By Daniel Pollack-Peizner for The New Yorker, 9 November 2015
In October, the publisher Hogarth rolled out the first in its ambitious new line of Shakespeare plays retold by contemporary novelists. The pairings are promising: Margaret Atwood, a master of ecological dystopias, will reimagine “The Tempest,” for instance, while Gillian Flynn, who knows her way around marriage and murder, will take on “Hamlet.” The début novel in the series is more of a curveball: the versatile Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of Shakespeare’s late puzzler, “The Winter’s Tale.”
According to the Times, Winterson’s publisher was surprised that she passed up “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth,” and chose instead what the reporter calls “one of Shakespeare’s most baffling, jarring and uneven plays.” The play is a mashup of disparate modes, reflecting the Jacobean taste for tragicomedy. The first three acts spin a vicious web of obsession and betrayal: King Leontes of Sicilia, certain that his wife, Hermione, is sleeping with his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, tears his own world apart—he tries to have Polixenes poisoned, rejects his newborn daughter as a bastard, and puts Hermione on trial for treason, creating such anguish that their son dies; when his wife hears that news, she drops dead as well. Then the figure of Time appears onstage to announce a sixteen-year leap forward. When the story resumes, the banished daughter, Perdita, who has come of age in Bohemia, attracts the affections of Florizel, the disguised son of Polixenes. Can the children’s love heal their parents’ strife? It’s pastoral romance grafted onto royal tragedy, “As You Like It” giving “Othello” a shot at redemption.
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