Manga Shakespeare is exactly what its name implies: manga adaptations of William Shakespeare's works.
A series of OEL Manga, Manga Shakespeare adapt various plays with an animesque twist. They use various styles, with some being Setting Updates while others take a fantasy route instead. The dialogue, however, is ripped straight from the plays with no modernizations.
The works adapted are: As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Richard III and Henry VIII.
Here
is the official website of the manga.
Manga Shakespeare provides examples of:
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Almost everyone's either cute and animesque or attractive and animesque.
- Adaptation Dye-Job:
- The Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet is blue-haired. He has one eye the same shade of blue, while the other is brown. Synthetic dye didn't appear until some 250 years after the play's release.
- Used heavily in Othello due to the High Fantasy inspiration. For example, several characters, including Othello, are white-haired.
- Adaptational Species Change: Due to the High Fantasy route for both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, the cast of the former are elves and the cast of the latter are... all manner of things.
- Cute Clumsy Girl: The Capulet servant trips over her own feet.
- Keet: Benvolio is portrayed this way in the Romeo and Juliet adaptation.
- Pretty Boy: Many of the characters. For example, Romeo is now a wavy-haired rock idol.
- Race Lift:
- Romeo and Juliet is set in Japan. Juliet is Japanese while Romeo is half-white, half-Japanese.
- King Lear features Lear and his daughters as Mohicans/Iroquois, there is conflicting information on which they are supposed to be, Kent is Huron and Edmund is black, the entire cast really due to the Setting Update and Gauls, Celtic Britons and Burgundians not existing any more by the time of the 1750's.
- Setting Update: All of them except for the two that are classified as "Histories" instead of "Tragedies" or "Comedies":
- Romeo and Shakespeare takes place in contemporary Tokyo.
- King Lear takes place in 1757 in North America.
- Macbeth takes place in a post-apocalyptic future featuring samurai, mutants and cyborgs.
- Hamlet is set in the 22nd century.
- As You Like It is set in contemporary China.
- The Merchant of Venice is set on a floating elvish city.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in a fusion of Ancient and Modern Greece.
- Yakuza: Romeo and Juliet come from rival yakuza families.
