Nicki Greenberg’s First Folio: Shakespeare’s Hamlet brought to book

Despite the catch cry that Shakespeare’s plays were ‘written for the stage not the page’, the authority of the ‘textual Shakespeare’, the quintessential object of disciplinary literacy in the English classroom, barely acknowledges the ‘historical plethora of Shakespearean performance’ (Lanier, 1996). The paratext of Nicki Greenberg’s lush graphic novelisation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2010) trumpets the book’s claim to be ‘staged for the page’. Unlike many adaptations for children, Greenberg’s mixed media ‘folio’ enshrines the poetic legacy of the ‘textual Shakespeare’ through 5 Acts while its visual semiosis engages in more complex dialogue with performance histories and their ephemera.