Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet

Illustrated by Emma Vieceli
Self-Made Hero, 195 pp.

Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet

Illustrated by Sonia Leong
Self-Made Hero, 195 pp.

To chibi or not to chibi—that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of traditional Shakespeare editions
Or add arms and mecha elements
And enjoy them in manga form…
Aye, there’s the rub.

The attraction of Self-Made Hero’s Manga Shakespeare editions is obvious to anyone who found the Bard to be a stuffy bore: these versions include pictures. Lots of them, in fact. Gone are the footnotes and dry plot summaries of the Folger Library editions I remember from freshman English; in their place are word balloons and cartoon characters. In Emma Vieceli’s hands, for instance, Hamlet has been transformed into an action-packed sci-fi adventure, complete with computers, cybernetics, and an environment ravaged by global warming, while Sonia Leong adopts a shojo-esque approach to Romeo and Juliet: her star-crossed lovers inhabit a Tokyo suburb where rival yakuza families vie for control of the streets.

The point, of course, is to show students that Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet aren’t just musty old documents with antique language, but plays. The artists do their utmost to bring the Bard to life, drawing sword fights and love scenes and impassioned arguments as their characters intone Shakespeare’s original dialogue. In the interest of making these versions more user friendly, however, many iconic speeches (especially the soliloquies) have been shortened, and whole scenes have been left on the cutting room floor.

In principle, I’m not adverse to making changes. After all, adapting Shakespeare to suit contemporary taste is an age-old practice. Nineteenth century directors often substituted their own endings when staging Shakespeare’s tragedies, and Kurosawa certainly took liberties with the Bard, transforming the witches of Macbeth into youkai and flipping the gender of King Lear’s ungrateful brood. But bowdlerizing Shakespeare’s best-known speeches? Well, that’s where this old curmudgeon draws the line. Compare the original and the manga-fied versions of Hamlet’s famous “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” speech:

ORIGINAL
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i’ the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?
Ha!
‘Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion!
Fie upon’t! foh! About, my brain! I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim’d their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds
More relative than this: the play ’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

MANGA SHAKESPEARE
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction
Could force his soul [to] tears in his eyes?
What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have?
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks;
the play ’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

Shorn of the allusion to classical antiquity and the scathing critique of Elizabethean actors, Hamlet’s speech has been reduced to an action plan for gauging Claudius’ guilt. It’s a fair gloss on this very famous soliloquy, I guess, but one that misses the beauty and richness of Shakespeare’s language.

Perhaps these editorial decisions would be less distasteful if the artwork was well executed. Alas, poor Yorick, it’s awful. The panels are a jumbled mess; the characters’ appearances vary considerably from page to page; the figures are posed without regard for anatomy or proportion; and the backgrounds are virtually non-existent. Vieceli’s rendering of Queen Gertrude offers a telling example of what’s wrong with these editions. Given her racy staging of the “Hamlet, thou have cleft my heart in twain” scene, it seems safe to say that Vieceli conceived of Gertrude as an attractive, middle-aged woman, not a nursing home candidate. But in some panels, Gertrude appears to be about 70 years old, with pronounced wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. Grandmother or MILF? The “cleft heart” scene is a whole different kettle of fish if Hamlet is beating up an old woman instead of chiding his youthful mother for her sexual behavior.

By now, I’m sure there are a few librarians, educators, or high school students who are reading this and thinking, This woman just doesn’t get it. These books make Shakespeare accessible to students who might otherwise find the material too daunting. But to be useful as pedagogical tools, adaptations must illuminate an aspect of the original that’s difficult for modern audiences to understand. In the case of Shakespeare, it’s the language, not the basic plotlines, that poses difficulty for most readers. If your illustrations for, say, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech simply show him looking pensive, then you haven’t added anything of explanatory value to the original. Shakespeare is especially tricky in this regard because so much of the action takes place off stage. Reaction and reflection lend themselves nicely to soliloquies, but are difficult to capture in pictures. Students would be better served by renting a good filmed version of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet than reading these manga treatments, as a film not only shows us what’s happening, but allows us to hear the emotions and sentiments behind language that sometimes confounds modern ears.

There’s another drawback to these manga-fied versions of Shakespeare. Whatever their merits, they reveal more about aesthetic and cultural norms of our own time period than they do about Shakespeare’s. Though the Bard’s words, stories, and characters are largely intact, their manga-fied presentation sheds little light on how Elizabethan audiences received these plays. Many students would be surprised to learn, for example, that there’s humor in both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, that the groundlings routinely heckled the performers, or that all the parts–including Juliet and Ophelia–were originally performed by male actors. An inspired manga-ka might have shed light on Elizabethan casting practices by inserting a bit of shojo-esque cross-dressing, for example, or using deformations to punctuate humorous moments. (In both Leong and Vieceli’s defense, a few chibis pop up in both volumes, though their deployment never quite synchronizes with the text.) Instead, the creators have simply gussied up the stories with new settings–something that could easily be accomplished with a film or stage version.

The bottom line: Manga Shakespeare is yet another earnest but misguided effort on the part of grown-ups to talk to teens in language we think they’ll understand. You dig, fer shizzle?

POSTSCRIPT: This review was revised on 5/5/07.