Shakespeare, but Make it Queer!: Retelling a Classic Play and My Love/Hate Relationship with William Shakespeare, a guest post by Emma K. Ohland

Every writer and reader alike stumbles upon Shakespeare at some point in time. It’s nearly impossible to experience any form of art without a peek into the world (or the word) of the bard. Whether it’s his more popular plays like Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet, one of his 154 sonnets, or one of the many aphorisms we say because of him like “in a pickle,” he’s renowned as one of the most prolific English writers in history. You either love him and agree his representation of human nature is exemplary and his themes are timeless. Or you dread to see the Shakespeare lesson coming, you cannot understand a word he says and think he’s so overrated.

I personally agree that he’s renowned. From an author’s perspective, he’s everything we want to be. The man wrote so much. He captured the beauty and the faults of the world across the genres of tragedy, comedy, and poetry, and he had a huge impact on culture and the human language. What writer doesn’t dream of all that?

However, I also understand that he’s overrated. I get why people are sick of learning about him all the time. I agree that his language is inaccessible and dreaded by many, and I still struggle to decipher his sentences. I especially recognize the frustration that this old white man is considered the greatest writer of all time when, really, it’s about time for him to move aside and make way for the marginalized voices who deserve to have their stories take the spotlight.

My question when writing my modern reimagining of Much Ado About Nothing was: how can both of these things simultaneously be true? I both love and hate Shakespeare, depending on the day. I want to acknowledge his greatness while wishing our education wasn’t limited to stories like his.

I took the opportunity of writing Here Goes Nothing to explore all the things I love about Shakespeare comedies: the messiness of young love, the exploration and questioning of identity, and the difficulty in proper communication. As I examined the original characters and turned them into teenage versions of themselves, I realized how much Shakespeare’s characters really do behave exactly like modern humans and make the exact same mistakes.  In fact, Shakespeare is so Young Adult coded already! Despite the original characters being adults, these were the exact themes that my favorite YA books explore. And that’s what makes Shakespeare timeless. At the very heart of every story, he is relatable. He’s just not accessible.

The 1993 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing – the version that heavily inspired Here Goes Nothing.

No one speaks in Early Modern English anymore, for one thing. Not all readers want to solve the story they’re reading like a puzzle or decipher it like a code. Having to reread the same line over and over again to get to the universal truth Shakespeare wrote can be maddening. It’s not just his language, it’s also the historical context needed to grasp the plot and character motivations, and oftentimes we don’t want to have to read articles and other books to understand the main plot.

Through a modern reimagining, we’re able to strip the story of all those unwanted elements and fit those universal themes into language and a setting that is instantly understandable. It allows readers to remove that inaccessibility and dive right into the good stuff. Placing the characters of Shakespeare in a modern-day high school shows young readers that those themes like the messiness of young love, the exploration and questioning of identity, and the difficulty in proper communication are there. We get the benefit of learning from Shakespeare’s messaging, understand ourselves better, and admit that Shakespeare had some dang good points to make!

Writing a retelling is also a chance to have a conversation with the original text. It’s been almost 500 years since his stories were written, so we’ve grown and changed a lot as a society. Some of the decisions his characters make are troubling and problematic, and there’s absolutely not enough representation of the diverse world we live in. I decided that I would fill my version of Shakespeare with a modern perspective on the world and make my characters people of color, and/or queer. Now, not only was I removing inaccessibility, but I was also adding to the art with what modern day readers deserve. I was changing the things about the original play that I didn’t like and keeping the pieces I did.

In doing so, I built atop the foundation that Shakespeare laid for us. I used his work and his universal themes as a steppingstone and applied them to the modern experiences of teenagers. I found that happy medium in my love/hate relationship with Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s greatness can live on, but we can also give space to new voices – and both can happen at the exact same time with the power of a retelling.

Meet the author

Emma K. Ohland (she/they) is an author who has been telling stories since before she knew how to write them down. She grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Indiana, but her imagination often carried her away to other worlds. She graduated from Purdue University with a B.A. in English literature. Her first YA novel, Funeral Girl, was selected as a 2023 Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year. She lives in Texas with her partner, their cat, and their dog.

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About Here Goes Nothing

A fun yet thought-provoking modern reimagining of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Eighteen-year-old Beatrice has never been a fan of her neighbor Bennie, but when Beatrice’s beloved younger sister starts dating one of Bennie’s closest friends, Beatrice is drawn into their social circle. As Beatrice wrestles with increasingly confusing feelings for Bennie, her usually close relationship with her sister is fraying, her grief over their mother’s death is simmering in the background, and she’s overwhelmed by looming senior-year decisions about what she wants to do with her life. But after a crisis arises, Beatrice must figure out how to process past traumas and open up to the possibilities of the future.

ISBN-13: 9781728487656
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab/Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/05/2024
Age Range: 14 – 18 Years

Filed under: Guest Post