MY FIRST SNOW QUEEN

When I was eight, in the year 2000, my dad gave me an ad usum adaptation (without any blood or guts) of Andersen's most famous stories (The Firelighter, The Little Mermaid, The Christmas Tree, The Ugly Duckling, The Tin Soldier, The Princess and the Pea...), illustrated by Cathie Shuttleworth. The translation, however, was not faithful to Nicola Baxter's source text, but a more or less free retelling by a Swedish translator called Ingrid Warne.
At a whopping sixteen pages long (the length of the longest story she had read for an eight-year-old!), the ad usum Snow Queen in this compilation was, together with Norse myths starring Loki, shonen anime like One Piece, Genesis's Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, one of the works that shaped my tweenage years.
This article is my English translation from Warne's Swedish of the Snow Queen in that collection. Together with the Lev Atamanov film, which I saw for the first time at Club Super 3 around the same year, it was my childhood introduction to this tale.
This is my contribution for the International Day of Children's Literature 2018.


And thus, without further ado, I am proud to introduce:

THE SNOW QUEEN 

Translated from the Swedish child-friendly adaptation by Ingrid Warne

into English by Sandra Dermark

(With vintage illustrations by Elizabeth Ellender)

Story the Zeroth: Which Serves as an Introduction

Maybe the secret of Andersen stories is that they he writes as if he were speaking out loud. Through this orality, we can hear his voice between the lines, how he tells his tales to friends, to little children. Or maybe the secret lives in that his tales inform us about the world and the possible dangers that lie in wait for us, even though there is always a simple and reassuring happy-ever-after ending; conditio sine qua non for young readers.

In their original form, Andersen's tales are often very long and a little complicated when it comes to language; they can be incredibly sorrowful and sometimes even gory. Here, they have been retold and adapted with a careful hand. The gore and the tragedy have been toned down, and thus, these stories can also be told to, and read by, the youngest audiences.
Each and every time that a tale is told, little touches are added, according to the narrator's interpretation and the adaptation to a target audience. Nevertheless, these tales stay faithful to the content of the original source tales and preserve, still, all of their magic.


Story the First: Of a Shattered Mirror and the Shards Thereof

All right, let us begin, and, when this tale comes to an end, we shall know much more than we know already, for we have among our characters a real villain, the most evil one of them all! First, you ought to know a little about this wicked sorcerer and his mirror. This story begins with a maleficent looking-glass. In that mirror, everything turned hideous and frightening and twisted, no matter how beautiful or how pleasant it was in reality; and, if someone smiled at their own reflection, the only thing that could be seen was a sinister Cheshire-Cat grin. When people looked into the sorcerer's mirror, they said: "I have been such an idiot. Everything is horrible. Ewww, how ugly and how wretched everything is! It does not pay at all to be kind..."

One day, the mirror shattered. The shards flew over the whole wide world, scattered all over the Earth's atmosphere, and some of them were so small that they lodged in human eyes, where they warped the sight of their victims. But no one could even feel that they had got such a shard in one eye as it entered, since the shards were so tiny. All they could notice was that everything in the world around them had turned so hideous and filthy... 
Even worse was it when several sharp shards lodged within people's hearts, that instantly froze to ice. Nevermore could anyone feel any hope or joy or love.


Story the Second: Of a Young Boy and a Young Girl

In those days, there lived two children, each one in a garret, their windows opposite one another, high above their bustling street. In the meantime, they had been playing and tending to their plants most happily. They had the custom of waving at each other across the street; in both their townhouses, each and every floor jettied forwards, being wider than the one below, and the eaves of the rooftops nearly touched. Outside the windows of those two topmost floors, upon the sills, there were two large planter boxes, where, for three quarters of the year, roses bloomed and sweetpeas entwined, and, in springtime and summer, since their respective homes were so close to one another, the children frequently climbed over and across these boxes, like a suspended bridge, whenever the girl visited the boy's place or vice versa, or they played or made their homework together in their little garden, while the perfume of roses and peaseblossoms surrounded them. Her name was Gerda, and his name was Kai.
In winter, when it was time to shut the windows to keep the cold at bay, their parents took the planter boxes indoors, and thus, Gerda and Kai had to run down all the stairs, and then  and climb up all the stairs across the street, if one of them wanted to visit the other. Or they had to climb down all the stairs, each child on their side, and meet at the entrance to their townhouses. Sometimes, the snow whirled around the corners, and sometimes, little white snowflakes danced around. From the thresholds of the townhouses or through peepholes made by holding a warm coin to the frosted windowpanes, they watched the snowflakes that waltzed about like swarms of white frosty bees.

"You do know that there is a snow queen?" asked Gerda's old grandmamma. "There is a snow queen, just like there are queen bees, queen ants, queen wasps... Try to find the biggest snowflake of them all, for that flake is the Snow Queen. She is the largest flake of those that form a swirl in the snowstorm."
Grandmamma always told stories, and both children just loved to listen to them.

Later the same evening, when Kai was going to bed, he walked to the window and peered out. Right then, he saw a large snowflake that alighted upright upon the windowsill. As Kai stood there watching, his gaze transfixed, the flake began to grow into a most beautiful lady all dressed in white. Her icy blue eyes glittered like stars, and her whole self shone with a strange, cold light, just like ice.
Kai immediately understood that it was the Snow Queen. She was the loveliest sight he had ever seen, the most beautiful female in the world, but, when she waved at him, he was frightened by the piercing cold look in her eyes. He turned his back to the windows and curled up in his warm bed. Right as he pulled the cover over his head, for a second, it seemed to him that a dark shadow, winged and black, flew by outside, past the window.

The next day, when Kai was playing outdoors with Gerda as usual, he let out a loud scream of pain. "My heart is hurting so much..." he groaned, wincing and clutching the left side of his chest. "And my left eye as well. I felt like I got an eyelash inside. But now I'm all right..."
Little to nothing could Kai know about the fact that a tiny mirror shard had just lodged in his heart, that turned to ice, and another, a splinter, in one of his eyes.
"Does it hurt much?" asked little Gerda in a friendly tone.
"Don't stand there gawking and looking at me like that!" Kai sneered, seeing that she was concerned. "Besides, I don't want to play with you anymore. You are stupid, and you look hideous."
"But we were about to look at my new storybook... Shouldn't we?" asked an astonished Gerda.

"Storybooks are only for babies," Kai sneered, letting some snow fall on his coattails and letting Gerda see it through his magnifying glass. "Ice crystals, on the other hand, are completely perfect, as long as they don't melt. Now I'm off with the other guys, to the Market Square to sled." He brusquely turned his back to her and sledded down the street. It was not he himself who spoke, but the ice in his heart.
That day a thick layer of snow blanketed the marketplace. The local bad boys found a frequent thrill in lassoing some horse-drawn carriage as they sat upon their sleds. Thus, they would set off and be pulled along through the streets at breakneck speed! As Kai was now looking around for the perfect carriage to hitch a ride on, he saw a two-horse open sleigh, pulled by two beautiful white horses, in the middle of the Market Square. "That's the sleigh that shall pull me," Kai thought. And thus, he lassoed that carriage, lifted his arms to feel the momentum, and the sleigh set forth with such tremendous power, racing at the speed of a piercing gale, that Kai was pulled off his sled, and had to lift his arms and cling to the back of the seat, behind the white-clad driver.

Out of town the carriage drove, into the open countryside, and the snow whirled around Kai, who had been whisked away at breakneck speed, nearly flying. He began to feel really frightened, but he did not even dare to let go; the word "help" choked in his throat, and he could only recall the nine times table.  The snow kept on falling heavier and heavier, and the boy nearly could not see anything, as the carriage flew across snow-covered fields and hills. The snowfall had become so heavy around Kai that he froze in fear. In the end, the sleigh stopped in the open countryside and the driver, the figure in white who held the reins, stood up and turned around. Then, Kai saw that it was the Snow Queen, dressed in a white overcoat of what appeared to be polar bearskin, with a matching winter bonnet and muff.

"Are you cold, little Kai?" she asked him, stealing from him a kiss that quenched all his feelings and erased all his remembrance of the past. As she kissed him, everything turned dark and he felt the blood freeze in his veins, yet that malaise only lasted for an instant. "Come here, and sit here by my side and wrap my fur coat around you..." The Snow Queen was lovelier than ever before. Kai looked at her and found her even more beautiful; he felt no longer afraid when the sleigh picked up speed once more and literally flew forth over the sparkling snow, in the light of the full moon. High up in the sky twinkled the stars, and he watched them glisten upon the white carpet of snow.

Story the Third: Of the Flower Garden of a Witching Woman

But at home, little Gerda went about and mourned her playmate. Where could Kai have gone? All winter long, she had felt alone, and wondered where her only friend had to be. People said that he was most likely dead, having been missing for all winter long, but Gerda refused to believe something that dreadful. As soon as springtime came, she donned her brand new red shoes and went forth to look for her missing friend.
Soon, she was out in the countryside and she came to a wonderful orchard full of fruit treetops, where cherry trees stood in full bloom among the quaint little cottages. One of the doors opened, into one of those thatched cottages with red and blue stainglass windows, and there stood, stepping out onto the threshold, an old lady in a flowered straw hat. Her smile was so friendly that Gerda, elated to find a friendly face, could not resist telling her about her friend Kai, and how he had vanished without a trace.

"I have not seen him," the old lady said, "but most surely he will drop by around here, sooner or later. Why not stay here and wait for him?"

In fact, the old lady had, for a long long time, wished for a sweet little girl to call her own. Now, she fed Gerda with fruits from her orchard and let her play in the beautiful orchard and flowering garden all springtime and summer long, but she had taken the care to magically wish all the roses away; otherwise, the girl would sadly be seized with homesickness, and remember both her home and her quest, the old lady thought.

But she had forgotten the roses that decorated her hat! One lovely day, Gerda took a look at it and realised it all. "Oh, no!" she gasped. "It will soon be autumn, and I have wasted all the springtime and summer away. I forgot why I once ventured out into the wide world... It was to look for Kai! I have lost too much time..."
The autumn equinox had come and she had not found Kai yet.
And, without even donning her red shoes, without even waiting to put them on, she hastened away from the beautiful orchard. On she walked and walked.

Story the Fourth: Of the Prince and the Princess

,

Soon, her feet were sore, and she sat down for a rest. Then, a male crow swooped down in front of her and began to skip all around, pecking at the seeds on the ground.
Gerda asked the crow if he had seen Kai, but not without telling what she was doing there, or asking for advice, before that.
"Maybe I could have seen him," the crow began. "But he has forgotten you. All he can think of now is the princess. Ever since he was betrothed, he can only think of her."
"Does he live with a princess?" asked a concerned Gerda.
And thus, he began to explain. 

The princess of the kingdom where Gerda and the crow were at the moment was very clever and learned. When she had read all the books in the castle library, she decided to look for someone she could marry. But her husband should not be a twit at all! She had already read all the books in that country and now she wanted to find a husband. But she did not want him to be a twit or someone tiresome, and rather someone as intelligent as she, or even more.
The princess had an announcement, which she had written out herself, printed in the press, and, moreover, she had it copied out and affixed to the doors of every University in three kingdoms; and soon the castle courtyard, and the long staircase of the castle, were full of dashing young suitors, each and every one brighter than the other, who wanted to see her. So many fine gentlemen came to the palace! But when they at last stood before the princess, they were so impressed by her, by the golden throne she sat upon, and by the sumptuous decoration of the throne room that they could not even breathe a word. When they met her, they couldn't think of anything to say except echoing the last words she had uttered, and thus, knowing what to expect from these suitors, she was no longer interested in them, and sent them all away. One right after the other.
Sadly, when they stood before her, they felt their hearts taken away by the princess herself, her throne, and the sumptuous decoration, and lost their voices; and the princess had all those twits sent away from her presence.

"But, what about Kai?" Gerda lost her patience. She wanted to know the whole affair immediately.
One day, there came a boy in worn clothes who was neither afraid of the princess nor of her great fortune. This strapping young lad who was not afraid of anything charmed the princess, by speaking to her about all the things and everything that she was interested in, and that, during their lively conversation, turned out to be their common interests.
Well, he talked to the princess in such a friendly way, and she liked him so much, that he won her through his clever liveliness in the fateful test-interview, and now he is a prince consort.
"Of course it was Kai! He's so bright!" Gerda gasped. "Now I must get to the castle and try to reach him there. But how could we do it?"
"It's difficult. The princess's guards will send you away, for sure. I shall see what I can do," the crow promised before he flew away. 
In the evening, he returned: "My fiancée, the princess's pet crow who lives at the castle, will let us in through the back door. Allons-y! Make haste! And waste no time!"

Gerda hastened running towards the royal castle, where the fiancée crow really stood there waiting by the back door, that stood ajar. Right when Gerda was about to sneak up the spiral staircase, lantern in hand, some soldiers passed by on horseback. But both men and horses were merely like twilight shadows. "These are dreams," the crows explained. "The things that the sleepers within the castle are dreaming of."
In the end, Gerda found the royal bedchamber. There stood two beds; in one of them lay the princess, and in the other slept a young man, whose head of messy hair popped up from the covers. Gerda came closer and pulled the covers off the sleeping lad. Then, she saw that it was not Kai at all, but a young prince. It was not Kai! What a nightmare!
Gerda began to cry with such heart-rending sobs of disappointment that she woke up both the prince and the princess. At first, she thought they would get cross, but they felt sorry for the little maiden and decided to help her. They promised her, then gave her, new shoes (a fine pair of little booties) and a carriage with inlays of gold. Two footmen were to drive Gerda further on through her quest, so that she could resume the journey comfortably.

Story the Fifth: Of the Robber Maiden

But, Gerda's adventures had not come to an end. As they were driving through some thick, dark woods, and the carriage shone brightly as a star between the tall treetrunks, some bandits who lay in ambush in the underbrush attacked them, seized the frightened horses, knocked the coachman and footmen out, and took the golden carriage. The attack was so sudden, so brusque, that the brigands made Gerda fall off her seat. They had immediately realised that the carriage was worth a fortune.
Their leader, a muscular and fierce-looking woman, armed with the sharpest and longest knife that Gerda had ever seen, pulled the passenger out of the carriage. "Look at this beauty! What a feast, when we have her for supper ton-...Owwwch!"
A wild young girl about Gerda's age suddenly sauntered from among the ferns and bit the bandit leader in the left ear, keeping her from harming Gerda. "Leave her alone!" the maiden commanded.

Maybe they should have killed Gerda, if that young girl who was part of the robber band had not pleaded and nagged for her sake. Now, she was escorted instead to their den, a crumbling old ruin, in the company of her unexpected saviour, who had decided to whisk her away into the lair to play with her and show her around.

The robber maiden had a pet reindeer, that she rode into battle and wanted Gerda to say hello to. She had expected the robber maiden's fiery steed to be a pony or a little mule instead. The reindeer didn't appear to feel at home in the robbers' den, Gerda thought.
That night, she lay and listened to the owls who roosted and hooted high up there in the rafters above her head, while the adults sang loud songs and drank themselves into a stupor, and the robber maiden snored so loud that she could be heard throughout the ruined keep. And, quite unexpectedly, one of them softly said:
"We have seen Kai, hoot hoot! It was last winter, and he flew with the Snow Queen in her carriage!"

"They were surely heading towards Lapland," another owl replied, "for there melts neither the snow nor the frost. Never, nevermore."

"That's right," the reindeer joined in. "The Snow Queen has her castle there, a palace of ice by the North Pole, and I know for I was born in Lapland, near the icy walls themselves."
The robber maiden heard the whole conversation as well, and the next day, at the crack of dawn, she told Gerda:
"Last night I listened to everything as well. I shall set my reindeer free if he promises to carry you on his back all the way up north to Lapland, to search for your Kai." The reindeer took to high leaps of joy, and Gerda too; she shed tears of elation. On that very same morning at sunrise, while all the adult bandits --leader, lookouts, and all-- were sleeping off their drinks, she climbed up on the deer's back, and off they set forth.

By day and by night they travelled, through deep forests and across high mountain ranges. Until in the end, the reindeer stopped in the middle of the tundra, drew the rider's attention to the brightly coloured lights in the night sky, and said:
"All right, this is Lapland. Don't you see my wonderful Northern Lights?"


Story the Sixth: Of the Wise Old Crones of the Far North

Shortly afterwards, they found a little deerskin tent where they asked to spend the night. The deer and Gerda told the Saami woman who lived alone in that tent the whole story of their quest. When she  heard where they were heading, she replied:
"Poor little ones! There is still quite a long way to go for you. The Snow Queen's palace? It's a long way to go, for that palace is in the Finmark, near the North Pole. But I know a wise Finmark woman, a friend of mine, who surely will help you find the way when you come to her place. Now I will write a message to her, for you to send it to her with my regards. Could you be so kind and do this poor old lady a favour?"
The next day, they set off once more. When Gerda and her deer had warmed themselves by the fireside and received the message, the quest resumed. Gerda carried a letter that she was to give the Finmark woman. On deerback she flew across the frozen, snowy tundra, until she reached the home of the wise woman. Inside her tent, there was a fire burning, it was warm and cozy, in spite of the snowstorm raging outside. In fact, it was so hot that the Finmark woman was very scantily dressed for the Arctic. After a while, Gerda could take off her cloak, her hat, and her shoes. Then, she gave the message to the wise woman, who read it most carefully.

 

Once she had read the letter from her friend, she cast a look at Gerda and the reindeer.
"If Gerda could only do magic!" the reindeer sighed mournfully. "Then, she could have forced the Snow Queen and get Kai back... I know you are very wise, so couldn't you please give Gerda some magic potion to vanquish the Snow Queen?" the deer asked.
"Little Gerda has no need for magic," the Finmark woman replied. "She has a kind heart, which has led her walking through fire and ice and bitter experience on her own two feet; that's all she needs. Kai is indeed at the Snow Queen's, and he is happy there only because his heart is frozen. And, furthermore, there's a shard of the sorcerer's mirror in one of his eyes."
The wise woman then turned to the reindeer and resumed:
"You shall carry Gerda to the Snow Queen's garden, and leave her there, by the holly bush with red berries that grows at the entrance to the castle grounds. You cannot do anything more. It is she who has to overcome the last obstacles, on her own."
Gerda climbed once more up to the reindeer's back. She forgot her cloak, her hat, and her shoes.
The reindeer did as the wise woman had told, even if he did not like at all, and felt sorry for, the idea of leaving Gerda all alone there, without any warm winter clothes, in the middle of the snowstorm in the dreary, cold Arctic night.

Immediately, a whole regiment of snowflakes whirled around Gerda. Some of them were icy blue, with monstrous shapes, and seemed to attack her, threateningly closing in all around her like soldiers; while others were white and soft, and, as they confronted the monsters, showed her the way to follow.

Story the Seventh: Of What Happened at the Snow Queen's Palace and What Happened Afterwards

And so Gerda came to the Snow Queen's palace, whose walls were made of driven snow and whose doors and windowpanes were of ice hardened by the north winds that flew through every half-open doorway and windowpane. She entered a vast frozen throne room and only Gerda's warm, kind heart kept her alive, from freezing to death. The throne of ice was empty and the Queen herself was nowhere to be seen, having just left her throne room to bring the winter down south again.
In a little oubliette behind the throne, she finally found Kai. He walked about pushing large blocks of ice as if he wanted to solve a puzzle; it was as if it were a rather meaningful duty that had been assigned to him.
"Oh, Kai!" Gerda called out loud, storming towards him.
But Kai merely kept on moving his blocks; he froze and did not say anything. He was as pale and frozen as a statue of ice. So pale that his earlobes, button nose, lips, and fingertips had turned a bluish colour. And he did not want to greet Gerda, who had come from so far away to rescue him...
Yet Gerda stormed forth towards him and clasped him in her arms. As she embraced him, her warm tears of joy coursed down her cheeks and splashed onto his face and chest, seeping straight into his heart and thawing the hard layer of ice; and that was the effect of her body warmth as well.
Within an instant, the ice that shackled the inside of his chest, and was strongest where the shard had lodged within the heartstrings of the left ventricle, was thawed, expelling the shard of crystal, which a heartbeat tore away into the bloodstream. 
Then Gerda began to sing a nursery rhyme, and roses bloomed in his pale cheeks,  the colour returned gradually to his features, and Kai... turning towards his friend... looking at her with green eyes that recovered more and more of their light, he burst into sobs upon seeing that familiar-looking maiden, while trying to remember the lyrics to the same tune, which both of them used to sing in happier days. He shed so many tears that the mirror dust, which had dissolved into the bloodstream, left his system through the eyes with that fiery flow, and fell upon the throne room floor. 
Only then did he recognise his beloved, adorable girl-friend. All at once, he remembered everything. He looked left and right, then up at the little maiden... and saw his best friend standing there.
"Gerda... my darling Gerda? What ever happened to me? And where are we? How vast and cold and lonely is this place! How could I have forgotten you...?" he whispered, his eyes filling with tears. The warm love in his heart had melted the ice splinters that had lodged inside him. At last, Kai was back to his old self.
He put his arms around Gerda and squeezed her tightly, lest she should leave him on his own in this strange throne room. And Gerda squeezed him even more tightly and they both burst out laughing. Their innocent laughter rang out across the hall, making the icicles chime and the great shards of ice sing in harmony.
She told him everything and, together, with four hands, they assembled the puzzle. Then something very strange began to happen. The elation of both young people was such that, when they placed the last piece of ice on the frozen surface of the lake, they formed a sun in whose middle beamed a flaming heart. There was no need to worry anymore. 
Now both of them were free, and the masters of their own destiny. Now Kai was free to leave, for the Snow Queen would no longer retain any power over him.
"Gerda, I'm free..." said Kai, too stunned to utter the words properly.
"Then, what are we waiting for?" Gerda replied, pulling him to his feet. "Come on, quickly. Let's go home!"
The two friends ran out of the hall. Hand in hand, Gerda and Kai left the Snow Queen's palace. In the northeastern skies, the darkness was giving way to the warm, rosy light of the dawn; soon, all the good things that springtime brought would return to the Arctic.

Outside the palace, the reindeer was waiting for them, and now they all began the long southward journey back home. Wherever they went, the snow melted away, and the grass and the flowers began to shoot up beneath their feet and hooves. They met the robber maiden on horseback, for she had emancipated herself on a quest through the wide world; she told them that the princess and her prince were travelling through foreign countries on honeymoon.

At last, they saw their hometown before them; they arrived in the town where they lived. Kai and Gerda quickened their pace. Hand in hand, they ran through the streets that both of them so well knew and loved.

It was as if time had frozen in their absence: everything in town was exactly the same. Kai and Gerda walked up all the staircases up to their respective garrets. Old Grandmamma sat, as usual, by the window, sunning herself, and the planter boxes were in full bloom with roses and sweetpeas. There the two of them stood, and there they sat down, like they had done so many times before locking eyes and facing one another, high above the bustling street. Had everything that had transpired only been an unquiet dream? Anyway, here they stood now, like ever before, as warmth and sunshine and the scent of flowers pervaded everything around them, from all directions. They were, both of them, older and wiser and more sensible, but they had the hearts of children, and were surrounded by a springtime full of light and warmth.

IAGO FOR TWEENS?

Abstract

"Boot Camp Shakespeare," by Georgia Shakespeare, introduces children from the ages of four to eight years old not only to Shakespeare but also to the craft and mechanics of theater. An improvised ensemble piece, "Scary Field Trip," turned Iago's ostensible motive for revenge, his anger at being passed over for promotion, into the fury of a "nerdy" kid tricked by his "cool" classmate. Although "Scary Field Trip" did not engage directly with the racial plot of Shakespeare's play, its casting practices and the structure of the appropriation itself nonetheless did so.

---

"Scary Field Trip," improvisation by Jennifer Henry, Stanton Nash, Diany Rodriguez, Robert Wells III. "Boot Camp Shakespeare." Georgia Shakespeare. Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia. August 3, 2005.

The essays in this issue of B&L not only consider the specifics of presenting Shakespeare for Children, but also question the purposes of doing so. Shakespeare camps, coloring books (indeed, competing coloring books by Bellerophon [A Shakespeare Coloring Book 1983] and Dover [Green and Negri 2000]), picture books, stuffed toys and other tools target an ever-younger consumer. The BBC's CBeebies website, aimed at preschoolers, features a Flash animation sequence of A Midsummer Night's Dream, under the rubric "Fairy Stories" (other stories include folk tales from around the world, such as "Rumpelstiltskin," "The Rupee Tree," and "Hansel and Gretel," and commissioned stories, such as "Treasure Pie"). In most of these instances, "Shakespeare" signifies on the one hand literacy — in Disney's Baby Einstein DVDs, for instance, Baby Einstein: Baby Shakespeare World of Poetry (2002) introduces toddlers to simple words and the alphabet song through the mischief of "Bard, the friendly dragon" — and on the other hand, literariness, since Baby Shakespeare also includes voice-over poems by Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes, William Wordsworth, and, of course, Shakespeare. The British "Key Stages" of education, which require every student to have read a Shakespeare play before graduation (some accounts have it, before age ten), have lent a peculiar urgency to the quest for ever-more accessible Shakespeare in Britain (as Sheila Cavanagh notes in her essay in this issue).

Georgia Shakespeare's Shakespeare Puppet

The British company "Shakespeare 4 Kidz: The National Shakespeare Company for Children" performs and merchandizes abridged Shakespeare plays with added songs, dances and so on for and to British elementary schools. These productions deliberately eschew textual accuracy in favor of retaining the main plot, sub-plots, and minor characters. (Their Macbeth, however, retains the witches' song in its entirety, including its offensive reference to "Liver of blaspheming Jew," an interesting comment in itself on transatlantic notions of what is appropriate in an elementary-school setting. I'm not suggesting that the company bowdlerize, but I note that the teachers' kits sold with the "Play Pack" include no suggestions on how to direct possibly animated discussions in a diverse classroom that might well include some so-called "blaspheming Jew[s]" or "Turk[s]").

The purpose of Shakespeare in "Shakespeare 4 Kidz" is, quite literally, national accreditation, on the part of the schools using the "Play Packs" and hosting the performances. And the reasons behind the enshrinement of Shakespeare (the only required author, at the time of this writing) in the British National Curriculum must necessarily remain mysterious. But there is clearly an element of wishful thinking, of the desire for a shared body of knowledge, of a desire to reclaim Shakespeare for England and for Englishness. At its worst, this impulse produces drama and criticism at its most conservative. But at its best, it could lead to re-evaluations of what we "mean by Shakespeare" (Hawkes 1992) in the classroom and on stage. Consider the Royal Shakespeare Company's year-long season of the Complete Works, which re-canonizes Shakespeare and his works as the heart of British theater, only to stretch the limits of what we might consider "Shakespeare" or even drama, to encompass ballet; opera (The Sonnet Project[Bryars 2006]); Polish ensemble theater (Macbeth); Indian folk theater (A Midsummer Night's Dream); musical theater (Merry Wives) and "responses": Hamlet: Tiny Ninjas (Weinstein 2006); King Lear: Yellow Earth (Ka-Shing 2006); the Baghdad Richard (Al-Bassam 2007), and others.

"Boot Camp Shakespeare"

"Boot Camp Shakespeare," a summer workshop run by the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, ostensibly presents live Shakespeare to children aged four to eight. I say "ostensibly," because what the camp really does is to use "Shakespeare" as the excuse to offer young children a preliminary approach to the craft and mechanics of theater and even to the emotional exercise of character acting. The children spend the first part of a hot summer morning in July or August working with actors from the festival on acting, stage combat, properties, sound effects, lighting, costume, and ensemble work; after a break for juice and cookies, they watch short scenes from the plays, performed by the Georgia Shakespeare actors, and then return to their work groups briefly before participating in a short performance — an appropriation of Shakespeare previously improvised by the young actors. Shakespeare himself appears as a large, soft, stick puppet, dressed as a drill sergeant in camouflage pants — but with Elizabethan ruff and quill pen — mustering his infantine troops for performance.

Upon entering the theater, children are asked to choose a color-coded activity, each led by a costumed actor personating a character from one of the plays, usually performed for laughs, but always ready with some verse appropriate to his or her activity. Katharina, leader of the red group, was in charge of acting; Hotspur (white) of stage combat; an ebullient Lady Macbeth (yellow) made elaborate props out of balloons; Caliban (orange) engineered "sounds and sweet airs" with improvised maracas made from paper bowls and plates, aluminum foil, and dried beans; Goneril and Regan (green) shone flashlights through cups to generate eerie lighting effects; Queen Margaret (blue) manufactured hats and costumes out of common household items, and Adriana (black) drilled her young troops in ensemble work.

The scene presented on the day I attended (with toddler in tow) came from Othello. The cast performed first a short section of the so-called temptation scene (3.3), which they explained to their young audience as Iago's attempt to revenge his feelings of exclusion and bitterness when Othello passes him over for promotion — a revenge that, however, vastly exceeds the original offense. The plot of the appropriation of the scene, "Scary Field Trip," based on improvisations by the actors, concerned the group dynamics of a school field trip to a dinosaur museum, during which a group of "cool" kids exclude the "nerdy" ones, alternately mocking and ignoring them. The dialogue was improvised around a loose script that allowed each child in the camp to participate. The parts of Robert (the coolest kid), Stanton (the nerdiest kid), Ms. Rodriguez (the schoolteacher), and Jen (the museum curator), were played by Georgia Shakespeare actors (using their own names), but children composed the groups, performed as cool and nerdy friends, made "scary" sound and lighting effects (with improvised maracas and paper-covered flashlights), used long balloons to make dinosaur bones, and faked fights.

The story begins when Robert, the coolest kid, plays a trick on the nerdiest one, Stanton, by pretending to be the voice of a dinosaur in the museum that has come to life. Angered by the subsequent laughter at his expense, Stanton becomes furious, enacting a revenge that, like Iago's, is disproportionate to the initial offense: he destroys the entire dinosaur exhibit, and frames Robert for the crime. At the end of the episode, the weeping Robert's tears are wiped with a handkerchief as his teacher urges him to "confess." As the actors explained afterwards, the curator and schoolteacher assume the cool kid's guilt based on circumstantial evidence (he "was in the wrong place at the wrong time," as "Scary Field Trip" suggests), just as Othello assumes Desdemona's guilt, based on the handkerchief.

Although the actors mentioned neither Othello's skin color nor issues of race directly, the same Afro-descendant actor who played Othello played Robert, the cool kid and eventual victim of Stanton's machinations. The improvisation thus engaged present-day assumptions about black skin ("coolness," at the beginning of the playlet, and perceived criminality at the end) to correspond to the beliefs about blackness animated in Shakespeare's play (admirable military prowess, on the one hand, and credulous jealousy on the other). In this unspoken parallel it reminded me of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's abbreviated Othello performed at the (US) Shakespeare Association in March 1999. That forty-minute, three-person touring version of the play for high schools excised the language of racial insult and skin color from the play, a controversial decision defended by the company on the grounds that the children in the schools they visited were already alert to the possibility of racial hatred directed towards interracial marriages without the theater company adding, as it were, insult to injury ("Forty-minute Othello"). I believe that might be true for many actors and viewers of color present at both productions — and yet — and yet — I wonder whether we nonetheless need to spell out the implications of color-conscious casting. That the improvisation, first, turned out the way it did and, second, worked as well as it did depended upon our assumptions about race in Atlanta. "Boot Camp" children are a little young for such a discussion, but it is almost impossible to engage Othello meaningfully without it.

The metaphorical resonances of the "Boot Camp" model and Drill Sergeant Shakespeare are likewise peculiar, but compelling. On the one hand, the analogy suggests, Shakespeare study requires basic training, and that training will be sudden, rigorous, even hectoring. On the other, such training will be familiar, down-to-earth, and above all US American. The puppet itself is soft, like a well-loved toy, and it presents Shakespeare literally in camouflage, as though this is a way to make Shakespeare blend in with its surroundings. In Georgia Shakespeare's "Boot Camp," then, Shakespeare comes to stand not for Englishness (as in the British National Curriculum) but for theater itself. And if spoken drama is to avoid the fate imagined by Richard Schechner, of becoming the twenty-first-century equivalent to the string quartet or chamber chorale, then the earlier that children encounter such an introduction, the better.

GOLDEN LADS AND LASSES

GOLDEN LADS AND LASSES: "Shakespeare for Children"

Abstract

The Folger Shakespeare Library's current (2006) exhibition, "Golden Lads and Lasses": Shakespeare for Children, explores the many ways in which Shakespeare's stories have been adapted, modernized, and packaged for children. The array of materials in the show — Victorian storybooks, paperdolls, comic books, and movies — provides an inspiring illustration of Shakespeare's continuing appeal for younger audiences.

The Folger's latest foray into its vast collection of Shakespeariana has resulted in a fascinating look at the many ways Shakespeare's plays and plots have been adapted for children. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition begins with the impossibly small Elizabethan hornbooks used by schoolchildren and ranges up through the past decade's rush of films renovating Shakespeare for teen audiences, including Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), a hip rethinking of Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo + Juliet (1996), the remarkably successful Baz Luhrmann film featuring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio as the doomed lovers.

Between these two extremes, the Folger presents a dizzying range of materials designed for children, mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Charles and Mary Lamb's famous Tales from Shakespear (1807) may be found here in dozens of editions, most featuring dazzling, hand-coloured illustrations. The nineteenth century was a ripe time for children's books, and the exhibition includes a wonderful breadth of examples, ranging from Edith Nesbit's Children's Stories from Shakespeare (1901) to Fay Adams Britton's blends of fairy tales with Shakespeare (1896), to Skelt's Juvenile Drama adaptations of Othello (c. 1840). Each of the beautifully illustrated books appears almost in miniature, the better to fit into tiny hands. The attention to detail and design in these print editions will fascinate readers and scholars of material culture alike.

The inclusion of Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler's heavily edited Shakespeare (1807), the basis for generations of schoolchildren's editions, helps to illustrate how Shakespeare began to be explicitly tailored to serve as a moral compass for the Victorian period. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the editions for children. Moralized retellings of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Merchant of Venice assure their readers that Shakespeare's plays serve as "instructions for our conduct in life." Modern books are less heavy-handed and generally seek to delight young readers with lively reworkings of the plays rather than to instruct them. Lois Burdett's Macbeth for Kids (1996) introduces children to the Scottish play with an abbreviated plot set in rhyming couplets, and Tina Packer's Tales from Shakespeare (2004) combines famous lines from the plays ("Is this a dagger I see before me?") with simple storylines.

Of particular interest to the exhibition's curators are the Shakespearean adaptations that focus on women. Beginning with a small book called Judith Shakespeare, by William Black (1884), the exhibition illustrates how retellings of Shakespeare's biography and plays were marketed to girls. An article in a magazine for girls from 1887, "Shakespeare as the Girl's Friend," exhorts young women to look for role models in Shakespeare's female characters as it teaches them how to understand the plays. More recent novels use the plays as a place to launch their own independent explorations into the interior lives of Shakespeare's women. Books such as Dating Hamlet: Ophelia's Story, by Lisa Fiedler (2002), and Shylock's Daughter, by Mirjam Pressler (2002), follow a recent trend in fiction by refocusing stories on the "secondary characters." (Think of Gregory Maguire's Wicked (1995) or Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife (1999), which tell the stories of the Wicked Witch of the West and the lonely wife of the Pequod's captain.) The urge to open these books and see for oneself how these authors have chosen to retell Ophelia's story can be nearly overwhelming. As an advertisement for the bookstore, this exhibition is a victory!

One of the most intriguing recent genres featured in the exhibition is the comic book or graphic novel. With origins in nineteenth-century picture books, the Shakespearean comic book found a niche in the middle of the twentieth century — the exhibition features half a dozen gorgeous editions of Hamlet and Macbeth from the period — and has since evolved into a postmodern extravaganza in the hands of contemporary artists. Marcia Williams's graphic novel for A Midsummer Night's Dream (1998), easily the most popular play adapted for children, stands as one of the show's highlights. She employs Elizabethan English for the play's dialogue within the frames of the comic, but then includes the "responses" of the audience, who are drawn around the margins of the page. The hecklers' places on the page correspond to their status, as either standing penny-payers or moneyed elites. As one wry groundling tells his friend while he gazes up at Helena, "Wish my wife was obedient as a spaniel!" The result of this bold graphic design is a delightful representation of the theatrical experience.

Interspersed between the more formal museum cases are paintings and drawings by local schoolchildren. Portraits of Shakespeare and designs of plays by elementary students hang proudly next to the First Folio that remains on display in the Folger's Great Hall. Hilarious letters written by students "in character" are worth their own visit. (Lady Macbeth assures her husband in one note that she is "icksploding" with ambition.) This attention to the experience of younger visitors is carried through in a case filled with Shakespeare-inspired toys, which includes the Hamlet finger puppets and the Shakespeare dolls that grace many a teacher's desk. The exhibition signage and wall text appears to be similarly aimed at younger visitors, but the result unfortunately serves neither child nor adult. Apart from a few gems that children might find intriguing — the fact that early modern theatergoers ate nuts, not popcorn, intrigued one tourist on my visit — at times the exhibition texts can be opaque, or even condescending to young readers. Creating a show with archival materials that will appeal to young, sophisticated visitors is no easy feat, however, and the show's impressive content makes the signage problem practically unnoticeable.

Wandering through the exhibition led my companions to recall their own first experiences with Shakespeare. While one had been taken to see a play, another had treasured the Lamb stories, and yet another had been read the plays as a very young girl. Discussion turned to the quality of the newest adaptations in the exhibition, particularly films such as Disney's Baby Einstein: Baby Shakespeare World of Poetry (2002) or Mike O'Neal's Green Eggs and Hamlet (1995), and whether experiencing Shakespeare through these films is the "best way." Given the potential of online editions of Shakespeare, which can feature every performance adaptation on film and dozens of images from manuscript, print, and the fine arts, there are now thousands of ways for a young person to access the Bard. One need only look at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Shakespeare Project, including Hamlet on the Ramparts, to see the possibilities for online editions for children. This virtual abundance makes the carefully hand-coloured illustrations of the nineteenth century seem quaint by comparison, but one hopes that we can come close to providing something as beautiful for our own children.

Although Shakespeare's stage did not admit young women as actresses, Shakespeare's boy actors impersonated a dynamic set of girl characters, including the thirteen year-old Juliet, fourteen year-old Marina, fifteen year-old Miranda, and sixteen year-old Perdita, and other characters, girls such as the wily Bianca, the tragic Lavinia, the canny Anne Page, and the iconic Ophelia, whose ages are not specified, although all of them are called "girl," usually by their fathers. Over the course of his career, Shakespeare's attention to girls and girlhood is, arguably, one of his ongoing preoccupations: the term "girl" appears sixty-eight times throughout his work. "Girl" can be used to label independent or recalcitrant behavior (as in Capulet's description of Juliet as a "wayward girl"), to highlight tragedy or victimhood (as in Lavinia's epithet, "sweet girl"), as well as innocence (as Leontes recalls "in those unfledged days was my wife a girl"). Shakespeare's ideas about girlhood, then, are neither confined to stereotypes of demure submissiveness nor limited to promiscuous service; rather, Shakespeare's girls claim their right to self-determination in the face of parental opposition, vigorously defend themselves and their families, and express their feelings and their fears with wit and verve. As Caroline Bicks points out in her contribution to this volume, "girl" is often used to signify the space between puberty and marriage, and it is this particular time "that enables unique acts of female creativity," as girls act to escape or challenge the roles that are assigned to them and can imagine and perform a variety of other options.

Shakespeare's vivid characterizations of girlhood thus inspire some of the most famous adaptations and appropriations of his work. Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines(1851), a set of fictional prequels that conjure the girlhoods of Shakespearean characters for the girl reader, with the idea of contributing to the status of Shakespeare as a "helping friend," offering "vital precepts and models" of femininity "to the young girl." Cowden Clarke traced her interest to another adaptation, Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (1807), which offered versions of Shakespeare's plays specifically "for young ladies," explaining that girls had more restricted access to their fathers' libraries than boys, and enjoining boys to explain the difficult parts to their sisters. Their versions of Shakespeare were tailored, therefore, to their ideas about the sensibilities and limitations of the girl reader. For Cowden Clarke, by contrast, her imaginative attentiveness to the prehistories of Shakespearean girl characters reflect her own ideas about the interest and importance of girls' lives and experiences.

Long before Cowden Clarke and the Lambs, however, some of the very earliest adaptations of Shakespeare focus on girls and girlhood. The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1670), an adaptation of The Tempest by William Davenant and John Dryden, takes a play with only one girl character, Miranda, and gives her a sister, Dorinda; Ariel, the spirit who takes on many female parts in Shakespeare's The Tempest, was played by a girl actress, and he is given a girlfriend, Milcha. Dorinda's boyfriend, Hippolito, was also a trouser role. As a kind of tacit celebration of the arrival of the actress on the public stage, the play is suddenly filled with girls. The process of adapting Shakespeare often has girlhood at its very heart: a Restoration adaptation of Shakespeare's Pericles, George Lillo's Marina (1738) focuses on Marina's story, as it is depicted in the final two acts of the play, sidelining the peregrinations of patient Pericles to the triumph of her virtue and virginity. Film adaptations of Shakespeare, such as Ten Things I Hate About You and Baz Lurhmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, brilliantly frame Shakespeare for the consumption of teenaged girl audiences, while the visual arts are consistently drawn to Shakespeare's girl heroines, from the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery to Gregory Crewdson's recreation of John Everett Millais's iconic Ophelia.

Shakespeare's own involvement in the processes of appropriation and adaptation also leads him to expand upon girl characters and promote girlhood. For example, The Two Noble Kinsmen, an adaptation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, elaborates Chaucer's character of Emily, moving far beyond Chaucer's own expansion of the character from his source material in Boccaccio's Teseida. Shakespeare endows his Emilia with a rich Amazonian history, including her girlfriend, Flavina. With the Jailer's Daughter, an adaptation of Ophelia, mad for love, Shakespeare embellishes his own source material, and each of the Jailer's Daughter's soliloquies, charting the progressive loss of her wits, is longer than the last. Alongside Shakespeare's creation of these major girl heroines, Two Noble Kinsmen opens with a procession of widows, who, no longer girls themselves, nevertheless frame the play's attention to the trials of girlhood within the larger scope of women's experiences, including those of the stalwart Hippolyta. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet adapts Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe via a set of continental rewritings including Masuccio Salernitano's Il Novellino (1476), Luigi da Porto's Giulietta e Romeo (1530), Matteo Bandello's Giulietta e Romeo (1554), Pierre Boiastuau's Histoires Tragiques (1559), as well as, in England, Arthur Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562) and William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1567). It foregrounds Juliet's girlhood, adding precise details of her age, and developing her as a character of exquisite intelligence and powerful drive. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, of course, inspired one of the earliest adaptations of Shakespeare by William Davenant (1662), a key event in the history of women on the English stage, and the beginning of a long history of adaptations of the play that place girlhood at the forefront, from Thomas Otway's curious fusion of Juliet and Lavinia in The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1680) to the theatrical experiences of Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love (1999).

Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare

Girls thus enjoy a special place in the history of Shakespeare adaptation. And there is, in fact, a special kind of kinship between girlhood and adaptation. Adaptation has often been considered secondary, or a derivative of the original masterwork, just as women were traditionally positioned as the "second sex," with their derivative beginnings in Adam's rib. Yet as adaptations provide an opportunity for a broader set of voices to weigh in on the canonical original, including girls, they also develop a relationship to their source material that may be understood in terms of a playfulness, from witty and satirical to energetically creative: qualities that also evoke ideals of spirited girlhood.

This special issue of Borrowers and Lenders explores the relationships between Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Girlhood. The first group of articles, under the subheading "Screen," examines adaptations of Shakespeare for television, YouTube, and film, with each medium representing girlhood in different ways. Ariane Balizet's discussion of girls' references to, anxieties about, and relationships with Shakespeare on the small screen focuses less on the adaptation of Shakespearean plots or characters for television than on the idea of Shakespeare himself as a representative of high culture and patriarchal authority, usually in a classroom setting, casting the girls as subordinate to it. However, her examples reveal girl characters in shows from My So-Called Life to Orange is the New Black prevailing and even triumphing over Shakespearean content, reversing the expectations of inferiority and transforming Shakespeare instead, as Balizet puts it, into a "tool against marginalization."

In the context of the emphatically democratic YouTube, in Stephen O'Neill's contribution, Shakespeare's Ophelia (who has the final section of this special issue devoted to her) becomes a shared point of reference for girl YouTubers, allowing them to develop a language and ongoing conversation about girl culture, their own identities as girls, and, as O'Neill puts it, "the (im)possibility of authentic expression in the contemporary mediascape." Focusing on how girls represent themselves rather than how popular culture represents them, O'Neill reveals the constitutive role played by Ophelia in girls' self-understanding, providing not only something to identify with, but also to react against. Ophelia thus enables dialogues that are about more than just Shakespeare's girl or girls; she is a launching point for girls' interrogations of contemporary commercial media, allowing girls to "produce and perform postfeminist identities online."

Rachael McLennan's essay on Ten Things I Hate About You, also concerns the use of Shakespeare to construct a feminist identity. The film adapts The Taming of the Shrew to chart not the cultivation of an ideal, passive wife, but the evolving responses of a teenaged girl to a premature and traumatic sexual experience. The culmination of this process occurs when Kat authors a Shakespearean sonnet: a sonnet whose merits, as McLennan argues, have been overlooked and underappreciated in the numerous critical discussions of this film. The sonnet reflects Kat's girlhood as she navigates between the two poles of her own crisis and empowerment, but it also reflects predicament of 1990s girlhood caught in the aftermath of second-wave feminism and at the advent of neoliberalism.

The second group of essays, entitled "Stage," contains three essays on the stage histories of Shakespearean girls. Caroline Bicks explores the figure Mary "Perdita" Robinson, for whom the name of "Perdita" is not just a recollection of her virtuoso performance of a famous Shakespearean "girl" character, but instead, an allusion to the good name and sexual innocence that she "lost" in her affair with the young Prince of Wales, later George IV. Locating the lingering presence of the Shakespearean Perdita in representations of Mary Robinson, Bicks highlights the interplay between the use of "Perdita" as a euphemism for "whore" and her Shakespearean status as an innocent "child of nature," revealing how her posthumously published Memoirs appropriates the girlhood of Shakespeare's Perdita in order to construct her own girlhood and defend her virgin innocence. Bicks reveals, ultimately, the extent to which girlhood itself both negotiates and is constructed in the interplay and tension between innocence and sexual knowledge, but she also locates a continuum, rather than a polarity, between the identities of woman and girl, as the adult Mary Robinson reclaims but also reshapes her own childhood.

Jo Carney's essay on Desdemona, Toni Morrison's radical rereading of Othello, the product of a collaboration with director Peter Sellars and singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré, reveals how Morrison similarly recuperates the character of Desdemona, damned by Othello as a whore, by shifting the focus to her girlhood. Ever since Sula and The Bluest Eye, Morrison's work has narrated the worlds and experiences of girl characters and has used Shakespeare as an ongoing counterpoint to her own fictions. In Desdemona, Morrison sets out the tension between social expectations of demure comportment and an approved marriage, and the sense of freedom Desdemona enjoys to play in the pond, or to imagine herself as a swan. With her North African maid, Barbary, enabling these acts of girlish wildness and imagination, Desdemona is primed and ready to listen to Othello's tales of adventure. As Desdemona's girlhood, here, is reconstructed not only retrospectively, as an adaptation of Othello, but also from beyond the grave, Desdemona's posthumous freedom enables the recovery of her own lost girlhood.

My own essay on the lost girlhoods of The Tempest concerns the afterlives of Miranda and Ariel on stage and film. A crucial aspect of Miranda's girlhood, I argue, is lost to a longstanding editorial and theatrical tradition that refuses to accept her talking back to Caliban, while the two-hundred-year-long history of casting a girl as Ariel is often dismissed as an outmoded and déclassé theatrical convention. In marked contrast to these suppressions of Prospero's girls, Restoration adaptations of The Tempest added girl after girl to Prospero's island, reflecting the play's overarching concern with girls and girlhood, as it charts the path to Miranda's marriage and Ariel's freedom — domestic reality and girlhood wish.

The three essays in the final group all focus on Ophelia, Shakespeare's paradigmatic girl-as-innocent-victim. Polonius calls her a "green girl, /Unsifted in such perilous circumstance," and Ophelia's afterlife, from the Jailer's Daughter in Two Noble Kinsmen to the performances of Kate Winslet and Julia Stiles, via John Everett Millais and countless nineteenth-century paintings, shaped representations of female madness, as Elaine Showalter has argued. They also inform more contemporary understandings of teen-girl anguish, as Mary Pipher's well-known Reviving Ophelia. The Tiqqun collective, "Raw Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl," which links the fetish for girlhood in contemporary commodity culture with the triumph of capitalism and the decline of the women's movement, opens with Hamlet's devastating works to Ophelia: "I did love you once." But Natalia Khomenko's essay on Soviet representations of Ophelia offers a startlingly different take on Ophelia as a corrupt and untrustworthy villain. What, in the West, serves as confirmation of her innocent girlhood is transformed, in the Soviet context, into evidence of moral decadence and bourgeois indulgence. This allows for the celebration of Hamlet as a political revolutionary, but it also takes Ophelia quite seriously as a villain. As Khomenko demonstrates, this vilification of Ophelia, however unfair it seems, provides feminist authors post-1991 with a rich opportunity to reclaim and remodel — dare we say revive? — this long-maligned heroine.

Dianne Berg's discussion of Mary Cowden Clarke's Ophelia explores the earliest and most influential attempt to fictionalize Ophelia's girlhood and, interestingly, provides another example of what she calls "abuse" — in this case, not by recasting Ophelia as a villain, but, instead, by promoting her wide-eyed, even vapid innocence, and, moreover, by inflicting upon her a set of traumas that provide extra background for her madness. Ophelia becomes an object lesson in vulnerable girlhood — an example of how important it is to take care of young girls — and part of a general tendency in Cowden Clarke (and in Victorian society as a whole) to underestimate and eliminate the agency of girls by constructing them as material to be molded. But Jenny Flaherty shows how contemporary young adult novels succeed in positively "reviving Ophelia," representing her as a survivor, with strength of character and numerous capabilities, rather than as a fragile victim, even as they use Ophelia's sense of being marginalized and an outsider to resonate with contemporary teenaged alienation. Reading a premodern text and heroine unabashedly through the lens of feminist theory and criticism, these novels thus successfully manage to, as Showalter puts it,"liberate Ophelia from the text."

To liberate Ophelia from the text: this is the project of adapting and appropriating all of Shakespeare's girls. The dream of liberation resonates, as well, with a variety of conditions in which girlhood is experienced. In some cases, girls require liberation from their circumstances: the freedom to be themselves apart from social and familial stricture. In others, girlhood offers a space for freedom, possibility, and creativity before the choices and responsibilities of adulthood. In some cases, girlhood is constrained by a materialistic and capitalist system that seeks to commodify their sexuality for private gain. In others, popular images of the young girl provide a spur and pretext for a satirical and subversive critique of the complicity of the commodification of girlhood with the triumph of neo-liberalism and the ideologically motivated perception of the failure of feminism. As the adaptations and appropriations of Shakespearean girlhood that are collected here engage with and contend against a set of inherited and idealized notions of girlhood that may be traced to Shakespeare, they also reflect the creative energies and independence of thought that Shakespeare himself linked, time and again, with girls.

Hateley, Erica. Shakespeare in Children's Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital. Routledge, 2009. xiii + 218 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-96492-0 (Cloth).

In the Spring/Summer 2006 edition on the theme of "Shakespeare for Children," Borrowers and Lenders published an article entitled "Of Tails and Tempests: Feminine Sexuality and Shakespearean Children's Texts," by Erica Hateley, in which the author examined what she termed the "mermaid-Miranda" figure in literature for children. She closely examined both Disney's 1989 film The Little Mermaid and Penni Russon's adaptation of The Tempest, the young adult novel Undine (2004), arguing that while these texts "seem to perform a progressive appropriation [. . .] they actually combine the most conservative aspects of both The Tempest and mermaid stories to produce authoritative (and dangerously persuasive) ideals of passive feminine sexuality that confine girls within patriarchally-dictated familial positions" (Hateley 2006, 1). In Shakespeare and Children's Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (2009), Hateley expands these ideas to examine not justUndine, but many other appropriations of Shakespeare for young people, while still maintaining her focus on gender issues within such texts.

In the Introduction, Hateley lays out the critical framework of her text by focusing on both Michel Foucault's concept of the "author function" with regard to Shakespeare's "discursive authority" and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's work on cultural capital, "particularly as it applies to 'Shakespeare' as both embodiment and marker of its attainment" (Hateley 2009, 10, 11). She introduces the subject of how "the discourse of 'Shakespeare' is put to work in literature for young readers to legitimate gendered difference," arguing that "children's authors deploy Shakespeare, not just as cultural authority, but as cultural authority on gender" (2009, 12, 14, emphasis in original). In other words, Hateley argues that authors of Shakespeare appropriations for children prescribe traditional gender roles for implied readers, using the cultural capital of the Bard to add weight to those prescriptions.

In Chapter 1, "Romantic Roots: Constructing the Child as Reader, and Shakespeare as Author," Hateley examines three prominent nineteenth-century adaptations/appropriations of Shakespeare for children: Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare (1807), Mary Cowden Clarke'sGirlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1850-1851), and Edith Nesbit's The Children's Shakespeare (1897). A treatment of all three of these foundational texts in the genre of Shakespeare for children in one chapter might initially seem overwhelming for a reader. Hateley prevents this, however, by giving a thorough background for each text, but then focusing closely only on each text's treatment of Macbeth. The chapter argues that these texts established patterns of appropriating Shakespeare for children that have lasted throughout the twentieth century, and "thus diachronically contextualize contemporary Shakespearean children's literature and the cultural forces reflected and reproduced by it" (2009, 21-22). This statement also explains why the chapter on nineteenth-century texts is important to Hateley's argument in the rest of the book, which deals almost exclusively with contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare for young readers.

The title of Chapter 2, "Author(is)ing the Child: Shakespeare as Character," is self-explanatory. In it, Hateley examines recent texts for young readers that incorporate William Shakespeare as a character, arguing that though "[f]or academics [. . .] 'Shakespeare' is a signifier or a discourse [. . .] whose personal history and experience are fundamentally irrelevant to the Shakespeare play," within popular culture, "Shakespeare is first and foremost the man whose plays reflect his personality and experience" (2009, 49, emphasis in original). This section includes close readings of Gary Blackwood's The Shakespeare Stealer (1998), Shakespeare's Scribe (2000), and Shakespeare's Spy (2003); Grace Tiffany's My Father Had A Daughter: Judith Shakespeare's Tale (2003); and Peter W. Hassinger's Shakespeare's Daughter (2004), all historical-fiction novels for young readers. Hateley's close readings provide numerous textual examples to support her claim that even though these texts present male and female protagonists and were written by male and female authors, within all of them "masculine readers are encouraged to recognise and ultimately appropriate the cultural authority of Shakespeare," while "feminine readers are encouraged simultaneously to recognise both the cultural value of Shakespeare and his work, and the extent to which their own natural distance from it is authorised by that value" (2009, 81). Though this chapter is comprehensive and useful within the area of novels that include Shakespeare as a character, it can feel removed from the other chapters, which deal exclusively with appropriations of plays.

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Hateley settles into the meat of her argument, presenting close readings of appropriations for young readers of three chosen plays: Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest. The author does an excellent job of explaining the plots of the stories and giving background where necessary: though I was not familiar with many of the children's texts she examined, I never had any trouble following her close readings or her argument. Chapter 3, "'Be These Juggling Fiends No More Believed': Macbeth, Gender, and Subversion," argues thatMacbeth's

gendered taxonomy of subversion and containment is transferred into contemporary children's texts as gendered models of reading: feminine subjects are allowed a limited sense of cultural subversion, aligned with passive reading praxes; masculine subjects are offered a self-reflexive model of reading that enables long-term cultural power. (2009, 83-84)

Hateley supports this argument by examining such texts as Neil Arksey's MacB (1999), which is basically Macbeth on the soccer field, and Welwyn Winton Katz's Come Like Shadows (1993), in which protagonists Lucas and Kinny experience an actual connection with one of the witches ofMacbeth via a magic mirror. She also does close readings of many other novels in this chapter, exploring specific ways in which feminine subjects are given a culturally subversive, though still passive, reading model, while masculine subjects are given a self-reflexive model. For example, in Arksey's MacB, female readers encounter a powerful and culturally subversive female figure in MacB's ruthless mother (the Lady Macbeth figure), but in the end MacB rejects her influence and blames her as the cause of all his wrongdoing. In Katz's novel, while both female (Kincardine or "Kinny") and male (Lucas) main characters are presented, throughout the novel Lucas is portrayed as a more acute observer and a confident person, while Kinny continually doubts herself, even wondering at times if she is crazy. Hateley aptly comments that "the conclusion of the novel makes clear that if the protagonist has been Kincardine, the hero is Lucas" (2009, 111, emphasis in original). She demonstrates that the male characters in these texts are presented as characters that male readers can identify with in a positive way, while the culturally subversive female characters are presented as evil, unstable, or simply less capable.

Chapter 4, "Puck vs. Hermia: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Gender, and Sexuality," asserts that "[s]pecific sub-plots of Dream are explicitly gendered" (Hateley 2009, 117). One such sub-plot involves what the author terms "Puck Syndrome," which is a narrative that places implied male readers "not only into a position of limited autonomy that is circumscribed by Oberon (the Shakespearean father), but also implicitly prefigures future authority for such readers when they become adults" (2009, 118). Appropriations that display this "Puck Syndrome" include Susan Cooper's King of Shadows (1999), Mary Pope Osborne's Stage Fright on a Summer's Night(2002; part of the Magic Treehouse series), and Sophie Masson's Cold Iron (1998). However, Hateley also explores appropriations that deal with other gendered subplots. John Updike'sBottom's Dream (1969) and Ursula Dubosarsky's How to Be a Great Detective (2004) both feature the "rustics" (the Dubosarsky text focuses on the Pyramus and Thisbe narrative), and stories for teenage feminine implied readers focus more on the "romance" plot dealing with Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius: examples include Meacham's A Mid-Semester Night's Dream(2004), Marilyn Singer's The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth (1983), and Charlotte Calder's Cupid Painted Blind (2002). After examining all of these texts, Hateley concludes that"Puck may operate as a carnivalesque figure of limited autonomy for pre-adolescent masculine readers, but when children's literature appropriates A Midsummer Night's Dream for adolescent feminine readers, no space is made for autonomous development" and that in these texts "[y]oung men are directed towards a life of the mind, young women towards a life of the body" (2009, 145, 146).

Hateley's final chapter of close reading, Chapter 5, "'This Island's Mine': The Tempest, Gender, and Authority/Autonomy," connects to her discussion of The Tempest and Russon's Undine that appeared in her 2006 Borrowers and Lenders article, but greatly expands both the range of texts treated and the point being made. She states that appropriations of the The Tempest for older child readers usually center on the "child figures" Miranda and Caliban, rather than on Prospero, "offering [these child figures] as figures of identification for the implied reader" (2009, 147). Hateley's choice to view Caliban as a child figure in the play is intriguing and can perhaps be attributed to her views on the "arguably analogous cultural position of children and subjects of colonisation" (2009, 148). In addition to Undine, she also examines Sophie Masson's The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare (2003), Dennis Covington's Lizard (1991), Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time(1962), and other novels. She concludes that novels like Lizard and Tad Williams' Caliban's Houroffer "the juvenile masculine subject [. . .] a model of cultural authority which is simultaneously predicated on the sexual subordination of the feminine (intratextual) and cultural authority (extratextual)" (2009, 164), and that novels that imply a feminine reader also comply with this model. While she concedes that "Russon comes closer than L'Engle or Oneal to offering the implied feminine reader a position of autonomy," she nevertheless states that Undine is not "an unequivocally feminist appropriation" because of its "maintenance of unregulated feminine sexuality as dangerous" (2009, 186).

That final statement reflects the main point of Hateley's Conclusion, that no Shakespeare appropriation for young readers that she has so far seen succeeds in escaping the following trap: "[r]ather than offering an imaginative space where categories of subjectivity [. . .] might be contested, appropriations of Shakespeare naturalise normative values, and even make the implied reader complicit in their production" (2009, 187). The author admits that even she is not quite sure what this text would look like, though she posits that it might need to shift away from focusing on specifically gendered characters in favor of a more "ambiguously gendered" character like Ariel (2009, 186). Hateley "looks forward to a text which combines feminine autonomy with the cultural capital of Shakespeare" but in the end concludes that

shifting the discursive norms of Shakespeare for children [. . .] must be enacted in at least two ways: the first being the willingness to admit the pluralities inherent in the Shakespearean text into appropriations of the plays; the second being the re-construction of children as criticalreaders rather than gendered readers. (2009, 186, 188-89, emphasis in original)

This book would be of great interest to both Shakespeare scholars studying appropriations of his work for children and scholars of children's literature in general; scholars interested in gender theory and construction of selfhood will also find it helpful. Hateley's close readings are thorough, as mentioned earlier, and her notes provide valuable additional information. Perhaps the only drawback to this text is that the title is in some ways a misnomer: though the book is called Shakespeare in Children's Literature (perhaps because Hateley's text is part of a Routledge series entitledChildren's Literature and Culture, edited by Jack Zipes), it deals mainly with young adult novels, and the Young Adult genre often presents very different subject matter from picture books or novels for readers under ten. Therefore, scholars interested in those areas of literature for young readers might not find as much useful analysis in this book. Nevertheless, this focus on young adult novels means that scholars interested in appropriations of Shakespeare for young adults or gender roles as presented in young adult novels will find this text invaluable.