As an English major, I would just like to say that this is the worst idea ever.
If you don't want to read the play, then watch the play. That's how it exists. Any novelization would no longer be Shakespeare.
Yep. Even if the novelist used all or most of Shakespeare's original dialogue, tons of the poetic elements, like the rhythm, would be lost.
I do get that it can seem inaccessible to read a play. That's why I agree—watch the play, maybe watch a film version of it if that makes more sense. The 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version of
Romeo and Juliet is a pretty good adaptation of that play, and then for
Hamlet, many swear by the Kenneth Branagh version, which is quite good, but I have a personal affection for the Mel Gibson version, which really shows how visceral and passionate Shakespeare's dialogue can be when read that way. I think if you watch a couple of Shakespeare plays performed or in film versions, you'll start to pick up some more on the cadence, on the way the dialogue sounds and is performed, and it'll be easier to get if you then decide to read the text of a play. Also, if you watch, say,
Hamlet[ and feel like you missed some stuff, then you can go back and read it and really kind of work back and forth between the mediums to figure out all of what's going on. Maybe from watching the film you get a general idea of the plot, but miss a lot of it in the complexity of the dialogue, and then you read the play and get a little more, and then go back to the film, then go back to the text to pick up more nuance, etc. I don't know, this is pretty much what I do. I love Shakespeare.
Also, hef, I didn't know you were an English major! I'm currently studying English myself.
Topic: Is it possible to get Shakespeare plays in "novel" form? (Read 4520 times)