Newly edited versions of Shakespeare’s plays will be just a series of blank pages, after feedback from young readers suggested that every single passage was an attack on their wellbeing.
“It’s horrific,” Sophie Stevenson, 14, said. “It’s literally the most boring piece of shit I’ve ever read. I don’t know how anyone thought this was remotely appropriate”.
Asked to point to words or passages which they find distasteful or unpleasant, year eight students said, ‘the whole fucking thing’.
“Every single word. All of it. It’s dreadful,” Sara Creighton, 13, said. “What the fuck does doth mean? Why does he say fiteth and not just fit? Just make it stop! Or ‘maketh it stoppeth’ I should say. Fuck my life”.
Jackson Reighly, 15, said a lot had changed since the first editions of Shakespeare were published. “I think one of the biggest differences that people forget about 16th century England is that people back then didn’t have to study Shakespeare. When he was writing those plays, he simply didn’t have that context, you know, of understanding how fucking excruciating it is to have to write a 3,000 word essay on Macbeth. It was a different time.
“So I think this new trend of editing dated texts is a really great opportunity to take a closer look at Shakespeare’s body of work, remove all 834,000 words, and give us something interesting to read”.
He said it was not true that a rounded education had to include studying Shakespeare. “You know who didn’t have to study Shakespeare? Shakespeare. And he seemed to do alright in life”.
