Review by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif, MA Shakespeare Studies

Modern Shakespeare retellings are tricky things. It’s hard to update the norms and values of the 16^th century and make them accessible to modern readers. It is even harder to translate fantastical elements into a modern setting.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time is a retelling of The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s late plays. It is a curious, complex play, straddling the line between tragedy and comedy, and the time jump of sixteen years in the middle makes it seem more like two plays than one. It also contains possibly the best Shakespearean stage direction of all time: exit, pursued by a bear.

The book’s plot carefully follows the framework of the play: Leo (Leontes in the play) is a wealthy London banker who finds himself crippled with jealousy over the perceived affair between his wife, the French singer MiMi (Hermione) and his best friend, Xeno (Polixene). After destroying his relationships with both, he sends away his daughter, Perdita, to the fictional town of New Bohemia in America, where she is found and raised by Shep and his son Clo, stand-ins for the Shepherd and the Clown. Sixteen years later, she falls in love with Zel (Florizel), the estranged son of Xeno.

The book’s homages to the play are clever and subtle, never bashing you on the head with a Shakespearean hammer. Even direct quotes from The Winter’s Tale, even a reference to the play within the book’s universe, seem natural. However, the book is strongly conscious of its Shakespearean roots. Time, one of the most significant themes of the play, resonates in the book’s title, the lyrics of MiMi’s song, and the name of a computer game designed by Xeno. The novel is also full of symbolic titbits that jump out at a reader familiar with the play on an academic level – for instance, MiMi reading Xeno’s palm reflects how Leontes’s description of Hermione and Polixenes ‘paddling palms’ was a phrase often used to describe palm reading in the early modern period.

The book manages manages to capture the play’s sense of tragi-comedy: it has strikingly tragic moments followed by laugh out loud comic ones, moments of bleak despair mixed with moments of pure hope. But Winterson’s greatest strength lies in her writing style, with lyrical, flowing prose that manages to be both succinct and striking, and dialogues that are snappy and poignant. Though the narrative follows a number of perspectives, it is Leo’s voice that stands out as the most powerful, evoking equal disgust and pity. She fleshes out characters from the play – with Perdita and (Flori)zel emerging as more compelling characters than their dramatic counterparts, while the Shepherd and the Clown are given a much deserved spotlight. Winterson also expands on implied elements of the relationships between MiMi, Xeno and Leo and between Xeno and Zel.

The Gap of Time is the first in the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which aims to adapt Shakespeare’s major works into novels, declaring that novelists will ‘take the plays of Shakespeare and use them to create something entirely their own’. In this respect, Winterson succeeds in creating something both timeless and modern, a product that is both Shakespeare’s and her own.