That Way Madness Lies: XV of Shakespeare's Most Notable Works Reimagined

by Dahlia Adler

The result is a collection that explores different cultures, celebrates a variety of genders and forms of love, and addresses different kinds of emotional pain head-on.

I’m stunned, watching this scene, uncomprehending. Is Benjamin this distraught my sister’s leaving? It’s not like Patience isn’t coming home, not like she’s being shipped off to some deserted island or exiled from Oklahoma permanently. Her internship is only six weeks. I feel bad for him, even if I can’t empathize with sadness at my sister’s absence.

just wanted the summer in New York City, a summer outside the isolated emptiness of where we live. More, I wanted something I could call mine.

Instead, I might be happier if I pursue what I want without worrying about what my sister does. It’s not just right to let this grudge go—I deserve to let it go, to dwell on new hopes instead of old wounds.

Ugh, that sounded so terrible, he thought. But there was nothing wrong with wanting to be friends with someone! It wasn’t any less of a relationship than a romantic one.

“Oh, you think I’m acting like I’m the only one impacted by this?” Katherine spat. “It’s not like I’m not dealing with enough nonsense, it’s not like I’m about to conceal my sister’s elopement a few weeks from finals. You have no idea the amount of stress I’m under right now. I can’t do this.”

“I want … to be respected. To be loved by someone who won’t tie me down and force me to do things I don’t want to do. I want to be independent but know that I have someone to come home to. I want to be myself and to not be mocked.”

once asked Titania if I might wear pants to a midnight dance, and she gave no reply but the bell song of her laugh.

lost my mother. I was stolen from my father. I was taken from the land that grew my blood. I will not lose the chance to know the first brown-skinned boy I

The quiet of his voice does nothing to dampen the weight of his words. This, the twin lodestars of our loneliness, pulls on us as surely as a moon.

Even now, almost grown, I am more pet than child. And they remain, to me, more king and queen than the mother and father they proclaimed themselves when I was too small to realize I was not just being brought to see the fairy court. I was being folded away into it.

was never going to be able to parallel park that behemoth.

extended summer by a week or so, Dad’s last message had said. Like he had the power to control the seasons, to stretch weeks into an indefinite or so. Like it was an option to mistake one week for three.

“No way,” Lando scoffed. “Cabin Tenners? Please. The Poffenbergers don’t care about art. I’d prefer someone who didn’t think reality TV counts as cinema verité. Besides, I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a secret crush.”

“Chill for you,” I spat. “Not for the people you left in the real world. Just because you don’t check doesn’t mean there isn’t news or that people don’t need you!”

“You know I play each villain with glee, but the ‘bastard brother’ with a bizarrely anglicized name might be the lowest of the Bard’s baddies. I spent nearly six months stomping the stage, indicating evilness until my eyebrows hurt. Evil eyebrows are a thing, did you know?”

Tegan flung the door ajar, blocking the entrance. “Call me one more womanly slur, even one Uncle Will penned himself, and I will destroy you and the antiquated gender binary you rode in on.”

“You misunderstand me. They set us up … to live out the story of Benedick and Beatrice. To fall for one another or some such nonsense. Hazem admitted it moments ago.”

This sort of vapid family arrangement had unfortunately put Taron’s constant oddness into a new context. Tegan could see the lonely rich boy all grown up. Especially now.

“Your dad gave you a Benz for your seventeenth birthday, and you already totaled it. You know what my pop got me for my seventeenth birthday? A phone call. In February.”

Tony laughs. “Yeah, because it’s hilarious. Anyway, kid deserves it, hiding his horns under that little Jewfro, acting like he’s some poor ‘minority’ when he could probably buy and sell all of us.” “Man, I think you might be spending too much time watching Fox News with your dad.”

isn’t watching Fox News with his dad, is the thing. Well, he does that too, but mostly his dad sits and yells about how the Jews and the Chinese and the Mexicans are destroying the economy. He doesn’t do anything about it, though, and Tony’s tired of not doing anything.

“Not give—lend! Isn’t that what your people do? You lend money to poor suckers and then charge a million percent interest? That’s all I’m asking for here. You lend me … let’s say, three hundred bucks now, and I’ll pay it back with interest.” “If you can afford to pay back a loan with interest, then why don’t you just lend Sebastian the money?”

And then Shai steps around him like he’s nothing more than an inconvenient ant in the path of an elephant’s paw and lets himself into the library, where Mx. Tubal awaits with the shadow of a smile on their lips and ears full of earbuds that play nothing at all.

“Pretty sure I can. You signed the contract. You’re a witness that he owes me this. And before you get high and mighty about it, why didn’t you just use your own money to take out Persia? I mean, it’s kind of your fault he’s in this position in the first place, isn’t it?” “I’d have had money if he hadn’t ‘borrowed’ it from me for a concert ticket he couldn’t afford,” Bas snaps. “You’re not the only one he screwed over.”

This tattoo was supposed to be proof of his supremacy, and he will leave here with a wound that will scar into proof he is no white king, not even a knight.

I will tell everyone every single thing that happened here today, right down to you desperately needing a change of pants. You hear me?”

“Don’t.” Shai squeezes her hand. “You’ve got your reasons for hiding your Jewishness, and I’ve got my reasons for wearing mine on my sleeve. Or, more literally, on my head, I guess. We both know the world isn’t exactly kind to us.”

Sophie who had won the money to come across the country to school. Sophie who escaped.

Bitch, most would say. Tyrant. They wouldn’t be wrong. It was never about who Julia was, though. It was what she made out of the rest of

But the seven of us are here for a different kind of power. The kind even money can’t command. It isn’t enough to make this town our own. We want the same thing the Shade sought—an eternity to savor and forge.

“Yeah, but.” Briony huffs. “Don’t you think she wants it too much? The power, I mean. Doesn’t it scare you, what she might do?”

“I’m okay,” I muttered, even though no one had asked, even though it wasn’t true.

It was rewarding. It helped me in the process of reconvincing myself that I was capable of creating an environment in which living things could grow and thrive.

Over the course of just the last two days Mateo was clearly getting worse, wilting and going brittle, barely hanging on. If he were a plant, I could repot him in this new, chocolate-cake soil and water him, and maybe he’d take root and get a second life, but, unfortunately, Mateo was a boy, not a plant.

But the thing about Hansel and Gretel is that their parents abandoned them in the woods to starve. Perdita didn’t want to know if she’d been left in the woods. It was easier to imagine that she’d just been born there.

What if Zal chose her but then had to lose that light in his eyes whenever he talked about the accusative case in Latin? What if he doesn’t choose me?

“It means something like purification or cleansing. It’s why stories can make us feel better about our emotions. They give us the opportunity to clean out our mental chaos and feel the emotion from a safe distance. You don’t have to tell me anything, of course, but just for yourself, it might help to do some journaling, or—” “I’ll think about

“But why does it have to be a tragedy, just because of what our parents decided to do?” he asked. He was shifting in his seat, clearly agitated. “Don’t we have any say in how things work out? Isn’t it our turn to make our own choices?”