(Original Review, 1981-01-18)
The book industry is becoming like the film industry; no new ideas so just reboot or copy a previous story...Star Trek Into Darkness being the most cynical by simply reorganizing original a Trek film script and a couple of cases word for word.
"Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead" (an) "interesting, imaginative reworkings of Shakespeare". Up to a point, Lord Copper. R&G riffs marvellously on Hamlet. But it relies on the audience having a pretty solid knowledge of the play, even down to some of the more minor characters in it, and being able to fit them into the large context. The basic pitch --- that the smaller characters have lives of their own --- plays out in front of the (almost completely unseen) "other play". I wonder how many people enjoy R&G without having Hamlet pretty well to hand: not many, to judge from the dire film of it a few years ago.
It's one thing to write a text that stands on its own but uses some elements of Shakespeare for those that want to spot it (10 Things I Hate About You) and another to write a text that is intimately bound up with a text you're assumed to know (R&G). But what's being proposed here is a standalone text which doesn't assume you know the play already, but which also provides a gloss on (presumably) most of the play. Whole other situation.
(Amusingly, an extract from R&G was one of the unseen texts in the SAT "English Literature" subject test this month. That must have been fun for some of the people taking it). I'm not 'against' it like some of the commenters seem to be but this is about the 100th time I can remember in the last 20 years or so that there has been some scheme to 'bring Shakespeare back to life' and it is pretty daft.
Shakespeare is still important to the 'template' for drama, scholars will point out that he (or they...) didn't invent anything but wherever it comes from people are still using Shakespeare all the time.
One would think writers, if they have any professional integrity at all, would have sufficient respect for another writer to leave his work alone. But then, of course, there's that money-thing that tempers respect for others.
Let's see: Shakespeare died, and five centuries later rewriting his works (which is not at all the same as creating original adaptations, whether it is “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” or “West Side Story”), but rewriting his works. What a way to note his death: arrogantly believing his works need resurrecting and thinking you can manage it. Oh, my.
I can't help feeling as though this is like 'pyramid selling' as the whole exercise stinks of little to do with literature. "IT", I believe is another prime example of the risk averse publishers exploitation. Exploiting Shakespeare - again, exploiting the talent of authors by coercing them to void originality and re-hash, and exploiting consumers with such a blatant marketing spin. Random House should know better, this, even if good will be the literary equivalent of big brother. The literati academics are quick to knock Jourdan and her 50th book out (she must be the only author to have written more books than she has read) - but this is just a highbrow version of the same thing!
This has nothing to do with writing, or literature, just sales. I know I got some shit because of the style and content of my book, but at least I can stand up and say it had integrity. Sadly, I remember the National Gallery pulling a similar carry-on with famous paintings.
The idea that contemporary authors cannot create genuinely new work inspired by the canon is very narrow, and if you'll forgive me, probably held by people who are not themselves writers. Winterson has frequently proposed in her own novels that stories are not linear, static objects. She has an extraordinary gift of invention and I am sure is quite capable of adding to the joy of The Winter's Tale by working through in her own mind what the play might mean to her, and to us. Even school-level reading of Shakespeare is an act of reinvention and interpretation. I think we should look forward to that act being performed by a writer of her distinction. But will their poetic and dramatic skills be up to it ? If genuine, why not bring to the masses more overlooked greats like Chaucer, Blake, Homer? We all know Shakespeare is a household name, throw in a known writer and BOOM - literary recycling.
