• Queering The Winter's Tale in Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time
• Niamh J. O'Leary (bio)

In 2013, Hogarth Press, the imprint of Penguin Random House founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, announced an exciting new project: The Hogarth Shakespeare. Conceived as an ambitious effort to retell some portion of the Shakespeare canon, the series promised "today's best-loved novelists" would adapt "the world's favorite playwright" into fiction.¹ Between 2015 and 2020, Hogarth published seven novels, based on The Winter's Tale, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello. (An eighth, a promised adaptation of Hamlet by Gillian Flynn, was announced but has not yet materialized.) Several scholars have undertaken examinations of the series, pondering everything from market forces to canon formation.² The series, which now appears to have gone quietly dormant, raises any number of questions about what draws audiences to novelizations of Shakespeare's work and what contemporary novelists have to say about (and to) the playwright. This essay focuses on Hogarth Shakespeare's inaugural book—Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold (2015). In examining Winterson's work, I begin to answer some of those questions: How does this novel talk back to Shakespeare? How does Winterson's approach help us understand some of the possibilities of adapting Shakespeare to fiction?

Analyzing the first four Hogarth Shakespeare books released, Douglas Lanier points out that the series came into being roughly the same time as Emma Rice took over Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London and set about dramatically reimagining the theatre's approach to performing [End Page 97] the plays, and as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned modern "translations" of the plays into more contemporary English.³ In this temporal context, the Hogarth series not only marked the quadricentennial of the playwright's death but also a moment when several attempts to modernize and reimagine Shakespeare experienced cultural pushback. Lanier explores what's at stake in the series insisting upon the literary nature of these novelizations, especially in light of resistance to adaptations of Shakespeare that eliminate Shakespeare's language. Four years later, Laurie Osborne contemplated the novels' relationship to their Shakespearean origins slightly differently, emphasizing the series' self-presentation as a literary project in its own right. In particular, Osborne considered the authors invited by Hogarth to participate in the project, none of whom were established Shakespeare scholars:

Hogarth's choice of creative rather than critical expertise emphasizes a cultural shift in Shakespearean narrative adaptation, away from celebrating a "quintessential" Shakespearean artistic insight in the mid nineteenth century and towards valuing recognized novelistic artistry in the early twenty-first century. This redirection of artistic energies marks Shakespeare's works more as raw materials than inspiration, as canon fodder rather than canon father.⁴

Osborne comments that the novelists chosen by Hogarth to adapt Shakespeare are significantly diverse in their approach to fiction, from Jo Nesbø's Nordic crime tales to Margaret Atwood's futuristic dystopias. Of this variety, Osborne observes, "Hogarth not only reinforces the generic flexibility evident within Shakespearean novelizations but locates that flexibility within the Shakespearean canon, which provides both the common ground and the potential for generic variation."⁵ Winterson's The Gap of Time merits examination both in its own right and as the inaugural novel of this landmark series, a novel that foregrounds its literariness through explicit engagement with the language of creativity and originality, brandishes its relationship to canon with pride, and simultaneously insists upon its own capacity to canon-build.

In many ways, The Winter's Tale may seem an odd choice to kick off the Hogarth Shakespeare series. Jeremy Rosen called it "a decidedly weird pick," claiming the play is "one of Shakespeare's oddest offerings."⁶ At the same time, noting that the late romance had not been adapted to fiction since the mid-19^th century, Osborne suggests that Winterson's choice to [End Page 98] adapt a "lesser-known" play "participates in … a noteworthy trend in modern Shakespeare novels."⁷ While compelling, The Winter's Tale is not among the most commonly performed or best...

• 珍妮特·温特森的《时差》中的冬天故事
• 尼亚姆·J·奥利里 (简介)

2013 年，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫 (Virginia Woolf) 和伦纳德·伍尔夫 (Leonard Woolf) 创立的企鹅兰登书屋 (Penguin Random House) 旗下的霍加斯出版社 (Hogarth Press) 宣布了一个激动人心的新项目：《霍加斯莎士比亚》(The Hogarth Shakespeare)。该剧被认为是重述莎士比亚经典部分内容的雄心勃勃的努力，承诺“当今最受欢迎的小说家”将把“世界上最受欢迎的剧作家”改编成小说。¹ 2015 年至 2020 年间，霍加斯出版了七部小说，改编自《冬天的故事》、《威尼斯商人》、《驯悍记》、《暴风雨》、《麦克白》、《李尔王》和《奥赛罗》。（第八部，承诺改编哈姆雷特吉莉安·弗林（Gillian Flynn）宣布，但尚未实现。）一些学者对该系列进行了研究，思考从市场力量到经典形成的各个方面。²这部系列剧现在似乎已悄然进入休眠状态，它提出了许多问题：是什么吸引观众观看莎士比亚作品的小说，以及当代小说家对这位剧作家有何评价。本文重点介绍霍加斯·莎士比亚的处女作——珍妮特·温特森的《时间的间隙：冬天的故事重述》 (2015)。在审视温特森的作品时，我开始回答其中一些问题：这部小说如何与莎士比亚相呼应？温特森的方法如何帮助我们理解将莎士比亚改编成小说的一些可能性？

道格拉斯·拉尼尔（Do​​uglas Lanier）分析了霍加斯·莎士比亚的前四本著作，指出该系列的诞生时间与艾玛·赖斯（Emma Rice）接管伦敦莎士比亚环球剧院并开始戏剧性地重新构想剧院表演戏剧的方式[第 97 页] 大致相同。，并且俄勒冈莎士比亚戏剧节委托将这些戏剧现代“翻译”成更现代的英语。³在这样的时代背景下，霍加斯系列不仅标志着这位剧作家逝世四百周年，而且也是几次现代化和重新想象莎士比亚的尝试遭遇文化阻力的时刻。拉尼尔探讨了该系列中的利害关系，坚持这些小说的文学性质，特别是考虑到对莎士比亚的改编消除莎士比亚语言的抵制。四年后，劳里·奥斯本对这些小说与莎士比亚起源的关系的思考略有不同，强调该系列本身就是一个文学项目的自我呈现。特别是，奥斯本考虑了霍加斯邀请参与该项目的作者，其中没有一个是公认的莎士比亚学者：

霍加斯对创造性而非批判性专业知识的选择强调了莎士比亚叙事改编中的文化转变，从庆祝十九世纪中叶“典型”莎士比亚艺术洞察力转向重视二十一世纪初公认的小说艺术。这种艺术能量的重新定向标志着莎士比亚的作品更多地是原材料而不是灵感，是经典素材而不是经典之父。⁴

奥斯本评论说，霍加斯选择改编莎士比亚的小说家在小说创作上有很大不同，从乔·内斯伯的北欧犯罪故事到玛格丽特·阿特伍德的未来主义反乌托邦。对于这种多样性，奥斯本观察到，“霍加斯不仅强化了莎士比亚小说中明显的通用灵活性，而且将这种灵活性定位在莎士比亚经典中，这为通用变异提供了共同基础和潜力。” ⁵温特森的《时间的间隙》本书本身和作为这一里程碑式系列的首部小说都值得审视，这部小说通过明确地运用创造性和原创性的语言来突出其文学性，自豪地展示其与经典的关系，同时坚持自己的能力佳能构建。

从很多方面来说，选择《冬天的故事》作为霍加斯莎士比亚系列的开篇似乎有些奇怪。杰里米·罗森称其为“一个绝对奇怪的选择”，并声称该剧是“莎士比亚最奇怪的作品之一”。⁶与此同时，奥斯本指出，自 19 世纪中叶以来，这部晚期爱情小说就没有被改编成小说，他^认为温特森选择[第 98 页完]改编一部“鲜为人知”的戏剧“参与了……一个值得注意的事件”。现代莎士比亚小说的趋势。” ⁷虽然《冬天的故事》很引人注目，但它并不是最常上演或最好的……