Rewriting Shakespeare
Hogarth series invites authors like Atwood to modernize the Bard
There’s an interesting twist in Margaret Atwood’s reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Louise Dennys is saying.
“She’s basically reset it completely in the modern world,” says Dennys, executive vice-president of Penguin Random House Canada. She asked her friend Atwood to take part in the Hogarth Shakespeare project, aimed at getting some of our most prominent modern authors to reimagine Shakespeare’s work for today.
“She’s just completed it. It’s so good. It’s just great. I mean, she’s so clever and contemporary and her characters are so rich.”
Penguin Random House has released the cover of Hag-Seed, as Atwood’s version of
The Tempest is called, and she’s just handed in the manuscript, so her contribution to the project is top of mind.
“She has managed to incorporate the theatre into it in a very real way. She has essentially . . . ” Dennys pauses, not wanting to give too much away.
“No, it’s written as a novel. And she’s Peggy, what can I say.”
Which, of course, makes the whole thing that much more intriguing.
The Hogarth Shakespeare project was started by Dennys and two of her international colleagues — one in the U.K. and one in the U.S. — as a way of marking the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death and introducing his work to a new generation.
International project features “cover versions” of Shakespeare’s plays that will be rolled out over a five-year period. Other writers include Howard Jacobson, Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler
There’s a good reason there are so many deaths in Shakespeare’s plays: audiences in his day demanded it. Here’s a look at some of the key passings in the works of the Bard.
74 deaths
As part of marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, British director Tim Crouch has written The Complete Deaths, chronicling all 74 deaths in the plays. The production by theatrical company Spymonkey opens at the Northampton Royal and Derngate Theatre in May 2016 before going on national tour. Holger Syme, an associate professor of English and chair of the English and drama department of the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, noted that Shakespeare was “clearly writing to a popular taste for onstage violence.”
Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus, among the least beloved by literary critics, was immensely popular in its time as it featured rape and dismemberment, the death of two sons who are baked in a pie and fed to their mother, the Goth queen Tamora, and burying a man chest deep so he can die slowly of thirst and starvation. “Shakespeare was a popular playwright; Shakespeare was writing for a marketplace that he knew really well,” Syme said. His plays, are “completely within a particular tradition of ‘revenge tragedy’ that was really hot at the moment in the 1590s when Shakespeare was writing.”
Hamlet’s Ophelia
The final exit of many important characters and among the “most emotionally weighty” don’t actually take place onstage, notes Syme, including the death of Falstaff in Henry V (in which he never appears, though he’s seen in three other plays) and the drowning of Hamlet’s girlfriend Ophelia. “It’s ostensibly a suicide, but Hamlet’s mother narrates it in such detail it sounds as if she saw it happen. She knows that Ophelia fell into this creek and floated for a while, and then the weight of her clothes sucked her down. Why didn’t someone jump in and help her?” Syme said.
Othello kills Desdemona
For Syme, the most devastating onstage departure is the strangling death of Desdemona at the hands — literally — of husband Othello, who falsely believes she has been unfaithful. “The most devastating death in Shakespeare is Desdemona simply because it takes so long . . . and in her dying words she perjures herself. She says, ‘Othello didn’t do this, I did.’ She dies with a lie on her lips. She’s trying to protect her husband to the last. Onstage, it’s incredibly powerful,” he said.
Adeadly final act
One of the most bloody of all Shakespeare’s plays is Hamlet, particularly in its final scene. In it, four main characters — Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes and Hamlet — die while a fifth character, Horatio, forestalls his own death due to Hamlet’s pleading. It is perhaps the deadliest example of how the work of Shakespeare — and his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson — was “not a squeamish kind of theatre,” said Syme.