The Return

Review: The Gap of Time Jeanette Winterson Hogarth Shakespeare 2015 Another of the novelized retelling of a Shakespear's work from Hogarth.   This one comes from The Winter’s Tale in which Shakespeare depicted jealousy with its attendant emotions and consequences.   It’s been called a tragicomedy i.e. bad stuff happens, but it still ends happy.   The audiences then as now did not like unhappy, the bad guy wins endings.   Justice and repentance must prevail.   And it does.   That’s a spoiler, but one that should be no surprise.   Winterson worked her novelized version from the interior of the jealous husband’s mind.   She does that portrayal well.   The guy is disgusting and deserves to come to a bad end.   He doesn’t though, just as Shakespeare wrote his play.   Now comes the part Shakespeare did not do.   The language the author chose to use throughout a large portion of this work is as crass as it can get....

Review: Vinegar Girl Anne Tyler Hogarth 2016 Vinegar Girl adds to the list of Shakespeare’s plays retold for current Western audiences that Hogarth has produced.   A time line for this project can be found here.   http://crownpublishing.com/hogarth-shakespeare/ Anne Tyler has tackled The Taming of the Shrew .   That Shakespearian comedy has come under rather severe criticism recently for the portrayal of “taming” in ways that are not at all considered amusing by many women in today’s marketplace.   Given that sentiment Tyler had to blaze a trail that departs significantly from the one Shakespeare trod. Not an easy task since much of the original depends outrageous situations and dialogues, and a setup that takes advantage of a man who could be understood by today’s reader as an individual trapped in an addictive behavior needing help, not ridicule. I’ll probably be a minority opinion, but I think that this book failed, and not from the lack of...