Whether Japanese warrior tales ( Throne of Blood and Macbeth ), Hollywood musicals ( West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet ) or literary interpretations (Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and King Lear ), William Shakespeare’s works have been adapted several times and in many ways for more than four centuries. Ahead of his 400th death anniversary in 2016, the Hogarth Press, an imprint of Random House, announced that it was commissioning contemporary writers to reimagine Shakespeare’s plays in prose. This year, as the world remembers Shakespeare on April 23, crime writer Jo Nesbo has published his noirish retelling of Macbeth .
Nesbo sets his tale in a dilapidated, rain-fed industrial town of the 1970s and spins the story of ambition, love and greed around a police force struggling with a drug problem. While Duncan, chief of the police, is idealistic and visionary, some of his men, such as the manipulating head of SWAT, Macbeth, are not.
The first in the reimagine Shakespeare series was Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time , a “cover version” of The Winter’s Tale. It is the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the ‘death’ of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited. Winterson explained to The Guardian why she chose this play: “All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around, and that carry us around... I have worked with The Winter’s Tale in many disguises for many years.”
In the past two years, Margaret Atwood has retold The Tempest (Hag-Seed ), giving the story of enchantment, retribution and second chances a fresh lease of life; Anne Tyler took on The Taming of the Shrew ; Howard Jacobson, The Merchant of Venice ; and Tracy Chevalier reinterpreted Othello , transposing the tragedy to a 1970s Washington schoolyard, pitting friends against each other and exploring the themes of jealousy, betrayal and bullying. In 2021, we will be reading Gillian Flynn’s reimagining of Hamlet .
The Hogarth Press was founded in 1917 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf to publish the best new writing of the age. The story goes that Woolf was so hypersensitive about criticism that the couple thought it prudent to start their own press. Would they be happy with these cover versions?
