MANGA SHAKESPEARE? EXPLORING ADAPTATION AND ‘TRUST’.Dr Shari SabetiSchool of EducationUniversity of Stirling

Manga Shakespeare:

Borders that need to be crossed in educating teenagers about Shakespeare?

•‘Cultural gap’ – ‘high’ to ‘popular’.

•Generation gap.•The ‘digital’ divide.•Different ways of knowing and being.•Different ‘literacies’? More visually oriented.

•Accessibility – ‘difficulty’ of language.

•Relevance.

Adaptation‘adapt’ [verb] •make (something) suitable for a new use or purpose;

•become adjusted to new conditions;

•alter (a text) to make it suitable for filming, broadcasting, or the stage.

[Oxford English Dictionary]

How is Shakespeare adjusted?•Text is abbreviated [though perhaps for other reasons]

•Setting modernized or future oriented

•Introduction of technology•Manga/visual language•Dynamism/speeding up

Much of this is based on assumptions adults make about young people…

The Persian Envoy Mirza Mohammed Reza-Qazvini meeting with Napoleon I at the Finckenstein Palace, 27 April 1807.

François Mulard.

.

TRUST (not ‘truth’)Speaking of dragomans in the Ottoman Empire even earlier, David Bellos explains that they had to,

‘translate the Sultan’s word, not his words’

‘…that trust is never granted without reservation. To conduct the negotiation or the trade between two communities speaking mutually incomprehensible tongues, the principal relies on the translator and is in his power, just as the translator serves one master only and is entirely in his power.’ [Is that a Fish in Your Ear? 122]

Who ‘trusts’ whom?•Publisher•Textual adapter•Comic artist•Shakespeare scholar•Shakespeare’s text•The reader•[The teacher/school] etc.

Theories of ‘trust’:

1.Katharine Hawley (2012)‘Trust, Distrust and Commitment’ NOÛS, DOI: 10.1111/nous.12000

2.Umberto Eco (1994)Six Walks in the Fictional WoodsHarvard University Press.

Hawley on trust:‘to trust someone is to rely on that person to fulfill a commitment’

Trust is:a ‘three-place relation, involving two people and a task’, It involves ‘expectations about competence and willingness’ (1).

Trusting is ‘affective’ and ‘participatory’ and is a way of treating someone as a ‘person’ (7)

Eco on trusting fictions:‘We believe, that so far as the actual world is concerned, truth is the most important criterion, whereas we tend to think that fiction describes a world we have to take as it is, on trust. Even in the actual world, however, the principle of trust is just as important as the principle of truth.’ (89)

‘We can't rely on the same degree of certainty in the actual world e.g. In epistemological terms, we cannot be sure that Americans landed on the moon (whereas we are sure that Flash Gordon reached the planet Mongo).’ (92)

Eco’s example of Hamlet:'We assume that it is untrue that Hamlet lived in the actual world. But let us say we are grading the term paper of an undergraduate majoring in English Literature and we find that the wretched student has written that at the end of the tragedy Hamlet marries Ophelia. I bet that any reasonable teacher would claim the student has said something untrue...’. (88)

Hamlet in space:

‘But Ophelia’s got to drown in a river’ so we came up with this idea of a hologram. It’s projected enough that you could actually believe that you’re drowning in it. But there were all sorts of little things that had to go in there that won’t come out – because it’s still Shakespeare’s play – but I think when you’re considering an adaptation, you have to know the world and what’s going to work where.’

Romeo and Juliet in Tokyo:‘when Romeo finds out about the party that’s happening at Capulet’s mansion because a servant can’t read the invitation and he helps the servant read. That’s obviously a rare thing to happen in Japan. So what I did was I had the personal assistant to Lord Capulet trip over and break her glasses and so she can’t read. Romeo has to read it for her.’

‘Samurai hoodies’ in Macbeth‘I wanted to rationalize why they were wearing hoodies but were also samurais. It was the ‘why?’ of it; I didn’t want it to just be random. So that’s why I came up with this post-apocalyptic thing; the modern world has crumbled so they’ve gone back to more traditional ways.’

‘Trustworthiness’‘Trustworthiness is admirable, something to be aspired to and inculcated in our children: it is a virtue in the everyday sense, and perhaps in the richer sense of virtue ethics too.’ (2012: 2)

‘Trusting someone to do something involves both trust in her competence and trust in her willingness to act; part of trustworthiness is the attempt to avoid commitments you are not competent to fulfill. The special case of trusting what someone says involves both trusting her to possess the truth (or knowledge), and trusting her to speak sincerely. People can betray our trust through either error or deceit, and part of trustworthiness is the attempt to avoid making assertions where you lack knowledge.’ (2012:17)

‘filleting’…‘…every word in Manga Shakespeare is Shakespeare. I haven’t changed one word. All I’ve done is to go through it and fillet, and just take those parts that remain in the spirit of what people are saying, particularly the soliloquies which are rather important and introspective and you’ve got to have that. Also, they move the action on. And try to, whilst leaving the integrity of what Shakespeare is saying, move the narrative along so that the sequence of what is happening and the sequence of the words mesh, they dovetail. I think that works.’

The scholar’s role:‘To proof-read a copy of the adapted text against the original Shakespeare and to check that the redaction was both accurate and made sense…made internal sense and logic…which it sometimes didn’t’.

‘Her ethos was that what she wanted to give would be all Shakespeare, rather than paraphrased Shakespeare. So with the exception of a few explanatory stage directions at the beginning of a scene…everything that you read – or the eventual reader will read – is Shakespeare. It’s just that it’s been, as indeed happened in the original plays, cut. In this case brutally cut to the mere essence of the story. She wanted to check that the speeches made sense and that what was left was all Shakespeare.’

Shakespeare – the man.

‘And people have said to me, aren’t you betraying William? And I say, ‘I don’t think he’s betrayable. I mean if he were alive now the first thing he’d say is ‘That’s great. Where are the royalties?’

Final Questions?•What are we trusting?•Which aspects of an adaptation are trustworthy and which aspects are not?

•Why do we trust a re-setting, but not always a re-plotting?

•Adaptations imply a certain trust in the knowledge of the reader, [Hamlet is not really set in space…] but are all readers equally ‘trustworthy’?

•Don’t children trust the whole fictional world you present to them? The more they relate to it, the more they trust it?

•Is it the INTENTION of the adapter that we trust?•How is trusting visual information different from textual information? ‘Seeing is believing?’

•Shakespeare’s ‘words’ are his ‘word’?