Penguin 'Staged' series: gendered YA Shakespeare editions for reading for pleasure

Abstract

This chapter examines the Penguin 'Staged' series of Shakespeare plays, available as e-texts and in hard copies, offering a critical analysis of its paratextual elements to demonstrate how the edition constructs an implied reader who is not only a young adult (YA) but also female and ‘bookish’. It employs Gérard Genette's paratext theory and Wolfgang Iser's concept of the implied reader to consider the editorial strategies employed to make and market the six volumes available in the series (so far). My analysis focuses on multiple paratextual elements, including the volumes’ cover artwork, forewords by well-known female YA authors, synopses of the plays that echo their YA forewords in vocabulary and tone, and digital and print publicity materials. I demonstrate how the series seeks to reclaim Shakespeare's plays for reading for pleasure through a YA and gendered lens. I show how the series’ orientation around what it refers to as the tropes of YA literature heavily emphasizes (and often equates) romance fiction and female perspectives within these plays. In doing so, I draw on existing studies of exclusionary, neoliberal girlhood in Shakespearean adaptation by authors such as Ariane Balizet (2019). I draw out the series’ real achievements that should be celebrated (e.g. in relation to the inclusion of diverse YA authors, in terms of ethnicities, sexualities and disabilities); acknowledge the challenges it faces (especially in relation to recent UK statistics on young people’s reading for pleasure); problematise how wide an appeal these texts will have for young readers; and make some recommendations to strengthen this series, or ones like it, in the future.