With each play, I faced the problem of deciding what to keep in, and what to leave out.
Reducing Hamlet, a play that runs over three hours, to 2500 words (my absolute limit) was tough going.
This turned out to be incredibly difficult. All I was doing was borrowing the stories back from the plays, and telling them for a modern audience. What he did with those plots was where his genius came in. Shakespeare didn't invent the plots of his plays, he took them from other playwrights, from history books, and from Ancient Greek and Roman writers. I was just some bloke from Wales – what right did I have to muck about with the work of England's greatest writer? Then I thought a bit more deeply. At first, when Orchard Books asked me to tell the stories of the plays for younger readers, I panicked.
0 kommentar(er)
