I love this, someone has taken some of William Shakespeare’s works of art and turned them into mangas!

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At school I read Romeo and Juliet and for the life of me I did not understand most of what was being said throughout the play.  Sure I knew the story line but only after it was told to me by my teacher!  I was just looking in the manga section of my local library and saw a manga book called Romeo and Juliet, I thought to myself “Why has someone made a manga form of Romeo and Juliet?”  So I picked it up and flipped through it.

I was so surprised I found it to be a brilliantly made comic!  It kept all of the words that Shakespeare used in his plays but you could actually see what was happening in pictures and it made it so much easier to understand what was happening. 

At the beginning the illustrator gives you coloured pictures of the characters that will be featured throughout the play, and they also add in the character’s own quotes with their picture.  They still use the words Shakespeare used so it’s a little hard to read at first but because of the illustrations you find it so much easier to figure out what the person is trying to say, also I find that the fight scenes look so much better in a manga book than in real life and well they just look really cool and they make you get into the story from the beginning.

At the back of the book they give you a blurb and a written description of the entire story plot in a less complicated way than shakespeare did (and in an english that you can fully understand.  It also gives a biography of William Shakespeare and they also update the year and time when the story takes place.  In Romeo and Juliet’s case they are in modern day Tokyo and the Montague and Capulet families are two different Yakuza (mob/gangster) families at war with each other.

The plays have been adapted by:  Richard Appignanesi, I think that they shorten the play and include less parts of speech but they keep the main bits in there so that the reader understands what’s happening and can follow the story.

If you know that you’re going to be doing a Shakespeare play next year then I would recommend that you find a Shakespeare Manga book and read it, cos even if you don’t understand what’s being said you can always just follow the pretty pictures and then read the blurb at the very end to know what the play was about and who the good/bad guys are!