hamlet manga

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Adam Sexton • Tintin Pantoja

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Copyright © 2008 by Adam Sexton and Tintin Pantoja. All rights reserved.

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5Act I

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Suiting the Action to the Word:Shakespeare and Manga

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V139

117

71

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Adam Sexton is the author of Master Class in Fiction Writing andthe editor of the anthologies Love Stories, Rap on Rap, andDesperately Seeking Madonna. He has written on art and entertain-ment for The New York Times and The Village Voice, and he teachesfiction writing and literature at New York University and criti-cal reading and writing at Parsons School of Design. A graduateof Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, helives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Tintin Pantoja is a graphic artist dividing her time betweenIndonesia and Manila. She graduated from the School of VisualArts in New York in 2006, having arrived in New York—herfirst time in America—a month before the World Trade Centerattacks in 2001. She is now working on several illustrated proj-ects. Tintin’s work can be viewed on her Web site: tintinpantoja.com

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Suiting the Action to the Word:Shakespeare and Manga

by Adam Sexton

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action...”—Hamlet (Act III, Scene 2)

Four hundred years after the writing of William Shakespeare’splays, it is clear that they are timeless. This is due in part to theirinfinite adaptability. The plays have been translated into dozensof languages and performed all over the world. Famously cre-ative stage productions have included a version of Julius Caesarset in Fascist Europe during the 1930s and a so-called “voodooMacbeth.” Nor have gender and age proved barriers to castingShakespeare’s characters. The role of Hamlet is occasionallyplayed by a woman—an appropriate reversal, considering thatboys acted all the female roles in Shakespeare’s day—while theteenaged Romeo and Juliet have been portrayed by couples intheir forties and fifties.

It is common knowledge that the plays of Shakespearetransfer especially well to the movie screen. Such has been thecase since Thomas Edison made one of the first sound films everusing a scene from As You Like It. Recent cinema standoutsinclude William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, directed by BazLuhrmann, and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet. Both take place inthe present day or near future: Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeowears a Hawaiian shirt—and Julia Stiles’ Ophelia wears a wire,so Claudius and Polonius can eavesdrop on her conversationwith Hamlet. Otherwise, these adaptations remain surprisinglyfaithful to Shakespeare’s texts. And both hit the audience ashard as conventional stage productions in which the actors are

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outfitted with doublets and hose, crossed swords, and whatHamlet calls “a bare bodkin”—his unsheathed dagger (replacedin Almereyda’s movie by a gun).

Shakespeare’s plays have been set to music as well, inoperas and ballets by composers such as Verdi, Tchaikovsky,and Prokofiev. The early comedy Two Gentlemen of Verona wasadapted for Broadway by the composer of Hair, and it won theTony award for Best Musical the same year that Grease wasnominated. In the words of theater critic Jan Kott, Shakespeareis indeed “our contemporary.”

In short, though some consider the plays of WilliamShakespeare to be sacrosanct, they have been cut, expanded (itwas common in the Victorian era to add songs and even happyendings to the tragedies), and adapted to multiple media, emerg-ing none the worse for wear. Although we cannot be sure of this,it seems likely that the writer, who was a popular artist and asavvy businessman as well as an incomparable poet, wouldapprove.

The graphic novels known as manga (Japanese for “whimsi-cal pictures”) are a natural medium for Shakespeare’s work.Like his tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances, which arethrillingly dynamic if properly staged, manga are of coursevisual. In fact, a manga is potentially more visual than a stageproduction of one of the plays of Shakespeare. Unbound by thephysical realities of the theater, the graphic novel can depict anysituation, no matter how fantastical or violent, that its creatorsare able to pencil, ink, and shade.

Take Romeo and Juliet’s famous Queen Mab speech. Even themost creative stage director cannot faithfully present the minus-cule fairy described by Mercutio. Manga artists can. The same istrue of the drowning of Ophelia in Hamlet. It is precisely becausethese vignettes are unstageable that Shakespeare has his charac-ters describe Queen Mab and the death of Ophelia in such greatdetail—they must help us imagine them. In its unlimited ability

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to dramatize, the graphic novel more closely resembles a contem-porary film with a colossal special-effects budget than anythingproduced in the Elizabethan era or since.

At the same time, manga are potentially no less verbal thanShakespeare’s spectacularly wordy plays, with this crucial dif-ference: in a production of one of the plays onstage or onscreen,we can hear the words but can’t see them. Though Shakespeareis never easy, reading helps. And that is precisely what mangaadaptations of the plays allow. Perusing a Shakespeare manga,the reader can linger over speeches, rereading them in part oraltogether. Especially in the long and intricate soliloquies typicalof Shakespearean tragedy, this allows for an appreciation of theplaywright’s craft that is difficult if not impossible as those solil-oquies move past us during a performance.

Overall, turning the pages of a manga version of one ofShakespeare’s plays is something like reading the text of thatplay while attending a performance, but at one’s own pace.Manga is not merely a new medium for the plays of WilliamShakespeare, but one that is distinctly different from anythingto have come before.

A note on authenticity: In order to fit our adaptations intobooks of less than 200 pages, the writers and editors of TheManga Editions have cut words, lines, speeches, even entirescenes from Shakespeare’s plays, a practice almost universalamong stage and film directors. We have never paraphrased theplaywright’s language, however, nor have we summarizedaction. Everything you read in The Manga Editions was writtenby William Shakespeare himself. Finally, footnotes don’t inter-rupt the characters’ speeches here, any more than they would ina production of one of Shakespeare’s plays onstage or on film.

There is no play better suited to the manga approach than Hamlet,Shakespeare’s tragedy about Hamlet, prince of Denmark, who is

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instructed by the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, to kill hisUncle Claudius. Since murdering Hamlet’s father, Claudius hasbecome king of Denmark himself and has married Hamlet’smother, Queen Gertrude. Prince Hamlet has a girlfriend,Ophelia, who is the daughter of Claudius’s most trusted advisor(Polonius) and the sister of Hamlet’s rival, Laertes. Hamlet’s bestfriend, Horatio, and two college chums, Rosencrantz andGuildenstern, visit him during the play. Of all these characters,only one survives to the end of the story.

The play is manga-friendly because it is unarguably action-packed, complete with a terrifying ghost, a tussle in an opengrave, and a climactic swordfight during which four centralcharacters die violent deaths. At least one character in Hamletgoes insane and two characters commit suicide, one of them byaccident. There’s an inadvertent murder, as well as two accom-plished from afar, by trickery. Another murder, achieved bypouring poison into the victim’s ear, takes place before the storystarts and is reenacted in the course of a play within the play.

At the same time, not one of Shakespeare’s plays containsmore internal material—thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears andideas—than Hamlet. Hamlet himself delivers five soliloquiesthroughout the course of the tragedy named for him, and all aremasterpieces of poetry and rhetoric, philosophy and wordplay.Though Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Manga Edition doesn’t explainthe soliloquies, it gives us the opportunity to read and reread themin the context of the visually-presented action described above.By means of dynamic new medium of manga, Shakespeare’s time-less tragedy is thereby made new—again.

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ore full-throttle action and ambition

gone haywire. More dreams and schemes. Alliances and betrayals. Murders and mayhem. Passions and poisons. Shakespeare has it all, and now you can experience the action and appreciate the intrigue in these manga editions. All of these books combine the classic art form and classic literature and feature an introduction that sets the stage so you’re engrossed from the first page.

Wiley, the Wiley logo, CliffsNotes, and CliffsNotes.com are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries.

978-0-470-09759-5$9.99 US/$11.99 CAN

978-0-470-09757-1 $9.99 US/$11.99 CAN

978-0-470-09760-1 $9.99 US/$11.99 CAN

978-0-470-09758-8 $9.99 US/$11.99 CAN

Look for these fast-paced manga editions wherever books are sold.

COMING IN 2009!Huck Finn—The Manga Edition978-0-470-15287-4

The Scarlet Letter—The Manga Edition 978-0-470-14889-1

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