ALL WILL BE BOWDLERIZED

Roald Dahl was not immortal, so neither are his words, the point of which is to make money

When I was 25 and between jobs I rewrote two works of Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet and the Scottish play. As I recall, I made $800 a pop for these books, the point of which was to place the original verse version (or whatever edition my employer decided on; I think it was Folger) opposite my easy-to-read contemporary American prose. Fun work—it took me all of a few days. (Last I checked my name wasn’t on these books any more, if it ever was. Maybe they rewrote the rewrites. If so, who cares? Not me.) I briefly moved on to writing crossword puzzle books featuring SAT vocabulary words, but the real money was in page layout and typesetting, so that’s how I spent my evenings until I got a proofreading job at a right-wing newspaper. A friend of mine who teaches English at a boarding school told me that one of his students is a family friend of a famous movie star who sometimes acts in Shakespeare adaptations, and that his advice was to read these dumbed-down editions to get a grip on the plays. That’s how he prepares for his own roles. This counts as my greatest literary achievement. But the point of such books isn’t literary or even really educational. The point is to make money. Alas, the response to my request for a royalty was: no way. Last I checked those editions sold tens of thousands of copies annually. I’m sure I’ll never sell as many books when or if I start writing them under my own name.