Macbeth (illustrated by K. Briggs)
In my notes on the Macbeth graphic novel illustrated by Gareth Hinds I mentioned some of the ways he’d cut and adapted the language of the play, concluding that it wasn’t a full-text Macbeth, nor should it have been.
This Macbeth, illustrated by K. Briggs, is a full-text version of the play, and while I want to give credit to Briggs for her ambition I came away thinking that this sort of thing isn’t well advised. I gave up on the graphic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for much the same reason. The text gets to be too much, and if you know the novel or the play that’s being adapted well enough you tend to skim it anyway and just look at the pictures.
I also want to credit Briggs for her striking visuals. She’s got quite an original sense of style, playing a lot with the format of the pages and mixing in various novel bits of imagery, like tarot cards, into a collage. She’ll also flip images upside-down, or present scraps of text or medieval-themed design elements as background. You can spend quite a bit of time on nearly every page, pulling it apart. And there are other creative flourishes I enjoyed too. Macbeth is so often presented, at least today, as a heroic young man that I liked seeing him as a bald, professorial type. At least he looks a lot like professors I had. You could roll your eyes at Malcolm appearing as a Black woman, but given the spirit of the proceedings this barely stood out.
But then there is all the text, which Briggs does try to jazz up as much as she can but which still just feels like it’s getting in the way. To be honest, and not only because I do know the play pretty well and was skimming, I started wondering at one point if the book might have worked better as a strictly graphic presentation, with no text at all. I mean, they made a whole lot of silent films out of Shakespeare’s plays, so, as crazy as it may at first seem, the words really aren’t indispensable.
Alex Good 
A mixed bag there.
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Yep. I like that she really did her own thing, but . . . it wasn’t my thing.
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As well, on to better things!
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Or at least other things . . .
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On e lives in hope..
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For “the words really aren’t indispensable” to be true, you’d have to point to one of those silent films that is at least as good as the play.
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Not “as good as” but something worthwhile and enjoyable in its own right. You can take the words away and still have a worthy, entertaining film.
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Talk about shifting goalposts!
I agree with the idea that an adaptation can be worthwhile in its own right (I say it all the time), but many times I point out that it is, at the same time, an awful adaptation. That’s the case here. The words definitely are indispensable to a Shakespeare play, but that doesn’t mean you can’t translate them into something else that is also enjoyable.
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Ahhh, Brian beat me to it 😀
I do think that a wordless representation would ONLY work for an audience that is already intimately familiar with Shakespeare or that particular play. I’m not that audience and would end up going to Wikipedia to figure out what is going on (heck, I did that a couple of times when I DID read the plays, hahahah).
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A silent film or graphic novel are different media from a play, so it would just be a different experience.
In medieval times almost no one could read. So things like stained glass windows or giant frescos in churches showing uplifting or monitory bible stories were known as “peasant’s bibles.” They were the bible for (again, the vast majority of people) who couldn’t read. And they couldn’t really understand the words as they were read either, as there was no vernacular bible. So you could have a “bible” (or at least parts of a bible) without words, and it could be effective and spiritually instructive.
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