SHAKESPEARE HERE AND NOW

     Among recent offerings, Amanda Craig’s Love in Idleness (2003) suggests that Shakespeare’s anarchic Dream is just the kind of scenario into which a professional Anglo-American family might stumble while on their Tuscan holiday (Chiantishire to the ‘chattering classes’), and in 2012 Penguin Random House launched its Hogarth Shakespeare Series of what is so far eight fictional adaptations by prominent writers. The first of these, based on The Winter’s Tale, was Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (2015), in which Jewish billionaire Leo (Leontes) convinces himself that wife MiMi (Hermione) is having an affair with school friend and creative whizz kid Xeno (Polixenes), whom he tries to kill by ramming his jeep into Xeno’s Fiat. Leo’s jealousy is dated to a teenage psychosexual trauma, and the novel also has a transatlantic setting, with Shakespeare’s Bohemia becoming New Bohemia, U.S.A., and Autolycus a used car salesman who is ‘Part Budapest. Part New Jersey.’. (Winterson, 127) Winterson’s approach may be considered ‘reductive’, ‘clos[ing] the play’s possibilities down’ (Crown), but one of the novel’s strengths, compared with Shakespeare’s Christian world in which forgiveness was almost taken for granted, is its sense of the greater challenge of forgiveness for contemporary society. Winterson’s Perdita character reflects that

     Shakespeare continues to tell our stories, and he gives us the language to do so through numerous quotations still in current use, such as ‘playing fast and loose’ and ‘more in sorrow than in anger’, that were memorialized by journalist Bernard Levin in his Enthusiasms (1983). Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey are two Shakespeare scholars who, in their Macbeth, Macbeth (2016), base their adaptation primarily on language and quotation, as each of their seven chapters is divided into sub-chapters headed by quotations from the play that are explored imaginatively rather than as narrative devices. For example, Lady Macbeth’s ‘Unsex me here’ leads a section in which a nun is shorn of her hair by other nuns jealous of her feminine allure. The writers’ stated ambition is ‘to get inside Macbeth’s murder chamber’ (Fernie and Palfrey, vii), which they do by imagining the Scotland that comes after his demise as the product of Macbeth’s diseased imagination. They evoke a ravaged landscape in which ‘the time is’ not yet ‘free’ (5.8.66), and make much of the tensions between the pious Malcolm and fiercely patriotic Macduff that emerge in the play’s England scene (4.3.101-3). Perhaps all Macbeth criticism is a discourse on evil, and such discourse can sometimes descend into banality, but this adaptation attempts to eschew banality through its repeated juxtaposition of quotations and motifs from across the play’s text, which the writers conceive as urgent and vital, with their own contemporary idiom, which is made urgent by the process of juxtaposition and the questions that Shakespeare’s tragedy raises.

     One such question arises in the character of Gru, named from Gruoch, the wife of the historical Macbeth. Gruoch has been the subject of a number of recent adaptations, such as David Greig’s 2010 play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Dunsinane, in which she is a defiantly Scottish heroine who despises pragmatic English colonialism; she calls her Celtic language ‘the forest’ (Greig, 76), or a language in harmony with nature in contrast to the tendency of the English speakers to contain and describe. Fernie and Palfrey’s strategy is to make Gruoch both an object of sexual desire and a subject of religious contemplation who connects Macbeth’s ordinariness with the uniqueness of the Lord Macduff, who ‘was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’ (5.10.15-16). As they note in the afterword (281), they are fascinated by the play’s single mysterious reference to Malcolm’s mother, who is not therefore the historical Gruoch:

In Macbeth, Macbeth, this figure of grace becomes Gru, a young woman who has been raped by Macbeth and enclosed in a sinister community of tonsured nuns (all of them war victims) from which she eventually absconds to become the lover and possibly second wife of Macduff. In this way, Fernie and Palfrey depart from both the historical facts and the play to consider the role of women in a society in which they are routinely ‘sacrificed and families, it seems,’ are ‘impossible’ (281). Beside this contemporary relevance, Gruoch’s duality may also recall the Madonna-whore dichotomy of 16th century Renaissance art, and shows the scope of the writers’ attempt to imagine the kind of world that Macbeth’s rhetoric has ended up creating.

     The novel is one of Bloomsbury’s ‘Beyond Criticism’ series that promises to explore ‘radical new forms that literary criticism might take in the 21st century’ and thereby take us ‘back to literature itself’ (‘Beyond Criticism’). It is, therefore, still criticism, using the fictional genre to get inside Shakespeare’s ‘notoriously dense metaphors’ (280) and exposing a tendency of Shakespearean rhetoric to marginalize ‘the cruelty, starvation, and pervasive oppression of ordinary people’ as they are ‘pushed to the fringes by Shakespeare’s concentration on the élite’ (Gopnik). The writers’ efforts to embed Shakespeare’s language in the present may serve a similar pedagogic purpose of broadening Shakespeare’s appeal beyond the Academy to which they belong. In their description of the Porter’s sons, language is as sensual as and certainly more reliable than any other source of nourishment:

Shakespeare’s archetypes remain alive in contemporary fiction: for what they say about our present situation but also as they take us back to Shakespeare himself.