Rewriting Shakespeare
10th July 2013
Sam Jonkers Reflects Upon Random House's Hogarth Shakepeare Project
I have frequently been accused of being conservative in my views, not without some justification. So when I spotted the recent Random House press release announcing that they planned to invite contemporary writers, beginning with Anne Tyler and Jeanette Winterson, both of whom I admire, to modernise William Shakespeare’s plays I was a little put out. After all Shakespeare’s plays have been around for a few centuries and when I glanced through the summer’s theatre listings the Bard’s plays outnumbered those of all other playwrights. So do they really need reworking?
Publisher Random House believes they do, announcing that the plays are to be “brought alive for a contemporary readership” giving best selling novelists “the opportunity to reinvent these seminal works”. Anne Tyler will rewrite “The Taming of the Shrew”, while Jeanette Winterson has selected “The Winter’s Tale” with the tongue in cheek comment, “I love cover versions”.
When my initial outrage subsided I realized that this is not really a new phenomenon, after all Charles and Mary Lamb translated the stories into prose for children in 1807; movie directors, theatre productions and television screenplays have all used the basis of the plays and adapted them for a modern audience, think West Side Story and Shakespeare in Love. I roared with laughter all the way through the Reduced Shakespeare Company's show, which presents all 37 Shakespeare plays in 97 minutes. Perhaps the idea of a rewriting is not really a defamation so much as a celebration of Shakepeare’s genius. I came round to the idea that if the younger generation needs a helping hand to understand and enjoy the comedies of the Bard then this project is no bad thing.
That evening my twelve year old daughter bounded in from school announcing that they had been asked to prepare a talk by way of English homework. All term they had been studying the works of a single author and now they were to choose their favourite character and supply their reasoning.
“It is an impossible task,” she declared, “there are just too many to choose from! Othello, Romeo, Juliet all so tragic; Puck so witty; Hamlet so mad!”
Ah, Mr. Shakepeare your magic endures!
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Sam Jonkers 26/Sep/2015 12:53
Jeanette Winterson's "The Gap of Time" is now available and sounds like a gripping read. In this article from The Guardian Winterson says, "I wasn’t interested in copying Shakespeare – this isn’t a retelling. I wanted to track Shakespeare in the same way that he tracked other people’s ideas, innovations, solutions, follies, even failures, and used them to his advantage." http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/26/jeanette-winterson-rewriting-shakespeare-winter-s-tale?CMP=twt_gu