William Shakespeare: Ein Sommernachtstraum. Neu erzählt von Barbara Kindermann mit Bildern von Almud Kunert (Weltliteratur für Kinder). Berlin: Kindermann. 6. Auflage 2013.

The principle behind their Tales from Shakespeare. Designed for the Use of Young Persons (1807) was thus modestly formulated by Charles and Mary Lamb in the preface to the first and most lasting adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays into a narrative form which modified the archaic English and reduced the complexity of the storyline to a level they believed comprehensible for children. Many renowned writers have, since then, tried to find ways to introduce children to the plays as cultural capital to accumulate for their further education. The 1960s saw a new wave of interest in recasting Shakespeare’s plays in the contemporary idiom in shortened theatrical and animated versions of the plays, in the form of novels, picturebooks, graphic novels, manga, comics, cartoons and films. This trend continues today, not least fuelled by the 450 th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 2014. There is substantial scholarship on the topic which has identified, amongst other things, “the move from an emphasis on the morally didactic potential of Shakespeare’s work to a focus on the entertainment value and theatricality of the plays”.