Shakespeare Criticism and Performance in Children's Literature: In Summer Light and Becca Fair and Foul

Abstract:In this article, I seek to place Zibby Oneal's In Summer Light and Diedre Baker's Becca Fair and Foul in dialogue with the body of texts that adapt Shakespeare's works into literature for children. In each of these novels, young women interpret and adapt Shakespeare's The Tempest. Both texts are self-reflexive adaptations; the stories themselves resonate thematically and geographically with The Tempest, and yet both are overtly conscious of the process and politics of adaptation containing, as they do, characters who interpret and critique Shakespeare's text.