‘But What Care I for Words?’: Narrative and Language in Shakespeare Comics

This article studies how narrativity, performativity and visuality are employed in Shakespeare comics: single-volume adaptations of individual Shakespeare plays in comic book, graphic novel or manga form. The cases studied include two Classics Illustrated titles (Julius Caesar, Hamlet), two No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels (Hamlet, Macbeth) and the Manga Classics Macbeth. These are all geared towards older children, but like most comics they can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. In discussions framed by adaptation theory and research on children’s editions of Shakespeare, I study how verbal content such as paraphrase, captions in text boxes and original Shakespearean verse interact with visual elements in these comics, and I argue that the legibility, aesthetic interest and reader engagement engendered by Shakespeare comics emerge primarily from their multimodal narrative design—which has literary, dramatic and visual arts qualities—whilst paraphrasing the verbal language is less effective. Scholarship on Shakespearean prose retellings for older children identifies cultural assumptions that underlie this genre of adaptation and demonstrates how narrative has been used to reinscribe problematic moral stances, worldviews and a form of bardolatry. Comics’ visual–verbal narrative design enables reinterrogations of the canon through comparing several Shakespeare comics. I show how the manner in which framing devices, drawing styles, character designs and settings interact and interblend with the verbal content, thus determining how Shakespeare comics create meaning, and how they help us reassess Shakespeare’s position in culture. At the same time, the conspicuous co-authorship seen in Shakespeare comics, between text, textual adaptation, mise-en-page and visual art, contributes towards subverting the notion of Shakespeare as singular genius.