Revisiting the Classics and the New Media Environments: Shakespeare Re-Told by Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood and Edward St. Aubyn

Dana Percec

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.20.10

Authors

Dana Percec Department of Modern Languages, the West University of Timișoara, Romania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.20.10

Keywords:

adaptation, Hogarth Shakespeare, media, performance, video game

Abstract

The versatility of the appropriation of Shakespeare in recent years has been witnessed in a variety of registers and media, which range from special effects on the stage, music, cartoons, comics, advertisements, all the way to video games. This contribution looks at some of the novels in the Shakespeare Re-told Hogarth series as effigies of the contemporary process of adapting the Elizabethan plays to the environments in which the potential readers/viewers work, become informed, seek entertainment and adjust themselves culturally, being, ultimately, cognitive schemes which are validated by today’s reception processes. The first novel in the series was Jeanette Winterson’s Gap of Time (2016), in which the Shakespearean reference to the years that separate the two moments of The Winter’s Tale’s plot becomes the title of a video game relying mainly on fantasy. Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) rewrites The Tempest as a parable of the theatrical performance and its avatars, as undisputable authority, on the one hand, and source of subversiveness, on the other. Dunbar (2018) is Edward St. Aubyn’s response to the family saga of King Lear, where kingship, territorial division and military conflict are replaced by modern media wars, and the issues of public exposure in the original text are reinterpreted interpreted by resorting to the impact of the audio-visual on every-day life.

Author Biography

Dana Percec, Department of Modern Languages, the West University of Timișoara, Romania

Dana Percec is Reader of English Literature at the Department of Modern Languages, the West University of Timișoara, Romania. Her PhD thesis was published in book form in 2006 as The Body’s Tale. Some Ado about Shakespearean Identities. She has authored or co-authored volumes and textbooks reflecting her interest in Shakespeare studies (Reading Cultural History in William Shakespeare’s Plays, Shakespeare and the Theatre: An Introduction, etc.). She is the editor of a series about contemporary middle-brow literary genres at Cambridge Scholars Publishers (about romance, fantasy, children’s literature, and preparing a volume about detective fiction). She is also a reviewer in the Comparative Literature section of Cambridge Scholars Publishers. She has written prefaces for several plays in the new Romanian edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works as well as many articles in indexed journals. She is a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union and other Romanian professional associations (The Romanian Society for English Studies, the Romanian Association of Comparative Literature), as well as international associations (ESSE, ESRA, ISA). She has been a PhD supervisor in English Literature since 2015.

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