Shakespeare's Hamlet for Kids: 3 Short Melodramatic Plays for 3 Group Sizes (Playing with Plays) (Volume 5)

I love reading with my kids, and I love introducing them to the classics, but I had basically come to the conclusion after re-reading the Richard plays, that Shakespeare was going to be a long time in coming.

But then I happened across "Shakespeare's Hamlet for Kids" , and it is a lot of fun and now, while we haven't read all of THE BARD's exact words, my children have an idea of what happened to Hamlet and his Uncle and Mom, and they had a good time with me reading the play together -- and what more can you want for a mom and an 8 and 10 year old.

What makes this book work as an introduction to Shakespeare is the humor and Brendan Kelso's kid-friendly rephrasing of the original text. What he does essentially is to sum up what show more Shakespeare says and then puts those thoughts into terms that kids can understand -- with a funny twist! And the nice bit is that he includes quotes from the original, highlighting the words, so that you'll read lines like, "something is rotten in the state of Denmark", and "neither a borrower and lender be" and know that they came from Will S.

Now, for how the book is organized. The interesting thing about Brendan's "Hamlet for Kids" is that the book actually contains 3 versions of the play. All of the versions take about 10-15 minutes to read, but the number of speaking parts varies according to how many people you wish to have involved. It could be a reader of one, or a cast of nearly 2 dozen.

But let me give you an example of how this works.

Here are the characters with dialog in the first version of Hamlet for Kids:

Hamlet
Claudius
Gertrude
Polonius
Ophelia
Laertes
Ghost

The Second version has all of the above characters plus:

Rosencrantz
Guildenstern
Horatio
--an unnamed actor
Osric
Forinbras
a Sailor

The final version adds Marcellus, Bernardo and the Grave Diggers, as well as a few other minor characters.

Having these different 'stagings' allows the adult(s) and child(ren) to pick the best version for them. Older children might prefer to read a longer, more complicated version, younger children the shorter, easier to follow one. Or vice-versa.

In any case, I'm excited by this series because it allows me to introduce Shakespeare to my children much earlier than I had thought possible. It allows us to discuss the plays on their level, and it introduces them to the Bard's best known lines so that when we hear them in other places, they will be reminded of where they come from.

Pam T~
mom/blogger show less

Scripts, Theatre, Shakespeare