two great tastes that taste great together

 

I think I may have mentioned here before that Sara has made herself business cards with the title "Manga Librarian." The Manga Library has been seriously upgraded for the new year by the addition of a wad of ancient Bodleian Library book order forms, which inspired the Librarian to produce her first Newsletter (so she could introduce the forms)…. which led in turn to a trip to B0rders in Dundee (we have a B0rders in Dundee!), which led to

 

MANGA SHAKESPEARE!!!!!!111!!!

 

XXXXD XD XD XD

 

Yes, I know it's been done before.  This series is actually CALLED "Manga Shakespeare." The School Marm Purist in me wants to disapprove [this is not Shakespeare: this is not manga] , but the Richard Plantagenet Fangirl (we share the same birthday) is just going …. YESSSSS.

 

The thing is, Shakespeare and manga were made for each other. Really. Ghosts, twins, fairies, swords, poison, incest, secret loves, lost princes and princesses, shameless borrowings from all other available literature and media, utter disregard for a remotely accurate historical and/or cultural setting, and OMG we haven't even GOT to the girls disguised as boys disguised as girls.

 

And somebody seems to think it's educational. Here's the BBC's take on it; here it is listed as an appropriate supplement to the National Literacy Trust's National Reading Campaign, for pete's sake. These guys clearly haven't spent much time checking out the artists' blog.  Laertes/Hamlet!  an interesting pairing that you'd have thought might have occurred to me before, given the infinite number of times I (and another) fought that battle with broken broomsticks in my back garden.  bwahahahahaha

 

So what has the Library got? Hamlet, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, which is all that was available in B0rders. And now I will break my usual moratorium on book reviews (I'm so bloody opinionated) because, really, you should all go out and buy (or lend) Manga Shakespeare to all the ten-year-olds you know.

 

The Hamlet is not great. The text suffers from the necessity of having been cut too severely, and it brings home to me what a difficult story it is. The setting in 2107 is truly gratuitous (unfortunately I can't refer directly to any of these books because they're all on loan at the moment). HOWEVER, the up-side is that the Manga Librarian is now asking questions like: "So, Mummy, why do you think the queen drinks the poisoned wine? Do you think she doesn't know it's poisoned and she's just thirsty, or do you think she THINKS it's poisoned and she wants to protect her son, or do you think she KNOWS it's poisoned and she wants to give Hamlet a reason to kill the king? And if she KNOWS it's poisoned, why doesn't she just say so? Do you think she wants to kill herself?"

 

phew.

 

The Richard III works really well--the setting is traditional, and it sort of does lip service to Blade of the Immortal, I'd say (the assassins all look like Magatsu… though the young Edward V does bear a passing resemblance to another Edward, particularly when he's glowering at Richard: "I fear no uncles dead.")

 

But the Romeo and Juliet is just--MWAH. I love it. Framed, obviously, as battling yakuza families in modern Tokyo. It works so well. This is how well it works: I sat there last night WEEPING through about the last fifty pages. I don't think I quite took on board, before, how much of the tragedy Romeo brings on himself--nevermind his difficult love affair (and nevermind how utterly FICKLE he is in the beginning, something I always forget)--the real spiral dive is when he kills Tybalt.

 

So there you have it. Sara has gone off to school for the past two days with something like fifteen books and DVDs in her schoolbag for distribution. She's now soliciting reviews for the newsletter. Yesterday while I was sitting in the cafeteria at the swimming pool, while Mark had his swimming lesson, one of the boys from Sara's class sat down next to me and told me how excited he was about the Manga Library…. all his plans for which books he's going to borrow, and how he hopes the Librarian will give him a place on her staff.

 

Her class is the only one in the school that reads manga, apart from a knock-on effect in Mark's class (Mark is the Library's official Cleaner).

 

oh, man, this post is out of control. I keep meaning to write about Venice.

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( Appendix A: The Newsletter )