Hamlet is Lois Burdett’s latest effort in the Shakespeare Can Be Fun Series. Burdett, who teaches Grades 2 and 3 in Stratford, has written Shakespeare’s biography and five other verse adaptations of his plays for her students to perform. Like its predecessors, Hamlet is punctuated by her pupils’ lively and perceptive illustrations and assignments. Clearly, they have been inspired by their talented teacher to reach a real comprehension of the plot and characters of Shakespeare’s most famous revenge tragedy.

I am not so sure, though, that this Hamlet will help the students grow to a fine understanding of poetry. Burdett’s retelling of the story is clear, accurate, and thorough, but her rhyming couplets are not poetry. They often don’t scan, and she mixes diction with complete abandon, one line using elevated, archaic vocabulary (often Shakespeare’s own phrases), the next descending to slang or business lingo without any reason for the shift in tone. Ironically, in their introduction to the greatest poet in the English language, these children will be developing tin ears for rhythms, and be equating phrases like the pedestrian “the facts I will review” with “Oh, my prophetic soul!”

Lack of scansion and literary diction is common in much modern North American children’s verse. Yet poetry need not be mundane for children to understand it. Children respond enthusiastically to the good poems of Lewis Carroll, Paul Fleischman, and Dennis Lee. It is a pity that Burdett, who recognizes that children rise to literary challenges, underestimated their capacity to do so in her work.