The Enchanted Island - Ian Serraillier

This is a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, retold. In general, I hate the idea of abridged or simplified stories for younger audiences.

If the reader is too young to read it, then they should read something else. There are plenty of great stories for any age group.

This retelling is particularly heinous because so much of what makes Shakespeare great is the language used to tell the tales. Don’t get me wrong, the stories are powerful, but the language is key to their telling.

Puck from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream is one of my favourite characters. You can hear the mischief he gets up to, and it is so much more mischievous because of the language used.

“I am that merry wanderer of the night./ I jest to Oberon, and make him smile/ When I a fat bean-fed horse beguile,/ Neighing in likeness of a filly foal;” (A Midsummer-Night’s Dream 2.1. 43-47).

The lines themselves tell a story that’s humorous. But the choice of language takes it much further than that. “Merry wanderer of the night” and “Filly foal” are so evocative that they go beyond the literal meaning of the words. 

At best, we are giving readers an average watered-down version of the original. At worst, we are taking from them what makes the stories brilliant in the first place.

If you’re not up to Shakespeare or he is just not your thing, that’s fine. Read something else.

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