RE-WRITING THE BARD
Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson on their ‘cover versions’ of Shakespeare for Hogarth Press
The 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, on April 23, will be a grand occasion for the literary world — and if you’re British, a “nightmare.” So says Jeanette Winterson: “It’ ll be Shakespeare everything. Tea towels, pillowcases, cupcakes … We’re going to go mad in an orgy of Shakespeare. I’m dreading it.” If this sounds like a plague on all our houses, it may be balanced by what Winterson and other eminent novelists are doing with the Bard’s work.
The Hogarth Press (founded 99 years ago by Virginia and Leonard Woolf ) has commissioned what Winterson calls “cover versions” of Shakespeare’s plays, including her own just- published The Gap of Time, which revisits The Winter’s Tale. Out this week is Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name, after The Merchant of Venice, which will be followed by Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, after The Taming of the Shrew (June); and Margaret Atwood’s reimagining of The Tempest (October).
“Anybody who’s been around for 400 years deserves some respect,” says Winterson. One needn’t, however, treat him with kid gloves. Having reworked Bible stories and Arthurian legends in her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), she modernizes The Winter’s Tale, changing its settings from Sicily and Bohemia to contemporary London and the fictional New Bohemia ( itself a fictionalized cover version of New Orleans). The prideful king Leontes is recast as Leo, a banker — “I thought, ‘What kind of alpha male would that be now?’ ” In the play, Leontes’ opposite number is the shepherd who raises his cast-out baby daughter, Perdita, as his own. “I thought, ‘ Who’s marginalized now in society?’ ” In her novel, he’s a black jazz pianist.
Winterson’s approach is political, but playful too — Leontes’ wife, Hermione, becomes MiMi, a French chanteuse; his friend Polixenes, a video- game designer; and the lovable rogue Autolycus, a used-car salesman. Winterson riffs off the Bard’s material just as actors would have done in Shakespeare’s day, improvising, she says, “because they’d forgotten (words), or they might spin out something because the audience was laughing … It’s collaborative; it’s dynamic; it’s absolutely not fixed; and that’s why he never bothered to invent a plot. He’d just look around and think, ‘What can I have?’ ”
For Jacobson, reworking the Bard summoned up what Shakespeare might have felt when he drew on others’ material to make his own transformative cover versions. “I thought, ‘ This is going to be quite restrictive.’ The strange thing is, I’ve never felt more free. … I didn’t have to worry about inventing a plausible tale. It was like having a rubber mattress to write on: I could bounce.”
Like The Gap of Time, Shylock Is My Name is set pointedly in the present day; it swaps Venice and Belmont for the nouveau riche Golden Triangle south of Manchester, home to many premier league soccor players. The heiress, Portia, becomes Plurabelle, a surgically augmented reality TV star, and when an auto mechanic decides to fix her Volkswagen Beetle instead of her Porsche Carrera, he wins her heart. Shylock’s role is more or less assigned to the philanthropist, Strulovitch — except that Jacobson inserts Shakespeare’s Shylock himself into the play, as if he materialized out of a collective literary unconscious. The moneylender becomes Strulovitch’s confidant, and together they philosophize about what it means to be Jewish, and what should happen when the modern-day Antonio owes him a pound of flesh.
Originall y Ja c o bson, whose novels include The Finkler Question (winner of the Booker in 2010) and The Mighty Walzer, had asked if he could rewrite Hamlet, but the editors had other ideas. “Yes, it was stereotyping me,” he says, “but I can hardly complain about that. No one made me write about Jews every second minute.” Jacobson delves directly into the disquieting — perhaps murderous — aspects of Shylock’s character with his trademark acerbic humour. He feels it’s reductive to call The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitic; the term, he says, is “drenched in the Jewish history of the last 100 years,” and yet he acknowledges, “There are things about Shylock that are extremely unpleasant. I think we’ve forgotten how energizing it is to be offended sometimes, to discover how much we don’t know, to be driven by really great works to a strong skepticism about things.”
Winterson, in contrast, chose The Winter’s Tale, to Hogarth’s surprise — Shakespeare’s penultimate play is notoriously difficult, starting off as a seeming tragedy and ending in out- of- nowhere comedy. Having herself been adopted, Winterson felt a connection to Perdita in her younger years: “I went into ( The Winter’s Tale) looking for literal answers rather than clues. I came back later, trying to understand what this play meant, and then realizing you just had to inhabit it as a place to be. You don’t ask what your house means, do you? Sometimes we’re just too focused on meaning.”
Like Jacobson, she allowed some of the richness of Shakespeare’s language — often seen as difficult or a barrier for prospective new audiences — to seep into her own, aiming for prose that wasn’t “arcane or showy” but would “endlessly turn the emotions of the reader.” And here, as in the originals, is where the novels are particularly rewarding. Shylock Is My Name opens: “It is one of those better-to- be- deadthan-alive days you get in the north of England in February, the space between the land and sky a mere letter box of squeezed light, the sky itself unfathomably banal.” Winterson writes of Perdita: “the past is right in front of her and every day she walks slam into it like a door that locks the future on the other side.”
Says Jacobson, “What I don’t want to see is Shakespeare made easy for people, and given the ( series’) writers, I don’t think these novels are.” For him, the books should “ask people to take the greatness of him on board and to realize that greatness is not off- putting. Struggle with it a little bit, and you’ll get the highest yield of pleasure you can get.”