The novelist’s recasting of Shakespeare is respectful of the original while injecting it with modern grit and characteristic wit and poetryTowards the end of this “cover version” of The Winters Tale,Jeanette Winterson tells us that the play has been a private text” for her for more than 30 years: “By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I cant live without; without, not in the sense of lack, or but in the old sense of living outside of something. She explains: “It’s a play approximately a foundling. And I am.”This modern novelisation is the first in a series of reimaginings of Shakespeare’s works by prominent authors to coincide with the 400th anniversary of his death next year. There’s a mania for rewriting the classics at the moment but,as Winterson points out, Shakespeare borrowed many of his plots from other people’s – including The Winter’s Tale, or whose elements came from a play by Robert Greene – so you gain to assume he would gain applauded the project.
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Source: theguardian.com