Pibgorn Rep: A Midsummer Night's Dream

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Pibgorn Rep: A Midsummer Night's Dream is a romantic online comic strip Play by William Shakespeare, adapted by Brooke McEldowney.

The story tries to stay close to the original version as it portrays the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors, their interactions with the Duke and Duchess of Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta, and with fairies who inhabit a moonlit forest with characters from Brooke McEldowney's two popular comic strips, Pibgorn and the award-winning 9 Chickweed Lane portraying the different characters from Shakespeare's original.

One reader's Short review:

Taking a mix of characters from both strips, and changing character's sexes where appropriate for his telling (for instance, Egeus, Hermia's father, has become Egea, her mother and the acting troupe of Pyramus and Thisby are now chorus girls), and with slight changes in the text (in his foreword, McEldowney explains that what is appealing for stage is not always so in the printed word, so some soliloquies were left out of his edition), McEldowney has taken Shakespeare's play and reworked it into a 1930's fashioned gangster presentation.

And it works.

McEldowney has kept true to the story, the words and the essence of Shakespeare's play, and has added his own visual flair, creating a refreshing and just plain fun version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. ^[1]

The story first appeared online as installments of Pibgorn. It has been collected and published as a 176 pages book with two introductions, the first by Alan Dean Foster ("Soliloquy With Big Band"), the second by Mr. McEldowney ("The Elizabethan Hoodlum Movie Musical Extravaganza Nobody Will Every See"), and, includes a glossary for terminology that would be unfamiliar to most readers. ^[2]

College professors of English literature, high school teachers of same, have proposed it as a text in their courses. ^[3]

McEldowney said William Shakespeare is "my collaborator" on the 176-page Pib Press cartoon book, which includes and expands on a storyline that appeared in the "Pibgorn" strip.^[4]