Best known for publishing popular study guides like the For Dummies series and CliffNotes, science and educational publisher John Wiley & Sons has paired Shakespeare with manga-style artwork in an effort to make the Bard more accessible to younger readers. Wiley will release manga adaptations of four Shakespeare plays—Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar—in February in a tankoubon, graphic novel book-format. This is the latest effort to use manga and comics in general to adapt the classics for a new generation of readers. Last year Abrams Books for Young Readers also published a line of manga-styled Shakespeare adaptations

Working closely with artists from New York’s School of Visual Arts cartooning program, Adam Sexton—a professor of critical reading and writing at Parson’s School of Design who also teaches literature at New York University—has put together a creative unit he refers to as Team Shakespeare that has transformed the plays into graphic narratives. Sexton is a Shakespeare enthusiast and has rigorously reviewed the plays and surveyed critiques of Shakespeare’s works in addition to watching film adaptations of the plays.

“All of the artists were [surprisingly] Shakespeare savvy,” said Sexton, who told PWCW that there were times when he had to act as the Shakespeare police??. Sexton said he was often called on to clarify what certain phrases meant and what type of visual characterizations were needed. “Sometimes visuals would appear that didn’t seem to me faithful to the text,” Sexton said, citing early artwork on Juliet, who he said didn’t look quite young enough in the initial drawings.

Artist (and SVA grad) Yali Lin worked on the Romeo & Juliet book and said the script was very clear: “I had a lot of freedom in the visual storytelling.” Lin told PWCW that the script included art direction and that Sexton encouraged her to watch the film adaptations of the play. Unlike other adaptations of Shakespeare, Sexton wanted to forgo paraphrasing and explanatory narrative. Sexton worked hard to ensure that all dialogue in the books was taken directly from the plays. “I want readers to know that everything in the books was written by Shakespeare,” he said.

At the same time, Sexton acknowledges that the adaptation process required that he cut out “an enormous amount of material,” which he described as the biggest challenge of the project. “Everybody makes cuts [in adapting Shakespeare],” Sexton said. “We’ve made cuts, too, but we tried to remain sensitive and faithful to the material.” Sexton emphasized that there is no substitute for reading Shakespeare’s plays themselves, and hopes that the manga adaptations will encourage people to read the original plays.

However, Peter Platt, a professor of Shakespeare and English literature at Barnard College in Manhattan, is skeptical that these manga adaptations will act as a gateway to the real thing. “This is an alternative to CliffNotes, which is an alternative to Shakespeare,” Platt said. He complains that students don’t use CliffNotes as a supplement to Shakespeare, but as a way to avoid having to read the actual text. Platt, who prefers the competing Spark Notes series (published by Barnes & Noble) to Wiley’s CliffNotes, believes there are better ways to supplement reading Shakespeare and cites Scholastic’s Dead Famous series as an example. “It introduces Shakespeare in an intelligent way and doesn’t pretend to take the place of it,” he said, pointing to William Shakespeare and His Dramatic Acts. Nevertheless, Platt acknowledged that creating a manga adaptation of Shakespeare “is important. I hope that someone will do a complete Shakespeare in manga.”

Sexton, on the other hand, pointed out that there will always be high school kids who rent the movie rather than read the text: “We can’t control that.” But for students truly struggling with Shakespeare, Sexton believes a manga adaptation will help make the Bard a little more accessible. “With the manga approach, you move through the visuals at your own pace. It’s a little more interactive than seeing a [theatrical] production,” he said. “We’ve trimmed away much of the text of each of these plays—you can get bogged down with relative trivia. Not every line that the man wrote was equally profound or essential to each of these plays.”

Look for more adaptations from Wiley and Sexton in the future. He’s also working on manga adaptations of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which will both be illustrated by Lin. Both books are due to be released in early 2009.