This term Year 10 students at Wimbledon High School went to see an adaption of Shakespeare’s famous play, Macbeth. The visit got me thinking about how Shakespeare’s work has been made accessible to people of all ages and tastes- through abridged children stories, to plays and even movies.
When I was younger, I was given a set of abridged Shakespeare stories. At the time I was not excited or impressed! To my nine-year-old mine, the books looked too hard to read, given that the author’s name sounded complicated and was long as well! However, I came around, after being persuaded to “give it a go”. I read one page of A Midsummer Night’s Dream- I was completely hooked to the characters from the ethereal fairy Queen Titania to the comic Nick Bottom. From then onwards, I started reading all the books- my favourites being As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. The books gave children like me an insight on what great literature looked like and was actually good preparation for the texts we study in KS3 and for our GCSE’s.
From early on, our teachers made sure we appreciated the writing of the world’s best-selling author. The works of William Shakespeare still sell millions of copies each year and it is estimated that up to 4 billion copies of his plays and poetry have already been sold! I remember that when I was in Year 5, I was lucky enough to see a couple of plays at Shakespeare’s Globe for the first time. The plays seemed to have captivated and appealed to all audiences from small school children, teens, adults and the elderly.
When watching films like ’10 things I hate about you’ ( based around The Taming of The Shrew) and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (the Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes version) a whole new audience falls in love with the stories. The modern twists on the famous tales encourage younger people to discover and explore something that may not have interested them at the beginning. These different media which have been used to portray Shakespeare’s writings, whether it be from stories, in a classroom or from the dazzling performance from Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo; go on to show that the works of Shakespeare will be around for many more years to come, for people to enjoy and appreciate.
