Teen Themes: Female Friendship

This post is the second of two posts on themes in A Midsummer Night's Dream that appeal to teenagers, part of my ongoing project about YA lit adaptations of Shakespeare. You can see the first post here.

The second theme that I found in A Midsummer Night's Dream that I thought a YA author could take advantage of is the friendship between Hermia and Helena. Most YA lit readers are female (male teenagers read less in general, and those who do read gravitate towards non-fiction) and friendship is hugely important to teenage girls.

Teen Themes: Frustrated Love

This post is the first of two about themes in A Midsummer Night's Dream that appeal to teenagers.

When adapting Shakespeare, it's important to consider what themes the target audience will appreciate. This means that authors who adapt Shakespeare for a teen audience need to find themes in the original texts that apply to teen experience. The themes that the authors of YA Shakespeare spinoffs choose to explore may or may not be the main themes of the original plays. For example, Ariel by Grace Tiffany (see my book review) explores the ideas that imagination is powerful, that the search for power can ruin people's lives, and that friendly love trumps spontaneous romance. Some of these themes align with The Tempest but others do not.

As I read A Midsummer Night's Dream, I looked for themes that would appeal to teen readers, especially themes that I would capitalize on if I were writing a YA adaptation. One theme I thought would translate well is frustrated love.

Tropes

I could spend (and have spent) hours and hours on TV Tropes reading about all the different plot and character devices that my favorite television shows use. So I thought, Why not Shakespeare? I looked around, and there are several pages about Shakespeare that are worth looking at. Each play has its own tropes page, and several adaptations do as well. Old Shakey has his own place of honor in trope history: The Zeroth Law of Trope Examples. If you follow through to different trope links, you can find other works that use the same devices as Shakespeare, which would be a good way to start a critical comparison.