{"id":26438,"date":"2015-12-02T09:01:23","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T17:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/the-winters-tale-retold\/"},"modified":"2015-12-02T09:01:23","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T17:01:23","slug":"the-winters-tale-retold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/life\/the-winters-tale-retold\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Winter’s Tale’ Retold"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Gap of Time: The <\/span>Winter’s Tale<\/span> Retold”<\/span> is the book for anyone who has ever seen or read William Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cThe Winter\u2019s Tale\u201d and gone WTF.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard sometimes to make sense of Shakespeare\u2019s language \u2014 it can be even harder to make sense of some of Shakespeare\u2019s plots – but Jeannette Winterson\u2019s book is both the cliffnotes you always needed and a wondrous new tale for a new era.<\/p>\n

The first of Hogarth\u2019s proposed Shakespeare novelizations to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare\u2019s death in 2016, \u201cThe Gap of Time\u201d has set the bar high for a series that will include such luminaries as Margaret Atwood doing the \u201cThe Tempest,\u201d Anne Tyler taking on \u201cThe Taming of the Shrew,\u201d Gillian Flynn riffing on \u201cHamlet\u201d and Jo Nesbo lending his signature touch to \u201cMacbeth.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was lucky enough to see Theatre in the Rough\u2019s production of \u201cThe Winter\u2019s Tale\u201d last year and while I enjoyed it greatly, there were some parts that left me a bit pensive.<\/p>\n

Like why does Leontes suddenly think his wife is having an affair with his best friend and insist on it to the point of destroying his life \u2014 and ending the lives of several others? This idea of adultery, which seems to come out of nowhere, launches the entire course of the play but is left, in Shakespeare, almost entirely unexplained.<\/p>\n

But in the greater elasticity of prose, Winterson has built a King Leontes whose motives we may not sympathize with but we do understand. She does us a great service in this, making the villain human and adding real tension to the story.<\/p>\n

Her prose sparkles and in true Shakespearean fashion, she leaves you with plenty of memorable one liners. Like this one: \u201cA sign of the times. But the times had so many signs that if we read them all we\u2019d die of heartbreak.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this, from the trickster Autolycus: \u201cOne thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn\u2019t happen to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

And when Leo is fired from his bank for \u201creckless losses\u201d: \u201cEverything he did with money was reckless, but no one wanted to fire him for his reckless profits.\u201d<\/p>\n

And my personal favorite, on the love of books: \u201cWhen you\u2019ve finished a book you can put it away and it doesn\u2019t ask to see you again.\u201d<\/p>\n

I do have one regret: That in modernizing Shakespeare\u2019s tale, Winterson has done away with the most famous stage directions in history, \u201cExit, pursued by a bear.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s not logical to have a bear on a Caribbean island, maybe people are more likely to be killed in random shootings than in wildlife maulings these days, but still I feel she could have managed it. Long live the bear! Shortly live the messenger!<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold” is the book for anyone who has ever seen or read William Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cThe Winter\u2019s Tale\u201d and gone WTF. It\u2019s hard sometimes to make sense of Shakespeare\u2019s language \u2014 it can be even harder to make sense of some of Shakespeare\u2019s plots – but Jeannette Winterson\u2019s book is both the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-26438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26438"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=26438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}