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Queering The Winter's Tale in Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time

2023; Western Michigan University; Volume: 57; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.2023.a904534

1936-1637

Niamh J. O’Leary,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Queering The Winter's Tale in Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time Niamh J. O'Leary (bio) In 2013, Hogarth Press, the imprint of Penguin Random House founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, announced an exciting new project: The Hogarth Shakespeare. Conceived as an ambitious effort to retell some portion of the Shakespeare canon, the series promised "today's best-loved novelists" would adapt "the world's favorite playwright" into fiction.1 Between 2015 and 2020, Hogarth published seven novels, based on The Winter's Tale, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello. (An eighth, a promised adaptation of Hamlet by Gillian Flynn, was announced but has not yet materialized.) Several scholars have undertaken examinations of the series, pondering everything from market forces to canon formation.2 The series, which now appears to have gone quietly dormant, raises any number of questions about what draws audiences to novelizations of Shakespeare's work and what contemporary novelists have to say about (and to) the playwright. This essay focuses on Hogarth Shakespeare's inaugural book—Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold (2015). In examining Winterson's work, I begin to answer some of those questions: How does this novel talk back to Shakespeare? How does Winterson's approach help us understand some of the possibilities of adapting Shakespeare to fiction? Analyzing the first four Hogarth Shakespeare books released, Douglas Lanier points out that the series came into being roughly the same time as Emma Rice took over Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London and set about dramatically reimagining the theatre's approach to performing [End Page 97] the plays, and as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned modern "translations" of the plays into more contemporary English.3 In this temporal context, the Hogarth series not only marked the quadricentennial of the playwright's death but also a moment when several attempts to modernize and reimagine Shakespeare experienced cultural pushback. Lanier explores what's at stake in the series insisting upon the literary nature of these novelizations, especially in light of resistance to adaptations of Shakespeare that eliminate Shakespeare's language. Four years later, Laurie Osborne contemplated the novels' relationship to their Shakespearean origins slightly differently, emphasizing the series' self-presentation as a literary project in its own right. In particular, Osborne considered the authors invited by Hogarth to participate in the project, none of whom were established Shakespeare scholars: Hogarth's choice of creative rather than critical expertise emphasizes a cultural shift in Shakespearean narrative adaptation, away from celebrating a "quintessential" Shakespearean artistic insight in the mid nineteenth century and towards valuing recognized novelistic artistry in the early twenty-first century. This redirection of artistic energies marks Shakespeare's works more as raw materials than inspiration, as canon fodder rather than canon father.4 Osborne comments that the novelists chosen by Hogarth to adapt Shakespeare are significantly diverse in their approach to fiction, from Jo Nesbø's Nordic crime tales to Margaret Atwood's futuristic dystopias. Of this variety, Osborne observes, "Hogarth not only reinforces the generic flexibility evident within Shakespearean novelizations but locates that flexibility within the Shakespearean canon, which provides both the common ground and the potential for generic variation."5 Winterson's The Gap of Time merits examination both in its own right and as the inaugural novel of this landmark series, a novel that foregrounds its literariness through explicit engagement with the language of creativity and originality, brandishes its relationship to canon with pride, and simultaneously insists upon its own capacity to canon-build. In many ways, The Winter's Tale may seem an odd choice to kick off the Hogarth Shakespeare series. Jeremy Rosen called it "a decidedly weird pick," claiming the play is "one of Shakespeare's oddest offerings."6 At the same time, noting that the late romance had not been adapted to fiction since the mid-19th century, Osborne suggests that Winterson's choice to [End Page 98] adapt a "lesser-known" play "participates in … a noteworthy trend in modern Shakespeare novels."7 While compelling, The Winter's Tale is not among the most commonly performed or best...