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Someone once asked me that question when I was working at a bookstore. I was stunned for a moment until I remembered SparkNotes' "No Fear Shakespeare" series (not available in my high-school days), in which a contemporary rewording adjoins the Bard of Avon's.[1] Since then, educational tools have followed the trends even further: I noticed some manga-style S.A.T. study guides a couple of years ago, but it was only this Saturday that I came across
Romeo & Juliet: No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels, "illustrated" by Matt Wiegle.
For those not familiar, Wiegle, a member of the PARTYKA comics collective, is the cartoonist behind the indispensable minicomic
The Four Husbands, adapted from an Igulik Eskimo folk tale. Despite my general distaste for having someone else "translate" Shakespeare for students (though I think it's effective if students "translate" it themselves as a learning exercise[2]), the solid design work, inexpensive price point and the chance to examine a polished, detailed version of Wiegle's artwork made it appear worthwhile.
To begin with, the cast-list page benefits from the graphic-novel format: not only do you get a character's name and description, but thumbnail-sized portraits to introduce and distinguish him or her. Wiegle has cleverly arranged Romeo and Juliet at the tops of the parallel columns of each of their houses, so visually, it breaks down not only into house vs. house, but also horizontally pairs the characters who share similar functions: Friar Lawrence and Nurse, Mercutio and Tybalt, etc.
However, the graphic-novel format poses a significant problem for the side-by-side comparison of the texts: SparkNotes' compromise is to keep as close to the original language as possible while making the meaning as plain as possible, to the detriment of both. The result is duller than what Shakespeare must sound like to people who don't like Shakespeare (jokes that are meant to be bad in the Elizabethan English, such as when the servants Sampson and Gregory are kidding around, are just flat in this mode — eventually the "editors of SparkNotes," who are credited with the writing, just sort of throw up their hands)[3], and you have to wonder if the infinitesimal amount of clarity gained by rewording famous quotations such as "What's in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet;/" (Act II Scene 2) into "Oh, be some other name! The thing/We call a rose would smell as sweet/if we called it by any other name" is worth it.
As the artist, Wiegle not only has to contend with that obstacle, but also with the limited space of word balloons: in this he succeeds admirably. He manages to keep the word balloons brief enough and laid out in a varied, visually attractive fashion: though he will change the lettering for effect, his chief method of giving a sense of how the words sound is by changing the shapes of the tails of the word balloons. The tail is an emotional indicator: generally, smooth, round ones denote calm, while
they become more jagged as the speaker becomes more emotional.
In
The Four Husbands, Wiegel proved that he had a gift for adaptation; as such, his cartooning is enough to (almost) overcome the leaden text and make this a fine graphic novel in its own right. Fittingly, his Juliet, who transforms from kid to lovesick teenager to tough, passionate woman in literally about a week, is his best and most subtle actor: she has the most range of expression (although he struggles a bit, across the board, with depicting grief: he seems to do sadness best when he has the folds of old men's faces to work with). I also find his backgrounds overly groomed: but perhaps he's trying to get across a sense of sets, rather than natural environments.
His "staging," i.e. compositions and page layouts, is brilliant as well: the wide top panel of verso p. 48 has the two facing each other in profile: Romeo, on the left, says his first words to Juliet. Then, an
apse-shaped panel-within-a-panel contains a two-shot as he takes her hand and flirtatiously talks about pilgrims and kisses, on the right is her reaction as she banters back. For the rest of the page, he frames parts of their faces in extreme close-up, interspersed with panels that show their bodies in relation to one another: it's the most intimate part of the book, leading to the mirroring, wide panel on the top of the recto page, in which they share their first kiss.
When Romeo is depicted as slightly childlike in the diagram he uses to explain to the Nurse his plan to sneak in to see Juliet, he's not only simplified it so that the not-too-bright Nurse can understand it; he betrays his essentially immature approach to this relationship (which both Juliet and Nurse fear). Wiegle, who plays around with layouts, uses a six-panel grid in both of the balcony scenes to depict Romeo taking his leave of Juliet. The long, narrow panels economically frame the spatial distance between the lovers, while conveying how difficult it is for them to separate, the painfulness of being near and yet so far, and other such nuances.
I wasn't very fond of
Romeo & Juliet when I read it in high school (Romeo is such an ass-hat: I know that's intentional and almost all of the other characters treat him as such, but still), there are other Shakespearean plays I vastly prefer. However, now that I have a little more distance from that time in my life, I find myself appreciating it a little more: I'm fascinated by the way Juliet's inability to quite let Romeo go goes from an intensity level of about 2 — i.e., a girlfriend who can't get off the phone with her boyfriend — to 11 (suicide).
Educationally,
Romeo & Juliet: No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels is no substitute for engaging with the play itself (it's probably intended to be a supplement, not a substitute, but seriously, who reads the CliffsNotes and then goes on to read the work in question?), but it's entirely fitting that Wiegle, like Shakespeare himself, was able to create inspired, inventive work from unoriginal sources.
Notes:
[1] Or whatever combination of folios the scholars and publishers have agreed to use for that edition, plus a little standardization of spelling, etc… most volumes of Shakespeare have some lengthy explanation of this, which I shamefully skip. But you get the idea.
[2] I don't have a problem with footnotes or anything like that: it's just the idea of not really engaging with the actual words at all. One of my favorite TV series, Slings & Arrows, which is about a Shakespearean theater troupe, makes a much better (and funnier) argument for the benefits gained from Shakespeare's words than I ever could.
[3] Wiegel does the best he can with some sausages in the background.
Image credits:
It appears that he artwork is ©2008 Spark Publishing
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
