ABSTRACT
Because Shakespeare’s language is difficult, sometimes prohibitively so, teachers commonly begin with an introduction to the story of the play before, if at all, moving in to a closer engagement with the text. (I sometimes wonder just what experiences Year 7 pupils who tell me that they have read Macbeth or The Tempest have had.) The stories of the plays are of course important; Shakespeare was a dramatic poet, and that involved making plots from stories, and plots into scenes. But it’s this very dramatic shaping as well as the language (ultimately they can’t be divorced) that can easily be lost or distorted in a narrative retelling for children.
