The Off-Scene as Fiction: Showing and (Re)telling "Hamlet" for Children and Young Adults

In this chapter I examine a number of narrative versions of "Hamlet" for children, from the Lambs' "Tales from Shakespeare" (1807) to contemporary novels for a Young Adult Audience. I focus on the way narrative texts describe events that "must have happened" offstage, like Hamlet's courtship of Ophelia, but of which there is no trace in the play. I argue that it is in the nature of narrative retelling to supply extra information: the most creative retellings of Shakespeare are, in a way, nothing but recreations of several imagined off-scenes added to the original plays.