WINTERSON HAD FUN REWORKING THE BARD
Two kings of Winter’s Tale become banker, video-game designer
The Gap of Time Jeanette Winterson (Alfred A. Knopf Canada)
Jeanette Winterson is an enthusiastic participant in a worldwide publishing effort to mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in April 2016.
The Hogarth Shakespeare project involves several publishing houses and celebrated authors who are reimagining plays by the Bard into a slew of novels that will be published over the next few years. Margaret Atwood, for example, will tackle a take on The Tempest, and the Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø will deliver a reimagined Macbeth.
“It was mentioned to me at the very beginning,” Winterson says. “I said, ‘I think it’s a great idea and I want to be on board straight away and I’ll do The Winter’s Tale.’ I knew the play, and I knew how I wanted to shape it. That is why I am out of the traps first.”
She got down to it in August 2014, and it was delivered this past April.
“I’m normally a quick writer. What I tend to do is get an idea off the page. Once I know what I am doing, I have just got to type it out.
“It was partly being possessed by the momentum of this piece. Whenever you see it onstage it just roars through, and you are out on the street before you know it. (And) it’s a play where everything happens on the surface.”
Because of that, there is a lot of room to imagine a backstory.
“This is a great job for a fiction writer to go into the gaps. It is called The Gap of Time. Those were the places I needed to explore and dig out for the reader.”
The Winter’s Tale is a story of two kings, Leontes of Sicily and Polixenes of Bohemia. They are long-acquainted but Leontes is jealous of Polixenes, believing the Bohemian has slept with his pregnant wife Hermione.
A daughter is born, Perdita, who is disowned by Leontes and is stolen away and abandoned, rescued and raised by a shepherd and his son. In the end, all are reconciled and everyone lives happily ever after, helped by the intervention of Father Time.
Winterson has always been a fan of this play.
“The simple and most obvious reason is that it’s got an abandoned baby,” she says. Winterson was given up for adoption by a Pentecostal family and spent years trying to find her birth mother.
“That is the shining centre of the play: that which is lost will be found. It’s the child being the symbol of everything that is lost and thrown away.
“Shakespeare, in his later years, began to believe in second chances, in forgiveness and in the possibility of things opening up rather than closing down. That’s what we see here. It doesn’t end as tragedy, and it doesn’t end as revenge. It ends in forgiveness.
“I am an optimistic person, but as I get older and I look at the tragedy of the world we are in now, you think, ‘If we don’t find a way through this, we are in trouble.’ And that way has to be about recognition of who we are, reconciliation with others, and forgiveness of ourselves and everything that we do.
“Also (there is) the hope that the next generation will do it better, which is the optimism of the end of the play that you think Perdita (the abandoned daughter) and Zel (the son of the Bohemian king) will succeed. Shakespeare says, ‘Can we just leave it to the kids because we’ve really screwed it up.”
There is little doubt Winterson sees this as her story, too.
“What else can I write from, if not myself? There is no Archimedean point outside myself (where I can) stand and be objective and observant. It’s the sum total of who you are at any point in time. I am always going to be exploring what it means to be abandoned and reconciled to something.”
The book is dark, but it is also very funny, much like the play. It is certainly a quick and enjoyable read.
“I had quite a lot of fun doing all that. One of the great joys of being a writer is that you get to play.”
Of course, she is messing with Shakespeare, and that doesn’t worry her one bit.
“He did exactly the same. The Winter’s Tale is drawn from someone else (a pastoral romance called Pandosto by one Robert Greene).
“They weren’t fixated by final text the way we are. Every time that thing went onstage in Shakespeare’s day, it would have come out different. The works were not even collected until he’d been dead seven years, in 1623. To some extent, there is no original and there is no later with Shakespeare. They are all cover versions, mine is just another.”
To get ready for writing, she spent a summer reading and rereading the play.
“What I wanted to do was just climb into it, get in there and know it really well so when I came to start work I wasn’t endlessly flying back to the text.”
Everything turns in The Winter’s Tale on the relationship between the two kings. In her novel, she has made Leo a banker and Xeno a video-game designer.
“There are no real references to their past relationship in the play. We know they grew up together, and we know there has been no female influence for either of them.”
“These two lonely boys are sent away together to school, so it’s natural to speculate that they have a teenage sexual relationship like so many do. It was intense and real. In Shakespeare’s time sexuality was kind of ambiguous. They weren’t worried about it in the same way we do today.
“We know some of the sonnets were written to one of Shakespeare’s male lovers. That’s why I decided to do that. I think it’s consistent and plausible.”
Finally there is a political discussion about the disparities between rich and poor in her book. In the end, though, even Leo, the callous banker, does have goodness in him, and it comes out.
“I think even the worst of us are capable of random acts of kindness.”
But it is time that takes the title role in The Gap of Time.
“It’s the agency of time that allows something to happen. Forgiveness means you have not forgotten but you have moved on. That is story of The Winter’s Tale and The Gap of Time.
“The whole point about time is that you can mess with it. Everything seems to happen in a day, or in 200 pages you have several lifetimes. This way of expanding and compressing time is very liberating for a writer.”
The book is dedicated to the mystery writer Ruth Rendell, who passed away in May after suffering a massive stroke.
The two women were friends for 29 years.
Winterson met Rendell when she was 27.
“I sort of grew up around her. Some people found her quite frightening because she could be cold and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. But to me she was very warm and non-judgmental.
“She had a stroke in January. I had to stop work because I was so distressed. I thought I might have to drop the project. One of the things I had to do was pull myself around and think, ‘Ruth would want me to finish this book.’
“She died while the book was being prepared for publication. It just seemed absolutely right that I should dedicate it to her.”