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