Deborah Peifer, a former theater director and professor of theater in Chicago, who has also been a theater critic for decades, calls Shakespeare in manga "an appalling idea, and a significant leap downward in the ultimate dumbing down of our country." Peifer, who regularly taught Shakespeare, says "The richest, most varied, most brilliant, most moving language ever put to the page really doesn't need pictures. ... And anyone who thinks that cartoons are the equivalent of live performance is really clueless about the experience of the theater event."
But other teachers say they can see a role for manga in introducing students to the classics.
"I teach Romeo and Juliet and I know I wouldn't use it in class, but any version of an original has its benefits," says John Sharbaugh, an eighth-grade English teacher at Bonnie Branch Middle School in Howard County. "West Side Story has its value versus Romeo and Juliet, and it's interesting to compare the manga version to the original, so that might be useful to students."
The Maryland State Department of Education supports the idea of graphic novels and comic books as a way to help reluctant readers develop a love of reading, says Bill Reinhard, department spokesman. "It's something we've always embraced," he says. "Anything that gets the kids to read is a good thing."
Reinhard emphasized that comic books and graphic novels should not replace the real thing. "It's a supplement," he says. "It shouldn't be the primary textbook."
Julia Bloch, a doctoral student in literature at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches Shakespeare, points out that the Bard himself borrowed stylistically from others. "We have a long tradition in early theater of borrowing from this form and that form," she explains. "It would be historically and literarily inaccurate to say that to put Shakespeare in manga form was to somehow distort the work's purity. There's many ways to read Shakespeare. Abridged isn't my first choice, but it might be others' [choice]."
Illustrated versions of the classics aren't completely new. In the 1950s, Scholastic Books released numerous classic novels and biographies in abridged comic book form under the title "Junior Scholastics." The comic books were best-sellers for decades, as kids of all ages chose the graphic version of classics from the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy and Sir Walter Scott.
