Hearing with Eyes and Seeing with Ears: Adaptive Aesthetics in the BBC’s Shakespeare for Children

‘Shakespeare on television’ has had a consistent presence over the last thirty years, but one of its lesser-known examples is the subgenre of ‘Shakespeare for children.’ A collaboration between BBC Wales and the Russian Soyuzmultfilm Studio, Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1994), features twelve canonical Shakespearean plays, including Hamlet, his longest play, and The Tempest, his last solo play, through half-hour episodes. Another series, titled Shakespeare in Shorts, released by the BBC Teach Online Program in 2018, adapts six plays into substantially condensed three-minute episodes set to modern music, also including Hamlet and The Tempest. Such changes in scale and narrative reach thus involve complex forms of the hypertextual. This chapter considers how these broadcast and online animations, which present heavily truncated narratives of Shakespearean plays, differ from extensive projects such as BBC Television Shakespeare (1978–1985), An Age of Kings (1960), The Spread of the Eagle (1963), The Wars of the Roses (1966), ShakespeaRe-Told (2005). Through an evaluation of the presence and treatment of (conventionally perceived) iconic lines, moments and episodes in the selected tales, this chapter explores how the synthesis of voiceover narration and the Bard’s lines (both spoken and sung) in each episode accentuates the theatricality of the tales.