by Mike Myers
Staff Writer
University of La Verne Assistant Professor of English Jeffrey Kahan recently signed a multi-book contract with Shakespeare Millennium Series, London, to edit the new complete works of Shakespeare designed for children.
These works of 38 plays will be released at the rate of three to six books a year.
The first three,“King Lear,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Winter’s Tale,” will be released this month. The complete works will be published after the release of the 38 single-edition plays.
“I was chosen to edit the complete works of Shakespeare for children because one of my colleagues was offered this job, but turned it down and referred me, then I was offered the job,” Kahan said.
This is not the first time Kahan has worked with Shakespeare.
He was a featured speaker on BBC television’s “The Irresistible Rise of William Shakespeare” and is the author of “Reforging Shakespeare” and numerous other works on Shakespearean authorship.
He has published articles in American Notes and Queries, The Ben Jonson Journal, English Language Notes, Early Modern Language Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Seventeenth-Century News, Women’s Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Newsletter, Notes and Queries and Upstart Crow.
Kahan is going to put the language of the books in character and use everyday English so that children can relate to it.
He has many publications varying from academic books, to academic articles, conference papers and book and film reviews. He is currently completing a book on Edmund Kean and another on superhero comics.
His latest work was a three-volume set of 18th Century Shakespeare imitations and forgeries for Routledge, due for bookshelves in August, and he is preparing an edition of “The Poetry of William-Henry Ireland,” also due in 2004.
He is co-editor of the CORD project, a work detailing all extant information of Elizabethan theater, actors, poets and playwrights.
One of his recent articles was an academic study of the Sanders Portrait.
Kahan’s education includes a diploma from Dawson College in Canada in 1984, a bachelor’s degree from Concordia University in Canada, in 1987, a master’s from the University of Birmingham in England in 1991 and a doctorate at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham in 1993.
