandon starts noticing that Maria is not acting like herself. When he tries to talk to her and she flat out lies to him, he realizes: “She was keeping a secret from him. That wasn’t like her, either. Brandon and Maria always told each other everything”

(84). Maria doesn’t want Brandon to know what’s going on; doesn’t want Brandon’s opinion of her to change. Maria is about to take Delilah out to the town of Lennox

(another nod to the play, as is their dorm advisor, Ross, as both are names of warriors in

Macbeth) to drug her and ruin her place at Acheron. Once at the bar, Maria has an attack of conscience and doesn’t think she can follow through with the plan. She calls Lily to tell her she can’t do it, and Lily, in true Lady Macbeth fashion, taunts and belittles Maria until she finally agrees. “What was the difference, really?” Maria finally justifies. “If

Delilah broke the rules to get what she wanted, why shouldn’t Maria?” (102).

Just as Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband to attain her goals, so does Lily to

Maria. It is Lily’s control over Maria that pushes her to the acts that ultimately cause her rise and fall. Although the initial plan is just to get drugs into Delilah’s system so that they would show up on a drug test, things go very wrong for Maria. The drugs Lily provided are not Oxy, as Maria expects, and cause Delilah to suffer hallucinations. When they return to campus, Delilah believes she sees a woman with a lantern on the stair, a

35 woman Maria cannot see. Delilah interprets this vision as a warning that she has to escape the poisoned air of the dorm: “Maria wanted Delilah to suffocate. Maria wanted her to die” (117). So, to escape, Delilah throws herself out of the upper-story window.

Her body lands outside Lily’s window. Lily thinks she hears Maria screaming, and goes to investigate the fallen figure, afraid it is Maria. Calculatingly, Lily realizes “[she] had a job to do. This had to look like an accident” (121). Though Delilah’s drug-induced leap is a departure from Shakespeare, Lily’s taking over where Maria has “failed” aligns with

Macbeth. She discovers a bloodied lip gloss in Delilah’s pocket, and after touching it, finds she cannot get the blood off. “She tried to wipe her hands on the grass. Then she took a tissue out of the pocket of her pajamas and scrubbed at her fingers. The blood only spread farther. As if it were blooming out of her own skin” (123). This parallels

Lady Macbeth’s inability to remove Duncan’s figurative blood from her own fingers.

Like Macbeth, Maria has not fully lost her conscience yet: “She had a part to play.

She had to sit there and act like she wasn’t screaming inside. If only she could hit

Rewind. Go back to that moment, sitting at the bar, with the capsule in her hand” (143).

At this moment, Maria is remorseful. She recognizes that what she did was wrong and wishes she could go back and not do it. These are the same reactions felt by her

Shakespearean counterpart. But the deed is done, and she must live with it.

Delilah is taken to the hospital and is in a coma, in which she will remain throughout most of the book. With Delilah indisposed, Maria slips into her shoes:

“People were constantly buzzing over her, asking her questions, deferring to her the way they used to defer to Delilah. She’d even taken over Delilah’s seat in the cafeteria, in the first chair at the table where all the popular seniors are” (162). As Maria begins to feel

36 the rush of power she now has with the Queen gone, her moral compass shifts even more.

She is made soccer captain in Delilah’s absence, and, in an echo of Macbeth, “some of the girls muttered that she was a tyrant” (167).

Maria’s relationships with her friends have become strained as a result of her newfound popularity. Those around her are suspicious of her and of Lily. Mateo, who was close to Delilah, is most suspicious:

I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since that night. Something just doesn’t seem

right. I know Delilah. She wouldn’t just up and do a bunch of drugs the night

before a practice. Especially something she hadn’t done before, like acid.

Winning was too important to her. (160)

Mateo is not alone in his suspicions. Brandon remembers seeing Lily on the fourth floor of their dorm. As the dorm has no elevators, this was out of character for Lily, and the student she was visiting on the fourth floor was a known drug dealer. Lily doesn’t do drugs, so this raises Brandon’s suspicions even more. In Macbeth, both Banquo and

Macduff have suspicions of Macbeth’s guilt, so Talley follows Shakespeare’s plot here as well. Maria spends less time with Lily in the evenings, and is not sleeping well, if at all.

Lily realizes she now must hold together their relationship and keep what secrets they share: “Lily had to keep up her strength. Act as normal as possible. For her and Maria both. She certainly couldn’t count on Maria to do it on her own” (170). And Maria’s relationship with Brandon is falling apart as well. Brandon confronts Maria about her behavior the night of Delilah’s accident. Maria calls to the spirits, who at this point she still believes are good and working with her, to help her. They say they will, and they do, but not the way Maria wants. The spirits “help” her by causing Brandon’s death through

37 creating hallucinations that ultimately give Brandon a heart attack. This is Maria’s unhinging, as the death of Banquo was for Macbeth. At Homecoming, where Mateo is crowned King and Maria Queen, Maria “sees” Brandon and freaks out: “They could all see him. Maria was certain of it. Hovering above the room over everyone’s heads.

Covered in blood. Why was he covered in blood? It had been a bloodless death” (252).

Lily tries to gloss over Maria’s public meltdown, but Maria is now sinking farther into herself and pulling farther away even from Lily.

As Macbeth revisits the witches to ensure he will not lose his place as King, so does Maria revisit the spirits to ensure she will get the Cawdor Kingsley Prize. She receives more Spanish predictions from the spirits, all of which are analogous to those in

Macbeth. The first is “Mateo Pifano” (292), which Maria interprets that Mateo is a threat to her. The second, “La sangre quire sangre,” (293) translates to “blood will have blood.”

The third prediction is cryptic. “En Dunsinane. Cuando el sol salga por el oeste” (293) translates to “At Dunsinane. When the sun rises in the west.” Dunsinane is the name of the school’s football field. Maria knows the sun doesn’t rise in the west, so she’s confused by this prediction, and like Macbeth, she discounts this prophecy.

The final act of Talley’s book brings a twist beyond that in Macbeth. Mateo has secretly entered the competition for the Cawdor Kingsley Prize, and Maria is enraged when his placement is higher than hers on the list. Then Lily, who has been suffering harrowing hallucinations of her own, walks into a lake on campus and drowns herself.

The climactic scene shows the reader the consequences of Maria’s rising thirst for ambition, but also allows her redemption of a sort not accorded to Macbeth. This is another facet of the YA adaptation. The importance of redeeming qualities is emphasized

38 here, as well as in the ending. Though Maria has done some horrific things, on the whole, she’s not a bad person. She has made bad choices. She has undermined Mateo’s chances at the Cawdor Kingsley by contacting his family and outing him as gay, so that his father withdraws him from Acheron. Maria has texted Mateo to meet her at

Dunsinane if he wants to know what happened to Brandon. In the final scene, Mateo confronts Maria. “What happened to you, Maria? Is your stupid Kingsley Prize really worth it? Pushing a girl out a window? Killing your best friend? Having your own girlfriend drown? Have you ever even cared about anything but yourself?” (351-2).

Rather than Mateo killing Maria, as Macduff did to Macbeth, in Talley’s version, Mateo is suddenly struck by lightning, and Maria, in an act that could be considered selfless, grabs his hand to take the bolt herself. She dies, but chooses death to allow Mateo to survive.

This alternate ending falls in line with the YA formula, which minimizes violence. Though there are still many tragic elements and deaths in Talley’s adaptation, she allows for a genre shift to give the reader hope. Delilah, as the epilogue tells the reader, does not die: “She’d woken up the same night Maria died. The same moment, actually. Delilah was sure of it, even though everyone told her there was no way to know for certain” (362). Since Delilah was painted in the book as a mean girl, this awakening allowed her a chance at redemption, something that Shakespeare’s Duncan did not need.

Delilah realizes at the end that she appreciates the people around her more than she showed prior to the accident she can’t remember: “Delilah wanted to hug [Maria]. She wanted to hug everyone she’d ever known. To tell them they were all worth so much to her” (370). In this, Talley sends a message that taking advantage of and being mean to

39 others results in a bad end, but redemption is possible. Maria’s death is not so much a punishment from the universe as it is showing how in the end, she, too, does the right thing. She allows Mateo to live by sacrificing herself.

Something Wicked

In Something Wicked, Alan Gratz turns Macbeth into a murder mystery laced with humor. Told from the point of view of Horatio Wilkes, this story brings the Scottish play to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, for the annual Mount Birnam Scottish Highland Games.

Gratz also plucks the plot in which disastrous results stem from unbridled ambition as a major focus of his adaptation, as well as the results of bowing under peer pressure. Using

Horatio as storyteller is a reference to Hamlet, when Hamlet tells Horatio, “And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story” (Act 5, scene 2, lines 331-332).

By bringing in a third-party storyteller, Gratz creates distance and perspective for the teenage audience. Horatio is part of the story, but not directly involved in the series of events he is “investigating.” Though Horatio tells the tale, his best friend Joe MacKenzie

(Mac) is the Macbeth character, and Mac’s girlfriend Beth represents Lady Macbeth.

Banquo is represented by Mac’s cousin, Wallace Banks, and Horatio himself ends up part of the story as the Macduff character. In this text, we also have a Lady Macduff in the form of Megan Sternwood. Gratz lightens the mood of the tragedy with witty sarcasm and humor, as well as pop-culture references to draw in a teen audience.

The witches’ role is played by a fortune teller, Madame Hecate, who gives Mac three predictions in a palm reading. Her three prophecies are: “Make the team you will.

And not only compete, but you will win! And you will be king of the mountain!” (8).

The team referenced is the MacKenzie family’s team in the Highland Games, a team that

40 Mac’s father has determined Mac is not good enough to join. In a nod to Shakespeare’s inspirational text, Banks asks the fortune teller for a reading as well. His predictions are mirrors to Banquo’s predictions from the three witches: “You are lesser than your friend, but greater. I see you not so happy, but much happier. While that one will be king of the mountain, it is you who will own mountain” (9). Beth also gets a fortune told, but hers is not nearly as important to the plot, and does not have a parallel in Macbeth. As they leave the fortuneteller’s storefront, Horatio observes, “Nobody was listening. Mac and

Banks had fortune and glory in their eyes, and Beth was no doubt lost in some fantasy where she was wearing a tiara” (10). Much as in Macbeth, the predictions of the fortune- teller weigh heavily on the minds of the recipients and lead them toward the choices they make throughout the text.

While not a part of the original play, the relationship between Mac and his father plays a heavy role in this text, thus adding a layer of inter-generational pressure. Upon their return to the mountain where the games are being held, Mac’s grandfather, Duncan, and Duncan’s son, Malcolm (Mal – Mac’s maternal uncle) inform Mac that there is an open position on the family team, and Duncan, against Mac’s father’s wishes, wants Mac to fill it. William, Mac’s father, consistently belittles his son, but Mac is determined to prove him wrong. Although parental disappointment is a common literary theme, the emphasis on the relationship between William and Mac is likely due to the shift to a YA audience; the fact that Mac’s father never seems proud of Mac or of his accomplishments is something to which teenagers can relate. Beth is a strong influence on Mac, pushing him to what she believes he needs to do in order to fulfill the prophesies, but William’s consistent expression of disappointment in him as a son is a strong secondary motivator

41 for Mac’s actions. It creates in Mac a sense of inadequacy. He must prove to his father that he is a worthy son. William invites Duncan to stay the night in their campsite, an invitation Duncan reluctantly accepts. And the plan is set in motion:

“Tonight,” Beth said to Mac. “It has to be tonight.” She was giddy,

practically bouncing.

“What has to be tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Mac said, but to Beth, not to me.

“You have to do it, Mac. For me. For us! Can you imagine the rush?”

She was almost breathless.

Mac grimaced. “Can we talk about this later?” he asked. I could tell he

didn’t want to have this conversation with me around, but Beth wasn’t letting him

off the hook.

“No! Later will be too late, and you know it!” Beth reached a hand under

Mac’s kilt and grabbed him. “Are you going to be a man for me? Huh? Are you

going to earn these?” (47-48)

Beth’s dominance over Mac is clearly delineated in this scene. Just as Lady Macbeth threatens Macbeth’s manhood to spur him on to action, so does Beth to Mac.

Gratz places the narrator Horatio close to events, but still on the periphery as an investigator and commentator. He is the one who discovers the murdered Duncan when no one can find him to start the Highland Games ceremonies. “I turned the body over with my flashlight, and Duncan McRae’s blood-drained white face stared up at me in mute, dead horror, his throat slit from ear to ear in a grotesque imitation of a smile” (55).

Malcolm’s name is written in blood on the back of the tent, which Horatio notes seems

42 odd, but he can’t put his finger on why. The police are called in, and Sheriff Wood

(whose first name, we find out at the end of the novel, is Birnam, thus echoing Birnam

Wood in Macbeth) investigates the case. With the death of Duncan, and Mal arrested for his murder, Horatio points out to Mac: “The mountain’s yours, now, isn’t it? Duncan was your grandfather on your mother’s side, right? She’s dead, and Mal’s been arrested, which means you’re next in line” (72). This realization sets Mac even more determinedly on the path to keeping the mountain under his control.

In this adaptation, Gratz also weaves through the story the influence that the older generation has on the younger. As Horatio pokes and prods into the reasons for Duncan’s murder, he uncovers a plan hatched between Mac’s father and Beth’s father to buy the mountain from Duncan in order to build a high-priced resort on the property. He finds this out when he discovers Megan Sternwood snooping for blueprints in the MacKenzie

RV. Then Horatio runs across a team of surveyors on the property. “How had Mac’s father known he was going to inherit the mountain this weekend? He couldn’t have anticipated Mal’s arrest – unless he and Mr. Weigel had some hand in Duncan McRae’s death. Had they decided Duncan was never going to sell them the mountain and killed him for it?” (117) Because this adaptation is presented as a murder mystery, it involves a few more subplots and twists and turns than the original play, but Shakespeare’s own plot is skillfully woven within. In fact, the Banquo character, Banks, is the next to be sabotaged. Banks is relying on winning a bagpipe competition to earn a college scholarship. He and his father are not wealthy, so the scholarship is his only chance.

However, his bagpipes are sabotaged, and as a result, Banks is devastated. Gratz sets the stage for Banquo’s ghost here when Horatio observes, “’No do-overs,’ Banks said again.

43 He walked away without saying good-bye, his drones dragging on the ground behind him. ‘Banks!’ I called. ‘Banks!’ It was like talking to a ghost” (135). Horatio confronts a band of bagpipers, the Hell’s Pipers, who have been bullying Banks and others at the games, blaming them for damaging the bagpipes. They give him some startling news:

“Your friend Mac? He paid us to do it, mate” (141). This aligns with Macbeth in the sense that Mac orchestrates a “death” of sorts for Banks. Mac’s act blocks Banks’s advancement and reduces him as a threat. Without the scholarship he could have earned by winning the contest, Banks could not go to college. This is when Horatio starts getting suspicious of Mac.

Meanwhile, Mac is doing well in the competitions, and confesses to Horatio:

When you’re king, you’re always looking over your shoulder. All those other

guys in the competition, they’re out to get me. They want to knock me off the

throne and take it all away from me. But they’ll see. I’m not going to back down.

I’m never going to back down again. (154)

Mac is now starting to feel the paranoia and pressure of success, much as Macbeth did when crowned King. Horatio has a tough time seeing this, as Mac is his friend and he wants to trust his friend. However, as Horatio continues to investigate, and tries to figure out who was really responsible for Duncan’s death, the pieces start falling together for him. And though Mac is becoming more and more cutthroat in order to secure himself, he is still feeling some guilt. Gratz gives us Banquo’s ghost scene during a party organized by Beth and Mac. Beth encourages Mac to sit at a table with her and some others, but he insists there’s no room. Banks is sitting on the bench, turned away from the group, and his appearance is upsetting to Mac. Beth, however, channels Lady

44 Macbeth perfectly during this scene: “It was like Mac was actually scared of Banks. Beth glared at him. ‘Mac. Sit. Down.’ She turned on the smile for her friends. ‘He’s just being silly’” (157). And Gratz also gives us a little humor here as Beth storms away from the party. “She stood from the table but tripped over Spot when she turned. ‘Get out of my way, dog!’ she screamed. ‘Out, out – damn Spot!” (162).

Beth’s guilt gets the best of her sanity in a fashion similar to Lady Macbeth.

While performing a Highland dance, she cannot stop rubbing her hands together, as if washing them. Then she says, “Who would have thought the old man would have so much blood in him?” (215). She becomes catatonic and is taken to the hospital; Megan

Sternwood accompanies her. When Horatio tells Mac what happened, Mac says, in a direct echo of Shakespeare, “She was having bad dreams . . . [s]ometimes I think the dead sleep better than we do” (217). This shows that Mac is starting to break down in a way as well. He’s fighting internally with the need to prove himself successful, but also with the pressure of the guilt of his actions. As does Macbeth, Mac returns to Madame Hecate, who gives him three more predictions (at Horatio’s behest, though Mac doesn’t know this): “Beware Macduff. No harm shall come to you so long as the pipers still play

‘Amazing Grace.’ Never vanquished will you be until great Birnam Wood comes for you” (220).

Feeling invincible, and with Macduff as a threat, Mac murders Megan Sternwood, who, as Horatio’s girlfriend, fulfills the Lady Macduff role. With his lady dead, Horatio is even more determined to take down Mac. Horatio’s sister, who has been present throughout the novel as a reporter covering the Games, can’t believe Mac is responsible.

Horatio tells her, “He’s not the guy you know. Not anymore. Ever since that first day at

45 the fortune-teller’s it’s like something’s taken hold of him, some kind of monster has been awakened” (235). The ambition driving Mac, the quest for the absolute power, has destroyed him. In the final confrontation between Mac and Horatio, Horatio wants to know what was in it for Beth, whom Mac had abandoned after she ended up catatonic in the hospital. Mac replies:

I wanted the mountain, but I didn’t have the balls to take it. Not without Beth.

She kept pushing me and pushing me, telling me to be a man. In the end, though,

who was the only one who could take it? Me, that’s who. She’s the one who

couldn’t handle it. I did what had to be done, and I’ll keep doing what has to be

done, all the way to the bitter end. (253)

Mac draws a sword on Horatio and attempts to take him out as well. Horatio has backup, however, and Mac is brought to his knees to await Sheriff Wood. Mac tries to tell

Horatio it isn’t his fault, that the fortune teller has told them what is going to happen, but

Horatio argues, “No, Mac. You’re not a character in a play with everything you say and do scripted out. You had a choice every step of the way and you blew it. We all did.

We’re all of us responsible for our own actions. You, Beth . . . even me” (258). This emphasizes the recurring theme in the YA adaptations that characters must take matters into their own hands; personal responsibility and choice trump the concepts of destiny or fate. Gratz reminds the reader here of the importance of keeping a conscience even in one’s pursuit of success. Mac’s brutal quest for success results in ultimate failure, as he is arrested for multiple murders, and Banks will end up owning the mountain, as the fortune-teller prophesied.

46 Something Wicked doesn’t shy away from the violence of Shakespeare’s original play. However, by telling the story through the eyes of a secondary character, Horatio, and adding the elements of humor and sarcasm throughout the text, Gratz still manages to distance the reader from the violent nature of the play. It takes the focus toward the family relationships, a common theme in YA literature, rather than on the gore of the multiple murders.

Exposure

In this adaptation by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes, the Scottish play takes place in Anchorage, Alaska, at East Anchorage High School. Askew and Helmes title their chapters with phrases from Macbeth. This is a very loose adaptation, with the main thematic focus centering on the need to take responsibility for one’s actions, and the negative aspects of ambition. This time, the story is told through the Banquo character, who Askew and Helmes turn into a female best friend with a huge crush. Main character

Skye Kingston, called “Beanpole” by her once-best friend Craig Mackenzie (Macbeth), tells this story. By placing “Banquo” so centrally in this text, what this adaptation emphasizes is the damage ambition does to peer relationships. Though there is still a death in the novel, the violence of the original play is notably absent. Most of this version centers on the ambition of the character of Beth, Craig’s girlfriend, the Lady

Macbeth of this adaptation. Skye is a wallflower of sorts, and once Craig and Beth became a couple, her friendship with Craig lessens, though Skye still harbors a crush on him. Most of the plot revolves around Skye, her crush on Craig, and relationships with those around her, including her family. By telling the story through a secondary character in the play, Askew and Helmes distance the reader from the horrors of the play itself.

47 This is a softening trend shown in many of the adaptations discussed. The Shakespeare plays can be graphic, gruesome, and horrific. But to suit the YA genre, the authors find methods to both soften and modernize the events in order to translate them appropriately for a teenage audience.

In keeping with the initial set-up in Shakespeare’s play, the adaptation sets up the hierarchy and the prophecies. After the opening scenes establish Craig as a hockey star, second in command to captain and star center Duncan Shaw, Craig accompanies photographer Skye to the school art room where she is about to develop the film she has shot at the hockey game. (She is old school and still shoots with a 35mm camera rather than digital.) In the art room, the two encounter the triad of native Eskimo girls who serve as the witch characters in this adaptation: Cat, Kaya, and Tess. The girls are working on native masks, and Craig tries one on. Cat explains its significance: “The red color signifies royalty and power. The person wearing this mask is destined for a meteoric rise . . . a warrior king perhaps. But beware. Red can also signify blood and death. Even the greatest of leaders are mere mortals” (19). Craig laughs it off. In

Banquo fashion, Skye also tries on a mask and Kays explains the significance of the mask she wears - immortality: “Whoever dons this mask will live on through the ages, never to fade away. Their greatness will increase with every new generation” (19). Though reminiscent of Act I, scene 3 of Macbeth, the prophecies are not as detailed or cryptic as the ones presented to Macbeth and Banquo. However, they do come back to play a role later in the novel. This flexibility is also characteristic of the YA adaptations. In YA literature, the events are not always set in stone. Personal choice and responsibility play

48 a role. Therefore, Askew and Helmes soften the prophecies given by the “witches” so they are more mutable.

The focus of the novel is the high school hierarchy, defined by who is “cool” and who is not. In conversation, Skye wonders what Craig sees in Beth. She is not the nicest person, and secretly, Skye believes Craig could do better. Craig explains, “There’s a strength to her that I appreciate. She’s ambitious, and she’s sure of herself, and she knows where she is going in life” (24). Through this conversation, the reader learns that

Craig leans on Beth for qualities he may not believe he has. Similarly, we see in

Macbeth that his wife wears the proverbial pants in the family, and pushes Macbeth to perform the initial deed necessary to start their ascent to her goal: the Queen of Scotland beside her husband the King. Though Queen of a country and Queen of the Prom are distinctly different, to a teen immersed in high school cachet, they might as well be interchangeable. Beth wants to be Prom Queen, and will do what is necessary to ensure that she and Craig receive the titles she believes they deserve. Craig’s relationship with

Duncan is established through Skye’s observation that “he and Duncan had become pals pretty quickly on the heels of his debut at school two years ago, but there was definitely a pecking order to this friendship” (37). So while Duncan likes Craig, he also makes sure to emphasize which of them is the Alpha (and it’s not Craig). This also parallels the relationship between King Duncan and Macbeth. While Duncan appreciates and respects

Macbeth, he also makes sure Macbeth knows his place in the hierarchy.

The escalation of the ascent of Craig and Beth begins at a party out at a hunter’s cabin, where students gather to get drunk. Craig has invited Skye to come, and she boldly takes him up on it. Beth is not happy about having a third wheel. A game of

49 flashlight tag breaks out, and Skye chooses not to go, instead hiding out in Craig’s Jeep.

This is where she overhears a conversation between Craig and Beth:

“You need to chill out, Craig.”

“How can you say that? We’re talking about a life here, and I’m responsible.”

“I know, sweetie. We both are. But don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.

What you need to do right now is calm down so we can figure out what to do. It

was an accident, baby. Don’t make this worse than it is already. We can’t go

back and change what happened. It’s just got to be our little secret.” (54-55)

Skye assumes from this conversation that Beth is pregnant with Craig’s child. But the grim truth is later discovered. Duncan goes missing from the party, and only his girlfriend is concerned. However, the following Monday at school, the guidance counselor announces, “It is with great sadness that I confirm the reports many of you have been hearing. Your fellow student Duncan Shaw died in a tragic accident over the weekend” (57). Once again, Skye is privy to a conversation between Beth and Craig in which they implicate themselves in the tragic accident. This is also a softening of the original murder in Macbeth; while Macbeth and Lady Macbeth actively murdered their

Duncan, Beth and Craig could probably have saved Duncan Shaw, but they chose not to.

Beth tells Craig, “you can’t save Duncan now. You can only hurt yourself” (62). While

Skye tries to figure out how to escape without their notice, Craig rounds the corner and they make eye contact. “You should stay away from me, Skye,” Craig tells her (62).

This is Craig’s way of keeping Skye safe. By pushing his friend away, he is trying to protect her.

50 A destructive relationship proves harmful to a more valuable one, and the closeness between Skye and Craig is strained because of this. A former friend of Beth,

Kristy, who serves to fill the Lady Macduff role, confides in Skye, “Convenient for her

[Beth] that Duff and Duncan are both out of the way. Now no one stands between her and Craig becoming Prom King and Queen” (69). This revelation solidifies Beth’s ambition, and perhaps raises suspicion regarding Beth’s involvement in moving the boys

“out of the way” to free a path for her own purposes. Beth’s hold over Craig is further emphasized when, thanks to her Eskimo friends, Skye gains possession of Craig’s cell phone, and reads a text received from Beth: “WTF??? Suck it up. I don’t have time for yr bullshit. Act normal and everything will be fine!!! Seriously, babe, be a man and f-ing

GET IT TOGETHER or you will ruin everything” (69). Beth’s belittling of Craig is like the belittling of Macbeth by his wife. Beth is in charge here, and Craig follows her.

Craig even uses the excuse of a teammate flirting with Skye as a reason to break off their friendship completely: “Things were cool with us before, but now you’re getting all up in my business. Wanting to hang out with my friends, apparently throwing yourself at my friends, now” (84). This reflects that softening of the play as well. Whereas Macbeth conspires to have Banquo permanently removed, as the witches have deemed him a threat to Macbeth’s kingdom, in Exposure, Askew and Helmes simply banish Skye-as-Banquo from his circle. This is more relatable for a teen audience than a paid assassination.

In YA novels, romance is often a primary focus as it is important to the teenage audience. Rooting for the underdog and seeing hierarchies transcended is commonplace.

Askew and Helmes use this rift between Skye and Craig to emphasize that Skye is not one of “them,” but they also start to show that perhaps Skye would be a better choice for

51 Craig. Skye is painted as more stable, while Beth’s deterioration into madness begins to appear. On Valentine’s Day, in the bathroom, Kristy and Beth are talking when Skye walks in. After Kristy leaves the restroom, Beth is sobbing and says, “I ruined everything. My hands are not clean” (107). She then notices a spot of blood on her cheerleading jacket – a spot Skye had noticed the night of the party – and begins frantically trying to get the spot out. “Any armchair psychologist could figure out why

Beth was going bonkers,” Skye tells readers, “and while I was definitely concerned about her state of mind, it was hard for me to feel completely sorry for her” (108). Because of her mental deterioration, Beth spends some time in a “rehab,” a parallel to Lady

Macbeth’s madness.

Prom is fast approaching, and Beth’s goal is to be Prom Queen with King Craig at her side. While to an adult, this prom title may seem meaningless, in the high school hierarchy, winning these titles is a show of popularity and adoration. It is at this point in the text that Askew and Helmes now bring in the Macduff figure. “Did you guys hear about Duff? He’s on his way back from Scotland! I found out just in time, because King and Queen nominations are due tomorrow. Sorry, Craig, but you’re got some competition now,” Kristy is pleased to share with Skye and Craig (125). Skye observes that Craig doesn’t seem to care too much. The weight of the guilt over Duncan is starting to show:

Beth and Craig were both trying to pretend like it was business as usual, but

everyone in school had figured out by that point that they were seriously jacked-

up. Beth ambled around school like she was sleepwalking, and Craig now sported

a hair-trigger temper. (127)

52 Prom is where Craig’s guilt completely loosens his tongue. Skye goes stag, attending with the Eskimo girls. Duff is surprised at Skye’s transformation. In conversation with her, he confesses, “I’m not thrilled about the regime change. . . if you get my drift” (148).

This is a parallel with Shakespeare’s play, as Macduff is the character who does not trust

Macbeth after his ascent to the throne. In this adaptation, it is Beth whom Duff distrusts more. He tells Craig, “Careful, bro. Don’t reject the black widow or she might accuse you of date rape and get you shipped to Siberia. Hell, you’re lucky to escape with your life. Just ask Duncan. Oh wait. He’s not around to ask, is he?” (148). When Craig and

Beth walk away, Duff and Skye continue to talk. Duff says, “Those two are just long overdue for a karmic ass-kicking. Or maybe a not-so-karmic one” (149). Skye’s response is to defend Craig: “Beth’s got this irrational hold over him, but he’s not who you think he is –” (149). Duff interrupts, making a critical thematic point: “Indecision is a decision” (149). He’s saying that by waffling and allowing Beth to make his decisions for him, Craig is still involved.

In a departure from Macbeth, Craig and Skye diagnose their failed relationship and work to repair it. When Skye comes out of the bathroom, she spots Craig sitting alone and they talk about the rift between them. Craig tells her that she was the reason they did not stay close and he ended up with Beth; that at his previous school, he was a nothing, and when his best friend (Skye) avoided him at school, Beth stepped in and offered him popularity. Skye realizes her own insecurities led to their not being close.

This theme is common to the YA genre. Many teens experience insecurities about their own lives, their friends, their belief systems, and by emphasizing this aspect of the relationship between Skye and Craig, Askew and Helmes make these characters more

53 relatable to their teen audience. Craig says, “Don’t you get what I’m saying? It’s all arbitrary. None of this means anything. One school’s King is another school’s target practice” (154). In this scene, Askew and Helmes show that our own insecurities can have a negative effect on our relationships. While not necessarily a huge theme in

Macbeth, it can be argued that because Macbeth is insecure, he tries harder to hold onto the titles he takes, even if his relationships (Banquo, Lady Macbeth) crumble as a result.

Craig continues to realize his responsibility when, after being crowned King, a jersey belonging to Duncan is thrown on stage. This triggers Craig into almost confessing his role in Duncan’s death; instead, he simply admits his feelings for Skye. “Maybe I let my ambitions get the better of me. Maybe we both let our insecurities paralyze us . . . you’ve got to believe it when I say it was only ever you” (158). While this is not a part of

Macbeth, the concept of the love triangle is popular in teen fiction. Craig has to choose between his best friend, Skye, and his controlling, crazy girlfriend, and unlike Macbeth,

Craig finally chooses correctly.

Of course, Beth is not going to stand for the slight, especially one so public.

Instead of going to the afterparty, Beth takes the limo to Craig’s house and cries to his father. Meanwhile, the confrontation between Macduff and Macbeth occurs in the form of a fistfight between Duff and Craig at the afterparty. As Duff is being dragged out by bouncers, he tells Craig, “I’m glad Duncan’s not around to see what you’ve become!”

(169). Craig’s father shows up to drag him home, forcing him to leave Skye behind. The restaurant owner calls her a cab, and as she’s leaving, she receives a text from Craig’s phone, telling her to meet him at the movie theater. Though when she arrives, Beth, who has stolen Craig’s phone, is lying in wait. Beth wants to lay the blame for everything at

54 Skye’s feet: “Once I saw the way Craig was looking at you at the party that night, I knew

I was losing him. I had to give him a reason not to leave me” (181). Though Beth attempts to kill Skye, the cavalry (in the form of Craig and the restaurant owner) come save the day, and Beth is institutionalized.

All’s not well that ends well, however, since Craig is determined to confess (a departure from the play as well), and this impacts Skye and Craig’s newfound relationship. Again, because this is a young adult novel, the police go easy on Craig, and while Skye heads off to California for college, the promise that they will later be together is the happy ending of this novel.

In these adaptations by Talley, Gratz, and Askew and Helmes, the authors all make different choices about what to include and what not to include. Talley includes almost everything faithfully from the play, including the violence, but brings it into a modern setting to which the audience is more likely to relate. In both Something Wicked and Exposure, though there are deaths included, the authors also choose to add elements of humor that are not present in the original play. The humor serves to lighten the story where necessary. Macbeth, though short compared to Shakespeare’s other plays, bears a lot of tension and depth in its scenes. By utilizing elements of humor, such as Horatio’s sarcastic wit in Something Wicked and the side storylines of Skye’s family problems and some light humor in interactions with her classmates in Exposure, these authors give readers a taste of the plot of Macbeth without the heavy drama and graphic violence the play contains. The shift from tragic Shakespeare to comic formula in the adaptations serves to make the reader more comfortable with the adaptation and, perhaps, more hopeful. The most common thread in all the studied adaptations ties into the theme of

55 ambition. Each author incorporates the destructive aspect of ambition and social pressure, particularly as it destroys valuable relationships between friends. For teens, sometimes friendship is the most essential element in their lives. By placing emphasis on this aspect, the adaptive authors encourage their teenage readers not to think hierarchically, but rather, in terms of partnerships, when constructing a friendship circle.

56

CHAPTER 3: HAMLET: DIVIDED LOYALTIES

Once students in high school reach their senior year, British Literature is usually the focus of the English IV class. Most schools teach Hamlet or Othello in this year.

This thesis will focus on Hamlet and the multiple adaptations available to accompany the teaching of this play. Hamlet explores the themes of revenge, indecisiveness, loyalty, and the mystery of death and what lies beyond. The revelation of Hamlet’s father’s ghost early in the play brings that mystery to light. All the adaptations address the ghostly specter in some way. While A. R. Braunmuller of the University of California, Los

Angeles observes in the introduction to Hamlet, “It is clear that Hamlet finds sexuality troubling, most evidently in his relation with Ophelia and then his brutal rupture of it, followed by his obscene and cruel banter before “The Mousetrap” (1342), the young adult novelists who adapted this play omit that aspect. The only adaptation in which

Hamlet is seen troubled by sexuality is in A Wounded Name, which paints Hamlet as an abusive boyfriend, marking Ophelia’s tender skin in fits of rage and hating himself for it afterward.

The ghost directing the Hamlet character in the quest for revenge is a common element in all the adaptations. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet tells the ghost, “Speak. I am bound to hear.” To which he responds, “So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear”

(Act I, scene 5, lines 6-7). It is assumed in the original, as in the adaptations, that the ghost’s revelation of his fate will incite the Hamlet character to revenge. But to whom

57

should Hamlet be loyal – to his dead father or to his living mother? This is part of what causes Hamlet’s indecisiveness. He doesn’t know if it’s better to live or to die (the famous “To be, or not to be – that is the question” [scene 1, line 56] speech in Act III).

He doesn’t know what he should do or if he even wants to be King. In many ways,

Hamlet is a character easily relatable to a YA audience. Teenagers often aren’t sure about their decisions and in what directions to point their lives; these reimaginings adapted by Alan Gratz, Lizabeth Zindel, and Dot Hutchison take Hamlet’s issues and frame them so that teenagers are more likely to both understand and enjoy the nature of the stories.

Something Rotten

Much as he did with his Macbeth adaptation, Something Wicked, in Something

Rotten, Alan Gratz presents the story of Hamlet through the eyes of Horatio Wilkes, the best friend of young Hamilton Prince, Junior (the Hamlet character). Just as Something

Wicked turns Macbeth into a mystery to be solved by Horatio, so does Something Rotten for Hamlet. Gratz’s naming conventions pay homage to Shakespeare’s play, right down to the inclusion of the sentinels from the opening scene. Bernardo and Francisco in

Shakespeare’s play become Bernard and Frank, security guards Hamilton and Horatio speak with early in the play. In Shakespeare’s text, Marcellus declares “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Act I, scene 4, line 90), the line from which Gratz takes his title. In this adaptation, Denmark is Denmark, Tennessee, the home of the Elsinore

Paper Plant, whose wastewater is contaminating the Copenhagen River and causing widespread damage to both the environment and the people of Denmark. The poisoning of the environment echoes the use of poison in Shakespeare’s play, by which Old Hamlet,

58

Hamlet, Gertrude, Laertes, and Claudius all die. But Gratz also politicizes this story by bringing in the environmental angle, and so the Ophelia character, Olivia Mendelsohn, is not only Hamilton’s ex-girlfriend, but an activist protesting against the continuing poisoning of the River.

Because this book series is presented as “a Horatio Wilkes mystery,” it now lies in Horatio’s hands to solve the mystery, putting the agency in the hands of the youth. As the novel opens, Hamilton believes that his father, Rex, has died unexpectedly from cancer. His uncle Claude has already married his mother, Trudy, and Hamilton fosters much anger against them both. Upon his arrival home from boarding school, with his friend Horatio in tow, Hamilton visits his father’s plant and meets with Bernard and

Frank, who show him a security video they’ve kept from everyone but him. The video shows Rex Prince telling a security camera that he’s been poisoned. This is how Gratz brings the ghost of King Hamlet into his story – the boys note that Rex’s appearance in the video is “ghostlike.” After watching the video, Hamilton and Horatio return to the

Prince home, which is so large Horatio compares it to a shopping mall. He then muses over his friend’s penchant for melodrama. Horatio rationalizes Hamilton’s behavior as a reaction to his mother’s sudden marriage: “She married her husband’s brother. That was weird and all, but Hamilton acted like it was more than that. Like his mother had betrayed the family somehow” (19). Though considering the news they have just heard,

Horatio doesn’t give Hamilton a hard time about his antics. Hamilton beseeches his friend for help, asking that Horatio attend the reading of his father’s will with him.

Horatio tries to decline, but Hamilton persists:

59

“Come on, Horatio. I need your help here. You heard my father.

Somebody killed him. Maybe Claude.”

“Maybe not.”

“Whatever. But I need to know who and why.”

I got up and put my bag away in the bottom of the wardrobe. “What

makes you think my guess is better than anyone else’s?”

“You’re like the smartest guy I know.”

Great. So now somebody was accusing me of being a genius. (22-23)

In this exchange, Gratz sets up Horatio as the point person on the investigation of Rex

Prince’s suspected murder. The choice to relay the events from the perspective of one of

Shakespeare’s secondary characters distances the YA reader from the story. Gratz also sets up Horatio not only as the point person, but as the comic relief. As in Something

Wicked, Gratz presents Horatio with much humor despite the fact that the central idea of the story revolves around possible murder. This again has a distancing effect on the reader.

In this adaptation, Gratz develops a relationship between his Ophelia character and Horatio, something that does not appear in Hamlet. Rather than being isolated and used as a pawn by the parental figures, Olivia and Horatio become friends, and perhaps there is a yearning for more between the two. At the very least, in this story, Olivia has a confidant in Horatio, a role he did not play in Shakespeare’s version. The morning after his arrival at the Prince home, Horatio meets Paul Mendelsohn (Polonius), Olivia’s father, and her college-aged brother, Larry (Laertes). Paul is the Prince family attorney, at the home for the reading of the will. Horatio first overhears a conversation in which

60

Larry points out that Olivia has been dating Hamilton, but that the relationship is no good for her. He tells his sister: “He’s using you, Liv. You see that, don’t you? When he goes back to that snotty prep school in Knoxville, you think he’s really going to carry a torch for you? [. . .] You’re good enough for a summer fling, but you’re not marriage material for a Prince” (25). After hearing this, Horatio steps in and distracts Larry from his barrage of hurtful words. Larry and Paul leave, and Olivia brings the conversation around to why Horatio thinks Hamilton broke up with her. “First it was his dad,” Horatio tells her, “You can’t imagine how hard that hit him. It was like somebody pulled his plug. He walked around like a zombie for weeks. Then Trudy and Claude happened”

(29). While Olivia seems to understand, it doesn’t make her any happier.

Hamilton’s rage at his mother and uncle incapacitate him to the point that Horatio must step in for his friend, and it only gets worse when the will is read: Rex Prince has left everything to Trudy. Mendelsohn states, “The will names only yourself as inheritor.

Legally speaking, all of Mr. Prince’s possessions – or the late Mr. Prince’s possessions – belong to you and you only” (34). Hamilton has a fit when his mother then asks Mr.

Mendelsohn, “Would you draw up papers, then, please, making Claude half-owner of everything with me?” (35). After Hamilton has an outburst, Mr. Mendelsohn drops another bomb on the family by introducing the Fortinbras character. Ford Branff, a former suitor of Trudy and the owner of Branff Communications, has entered a takeover bid for the Elsinore Paper Plant. Hamilton’s reaction? “Yet another man my mother has shacked up with wants to take over the plant. Do you think he’ll want to be a second father to me too?” (36). One of Hamilton’s biggest issues is not knowing whom he can trust. His resentment lies mostly in the direction of his mother and his ex, and he blames

61

all women for the hurts cast upon him by those in his inner circle. He expresses some of this resentment to Horatio: “Damn it, Horatio, they used the flowers from my father’s funeral to decorate the wedding reception. You want me to take it easy?” (38) This parallels Hamlet, but then Gratz deviates from Shakespeare’s play by giving Hamilton more reason to hate his uncle. Hamilton tells Horatio: “For years I watched my dad support Claude through every one of his ridiculous ideas. He always came to Dad for money for his schemes and Dad always gave it to him” (39). So watching Claude drain the Prince finances on get-rich-quick schemes contributes to Hamilton’s hatred of his uncle. The hatred intensifies when his uncle marries his mother and, as a result, is gifted with half of the Prince fortune. The family relationships are breaking down, and since family plays such a strong role in the YA novel, this is an important emphasis. Hamilton mentions he’s considered suicide when Gratz reduces Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” speech to a mere few lines: “I’ve thought about it, you know. Killing myself. I’m serious. I mean, why not? At least then you get to sleep forever” (102). Gratz also then paraphrases the pushing away of Ophelia when Hamilton tells Olivia, “You might as well give up men all together. No, come to think of it, women aren’t any better. Maybe you should just be a nun” (106).

Hamilton’s anger and despair causes Horatio to intervene and so take a larger role in this adaptation. Since Hamilton, much like Hamlet, spends too much of his time wallowing in his own self-pity and, in Hamilton’s case, drinking himself into numbness,

Horatio starts doing some digging of his own. He talks to Trudy, and discovers that she feels terrible that Hamilton is reacting the way he is. “Claude really cares a great deal about him,” Trudy tells him. “About the whole family. He’s a dear, sweet man who saw

62

me through a difficult time. I know Hamilton disapproves, but Claude’s made my life so much happier in these few months. I wish Hamilton could see that” (49). Olivia takes

Horatio to see the actual damage to the Copenhagen River, downstream of the plant: “It looked like a river of Pepsi. A dark brown liquid churned up white froth as it broke against the rocks, and pallid clumps of foam roamed the surface like slugs” (55). So while Hamilton is drinking away his sorrows and being indecisive about how to handle his situation, in this adaptation, he has his wingman Horatio, who steps in and attempts to figure out if Hamilton’s suspicions regarding his father’s death are valid. In making

Horatio a more integrated character, Gratz is pulling back and allowing distance between the play’s main characters and the reader. The reader gets to see the action from a less- involved third party perspective, once again creating a softening effect on Shakespeare’s works.

One of the biggest differences in this adaptation and the play by which it is inspired is that in the course of events, the Hamlet character takes a backseat to Horatio.

It is Horatio who lures the potential murderers of Rex Prince to attend a play so as to determine which of them is involved. Gratz makes Rex a benefactor of The Denmark

Players, a community theater group conveniently performing Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern are Dead. It is Horatio who works with Olivia to expose the damage to the river. And ultimately, it is Horatio who saves Hamilton’s life when Claude contracts

Roscoe Grant and Gilbert Stern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) to have Hamilton murdered. Horatio confesses the reason why he has taken such a big part in his friend’s current situation when he says, “I had always stood by quietly and let him do whatever he wanted as long as he wasn’t hurting anybody else. He was a big boy, and I figured he

63

could take care of himself. I guess now I was beginning to think he couldn’t” (100).

Loyalty is always a question in discussions of Hamlet, and in this adaptation, Horatio’s loyalty to his friend is unwavering, even while he is forging a bond with Hamilton’s ex- girlfriend. Loyalty is a primary theme in many YA novels, so it makes sense that Gratz emphasizes this theme.

The skeletal framework of Hamlet remains in Gratz’s reimagining. Mr.

Mendelsohn and Claude are eavesdropping on the conversation in which Hamilton tells

Olivia she should be a nun, and Mr. Mendelsohn muses, “I think he’s still in love with her. That’s the reason he’s been so melancholy lately. I suspect they’re having a lover’s tiff” (108). To which Claude replies, “Whatever he’s wound up about, I think he needs an intervention” (108). Horatio, listening in to this conversation, isn’t sure what kind of intervention Claude is referring to, but he is already suspicious of Claude’s involvement in Rex’s death. His suspicions are confirmed the night of the play. Horatio has doctored the suspects’ programs for the play, writing in them, “I know what you did to Rex Prince.

I have proof. Meet me behind the stage after the pirates attack” (129). And so at that moment, “The lights came up. The scrim disappeared. The bodies of Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern appeared, swinging from ropes. And beneath them, illuminated for everyone to see, stood Claude Prince” (131).

This discovery jolts Hamilton into action, and Horatio isn’t sure he’s happy about this: “I was pretty sure now that Hamilton planned on doing something completely idiotic, but there was no stopping him short of tackling him” (136-7). The something idiotic involves Hamilton asking his mother to go hunting, where he confronts her about his father’s death. Horatio has reluctantly come along and witnesses Hamilton shoot a

64

man wearing Claude’s bright-orange hunting vest. Only it isn’t Claude; Paul

Mendelsohn has come looking for Trudy and ends up shot, though not mortally wounded, for his trouble. Again, the author distances this story from the violence of Shakespeare’s play. This is the final straw for Claude. He now stages the “intervention,” to which

Hamilton insists Horatio accompany him. Claude tells Hamilton he’s going to send him away to a clinic: “An alcohol rehabilitation clinic. You’re an alcoholic, Hamilton, and you need to get better” (153). Hamilton, of course, does not want to go. Horatio convinces him to pack as if he’s going, while Horatio quietly continues to investigate

Rex’s death.

The teenagers continue to maintain control when events start coming to a head, building to the climax. With the assistance of Ford Branff, Horatio arranges a news team to come out and watch Olivia “drink” the contaminated river water. Only the faux drinking they have arranged is overturned when Olivia boldly drinks the actual contaminated water (and has been doing so for days): “She took a big hit of the stuff, and it immediately came back up, along with half a gallon of whatever else she had to eat and drink in the last few hours. I caught her in my arms as she collapsed to the ground”

(169). This is Gratz’s nod to Ophelia’s death, though in Something Rotten, Olivia doesn’t die. The environmental exposé then becomes part of the formulaic YA happy ending.

Horatio states, “Local community leaders were shocked – shocked! – to discover their river was so polluted, and there were rumblings about an emergency session of the

Denmark City council” (170-1).

Horatio also intervenes to save Hamilton from Claude’s plot. Claude is still determined to get rid of Hamilton by supposedly sending him to rehab. Horatio is meant

65

to drive him to the facility, but Claude says he “asked these boys [Roscoe and Gilbert] to take you to the facility for us. We trust them. They’re old friends of the family” (183).

Horatio becomes suspicious and follows them. He calls the facility and discovers

Hamilton was not expected, so he calls Hamilton and manages to extract him from

Roscoe and Gilbert in time to save his life. Claude has rigged a bomb into Roscoe and

Gilbert’s car in his attempt to rid himself of Hamilton, so Roscoe and Gilbert die in a fiery car explosion. Once again, Horatio has stood up for Hamilton and demonstrated his friendship and loyalty. Horatio, Hamilton, and Olivia expose Claude at the City council meeting: Horatio observes, “Claude Prince had poisoned his brother with dioxin samples taken from the river. In the front row, Trudy Prince stood. She must have felt poisoned herself, in a way. I noticed Claude didn’t rush to her side this time. He was rushing somewhere else” (204). This observation emphasizes that Claude’s loyalty was never to the family, confirming Hamilton’s suspicions.

In the genre shift from tragedy to comedy often seen in these adaptations, Gratz also gives his version of Hamlet a happy ending. Claude’s dastardly deeds are exposed and he is arrested. Hamilton says to a reporter:

I’m just happy to finally bring my father’s killer to justice. And now that real

evidence of Elsinore’s environmental abuse has come to light, I pledge as a future

owner to do whatever it takes to clean up the Copenhagen River. With the

dedicated help of community activists like Olivia Mendelsohn, of course. (205)

Hamilton and Olivia are back together, Claude is behind bars, and Horatio gets to ride off into the sunset, having solved the mystery (but not getting the girl).

66

Gratz dramatically reduces the number of deaths from the original play. He includes only three deaths – Rex Prince, without whose death there would be no story, and Roscoe and Gilbert. Hamilton, Olivia, and Paul Mendelsohn all survive. Larry takes a much smaller role than Laertes in the original play. For its intended audience,

Something Rotten gives a humorous slant to a tragic play, leaving out suicides and most of the murders. It also puts the main character more in the backseat. This gives the story a distinctly different perspective than if it were told through Hamilton’s point of view. It allows for an impartial third-party investigation into the death of Rex Prince, where

Hamilton’s emotional responses cloud his ability to think rationally about the situation, and, ultimately, places a young person – Horatio – in control of events.

A Girl, A Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills

Lizabeth Zindel takes a light, innovative approach to Hamlet in her reimagining of the play. She focuses on themes of family, love, and forgiveness when pulling threads from the play. She also chooses, as Robin Talley did in As I Descended, to reverse the gender of the title character. Thematically, this adaptation digs deeper into the quest for the truth as well as the revenge plot, which is set in motion by the older generation appearing from the grave in the form of the main character’s ghostly mother. In this adaptation, Hamlet is a high-school senior named Holly. Though Holly lives in Los

Angeles, she attends a boarding school in Connecticut. The novel takes place over her winter break from school, the first time she’s come home to LA since her mother’s suicide over the summer. Zindel also reverses parental roles: it is her mom who is dead, and Holly’s father, Gardner, plays the role of Gertrude; Claudius is represented by her mother’s older sister, Claudia. Claudia is now Gardner’s girlfriend; he has called Holly

67

at school to break that news. Horatio’s role as support comes in the form of two people –

Holly’s “BFF” Felicia and her family’s maid, Anna Maria. Zindel develops this story in true Hollywood style. Holly tells us, “My mom was the daughter of one of the classic studio heads from the golden age of Hollywood. Her dad was a big deal in this town, and my mom, a movie producer, was a pretty big deal, too” (10). As Felicia, who has picked

Holly up at LAX, drives up Elsinore Lane toward Holly’s home, she dreads what is to come, thinking, “Everything looked the same on the outside . . . But I knew that inside the house everything would feel completely different. In the past, my mom had always been there to greet me when I came home from school. Now she was gone – forever”

(12). The focus of this adaptation is strongly on family dynamics. Holly is a child who has lost a parent, and now must face the complications of her father getting involved romantically with her aunt.

Holly’s mother, Kate, and her sister, Claudia, have often argued. Holly’s feelings toward her aunt are negative to begin with, and worse now that Claudia has her metaphorical hooks in her father. Holly observes immediately the changes as she walks through the family home:

I noticed a bunch of framed posters of flicks that Claudia had produced hung on

the walls. She was a movie producer, too, like my mom – but way different. My

aunt likes to fancy herself the queen of cult horror films, but my mom and I had

thought otherwise. The only thing regal about Claudia’s flicks was that they were

royally tacky. (16)

Holly also feels distanced from her father, who has come home from work to greet her and have lunch with her. When her father tries to give her a hug, Holly doubts the

68

sincerity of his love, saying, “I went through the motions, but the embrace felt empty and cold, like my dad and I were players who were no longer on the same team” (18).

Holly’s closeness to her mother – and her own guilt for leaving her bipolar mother alone on the day she took her own life – makes it difficult for her to accept her father’s moving on, especially with her aunt. Animosity is present between Holly and Claudia from the start. “Claudia sat down in the seat traditionally saved for my mom. It made me want to pull the chair out from under her,” says Holly (20). The evil step-parent is a common trope in literature, and Zindel uses that to her advantage in this adaptation.

Holly’s resentment deepens when she realizes that Claudia is benefitting from her mother’s death. She reflects, “My mom had been the head of Goldmayer Productions.

When my mother passed away, my dad became executor of her estate and now it seemed like he’d made the stupid decision to pass the torch to my aunt” (21). In her new role as

CEO, Claudia has taken on a personal assistant, Patty (Zindel’s version of Polonius).

And like Shakespeare, Zindel gives Patty two children. Her eldest daughter, Lara

(Laertes), doesn’t figure significantly in this novel. However, her youngest, Oliver, is

Zindel’s Ophelia. Upon their first meeting, Holly finds Oliver very attractive, but she has reservations about getting involved with him: “I couldn’t forget, Oliver was the son of

Claudia’s assistant. And that meant I had to be careful. Who knew where his loyalties lay?” (26) Loyalty is definitely at the heart of this adaptation as well. Holly wants to continue to be loyal to her dead mother rather than her living father, creating the revenge plot that is central to Hamlet and the studied adaptations.

It is at this point in the novel that Zindel brings in the spirit world that

Shakespeare introduces with Hamlet Senior’s ghost. Desperate for a chance to

69

communicate with her mother one last time, Holly convinces Anna Maria to perform a

Santería ritual in her mother’s honor. During the ritual, Anna Maria gravely informs her that “A spirit may not be at rest” (44). Assuming the spirit is her mother’s, Holly begins to wonder if her mother’s death is not as it had seemed. Going to a party with Felicia,

Holly thinks she sees “my mother leaning out from behind a tall oak tree in the front yard” (47). Holly becomes distressed, and Felicia tells her if she wants to leave, let her know. But Oliver is at the party, and distracts her from her sorrow. Even as Holly wants to speak with her mother’s ghost, she is, of course, a teenage girl, and she is interested in

Oliver. This creates a conflict between Holly’s loyalty to her mother’s memory and her desire to know more about Oliver. Holly teases him with her reluctance to get involved:

“I don’t know. I mean, you are the son of the enemy’s assistant.”

“I think your aunt’s a whack job. Is that okay for me to say?”

I wanted to stamp a big A+ on his forehead. And maybe even a gold star sticker.

(50)

But teen love never runs smoothly, to paraphrase Shakespeare, and a YA contemporary novel based on Hamlet is no exception. Patty does not want Oliver pursuing Holly. He confesses, “She saw the way I looked at you and said you were off-limits” (62). Holly assures him Patty’s job is not in danger, no matter what transpires between the two of them.

Holly continues to see what she believes to be her mother Kate’s ghost, and finally, gets to communicate with her: “I saw something that made me stop walking and stare. It was my mom – at least, it looked like my mom – sitting all alone at one of the cocktail tables. She stared down at the tablecloth, shaking her head back and forth like

70

she was upset about something” (73). The image disappears, but Holly is unnerved.

Later that night, out in the garden, Kate’s ghost approaches and talks to her. “Claudia poisoned me,” she says. “She wanted what I had” (83). The ghost then tells Holly the reason she’s giving her this information: “I could only come back to talk to the person I loved most in the world. And that person is you. So I have to ask you to take revenge on her, for what she did to me. For what she did to all of us” (84).

Kate’s request launches Holly on a quest to figure out if she is speaking the truth, and if she is, to act on the promise she made to her mother’s ghost. Holly’s loyalty is to her mother, as it has always been. Her aunt is the interloper; her father, like Hamlet’s

Gertrude, is someone who doesn’t want to be alone. Though she doesn’t confess the promise she’s made, Holly tells Anna Maria about seeing the ghost. Anna Maria gives warning: “Sometimes bad spirits come in the form of familiar faces. Maybe your friends are your enemies. Maybe your enemies are your friends” (101). But Holly is determined now and tells Anna Maria not to believe what she sees. She says, “I had a plan. I’d be nice to Claudia. I’d get close to her. I’d find out what really happened the day my mother died” (102).

This is perhaps Holly’s descent into Hamlet’s “madness” – she will not hear voices of dissent to her plan, even if they come from someone she used to trust (Anna

Maria). Holly’s plan launches with a “girls’ night out” with her aunt, in which she gets

Claudia drunk in the hopes of loosening her lips for a confession of guilt. Instead,

Claudia gets sloppy, and when she goes to pay the tab, strews her belongings over the counter, including multiple prescription bottles. Holly wonders if the bottles contain the

71

pills that murdered her mother. And Claudia throws her a curveball in the car on the way home when she confesses having been attracted to her father all along. Holly reflects,

This was the first time I had ever heard my aunt blatantly admit she’d had her eye

on my dad before my mom even passed away. That, plus the fact that she’d been

with my mom the day she died, plus the pills, seemed to prove that what I had

seen the other night was really my mom’s ghost, and that what she had told me

was true. (125-6)

Armed with these facts, Holly continues to push forward with a revenge plan. Though while she is trying to figure out how to get revenge on Claudia, to remove her father from

Claudia’s clutches, she’s also developing a relationship with Oliver. Zindel doesn’t give

Oliver the madness that Shakespeare gives Ophelia. Instead, the only reference to

Ophelia’s unstable state of mind is how he feels about Holly: “With you, it’s different. I haven’t felt unhinged in a long time. Unhinged in a good way, I mean” (164). Zindel leaves the madness in Holly’s family; her mother suffered from bipolar disorder, as did her grandmother. In fact, it is the postpartum depression experienced by the grandmother that made Claudia resent her sister since birth.

Holly’s loyalty to her mother becomes an obsession; she is determined to see

Claudia as the enemy who destroyed her family. This obsession borders on the madness that is demonstrated in Shakespeare’s play in both Hamlet and Ophelia. Holly decides to destroy her “enemy” using a Santeria spell, but her father interrupts her in the act. When confronted, Holly says, “‘Dad, this was my private business and now it’s ruined. Now everything is ruined.’ And I meant not just the spell but also our family” (181). Because of her action, her father suggests she seek professional help, to which she agrees: “Most

72

of me didn’t want to give in to my dad. But this little part of me felt like I didn’t really know what else to do or who else to turn to” (182). As a result, Holly agrees to go talk to a doctor. The doctor’s advice to Holly is to spend more time with Felicia and Oliver while she is home on break. She tells Holly, “I think being with people who love and care about you can be very healing” (194). But Holly isn’t ready for healing – she’s still determined to get rid of Claudia. However, this becomes more difficult when Gardner takes her for a special dinner, just the two of them, where he says that he and Claudia are engaged and asks what Holly thinks of the situation. Her response is not what he wants to hear: “What do I make of it? Well, I’m glad you asked, Dad. What I make of it is that it’s sick and disgusting. This is your wife’s – my mother’s – sister. And Mom’s hardly been dead six months” (208). Upon returning home, Holly leaves to go visit Oliver and take solace in his comforting presence. But it doesn’t last; when she comes back she is tortured by visions of Claudia in a wedding dress. Then her mother’s ghost pays another visit – this time to dissuade Holly from loving Oliver for fear she will get hurt – saying,

“I don’t want to see you tricked, or hurt. Maybe you should take it slowly with this boy, honey” (223). The next day, Holly tells Oliver she needs “space,” and he is hurt by her spurning their budding relationship.

Rather than turning to her peers, Oliver and Felicia, for healing help, Holly continues to indulge her mother’s spirit. Now that Holly knows her father and aunt are to be married, Claudia asks to see Holly and tells her that she knows she makes her father happy, unlike her mother, Kate. She says the anti-depressants Kate took “‘made her hard to be around, moody and difficult. Your dad couldn’t take it anymore and when he asked her for a separation, it was only a few days before she took her life and – […] I thought

73

you knew.’ Her tone dripped with fake concern” (232). Armed with this information,

Holly doesn’t know whom she can trust anymore and becomes isolated from her friends and family. Her mother’s mental illness seems to also be affecting Holly.

Enter Shakespeare’s characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the form of

Holly’s cousins on her father’s side, Rhylee and Ginger. Gardner and Claudia have invited them to visit, something Rhylee confesses to Holly once her father and Claudia leave for a romantic New Year’s Eve overnight. She says, “They did invite us here, but only because they’re worried about you. And I guess they think it’ll be easier for you to talk to us because we’re closer to your age” (250). Rhylee and Ginger have met some

Australian filmmakers at the airport, and the five young men show up at Holly’s to help them all celebrate the New Year. At the party, Holly recruits the filmmakers to help her make a movie of what she thinks happened the day her mother died; she will show this film to her father and Claudia the following night at a dinner party.

The adaptation’s conclusion makes evident that young people don’t necessarily understand the lives of the adults closest to them. This is where Holly finds that all is not as she assumed it to be. Her misplaced obsession with her mother’s death is self- defeating. Her father tells her, finally, that Claudia had nothing to do with her mother’s death because he was with her the day Kate committed suicide, and he was the one who found Kate overdosed in their bed. He confesses that it was not him who wanted the separation, but Kate. And Holly finally recognizes the truth: her mother had indeed committed suicide, a result of not properly treating her bipolar disorder. “’It’s not your fault,’ I said into my dad’s sweaty T-shirt, which was now wet with my tears. And it wasn’t my fault, either. It wasn’t even Claudia’s fault, as much as I had wanted to blame

74

her” (288). A visit to her psychiatrist helps Holly make more sense of the sudden appearance of her mother’s ghost and the directions she received. And then, hope. The doctor says, “Perhaps you’re getting ready to feel joy again. Our time on this earth is so precious and short. Your mother would want that for you” (297).

This adaptation differs greatly from the original story of Hamlet, but falls into the pattern of switching the genre from tragic to comic. Rather than a tragedy, this text also focuses on the happy ending. Holly goes to Oliver to beg forgiveness, and his sister,

Lara, rather than trying to kill Holly for hurting her brother, says, “Break his heart again and you’ll have me to deal with” (299). This version avoids the bloodshed with which

Hamlet concludes. Everyone lives except for Holly’s mother, whose death is a result of her own mental disorder rather than a calculated murder. Zindel lifts the relationships and the revenge plot from Shakespeare, but turns it into a story of forgiveness and hope.

Oliver and Holly end up together, in love after a mere two-week courtship, and Claudia and Gardner, we assume, will live happily ever after.

A Wounded Name: A Tragedy

In Dot Hutchison’s version of Hamlet, the focus is on Ophelia almost more than it is on Hamlet. Though the book follows the basic plot structure of the original play, with each of the five parts corresponding to the Acts in the play, this adaptation is told from

Ophelia’s point of view. By changing the point of view, Hutchison emphasizes the pressures placed on young adult females, as well as males, by their elder relatives. There is more attention paid to the struggle that Ophelia must endure throughout her role in the story than in Shakespeare’s play. The modernization here takes place at Elsinore

Academy, an elite private boarding school that has been run for generations by the

75

Danemark family. Headmaster Hamlet Danemark V has died when the book begins, and his namesake son, who is referred to as Dane throughout the text, is inconsolable about the loss of his father. Many of the main characters in the play are transferred to this adaptation as well. Ophelia’s father, Polonius, is the Dean of Curriculum; her brother,

Laertes, also a student and friend of Dane; and Horatio is a scholarship student whose friendship with both Dane and Ophelia figures prominently in this storyline. Fortinbras is represented by Reggie Fortin, whose family members sit on the Board of Directors of

Elsinore Academy, though Reggie is on the faculty at a competing school, Monticello

Academy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s school friends, play their parts in this adaptation as well.

Hutchison’s adaptation includes not only the revenge plot, madness, and the indecisions faced in the original play as Dane tries to figure out whom he can trust, but also focuses on the lines between life and death. Ophelia’s mother, Morgen Bishop, has drowned herself and attempted to drown Ophelia with her. Hamlet V was able to revive

Ophelia, but she “died” for a short while. Polonius hospitalized Ophelia, a time she only refers to as “the cold place.” Ophelia suffers from mental illness, according to her father, who medicates her effectively so she will not see fairies and ghosts. This, and Dane’s decline into what seems to be bipolar disorder, plays a role in this adaptation as well.

This adaptation brings the question of madness to the forefront; while madness is a theme in Hamlet, Hutchison’s adaptation digs more deeply into Ophelia’s condition than the

Shakespeare version. Ophelia’s observations convey the majority of this story. By shifting the focus to the female character, Hutchison appeals to a teen audience that is largely more female than male. The shift to the female perspective also frames the story

76

in a softer sense. Even though there is still violence in the story, as there is in the play, switching the point of view to Ophelia distances the reader from the graphic element of the violence, which in Shakespeare’s play is committed by the male characters.

The book opens after the groundskeeper, Jack, has discovered the body of

Headmaster Danemark in his favorite spot in the gardens. “The Headmaster will be buried today, and the bean sidhe keen,” Ophelia observes (1). Bean Sidhe is a term used often in this text, and is an Irish Gaelic term referring to spirits more commonly referred to as “banshees.” They mourn the dead, and Ophelia can see and hear them, especially if she neglects to take her medications. Ophelia’s awareness of the supernatural, introduced in this adaptation, lends an additional touch of the fantastic to the story. But her ability also sets up Ophelia’s prison of sorts – both Polonius and Laertes check up on her regularly, making sure she’s medicated.

Every Saturday, Father splits the pills into different days so I can’t forget the little

round blue, the oblong yellow, the tiny white and the horse-pill white, and all but

seven days each month the pink oval like a Tic Tac. Every day the pills, every

week the accounting with Father to reassure him I’ve taken them all. (2)

Ophelia’s self-perception is one of invisibility, though she is spied upon by her male relatives: “Sometimes I wonder if they really did revive me all those years ago or if I’m just a ghost, a trick of shadows and light that both Father and Laertes think they see” (4).

Ophelia also resents Laertes playing the part of a parental figure with her: “He will drink and smoke and take girls to his room, but he won’t let himself think even for a minute that little Ophelia can make her own choices and decide who she wants to be with or that she wants to be with someone” (40). This is a double-standard commonly seen between

77

boys and girls – in the real world as well as in literature – and a complaint to which teen readers will relate.

One person Ophelia believes genuinely sees her is Dane. Her saving grace is the time she spends in his company. As she joins him to attend his father’s funeral, “[h]e gropes for my hand and squeezes it too tightly, but I let him. I can accept the small pains if they will help him bear this greater one” (8). Hutchison paints the relationship between

Ophelia and Dane as somewhat abusive; Ophelia is a victim, but she endures this treatment to prevent Dane from having to deal with his pain, to her own detriment.

Ophelia believes this is her place in the love she shares with Dane, a love that is mostly kept secret. The only one who really knows about the relationship is Horatio, Dane’s best friend, and in this text, Ophelia’s close friend as well. Both Ophelia and Dane often reference Horatio’s goodness. “Sometimes I think Horatio is the best of us, and I never feel disloyal for it. Sometimes, love is naming the faults so they can’t be forgotten,”

Ophelia observes (10).

It is Ophelia who first makes note of the oddity of the closeness of Claudius with his sister-in-law, Gertrude. In the receiving line at Hamlet’s funeral, she notices:

It’s natural and right for him to be in this line of condolence, but he takes a

strange place in it. Dane said his uncle had already made his bid to become

Headmaster, but he acts as though it already is his. His gestures and words take

on a proprietary air, not just in the way he greets the guests but in the hand at

Gertrude’s back, the way his thumb rubs small circles into the layered silk and

linen. (21)

78

At this point, suspicion has not fallen on Claudius. The staff and families of Elsinore

Academy seem to take it for granted that the Headmaster died from a heart attack, and

Gertrude hasn’t allowed an autopsy to determine any differently.

Dane leans very heavily on Ophelia to get through the loss of his father, another deviation from Shakespeare’s play. After the funeral, the teens escape to Hamlet’s grave to mourn in their own way, with drinks and cigarettes. Dane keeps Ophelia close, which

Laertes resents. He tries to send Ophelia back to the house, but Dane refuses to let her go and sends Laertes to tell Polonius where they are so he doesn’t worry. Having once

“died” herself, Ophelia knows that “Fear is only ever for the living, and Dane bears enough fear for us both, so I will be his bravery. I’ll be whatever he needs me to be. I promise” (42). But Ophelia’s promises may not be ones she can keep. A week after the

Headmaster’s death, Dane asks Ophelia to wear his class ring, telling her, “You’re the one thing that’s real. The one thing that makes all of this real, that makes me feel real. I need you, Ophelia. I need to know you won’t walk away” (49). Their relationship is increasingly physical, an element not explored by Shakespeare in the original play.

In keeping with the adaptation’s fuller development of Ophelia, she is the character who looks into Hamlet’s death. When Ophelia accepts Dane’s ring and some breathless kisses as well, he wants to say goodnight to his father, so they visit Hamlet’s grave. This is when Ophelia first sees the Headmaster’s ghost. “The fledgling ghost is born from Hamlet’s grave. Hamlet is still here,” she is shocked to discover (51).

Knowing that ghosts are usually present when death is unnatural, Ophelia ends up turning to her friend, Jack the groundskeeper, for advice. He doesn’t know she sees ghosts but does have a fondness for her, as he did for her mother. Jack, who has been a part of

79

Elsinore for a long time, provides some insight for Ophelia to ponder. He gives her a syringe of what appears to be poison that he discovers not far from the site of the

Headmaster’s death. It’s circumstantial at best, but the fact that Claudius is the first to arrive on scene makes Ophelia wonder if there is something more to the circumstances.

“What could make a man kill his own brother?” she asks.

“Why did Cain kill Abel?”

“He was jealous.”

“Been here a long time, Miss Ophelia,” Jack tells Ophelia, “I remember those

boys at school. Never a thing the elder had the younger didn’t want, never a

privilege or an honor earned by the elder that the younger didn’t expect a share

in.” (57)

Now Ophelia is torn – is her loyalty to the Headmaster, or to Dane? “To whom do we owe the greater debt,” she muses, “the living or the dead?” (59) This is a recurrent question and theme in Hamlet and is re-emphasized in this adaptation. Loyalty is also put into question when we look at the relationships of the young people in both the adaptation and the play. The older generation, living and dead, manipulates the younger to obey their will. The younger generation wants to obey, because of familial love and loyalty, even when obeying their elders is to their own detriment. Hutchison draws a strong parallel with Ophelia and Dane here. Ophelia’s conflict is to be loyal to her dead mother or to her living father, while Dane’s loyalty is torn between his dead father and living mother. To a YA audience, where many teens come from broken homes, deciding with which parent to align loyalty with can be a relatable struggle.

80

Ophelia must decide to what extent her love and loyalty extends to Dane, who struggles with his father’s death. As Dane becomes increasingly angry, it becomes more evident that Ophelia is the only one Dane trusts. It is at a celebratory dinner, orchestrated by Claudius, including the Danemarks and the Castellan families, that Claudius incites

Dane’s bitter rage toward both him and Gertrude. Not only does Claudius announce his appointment as Headmaster at Elsinore, he also announces his engagement to Gertrude.

Dane explodes. “So it’s not enough that you take his position in the school; now you must take his position in bed? Father’s been dead barely a month! What the hell is wrong with you?” he addresses Gertrude, “Barely in the ground, but you need to replace him? Christ, and with his brother?” (69). Ophelia is sent after him when he rushes from the restaurant, as both Gertrude and Polonius believe she can calm him. Instead, he puts her on the back of his motorcycle and races back to campus. He takes them to the edge of the lake in which her mother drowned and becomes violent with Ophelia, acts that she takes because she loves him. He apologizes when he sees the marks on her arms from his slamming her bodily into a tree, hating himself more for hurting her. Dane leaves her alone, and the ghost of Ophelia’s mother comes to talk to her. The ghost resides at the lake where she drowned, waiting for Ophelia to join her. This becomes a recurrent event in the text, as her mother continually tries to convince Ophelia that she would be better off accompanying her in the ghostly realm.

Because this story is told through Ophelia’s point of view, with her commentary on events, it reveals things that others don’t see or overlook. The wedding plans continue, and Ophelia observes, “Whatever progress Dane had made in recovering from his father’s death is gone now, shattered in the face of his mother’s betrayal” (79). Dane

81

takes his mother’s remarriage personally, an affront not only to him but to his dead father. At the wedding, Ophelia sees “a blue-white flicker in the window slowly resolves into a face as the evening turns to night. A dignified face, full of strength and pride and love. And sorrow. An infinite, nameless sorrow. Hamlet is here to watch his wife and brother marry” (88). Because her family would accuse her of not taking her pills if she admitted to seeing ghosts, this is a secret Ophelia must keep. And this secret worsens, when she watches the ghost return to his grave and sees something odd even for ghosts:

“A second blue-white shadow coalesces into an identical form, but where its twin is sorrow, this one is rage. […] As if he can hear me the ghost on the headstone gives a slow, sad smile and solemn nod. The other throws back his head and give a feral, silent scream that contorts his face, making his fisted hands shake. And even though the lake is out of sight, I can hear my mother laughing” (89). The manifestation of the double ghost that only Ophelia can see is the end of Part I of the novel. Again, her perspective is the most complete of the novel’s characters.

To add greater emphasis on Ophelia, Hutchison alters Shakespeare’s play so that

Gertrude is very fond of Ophelia, and takes her shopping each year before school starts.

This year, she tells Ophelia about her courtships with both Hamlet and Claudius. Ophelia is dismayed when Gertrude confesses how she chose between the brothers: “I finally decided I would marry the one who asked me first” (103). Ophelia often observes that

Gertrude doesn’t seem very bright. However, Gertrude does offer a bit of insight on love.

She says, “Things are never as terrifying as when love is involved. What we do for love .

. . it can be wonderful, the best of all that a man has to offer. But sometimes . . . sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes what we see is far from the best it can be” (106). While

82

Gertrude seems to be talking to herself, it is also meant for Ophelia. For in truth, the love affair she is carrying on with Dane is terrifying.

Ophelia’s isolation is in danger of increasing as Part II opens. Dane, Laertes, and

Horatio put in applications for a semester study abroad program. This dismays Ophelia:

“They’re all leaving, or trying to leave. They all want to walk away. I stay and I stay and

I never walk away and I watch everyone else walk away from me” (111). Claudius approves Laertes’s and Horatio’s requests; however, because he thinks Gertrude still needs her son around in the wake of the loss of her husband, he asks that Dane not leave them. Since Horatio was only going abroad to accompany Dane, he chooses not to go.

However, Laertes is off to France. Before he goes, he again tells Ophelia he doesn’t want her around Dane. And this time, he tells Polonius that she is acting improperly with

Dane, spending too much time alone with him. This is similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in that both Laertes and Polonius extract promises from Ophelia that she will not be alone with Dane anymore. Frustrated, Ophelia rants, “Dane asked for a promise. Laertes asked for a promise. Father asked for a promise. A promise is a rope around the neck” (136).

At this point, Ophelia is starting to feel torn in multiple directions: she suspects Claudius has a hand in the death of Hamlet, she’s seeing the ghosts and the bean sidhe more often, and she knows she cannot keep all the promises she’s made. Someone must be betrayed as the promises refute each other.

It is a turning point in the text when Horatio tells Dane that someone has seen a ghost resembling his father on campus; the two boys and Ophelia meet at midnight to see if the ghost appears. When it does, Dane is insistent that he go speak with it. Ophelia recognizes that the ghost with whom Dane speaks is the angry version of his father’s

83

ghost, and she overhears words like “revenge” as the two speak. This is again a departure from Shakespeare’s play. Because Ophelia provides the point of view, we have emphasis on her knowledge and superior understanding of the ghosts and supernatural world.

When Dane returns to his friends, he confesses he now knows what he must do and tells them, “Don’t be scared, either of you. I may act . . .I may . . . I’ll only be acting, I swear it, but you have to trust me. You can’t let them know it’s not real. Promise me” (147).

Ophelia, as the keen observer throughout the novel, understands Dane better than anyone.

She is concerned for him, knowing as she does which ghost with whom he spoke, but she also knows she must stand by him; he needs her.

Similar to Hamlet’s madness at court, Hutchison opens part three with Dane acting bizarrely: “the third day of classes, Dane swept through the halls in tights . . . [t]he next day he spoke entirely in German. [. . .] He’s had days where he can’t seem to stop talking and days where he hasn’t said a word” (156). Ophelia notes, “As long as he has an audience, he’s performing, even if the act is to appear normal. There’s a logic to his frenetic activity, a twisted course of thought that eludes me, even as I know it should be obvious. That it is an act I’m certain. He warned us, he swore it would all be acting”

(159). In Hamlet, Ophelia is not aware that Hamlet is acting; Hutchison gives her that knowledge. But even as he acts crazily in sight of others, nightly he comes to Ophelia.

She never knows if the gentle, loving Dane will visit or the Dane who causes her physical pain. “Dane isn’t dead, but he’s splintered as well, fractured and shattered into so many different pieces that I never know which of them I’ll see” (175). As a result of this crazy behavior, Claudius and Gertrude bring in “the Toms” – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Just as Polonius sends Reynaldo to Paris to try to find out what Laertes is up to, Claudius

84

and Gertrude are hopeful that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can bring them news about what is causing Dane to act so insanely. Claudius says, “I would ask that you stay with us a while .. . and put your energies to spending time with him, to discovering just what afflicts him so we may find the cure” (182). But Ophelia knows the truth – that his madness is a sham. And she knows why: “what I’ve finally begun to understand is that madness allows for an appalling honesty” (190). She knows that this is Dane’s plan. If he can convince the others of his madness, he can spill the truth and wound them with his words. She fears, though, that Claudius will not let him get that far.

Part four brings much of the original play into the book. As in the play, Polonius and Claudius use Ophelia as a pawn to get Dane to confess that perhaps his love for

Ophelia is why he’s acting so crazy. But instead, he denies his love for her, and rather than send her to a nunnery, Dane tells her: “Away to a woman’s college, Ophelia. It is the only place for beauty and uselessness to go hand in hand” (218). Dane stages the play to implicate Claudius in his father’s murder in this part of the novel as well, and successfully. When the actors mime the death of Hamlet at Claudius’s hand, Claudius becomes flustered and leaves the room. Gertrude requests Dane’s presence in her rooms, where Polonius is hiding behind the curtains to eavesdrop. Thinking it is Claudius, Dane shoots and kills Polonius. He hides the body to give himself time to go to Ophelia one last time, then he is gone.

With her father dead, and Laertes on a path to get revenge, Ophelia finds herself pulled more and more to her mother’s ghost and her own madness. With Polonius gone and Laertes bent on making Dane pay, no one is making Ophelia take her pills, so she hasn’t taken them. Dane sends Ophelia a letter, telling her he is fine, he has been with

85

Reggie Fortin at Monticello Academy. He tells her he will be returning soon to enact his revenge on Claudius. Dane also tells her to go to Monticello, that Reggie will make a place for her, and that it would be in her best interest. But when Ophelia overhears

Claudius and Laertes plotting to ensure Dane will die at Laertes’s hand, she can take no more. Especially when Claudius proposes that she, Ophelia, be offered as a prize to convince Dane to have a boxing match with Laertes (who is a boxing champion).

Ophelia makes her decision. With the realization that it is now inevitable that Dane will die, Laertes will die, and Horatio will be shattered at the loss of Dane, Ophelia loses all hope. She retrieves her mother’s wedding dress from storage, puts it on, and makes her way to the lake to finally join her mother.

“Welcome home, Ophelia,” murmurs my mother, and water soaks through a

million secrets and carries me deeper into the darkness, but there, in the distance,

thousands of candles burn, candles in windows and streets and the hands of

women who laugh and dance and play and left fear and grief far behind.

Sound rushes to my head, a throbbing, panicked beat, an iron band across

my chest, but Mama takes my hand and leads me closer to the lights that flicker

and weave, and the sound bursts with a great cry.

The rest is silence. (310-311)

And so, A Wounded Name: A Tragedy earns its name. Hutchison, in her adaptation, has woven most of the original play’s plot into her book. She has only downplayed the threat of takeover by Reggie Fortin, who is not trying to take over Elsinore, but is instead trying to encourage them to move their curriculum into a more modern direction. He plays a very small part in Hutchison’s book. The development of Ophelia and Horatio as

86

characters in this text is also a departure from Shakespeare’s original work. Both characters become more meaningful in this adaptation, emphasizing that Dane has a place to turn when his family betrays him. It raises the question of who one’s true family is – is it necessarily blood, or those that we can count on in times of trouble? Being able to turn to friends for support when family lets you down is appealing to the audience Hutchison reaches.

As with the other plays, the Hamlet adaptation authors made choices about which parts of the play to leave in and which parts to leave out. The political aspects of the play are missing in both A Wounded Name and A Girl, A Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills, though Something Rotten puts an environmental issue in to politicize the text. All three authors slant their adaptations to appeal to a teen audience by bringing issues to the forefront that teens would relate to. Parental pressure is a key element here, as is a split loyalty. In the case of the characters in the novels, it’s whether to be loyal to a dead parent or a live one; in the case of many teens who may come from broken homes, they might be forced to choose loyalty to one parent or the other. All the adaptations also address drugs and mental illness. While Shakespeare’s tragedies include multiple deaths, these adaptations minimized murders outside of the parental murder that kicks off the play and its adaptations. The only text that does not give the characters the opportunity for a happy ending is A Wounded Name, in which Ophelia does meet a watery grave.

Gratz and Zindel stand by the desire for a YA novel to have a happy ending, and as such, their adaptations give hope to the Hamlet characters and the potential for healing.

Hutchison adheres much more closely to Shakespeare’s play, and uses Ophelia’s weariness with the events of her own life to allow her to drift away and join her mother in

87

death. This is the only one of the adaptations that includes Ophelia’s suicide. By including the suicide, Hutchison shows the devastating effects of isolation and mental illness. Instead of reaching out for help, Ophelia gives in to her illness.

88

CHAPTER 4: PRACTICAL CLASSROOM APPLICATION

In the introduction to her text, Reading Shakespeare with Young Readers, English teacher Mary Ellen Dakin asks, “Why should we read Shakespeare, again and again, with young adults in classrooms across the country? And if we can agree upon some answers to that question, the corollary ensues – How?” (viii). Shakespeare is part of the literary canon that appears in high school curricula across multiple grade levels as required reading. Dakin acknowledges the challenge faced by contemporary high school students:

“It would be false to assert that Shakespeare is easy reading. He is a writer of rare complexity” (25). So, if Shakespeare is so challenging, and thus potentially off-putting to student readers, why are we forcing them to read him, not only once, but multiple times before they graduate? In From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges between Young Adult

Literature and the Classics, Sarah K. Herz suggests that starting with complementary

Young Adult novels may help:

For students who are not ready or who cannot yet respond to Shakespeare,

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James, Wharton, Miller, and other authors of demanding

literature, there is a body of quality YAL (Young Adult Literature) that invites

them to become confident readers, responding readers, and makers of meaning.

(22)

The studied adaptations serve to give teens an introduction to some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays by putting them into both language and a contextual frame they are more likely to understand. Utilizing YA adaptations in the classroom can open eyes to

89

Shakespeare that were formerly shut tight. Herz acknowledges, however, that YA is not easily defined. “There is no agreed upon literal definition of YAL. Some have defined it as any kind of literature read voluntarily by teenagers; others delineate it as books with teenage protagonists, or books written for a teenage audience” (11). As a member of the

Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, I have often heard YA defined in these terms, as well as defined as stories that address problems the typical teenager faces.

This is what makes the novels attractive to a teenage audience. While many of the secondary texts discuss companion texts, they rarely focus on adaptive texts. Instead, they seek to compare the plays with novels that have similar themes, rather than stories that have deliberately used Shakespeare’s plays as models for their own novels.

However, we can look briefly at how some teachers are using companion texts to teach

Shakespeare. (The appendix provides an annotated bibliography of all the primary sources cited in this paper, as well as other Shakespeare adaptations read, but ultimately not included, for this thesis.)

Arthea J. S. Reed says in her essay, “Using Young Adult Literature to Modernize the Teaching of Romeo and Juliet”:

Romeo and Juliet is frequently the first Shakespeare play taught in the high school

curriculum. It is an excellent choice for introducing teenagers to Shakespeare

because they can relate to its plot, characters, and themes. […] The themes are as

current as they were in Shakespeare’s time: parent-child conflict, teenage love,

friendship and peer pressure, and suicide. (93)

While Reed observes in her essay that Romeo and Juliet is an easily accessible play for teens, she also addresses the difficulties some students may have in comprehending it.

90

Professor Joan F. Kaywell of the University of South Florida, the editor of the anthology

Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the Classics, has been a staunch supporter of using contemporary works aimed at teenagers as companions to the canonical classics for almost a quarter of a century. Reed’s essay appears in Volume One of the anthology series, and she says:

By using contemporary young adult literature along with Shakespeare’s Romeo

and Juliet, students can better understand the play. In addition, they can examine

how contemporary writers use characters to carry the plot’s action and utilize

language to develop characters and themes. They can also begin to understand

the universality of great literature as they discover the classical themes of tragedy

in contemporary young adult fiction. (93)

Reed is specifically discussing complementary texts, rather than adaptive texts. As shown in the thesis, many of the adaptive texts do not allow students to, as Reed states,

“discover the classical themes of tragedy,” as they alter the endings to support a more optimistic point of view. However, the strategies Reed offers to accompany companion texts can also be used on adaptive works. Reed goes on to suggest strategies and methods to align texts with the play during pre-reading, while reading, and after reading of the text. In the pre-reading phase, Reed suggests introducing the plot and the themes by having them read YA texts that have a similar “teenage lovers from around the world” plot or a theme relative to the themes presented in Shakespeare’s play (94). Some of her during-reading activities include comparing the YA novel to the play as the class reads the play, or keeping a diary of a character from the YA novel and one of the characters from Romeo and Juliet. These activities allow students to analyze how the contemporary

91

novel compares to Shakespeare, and may give them a deeper understanding of the play.

Part of the problem, Dakin notes, is the language barrier students face: “Shakespeare’s characters are as rich and complex as the language they speak, but too many students lack a personal vocabulary equal to the task of describing and analyzing such complexity”

(26).

Dakin chooses to focus on strategies to teach the plays more or less in isolation, but by incorporating adaptations in the curriculum, teachers can first infuse the students with interest in the plots and characters before revealing that the author took inspiration from the various plays. In his book, Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in

Secondary School, author Robert E. Probst makes note of the difference in terminology and the connotation we attach to it. He notes that “Literature” and “Fiction” are different sections in the bookstore, and observes:

“Fiction” is what you want to read. It’s what you pick up at the airport bookstore

before a long flight, what you buy to take with you to the beach. […] “Literature,”

on the other hand, is what you want to have read, but you don’t particularly want

to read it tonight. You want it to become part of your past without ever burdening

your present. (2-3)

As a reader and a teacher, this quote resonates greatly. In my classroom, I often hear students complain about having to read “boring” text. The textbooks provide recommended stories and novels, and we build curriculum around textbooks. What if we, as teachers, align our required curriculum of “literature” with “fiction” that students might find more pleasurable? As Probst further points out:

92

Students . . . bring with them experiences, interests, and a lengthy agenda of ideas,

problems, worries, and attitudes, all of which concern and preoccupy them. If

literature is enjoyable or it touches upon some of those preoccupations, then

students will have a reason to read. (29-30)

Contemporary YA adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, then, may provide that connection. As contemporary authors bring contemporary problems to the models of

Shakespeare’s characters, a student may be more likely to find resonance with the contemporary character. For example, in teaching Romiette and Julio in preparation for

Romeo and Juliet, the students meet teenagers like themselves, who are involved in an inter-racial relationship of which the local gang members do not approve. This is likely a more relatable plot to start with, rather than two feuding families who would kill each other rather than allow their teen children to marry. Presenting Hamlet or Macbeth by first introducing Something Rotten or Something Wicked will allow students to make connections with the characters on a contemporary level before meeting them as portrayed by Shakespeare.

The ideal incorporation of the adaptation is reading it in its entirety prior to its

Shakespearean companion. One of the most tried-and-true elements of the high school

English curriculum is the compare-and-contrast essay. Pairing a YA adaptation with its model play allows for a final assessment demonstrating how the YA author’s work compared to Shakespeare’s play. Based on a teacher-chosen rubric, students can focus on character development, setting, plot, or theme, and analyze each text individually and compared to its partner text. The essay can be an assessment tool; students must

93

demonstrate rigor in writing an essay such as this in comparison with a multiple-choice test.

Not every teacher will have the flexibility to teach a companion novel when teaching Shakespeare within a required English curriculum. It is possible to utilize the novels as projects attached to the study of the companion play. A strategy that has worked in my own classroom (though I have not used it for adaptations, it can absolutely be used that way) is the Literature Circle. The basic concept of a Literature Circle is to assign the same novel to a small group of students. In a sophomore class, for example,

Macbeth may be required reading. Break students up into three groups and assign a

Macbeth adaptation to each group (see Chapter 2 or the Appendix). There are multiple approaches to Literature Circles, but in general, each person in the group has a role to play. In Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults, Dakin presents roles such as

Questioner, Clarifier, Summarizer, Predictor, and Connector (106-110). When I use

Literature Circles, the groups meet the first week, select their roles, and determine how many pages they plan to read that week. Each weekly meeting then results in a discussion of the reading with each participant playing their role. I ask students to then rotate roles for the next week, so that each student experiences all the possible roles in a group. At the end, I have the students create a book talk or other project to present their book to the rest of the class. This way, only one class period a week is impacted by the additional text, students are reading at home, and at the end of the unit, students learn about multiple texts that look at the same play in diverse ways.

It is not necessary, either (though I believe, preferable), to teach the entire adaptation if the curriculum map does not allow the time for it. Teachers can choose

94

sections of the adaptive texts to have students read alongside the Shakespeare play’s comparative scenes, when applicable. For example, sharing with students the opening chapter of As I Descended, when Maria, Lily and Brandon use the Ouija board, alongside the scene in Macbeth when Macbeth and Banquo encounter the Weird Sisters for the first time can be a useful classroom tool. Students can analyze the modern adaptation as compared to the original. This can be done in classroom discussion, Socratic seminar, or in a written assignment at teacher discretion.

As teachers struggle in classrooms to engage student readers, I would encourage teachers to open their minds to incorporating YA literature in the teaching of the classics, especially when teaching Shakespeare. Henz says, “There is clearly a distinct body of literature written specifically for young adults and being read by them” (11). We would be foolish as instructors to ignore what the students want to read. As Probst says,

“Treating literature as experience, rather than simply as meaning-bearing text, requires us at least to reassess the nature of interpretation” (27). Every year in classrooms across the

United States teachers tell students how Shakespeare should be read; by utilizing contemporary adaptations in the classroom, teachers can bring more students to an understanding of what Shakespeare is all about.

95

APPENDIX

Annotated Bibliography (Primary Sources)

Romeo and Juliet

Draper, Sharon M. Romiette and Julio. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1999.

Romiette Cappelle meets Julio Montague and sparks fly. Romiette is African-

American, Julio is Hispanic, and the local gang, the Devildogs, doesn’t approve of

their interracial relationship. The Devildogs threaten them, and the two have to

figure out how to avoid the fate of their Shakespearean namesakes.

Jay, Stacey. Juliet Immortal: a novel. Ember, 2012. In this text, the author presents

Romeo and Juliet as time-travelers, each with a cosmic job to perform. Juliet’s

job is to save soulmates from being separated by death, while Romeo’s quest is to

force one of the soulmate pair to kill the other. This is a result of a curse placed

on Romeo. The story is told from Juliet’s perspective.

Selfors, Suzanne. Saving Juliet. Walker, 2009. Mimi Wallingford is from a family of

actors, who run a theater that only produces Shakespeare’s plays. Mimi would

rather become a doctor than an actress, but her mother is pressuring her to

continue the family legacy. During a production of Romeo and Juliet, Mimi and

her co-star time-travel back to Verona during the time of Romeo and Juliet, where

Mimi meets Juliet and learns that the insipid teenager she thought Juliet was is not

really who she is. Can Mimi save Juliet from her fated death, and save herself

from having to follow in the family footsteps?

96

Serle, Rebecca. When You Were Mine. Simon Pulse, 2012. This book adapts Romeo and

Juliet from Roasline's point of view. Rosaline and “Rob” (Romeo) are next-

door-neighbors who are meant to be together, until Rosaline’s cousin Juliet comes

back home and steals Rob away from her.

Macbeth

Askew, Kim, and Amy Helmes. Exposure. Merit Press, 2012. In Alaska, Skye Kingston

has had a crush on Craig MacKenzie for as long as she could remember. But

they’re best friends, and Craig is dating mean girl Beth. Beth aspires to be Prom

Queen with Craig at her side, and will do anything to accomplish her goal. This

loose adaptation looks at Macbeth through the eyes of Skye, the Banquo

character.

Cooney, Caroline B. Enter Three Witches: A Story of Macbeth. Thorndike Press, 2007.

Rather than focus on a modern twist on Shakespeare’s play, this text instead looks

at Macbeth through the eyes of teenage characters in the actual time period in

which the play takes place.

Gratz, Alan. Something Wicked. Puffin Books, 2008. Horatio Wilkes, the main character

in Something Rotten, is back with another mystery to solve. At the Scottish

Highland Games in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Horatio’s friend Mac must prove

his worthiness to his father. Through a fortune teller’s prophecy, he and his

girlfriend Beth orchestrate plans for Mac to win the games and own the mountain.

This humorous adaptation downplays much of the death and madness of the

original play but still manages to tell the story of Macbeth.

97

Talley, Robin. As I Descended. HarperTeen, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers,

2016. Set in a boarding school where Maria and Lily are roommates/lovers, a

séance in the beginning of the book leads Maria to believe that she will take a

prestigious scholarship (the Cawdor Kingsley) away from the reigning “queen” of

their school. Instead of three witches, this adaptation uses ghosts and the

presumption that the campus is haunted to drive Maria and Lily into madness.

Lily represents Lady Macbeth and Maria Macbeth himself. This very intriguing

adaptation that brings the play’s elements into the novel. The book is divided into

acts, and uses actual quotations from the play as chapter titles. The overriding

theme of the text taken from the play is the desire for power driving one insane.

Hamlet

Gratz, Alan. Something Rotten. Speak, 2007. Something is rotten in Denmark, Tennessee.

The story is told through the viewpoint of Horatio Wilkes, friend to Hamilton

Prince (Hamlet), whose father Rex has been murdered (though everyone thinks he

died of cancer). Prime suspect: Hamilton’s uncle, Claude, who is now married to

Hamilton’s mom, Trudy. Another suspect is Hamilton’s ex, Olivia, who is

protesting against the paper plant owned by the Princes, which is contaminating

the local river. This book keeps much of the Hamlet plot and characters, while

modernizing it into a mystery to be solved by Horatio Wilkes.

Hutchison, Dot. A Wounded Name: A Tragedy. Carolrhoda Lab, 2013. This novel adapts

Hamlet, from Ophelia's point of view. The text takes place at modern-day

Elsinore Academy, a school run for generations by the Danemarks. Headmaster

Hamlet is found dead at the beginning of the book, as the ghost of the dead King

98

is sighted at the beginning of the play. Hutchison uses much of the play’s

plotlines as the foundation of the text while still building Ophelia up into a

stronger character than she is in the play. Hamlet (known as “Dane” in the book

to distinguish him from the father for whom he was named) is disgusted when

after his father’s death, his mother marries his uncle. The ghost informs Dane that

he must take revenge. Laertes runs off to France, and Polonius is killed by Dane

during the confrontation in his mother’s room. The focus on Ophelia frames

teenage rebellion. Ophelia’s mother died, trying to drown Ophelia with her, and

still wants Ophelia to come to the fae world of the City of Ys beneath the lake.

While Ophelia fights her ghost mother’s wishes, she also fights her father’s

wishes. Polonius would keep her drugged so she does not experience the faerie

world. Besides seeing ghosts, Ophelia also sees bean sidhe – a type of faerie.

Dane, too, fights his parental wishes. They want him to accept his father’s death

and move on with stepfather/uncle and mom. Hutchison keeps the naming

conventions and many of the characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have an

appearance, as does longtime Hamlet companion Horatio, who in this reimagining

is also very good friends with Ophelia and gay, in love with Hamlet as well.

Hutchison also ties in an abusive boyfriend storyline here. Dane vents his anger

often with Ophelia, leaving bruises on her for which he always apologizes, but

she does not stop him from hurting her.

Winters, Cat. The Steep and Thorny Way. Amulet Books, 2016. Set in Oregon during the

1920s, the novel’s main character, Hanalee, is the Hamlet figure; her mother has

remarried her “uncle” Dr. Koenig after the death of her black father (Hanalee is

99

mulatto). There are characters loosely based on Laertes and Ophelia (the brother

and sister pair), and the naming conventions – “Hanalee” and “Hamlet,” “Greta”

and “Gertrude,” “Clyde” and “Claudius.” Thematically, the book leans on

Hamlet – Hanalee’s father was murdered, and the accused, who is released from

prison on good behavior, tells Hanalee her stepfather was the actual murderer.

Zindel, Lizabeth. A Girl, a Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills. Viking, 2010. Gender-

swapping with a female Hamlet, male Gertrude, and female Claudius. In this

adaptation, Holly’s mother has died of an apparent suicide. When Holly finally

returns home for winter break (she goes to boarding school in Connecticut), it is

to the news that her father, Gardner, and her mother’s sister, her aunt Claudia, are

dating. Holly resents this relationship and believes her mother’s ghost comes to

her to tell her she was poisoned by Claudia, inciting the revenge plot. Polonius

and Ophelia are represented by Claudia’s personal assistant Patty and her son

Oliver. Though Laertes is represented by Oliver’s sister Lara, she doesn’t play a

large role in this retelling.

Much Ado About Nothing

Anderson, Lily. The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You. St. Martin’s Press, 2016. This

adaptation takes place primarily at the “Messina Academy for the Gifted,” where

the main character, Beatrice “Trixie” Watson, has been in a ranking war with Ben

West. Her best friend, Harper, and Harper’s love interest, Cornell (who is also

enamored of Harper but too shy to do anything about it) are first and second in the

class, so Trixie’s goal is to bump Ben out for third. A cheating scandal erupts in

the senior class, and eventually, Harper gets expelled. Trixie knows her best

100

friend would never cheat and now has to dig deep to find out the truth. Ben and

Trixie discover they actually might like each other.

Gehrman, Jody Elizabeth. Confessions of a Triple Shot Betty. Dial Books, 2008. Three

girls – Geena, her best friend Amber, and her cousin Hero – work a local coffee

shop during the summer. Geena wants Amber and Hero to get along so that they

can all hang out together. But Amber and Hero take an immediate dislike to each

other. Rich boy John takes a shine to Hero, but Amber is in love with John.

Hero’s not interested; she’s fond of exchange student Claudio. And then there’s

Ben, Geena’s nemesis . . . or is he? Plot ensues to make Geena think Ben likes

her and vice versa, but when a picture surfaces of Hero supposedly naked in

John’s bed, Geena has to find out the truth. But will Ben side with her, or his

friends?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Sutherland, Tui T. This Must Be Love. Harper Collins , 2004. This loose adaptation is

broken down into Acts, with some of the character names directly lifted from

Midsummer. The story is told in a combination of text messages, e-mails, and

some narrative/dialogue. The novel brings the magical element in through a

group of players that the foursome (Hermia, Helena, Dmitri, and Alex) end up

going to see perform (and get dragged into the performance).

Twelfth Night

Gehrman, Jody. Babe in Boyland. Dial Books, 2011. A teenage girl, Natalie, adopts a

male identity to infiltrate another school to discover how boys think after being

ridiculed for her answers in her newspaper’s advice column. This loose

101

adaptation mentions Shakespeare and Natalie portraying Portia in The Merchant

of Venice.

The Winter’s Tale

Johnston, E.K. Exit, Pursued By a Bear. Dutton Books, 2016. In this loose adaptation, a

cheerleader becomes impregnated by rape at cheer camp. Her boyfriend “Leo”

(Leontes) is very jealous and assumes she is cheating on him when she is raped.

King Lear

Lockhart, E. We Were Liars. Delacorte Press, 2014. The book is told from the perspective

of Cadence, the grandchild of Harris Sinclair, who has three daughters, Penelope,

Carrie, and Bess, whom Sinclair pits one against the other regarding their

inheritances and who will reap the most from him upon his death. While this is

not a true “retelling” of Lear, Lockhart mentions the text in the book. Cadence

gives away a copy of King Lear in her quest to rid herself of her possessions. The

parallel to Lear is in the madness of the King. The aunts and Cadence’s mother

often make reference to the fact that Harris is no longer in his right mind

following his wife’s death and there is a tragedy that is not fully revealed until the

end of the book: that Cadence, her cousins Mirren and Johnny, and the love of her

life, Gat, set a fire to the main house in which Harris lives (no one is on island at

the time but them and two golden retrievers), inadvertently causing the deaths of

all but Cadence. Carrie, Bess, and Penelope represent Regan, Goneril, and

Cordelia, and Lockhart effectively weaves that Shakespearean thread throughout

the novel.

The Taming of the Shrew

102

Strohm, Stephanie Kate. The Taming of the Drew. Sky Pony Press, 2016. While at

Shakespeare Theater camp, a group of girls adopt strategies from “The Taming of

the Shrew” to bring one of their fellow actors down a peg. The main character

falls for the actor in the process. Clever use of Shakespeare both as part of the

story (the kids are at theater camp putting on a production of Shrew) and use of

themes/plot in the main storyline.

The Tempest

Askew, Kim, and Amy Helmes. Tempestuous. Merit Press, 2012. Miranda Prospero is a

rich teen who falls from grace in a cheating scandal that she genuinely had no part

in. Part of her punishment is repaying the money she earned through connecting

“nerds” with “jocks” for tutoring. So she is working at the mall hot dog stand

with a homeschooled co-worker, Ariel. This is a very loose adaptation. In the

book, Miranda and Caleb (Caliban) develop a love interest, which is not so in

Shakespeare’s play. The shipwreck is a blizzard that traps everyone in the mall

overnight. Miranda’s father is not present in the book except as a spoken-of

character. The other boat that wrecks and the shipwrecked people are represented

by Miranda’s former friends/schoolmates, who barricade themselves in another

part of the mall and protect their booty with BB guns. Pranks and mischief

abound, and there’s a subplot about a thief in the mall that turns out to be the

security guard.

103

WORKS CITED

Askew, Kim, and Amy Helmes. Exposure. Merit Press, 2012.

Dakin, Mary Ellen. Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults. National Council of

Teachers of English, 2009.

Draper, Sharon M. Romiette and Julio. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1999.

Gratz, Alan. Something Rotten. Speak, 2007.

---. Something Wicked. Puffin Books, 2008.

Herz, Sarah K, and Donald R Gallo. From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges between

Young Adult Literature and the Classics. 2nd ed. Greenwood Press, 2005.

Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O'Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2013.

Hutchison, Dot. A Wounded Name: A Tragedy. Carolrhoda Lab, 2013.

Jay, Stacey. Juliet Immortal: a novel. Ember, 2012.

Probst, Robert E. Response & Analysis: Teaching Literature in Secondary School.

Second ed. Heinemann, 2004.

Reed, Arthea J.S. “Using Young Adult Literature to Modernize the Teaching of Romeo

and Juliet.” Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the Classics, Edited by

Joan F. Kaywell, Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 1993, pp. 93–115.

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2016.

Selfors, Suzanne. Saving Juliet. Walker, 2009.

Serle, Rebecca. When You Were Mine. Simon Pulse, 2012.

104

Shakespeare, William. Complete Pelican Shakespeare. 2nd Revised ed., Penguin

Classics, 2002.

Talley, Robin. As I Descended. HarperTeen, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers,

2016.

Zindel, Lizabeth. A Girl, a Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills. Viking, 2010.

105