9. Hearing with Eyes and Seeing with Ears: Adaptive Aesthetics in the BBC’s Shakespeare for Children

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shakespeare’s texts are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2016).

In Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1982), John Ellis discusses that in broadcast television, “sound carries the fiction” and “the image has a more illustrative function” (128). See also Karen Lury’s analysis of sound in children’s programmes in Interpreting Television (London: Hodder Arnold, 2015).

Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 40. See also David Lodge, “Adapting Nice Work for television,” in Novel Images: Literature in Performance, ed. Peter Reynolds (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 191–203.

Perrin was a Frenchman who “made his living as a tutor to the English and Irish gentry, promoted Shakespeare as a vehicle for instructing his youthful pupils in both morality and the French language.” See Kathryn Stephen Prince, “Illustration, Text, and Performance in Early Shakespeare for Children,” Borrowers and Lenders 2, no. 2 (2006), https://​borrowers-ojs-azsu.​tdl.​org/​borrowers/​article/​view/​52/​102, accessed 15 October, 2022.

See also Georgianna Ziegler, “Introducing Shakespeare: The Earliest Versions for Children,” Shakespeare 2, no. 2 (2006): 132–151, https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​1745091060098380​2

Mary Seymour, Shakespeare Stories Simply Told (Edinburgh: T. Nelson and Sons, 1883), Preface, https://​archive.​org/​details/​shakespearessto0​0shakgoog/​page/​n6/​mode/​2up, accessed 15 October 2022.

See Preface by Sidney Lee for Mary Macleod’s Shakespeare Story Book (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1902), xii, https://​www.​gutenberg.​org/​files/​49146/​49146-h/​49146-h.​htm, accessed 15 October 2022.

Lois Grosvenor Hufford, Shakespeare in Tale and Verse (London: Macmillan, 1902), vii, https://​webapp1.​dlib.​indiana.​edu/​inauthors/​view?​docId=​VAC1105&​brand=​ia-books, accessed 15 October 2022.

Leon Garfield, Six Shakespeare Stories (Chicago, Oxford: Heinemann, 1994), https://​archive.​org/​details/​sixshakespearest​0000garf/​mode/​2up?​view=​theater, accessed 20 October 2022.

The vast body of scholarship in the field of adaptation studies of Shakespearean works started to take shape in the form of Shakespeare on film, of which seminal publications include Shakespeare and the Moving Image: the Plays on Film and Television, eds. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Robert Shaughnessy, Shakespeare on Film (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: a Century of Film and Television (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Russell Jackson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell (Blackwell, 2012). As the understanding of what adaptation is and means develops, more recently, further questions about Shakespeare adaptations and the implications behind corresponding processes of readings, interpretations, performances and productions have been raised in studies such as Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, Studying Shakespeare Adaptation: From Restoration Theatre to YouTube (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Shakespeare for younger audiences ranges from stage productions and puppet shows to films and animations to novel adaptations, graphic novels and picture books. See Abigail Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Versions and Adaptations (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

See Victoria Elliott and Sarah Olive, “Secondary Shakespeare in the UK: what gets taught and why?,” English in Education 55, no. 2 (2021): 102–115, https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​04250494.​2019.​1690952. See also Sheila Cavanagh, “‘Crushing on a Capulet’: Culture, Cognition, and Simplification in Romeo and Juliet for Young People,” Borrowers and Lenders 2, no. 1 (2006), in which Cavanagh explores how existing Shakespearean resources for teachers and students in the U.K. and the U.S. (with examples pertaining to Romeo and Juliet) can help prepare young people to learn about Shakespeare, a fixture in school curricula. Teaching and study aids have been made available in forms of books and programmes, such as Starting with Shakespeare: Successfully Introducing Shakespeare to Children by Pauline Nelson and Todd Daubert (Colorado: Teacher Ideas Press, 2000), in which the authors speak to users of their book: ‘To everyone who had to study Shakespeare and hated it! You always knew there should be a better way? and now there is!’ (iv); Shakespeare: To Teach or Not to Teach: Teaching Shakespeare Made Fun: From Elementary to High School by Cass Foster and Lynn G. Johnson (Arizona: Five Star Publications, Inc., 1994); Lois Burdett’s series ‘Shakespeare Can Be Fun!’; the Folger Shakespeare Library’s series ‘Shakespeare Set Free: Sourcebooks for Classroom Teachers’. The titles of these resources suggest that Shakespeare is boring, Shakespeare is hard and that Shakespeare can cause fear.

Maddalena Pennacchia, “Shakespeare for Beginners: The Animated Tales from Shakespeare and the Case Study of “Julius Caesar,” Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature, ed. Anja Müller (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 60.

Quoted in Willems, “Verbal-visual, verbal-pictorial or textual-televisual?,” 69.

Frank W. Wadsworth, “‘Sound and Fury’ — King Lear on Television,” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 8, no.3 (1954), 267.

“Shakespeare in Shorts,” BBC Teach, https://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​programmes/​articles/​4w5xvV324jx463Xy​CyctnBs/​shakespeare-in-shorts, accessed 28 September 2022.

In addition to BBC Television Shakespeare, other BBC television series of Shakespearean plays include An Age of Kings (1960), in which the episodes are 60–80 minutes long; The Spread of the Eagle (1963), in which each episode is 50 minutes long; The Wars of the Roses (1965), which, when repeated again on BBC 1 in 1966, was broadcast as 11 50–minute episodes; and ShakespeaRe-Told, in which the episodes are 85–89 minutes long. Seminal discussions of these television series include Stephen Purcell, “Shakespeare on Television,” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, eds. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 522–40; Emma Smith, “Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 134–49; Susan Willis, The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon (Carolina: North Carolina Press, 2002); Herbert R. Coursen, Watching Shakespeare on Television (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993).

The first series (1992) contains A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Twelfth Night. The second series (1994) contains Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, The Winter’s Tale and Othello.

See Patty S. Derrick, “‘The Childhood of our Joy’: Romeo and Juliet for Kids,” Shakespeare and the Classroom 11 (2003): 30–34; Herbert R. Coursen, Shakespeare in Space: Recent Shakespeare Productions on Screen (New York: Lang, 2002); Janet Bottoms, “Speech, Image, Action: Animating Tales from Shakespeare,” Children’s Literature in Education 32 (2001): 3–15, https://​doi.​org/​10.​1023/​A:​1005292203854; James Andreas, “The Canning of a Classic: Shakespeare: The Animated Tales,” Shakespeare Yearbook 11 (2000): 96–117; Ingeborg Boltz, “Shakespeare: The Animated Tales: Vom Trickfilmstudio in die Schule,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 133 (1997): 118–133; Martha Tuck Rozett, “When Images Replace Words: Shakespeare, Russian Animation, and the Culture of Television,” in Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century, eds. Ronald E. Salomone and James E. David (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997), 208–214.

Gregory Semenza, “Teens, Shakespeare, and the Dumbing Down Cliché: The Case of The Animated Tales,” Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 2 (2008), 41, https://​doi.​org/​10.​1353/​shb.​0.​0006. In Shakespeare for Young People, Rokison has also observed that “the depiction of the characters in many of the animations often conforms to unimaginative stereotypes,” 138.

“Animating Shakespeare,” broadcast record, British Universities Film and Video Council, http://​bufvc.​ac.​uk/​shakespeare/​index.​php/​title/​av37046, accessed 10 April 2024.

Janet Bottoms, “Speech, Image, Action: Animating Tales from Shakespeare,” Children’s Literature in Education 32, no. 1 (2001): 6, https://​doi.​org/​10.​1023/​A:​1005292203854

In the animation, Mercutio’s musicality is seen, rather than heard. In the play, he has two song episodes (2.3.122–127, 2.3.131).

In the episode, half a dozen fairies lay down around Titania and join her in her sleep, whereas in the text ‘[o]ne aloof stand sentinel’ (2.2.26) whilst the rest leave the fairy queen.

Viola “can sing / And speak to him in many sorts of music” (1.2.56–57). Even though there is no mention of Viola’s instrumental abilities in the play, it makes sense that she, raised in a family whose riches enable her to pay the captain of a ship bounteously (1.2.51), can play on some musical instruments as young ladies (especially unmarried ones) of gentry households would learn to sing as well as play on different musical instruments (Katrine K. Wong, “Gender and Music in Shakespeare,” eds. Christopher R. Wilson and Mervyn Cooke, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music [New York: Oxford University Press, 2022], 157). Bianca and Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew are two other such examples.

“Shakespeare in Shorts Animation Series—Shakespeare Set To Music & 2D Animation,” https://​fettleanimation.​com/​work/​shakespeare-in-shorts-animation-series/​, accessed 26 November 2022. The six plays involved are Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest, Hamlet and Twelfth Night.

“Shakespeare in Shorts Animation Series.”

Laura Tosi, “The Narrator as Mediator and Explicator in Victorian and Edwardian Retellings of Shakespeare for Children,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 92 (2020), 2. http://​journals.​openedition.​org/​cve/​8088

“English KS2: Shakespeare Retold,” https://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​teach/​school-radio/​english-ks2-shakespeare-retold-index/​zh4h2sg, accessed 26 November 2022.

“KS2 Music: The Tempest,” https://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​teach/​school-radio/​music-ks2-the-tempest-index/​zfgcgwx, accessed 26 November 2022.