Rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays for young readers: the Manga Shakespeare series

Abstract

This paper discusses rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays aimed at young readers and published as comics in the series Manga Shakespeare featured by the British publishing house SelfMadeHero and available in Brazilian Portuguese under the Galera Record label, with special focus on the adaptation of Hamlet. Following a presentation of the aims of the English manga series and of the plays already published, at least two levels of Hamlet’s rewriting will be examined: firstly, its adaptation into manga, a process which not only adds multimodality to the final product but also entails changes concerning time and place. Secondly, the interlingual translation of the adapted text and of the paratexts, which resulted in the Brazilian edition that belongs to the series Mangá Shakespeare. For both levels of rewriting we will try to determine: (i) overall features of the transpositions; (ii) to what extent the main characteristics of the works regarding theme, plot, character design, and language are maintained; and (iii) which image of the writer and of the work is created by the rewriters.