Shakespeare continues to inspire fabulous new fiction, from obvious reinterpretations to more outlandish retellings. Enjoy 7 Amazing Shakespeare Retellings Everyone Should Read.
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7 Amazing Shakespeare Retellings Everyone Should Read
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
The beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines Shakespeare’s final, great play, The Tempest, in a gripping and emotionally rich novel of passion and revenge.
Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other. It will boost his reputation. It will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan.
Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. Also brewing revenge. After twelve years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison.
Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall?
Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn
Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions.
Now imprisoned in Meadowmeade, an upscale sanatorium in rural England, with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?
Edward St Aubyn’s take on King Lear, Shakespeare’s most devastating family story, is an excoriating novel for and of our times – an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Larry Cook’s farm is the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa, and a tribute to his hard work and single-mindedness. Proud and possessive, his sudden decision to retire and hand over the farm to his three daughters, is disarmingly uncharacteristic.
Ginny and Rose, the two eldest, are startled yet eager to accept, but Caroline, the youngest daughter, has misgivings. Immediately, her father cuts her out.
In A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley transposes the King Lear story to the modern day, and in so doing at once illuminates Shakespeare’s original and subtly transforms it. This astonishing novel won both of America’s highest literary awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.
Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief. It is also the story of a kestrel and its mistress; a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; and a glovemaker’s son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is a tender and unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
Three witches gathered on a lonely heath.
A king cruelly murdered, his throne usurped by his ambitious cousin. A child heir and the royal crown, both missing. Witches don’t have these kinds of leadership problems themselves – in fact, they don’t have leaders.
Granny Weatherwax is the most highly regarded of the leaders they don’t have. But even she finds that meddling in royal politics is a lot more complicated than certain playwrights would have you believe.
Particularly when the blood on your hands just won’t wash off . . .
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
Kate Battista is stuck.
How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and infuriating younger sister Bunny?
Dr Battista has other problems. His brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, his new scientific breakthrough will fall through…
When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he’s relying – as usual – on Kate to help him. Will Kate be able to resist the two men’s touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round? Anne Tyler’s brilliant retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as surprising as Kate herself.
Fool by Christopher Moore
This is a bawdy tale, a hilarious new take on William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity,. . . If that’s the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story!’
So speaks Christopher Moore, one of America’s funniest and bestselling authors, regarded as highly as classic satirists such as Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.
Read Fool and discover for yourself why this book has dominated bestseller lists across the world, and why it has reduced millions of grown men and women to tears of helpless laughter…
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