Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation, Trauma and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences

The collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital shaming. Violence against women. Sexual bullying. Racial slurs and injustice. These are just some of the problems faced by today’s young adults. Liberating Shakespeareexplores how adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays can be used to empower young audiences by addressing issues of oppression, trauma and resistance.

Showcasing a wide variety of approaches to understanding, adapting and teaching Shakespeare, this collection examines the significant number of Shakespeare adaptations targeting adolescent audiences in the past 25 years. It examines a wide variety of creative works made for and by young people that harness the power of Shakespeare to address some of the most pressing questions in contemporary culture - exploring themes of violence, race relations and intersectionality.

The contributors to this volume consider whether the representations of characters and situations in YA Shakespeare can function as empowering models for students and how these works might be employed within educational settings. This collection argues that YA Shakespeare represents the diverse concerns of today’s youth and should be taken seriously as art that speaks to the complexities of a broken world, offering moments of hope for an uncertain future.

Jennifer Flaherty is an Associate Professor at Georgia College, USA. She co-edited Arden’s The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play (2021) with Heather Easterling. Her research emphasizes adaptation, global Shakespeare, and girlhood; her publications include articles on Young Adult appropriations of Ophelia and Macbeth, published in Borrowers and Lenders and Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction.

Deborah Uman is Professor of English and Dean of the Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, USA. In addition to her monograph, Women Translators in Early Modern England (2011), she co-edited Staging the Blazon in Early Modern Theater (2013) with Sara Morrison and has published numerous essays on translation, adaptation and gender in Shakespeare’s plays.