Why Young Adult Novelizations Belong in the Classroom

the plays. Bowdler’s (1807) The Family Shakespeare and the Lambs’ (1807) Tales from Shakespeare excised or softened objectionable elements, while Cowden Clarke’s (1850) The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines imagined the childhood and adolescent years of the heroines for young Victorian women. In these early examples and in more recent efforts to adapt Shakespeare for young people—such as Nesbit’s (1897) The Children’s Shakespeare and (1907) Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare, Burdett’s (1994–2002) Shakespeare Can Be Fun series, or Coville’s (1996–2007) William Shakespeare series—there seem to be two significant assumptions at work. The first is the notion that Shakespeare’s plays are valuable and necessary reading. As Bottoms (2000) asserts, “So accepted has the idea become that Shakespeare should be taught to children that we hardly query why or where it arose” (p. 11). Garber’s (2008) point that the plays have “almost always seemed to coincide with the times in which they are read” (p. xii) suggests why many, as Dakin (2009) puts it, believe Shakespeare “transcends the isolation of the human being and the barriers of time, place, gender, race, and status that divide us” (p. xiv). This widely held belief in the universality of the plays explains not only older efforts like those of Bowdler, the Lambs, and Clarke to bring Shakespeare to young people, but also our continued reliance on Shakespeare in the secondary classroom and the recent growth in texts presenting Shakespeare to children. Yet the idea of Shakespeare as required reading fits awkwardly with the second most frequently made assumption about W hat if Ophelia had been more like the assertive Juliet? Might she have been able to save Hamlet and her nation from tragedy? “Yes,” answers the young adult novel Dating Hamlet (Fiedler, 2002). In it, an intelligent Ophelia uses a sleeping potion to fake her drowning death and, with Hamlet, escapes the corruption of Denmark for—where else?—Verona. Because it is so radical, Dating Hamlet may seem like an isolated instance of our ongoing engagement with the what ifs so tantalizingly presented by Shakespeare’s plays. But along with its sister texts Romeo’s Ex (Fiedler, 2006), Saving Juliet (Selfors, 2008), and Ophelia (Klein, 2006), these works represent an effort by contemporary young adult novelists to refigure the plays for young readers. Because of their fiery and likable heroines, extended love scenes, and frequent and heated disagreements between the main characters and authority figures, these novels seem to perform as chick lit for young adult readers. Indeed, they have already gone “viral.” Yet, young readers are far more likely to encounter one of these novels in the public library or from a friend than in the classroom. Why? we wonder. We believe these novels belong not merely in libraries, but also in the secondary classroom. There, they become an ideal vehicle for teachers who seek to enable their students not only to identify with the plays’ characters, but to critique their themes.