The Gap of Time
The Winter's Tale Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"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. . . . And I love cover versions." Jeanette Winterson
The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's “late plays”. It tells the story of Leontes, King of Sicily, whose insane jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter, Perdita, from the kingdom and then the death of his beautiful wife, Hermione. Perdita is brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of miraculous events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.
In Jeanette Winterson's retelling we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crash, to a storm-ravaged city in the US called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, video games and the elliptical nature of time. It tells in a hyper-modern way, full of energy and beauty, of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and love, redemption and a lost child on the other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even the most devout Shakespeareans have trouble with his late plays the ones where lost children reappear, the dead live again, and, with enough coincidences and unlikely events, King Lear level tragedy ends happily. Winterson (The Daylight Gate), however, loves The Winter's Tale so much that she's written a "cover version" of it in this, the first in Hogarth's Shakespeare series in which contemporary writers "retell" the Bard's plays. She replaces King Leontes with Leo, an arrogant English money manager; old friend King Polixenes becomes Xeno, a video-game designer. As in the play, Leo's conviction that the child his wife is carrying is not his but Xeno's results in broken hearts and ruined friendships, exile, and a daughter turned foundling, raised by a bar owner and his son in a New Orleans like city. But Winterson doesn't just update the story: she fills in its psychological nuances. Why would Leo suddenly decide his wife is sleeping with Xeno? Winterson's backstory can't justify his actions, but it does add fascinating context. And in her version, the violence, by turns comic book and terrifying, happens onstage, not off. It's fun to see Winterson solve the play's problems, but the book's real strength is the way her language shifts between earthy and poetic and her willingness to use whatever she needs to tell the story (angels, video games, carjackings). She makes us read on, our hearts in our mouths, to see how a twice-told story will turn out this time.
