The Gap of Time

Starred review from August 10, 2015
Even the most devout Shakespeareans have trouble with his late plays—the ones where lost children reappear, the dead live again, and, with enough coincidences and unlikely events, King Lear–level tragedy ends happily. Winterson (The Daylight Gate), however, loves The Winter’s Tale so much that she’s written a “cover version” of it in this, the first in Hogarth’s Shakespeare series in which contemporary writers “retell” the Bard’s plays. She replaces King Leontes with Leo, an arrogant English money manager; old friend King Polixenes becomes Xeno, a video-game designer. As in the play, Leo’s conviction that the child his wife is carrying is not his but Xeno’s results in broken hearts and ruined friendships, exile, and a daughter turned foundling, raised by a bar owner and his son in a New Orleans–like city. But Winterson doesn’t just update the story: she fills in its psychological nuances. Why would Leo suddenly decide his wife is sleeping with Xeno? Winterson’s backstory can’t justify his actions, but it does add fascinating context. And in her version, the violence, by turns comic book and terrifying, happens onstage, not off. It’s fun to see Winterson solve the play’s problems, but the book’s real strength is the way her language shifts between earthy and poetic and her willingness to use whatever she needs to tell the story (angels, video games, carjackings). She makes us read on, our hearts in our mouths, to see how a twice-told story will turn out this time.

August 15, 2015
Shakespeare did a pretty good job with his plays, but Hogarth Press is putting out a series of rewrites by contemporary novelists. This is Winterson's version of A Winter's Tale. Winterson says the play "has been a private text for me for more than 30 years. By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I can't live without; without, not in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something." The play does have a thematic resemblance to Winterson's novels (The Daylight Gate, 2013, etc.) and memoir (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 2012), with its autocratic father, hints of incest, passionate love shading into abuse, foundlings, and redemptive innocents. Shakespeare's telling reads like a fairy tale: a jealous king, convinced his wife is having an affair with his best friend, has his baby daughter set adrift. She washes up on the coast of the friend's kingdom, Bohemia, where a shepherd finds her. Meanwhile, the Delphic Oracle vindicates the queen, who (supposedly) drops dead, only to reappear years later as a statue who comes to life once the lost princess is allowed to marry the Bohemian prince. Winterson changes the king into a London hedge fund tycoon, the queen into a French pop star, the shepherd into a black musician in New Bohemia, Louisiana, the queen's loyal scold of a serving woman into a Jewish executive assistant spouting Yiddish proverbs, and so on. It generally works well, but the transformation drains the story of some of its fairy-tale magic: for example, the statue business shows up only as a video game and a metaphor ("Every day she finds another carving, another statue and she imagines what it would be like if they came to life. And who trapped them in stone? She feels trapped in stone"). Winterson's most interesting addition is to make the king-king-queen love triangle explicitly sexual: here the two men are not just best friends, but boyhood lovers. Ponderous comic sections are redeemed by flights of epigrammatic lyricism that twist cynicism into hope.

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June 1, 2015

Led by Hogarth UK and involving partnerships with a dozen publishers worldwide, the "Hogarth Shakespeare" series aims to refresh our view of the Bard by asking notable contemporary authors to offer their own prose reimaginings of the immortal plays. First up is Whitbread/E.M. Forster honoree Winterson, who's taking on The Winter's Tale. Says Winterson, "I have worked with The Winter's Tale in many disguises for many years. This is a brilliant opportunity to work with it in its own right."

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