Novelists Get a Task: Rewrite Shakespeare
A year and a half ago, the novelist Jeanette Winterson got an irresistible offer from a publisher. The assignment: Choose any Shakespeare play she wanted, and adapt it into a novel.
“I said, ‘That would be great, put me down for “The Winter’s Tale,” ’ and they looked at me like I was insane,” she recalled.
Ms. Winterson was one of the first writers to sign on for a project conceived by the publisher, Hogarth, which asked contemporary writers to reimagine Shakespeare’s plays.
“The Winter’s Tale” is one of Shakespeare’s most baffling and uneven plays. The opening acts build up to a tragic climax that leaves the king, Leontes, mourning the loss of his wife, son and infant daughter. Then, after a memorable stage direction — “Exit, pursued by a bear” — and a 16-year gap, the play morphs into a wacky pastoral romp. In her adaptation, “The Gap of Time,” which came out this month, Ms. Winterson preserves the play’s weirdness and uncomfortable blend of tragedy and humor.
“The Gap of Time” takes the play’s themes of love, jealousy and estrangement and spins them into a taut contemporary tale about an insecure London banker who accuses his wife of cheating on him, and destroys his marriage and a friendship in the process.
Hogarth has assembled an allstar roster of stylistically diverse writers to translate Shakespeare’s timeless plays into prose. So far, eight novelists have joined the series, which arrives in time for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death next year.
Tracy Chevalier, author of “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” is tackling “Othello.” Margaret Atwood is reimagining Shakespeare’s wild fantasy tale “The Tempest,” set in a prison. Gillian Flynn, author of the best-selling novel “Gone Girl,” is adapting the tragedy “Hamlet” into a novel about murder, betrayal, revenge and madness.
William Shakespeare wrote nearly 40 plays, and there have been countless adaptations of his dramas over the centuries.
“Shakespeare was unbelievably clever at figuring out what stories have long lives,” said Stephen Greenblatt, author of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.” “He was a great recycler of stories, and there’s no reason why his stories shouldn’t be recycled.”
Most of the writers Hogarth approached immediately had a play in mind.
“I said, ‘If I can have “Macbeth,” then I’m in,’ ” said Jo Nesbo, the best-selling Norwegian crime writer.
Mr. Nesbo was drawn to the moral ambiguities in “Macbeth,” Shakespeare’s tragedy about a Scottish nobleman whose hunger for power drives him to murder the king, Duncan, at the behest of three witches.
In Mr. Nesbo’s version, due out in 2017, Macbeth is the leader of a hostage rescue team in a gloomy, coastal European city, where crime and corruption are rampant. The three witches are making illegal drugs rather than a witches’ brew, and promise Macbeth that he will ascend through police ranks — but only if he kills Duncan.
“Those classic plays, they read like crime stories,” Mr. Nesbo said.
Howard Jacobson, whose work often grapples with Jewish identity, said he somewhat grudgingly took on “The Merchant of Venice.”
When he first read the play as a teenager, Mr. Jacobson said, he was troubled by the depiction of Shylock, a Jewish merchant who seeks “a pound of flesh” from a gentile who owes him money. But when he reread it more recently, he saw Shylock as a more subtle and sympathetic figure.
Ms. Winterson, author of “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” chose “The Winter’s Tale” partly because she related to the abandoned baby at the center of the story. Ms. Winterson was taken in by strangers after her mother gave her up for adoption, an experience she recounts in her memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”
“As someone who was given away and is a foundling, I’ve always worked with the idea of the lost child,” she says. “It’s like starting a book with some of the pages missing.”
Ms. Winterson found the restrictions of working with someone else’s plot liberating.
“Shakespeare never invented a plot, he always went to an existing story or text and said, ‘I’ll have that,’ ” Ms. Winterson said. “I think he would approve of what we’re all doing.”