CEDAR, Texas, Dec. 21, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Author Jerry Rubin provides an easier reading experience for students or any reader encountering Shakespeare for the first time. An Xlibris release, Hamlet Without the Potholes, modernizes literary classics for today's readers.
A part of the series Shakespeare Without the Potholes, Hamlet Without the Potholes provides one of the thirty-seven updated versions of William Shakespeare's generally recognized plays. This book, like the rest of the series, modernizes some of the outdated vocabulary and grammar, and revises many of the more difficult passages that in the original can be understood, if at all, only by careful scanning of a footnote, and sometimes not even then.
"Reading one of Shakespeare's plays is like driving down a broad and beautiful highway lined with gorgeous sights, observing, as one passes, the wide range of human types and situations; but unfortunately the road is marred by potholes small and large -- archaic words, phrases and grammar, words whose meanings have migrated during the course of four hundred years, and passages that are difficult or impossible to comprehend," the author says.
In this book, Rubin becomes a pothole-fixer, attempting to provide a smooth and continuous pleasant journey for the readers. In making the alterations, he has tried to retain the meter and maintain almost all of the poetic substance. In some cases, where Elizabethan pronunciation differed from the modern, the original meter was restored.
"I can only hope that the Without the Potholes series introduces Shakespeare to those students who have hitherto been hesitant to plunge into the plays, for there is a world of beauty - that I have tried hard to preserve - to be discovered in them," Rubin says with a close.
For more information on Hamlet Without the Potholes, log on to www.Xlibris.com. The complete series of 37 plays is available on home.rr.com/shakespeare or, if not accessible, search Amazon.com for "Shakespeare Without the Potholes."
About the Author
Jerry Rubin is a lover of Shakespeare who grew concerned when he found that esteemed friends and associates preferred reading Stephen King novels to Shakespeare's plays, claiming to be put off by the difficulties of the texts. Shocked by this revelation, he has spent several years producing the Without the Potholes series.
Hamlet Without the Potholes * by Jerry Rubin
From the "Shakespeare Without the Potholes" Series
Publication Date: July 18, 2000
Trade Paperback; $18.69; 216 pages; 978-0-7388-2432-1
Members of the media who wish to review this book may request a complimentary paperback copy by contacting the publisher at (888) 795-4274 x. 7479. To purchase copies of the book for resale, please fax Xlibris at (610) 915-0294 or call (888) 795-4274 x. 7876.
For more information, contact Xlibris at (888) 795-4274 or on the web at www.Xlibris.com.