I’ve only read A Christmas Carol this past Christmas and I had only one problem with it: Dickens’ prose is definitely not for me. It feels like trying to eat a bar of iron. He is one of those authors whose books I love the idea more than the experience of reading itself. Whenever I think about that short story, I feel like I like it better than I did back when I was reading it – because the longer I’m away from it, the more I forget about the roughness of the writing and more about the story itself.
And then Ian Doescher comes and fixes the whole thing by making it palatable for Shakespeare lovers and the irony of disliking Dickens’ writing but loving Shakespeare’s, which is objectively harder to swallow, doesn’t go unnoticed, thanks for asking.
This book has a really interesting approach to an adaptation – not only does the writing resembles Shakespeare’s, but also the characters are borrowed from the Bard’s works. There is a lot of intertextuality with the plays, but you don’t miss out on the story itself if you haven’t read them. The characters are merely used as "actors" for the characters in A Christmas Story (like Juliet playing Scrooge’s teenage girlfriend and Romeo playing Scrooge himself as a teenager). There are also some lines from the original plays, but they are contextualized in the story, so even if you don’t pick them up, it doesn’t spoil your reading experience, for example:
Puck, the Ghost of Christmas Past: Other Christmases we’ll see,
We shall spy the man to be.
Up and down, yea, up and down,
I shall lead thee up and down.
and
Mercutio: A gift on both your houses, my good lads!
This was a really wonderful read – one that will captivate both Dickens’ enthusiasts and Shakespeare’s aficionados. I’m really impressed with Doescher’s creative process!