The Sisters Grimm and Shakespeare

There was an incredibly--or perhaps, in the context of slanted childhood perspectives, relatively--popular children's fantasy series of novels that had proliferated throughout my class as I entered 7th grade. While it was no The Lightning Thief, The Sisters Grimm by Michael Buckley did inspire a similarly enthralling sense of mythological charm in its plot-line consisting of two orphaned sisters who find out that they are--in a shocking twist--descendants of the Brothers Grimm, and as a result need to enter a world of fantasy in order to live up to their family name. Fast forward through a quick bit of requisite Children's fantasy exposition, and the sisters are thrust into a world where the fantastic characters of European folklore live and breathe in the dirtiness of reality. Moreover, The Sisters Grimm being the diligently referential tween novel it is, Michael Buckley wasted no time in introducing Puck, from the now ominously relevant A Midsummer's Night Dream, as the typecast wildcard character to accompany the girls on their misadventures. In the book, the girls mistake Puck for Peter Pan. At the time, I found this gag (and Puck's response in the book) incredibly entertaining, and deservedly so as Buckley had done a wonderful job with Puck's character: he was a sass-ridden, foul-mouthed pixie (fairy?) with zingers to boot, an overbearingly welcome addition to the story. He was, of course, written for a pre-teenage audience.

Puck, the mischievous wild card.

Suffice it to say that when my 7th grade English class coincidentally began reading A Midsummer's Night Dream naught but a few weeks later as part of a project on Shakespeare, I--a 7th grader accustomed to Buckley's hip, 21st century imagining of Puck--found Shakespeare's original handling of his own character to be incredibly disappointing. I don't remember much from what soon became a far too immature reading of Shakespeare, but I definitely do not remember laughing much (save for the awkward moments in which my teacher insisted that the writing was stupendously clever and funny, and laughing became an obligation). Likewise, there was a pivotal moment in which I read a line of dialogue spoken by some character who was very apparently not meant to be read as intelligent. An annotation specifically noted how Shakespeare purposefully took one really long, pedantic word in her dialogue--I remember the word being in the realm of something like "loquacious"--and replaced the word with a similarly sounding (but incorrect) word--it might have been along the lines of "lugubrious." I had no idea what either of the words meant, and couldn't help but feel uneasy at the thought of Shakespeare planting this joke in his script centuries ago, and then smirking at the thought of foolish viewers, like me, missing the joke even centuries later. Consequentially, there was a cataclysmic marriage between the disappointment I felt in finding my beloved character Puck "corrupted" by Shakespeare and the shame that simultaneously overcame me for being bested by an enigmatic playwright who had been dead for centuries. So, hopefully, a more mature and private reading of A Midsummer's Night Dream will leave me a little bit less engulfed in negative emotions.