The Daily Telegraph - Features
It’s Shakespeare for children – but in a radical new form
SHAKESPEARE’S FIRST FOLIO: ALL THE PLAYS: A CHILDREN’S EDITION by Anjna Chouhan, illustrated by Emily Sutton
416pp, Walker, £26.99 (0808 196 T 6794), RRP£30
Shakespeare has inspired so many abridged editions for children that it can be hard to know where to start. In the past few years, Michael Morpurgo’s Tales From Shakespeare (2023) has competed with bumper new retellings by authors such as Anna Milbourne and Angelica McAllister; Romeo and Juliet now comes in the form of a 22-page board book. But this new doorstopper is the first illustrated children’s edition of the First Folio, which included 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, and was first published in 1623, seven years after the author’s death.
In Shakespeare’s First Folio: All the Plays: A Children’s Edition, the plays are published in the same order as in the original volume, but the contents page reveals how drastically they’ve been cut. Henry IV, Part I takes up eight pages, while Hamlet runs to 12. Yet what’s remarkable is how much of the poetry has been preserved. The texts were abridged by Shakespeare scholar Anjna Chouhan, working with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust with the aim that each play could be performed by small groups of schoolchildren, in less than 20 minutes, “using almost entirely Shakespeare’s original language”.
So, rather than rewriting the plays in short passages of modern prose, as in other abridged versions, they’ve instead scaled them back to the key lines. Macbeth is reduced to eight pages, but the witches’ opening scene remains virtually untouched. In The Tempest, Caliban’s “the isle is full of noises” speech has survived, as has much of Prospero’s final soliloquy: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.”
The book is illustrated by Emily Sutton, who has supplied more than 150 ingeniously detailed watercolour drawings, including 36 title-pages, and 300-odd character portraits ranging from Macbeth to Crab, the “sourestnatured” dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The colourful, contemporary style of her drawings makes a clever contrast with the complexity of the language.
Chouhan explains that with “propriety in mind” certain topics and references – mainly alluding to sexual relations and race – have been removed; but one can hardly quibble about censorship, given that more than 90 per cent of each play has been cut. What’s more interesting is what has been left in – and Chouhan’s triumph is in how she picks out each play’s most memorable passages and form a coherent narrative. True, some children might still be left bemused by Hamlet’s existential musings, or by Lady Macbeth’s incantations to the spirit world. But with each play reduced to 20 minutes they won’t be bored – and it’s a rare delight to find a children’s edition that leaves Shakespeare’s language intact.