The book:
Shakespeare’s many plays are refashioned and retold in countless adaptations, be it in theatre, cinema, or even puppetry and hip-hop. Hogarth Press’s decision to commission authors to retell Shakespeare’s plays piqued our interest, however, as the criteria was far from encumbering - they must ‘be true to the spirit of the originals - and the calibre of the first author very high indeed.
The Gap of Time is an ingenious retelling of The Winter’s Tale, containing both the real human emotion and elements of magic which featured in the original. Given new life by Jeanette Winterson, herself a master of both reality and imagination, it is transported to modern settings, with a cast of characters nodding back to Shakespeare’s own.
Knowledge of A Winter’s Tale is not required, as both the original and Winterson’s ‘cover’, as she self-deprecatingly puts it, are simply exquisite stories exploring the universal experiences of love, sex, birth and death.
What the Guardian thought:
Towards the end of this “cover version” of The Winter’s Tale, Jeanette Winterson tells us that the play has been a “private text” for her 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.” She explains: “It’s a play about a foundling. And I am.”
This contemporary novelisation is the first in a series of reimaginings of Shakespeare’s works by prominent authors to coincide with the 400th anniversary of his death next year. There’s a mania for rewriting the classics at the moment but, as Winterson points out, Shakespeare borrowed many of his plots from other people’s – including The Winter’s Tale, whose elements came from a play by Robert Greene – so you have to imagine he would have applauded the project.
Though she has set her modern version in London, Paris and the fictional city of New Bohemia (which sounds like New Orleans), it remains faithful to the plot of the original, even down to adaptations of the characters’ names. But she has shifted the structure to open with a greater dramatic punch – the discovery of the foundling baby, Perdita, and the violent death of the man who was supposed to abandon her on her father’s orders, but is moved by compassion to save her life
The novel is composed according to the play’s acts, including two “Intervals”, in which the narrator invites us to step out of the story and consider its themes in relation to ourselves. The whole book is acutely aware of its own artifice, drawing attention to it in the way that Shakespeare’s plays so often do.
The Winter’s Tale, one of the late, “problem” plays, is a story about loss, remorse and forgiveness, and the nature of time. Winterson has captured all this with evident respect and affection for Shakespeare’s text, and made it new with her own bold and poetic prose and her insights into love and grief. There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps, while some of the comic scenes are as excruciatingly unfunny as Shakespeare’s own, which one has to assume is a deliberate homage – fortunately there is plenty of Winterson’s characteristic sharp humour scattered elsewhere. Perhaps most surprising is how readily the plot translates to a modern context; how plausible this version seems, for all its knowing self-reference. As Winterson says in her first Interval: “The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like.”
Stephanie Merritt - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
- The Girl Who Fell to Earth by Sophia Al-Maria
- A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
- The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate
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