Shakespeare Criticism and Performance in Children’s Literature: <em>In Summer Light</em> and <em>Becca Fair and Foul</em>

Philip Smith

Philip Smith Savannah College of Art and Design http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7781-4350

Keywords: children's literature, tempest, Shakespeare, In Summer Light, Becca Fair and Foul, essentialism, girlhood

Abstract

In this article, I seek to place Zibby Oneal’s In Summer Light and Diedre Baker’s Becca Fair and Foul in dialogue with the body of texts that adapt Shakespeare’s works into literature for children. In each of these novels, young women interpret and adapt Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Both texts are self-reflexive adaptations; the stories themselves resonate thematically and geographically with The Tempest, and yet both are overtly conscious of the process and politics of adaptation containing, as they do, characters who interpret and critique Shakespeare’s text.

Author Biography

Philip Smith, Savannah College of Art and Design

Philip Smith is the author of Reading Art Spiegelman (Routledge 2015) and Shakespeare in Singapore (Routledge 2020). He is co-author of Printing Terror: American Horror Comics of the Cold War Era (Manchester UP, 2021). He served as co-director of the Shakespeare Behind Bars program at The Correctional Facility at Fox Hill, Nassau, Bahamas and as fight choreographer for the Shakespeare in Paradise festival. He is Associate Chair of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at Savannah College of Art and Design. He is the editor in chief of Literature Compass.