Hogarth Shakespeare & Nutshell

Today I came across the Hogarth Shakespeare Initiative, which, in its own words, "sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today." Some of the plays have already been 'done' - Howard Jacoboson's Shylock is My Name (The Merchant of Venice) and Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time (The Winter's Tale.) Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (The Tempest) is due out next month.

A good idea? Not sure... but certainly an interesting one. You can read more about it, and see scheduled books in the series, here: http://crownpublishing.com/hogarth-shakespeare/.

Not part of this initiative, but in a similar vein, is Ian McEwan's Nutshell. This is a modern-day retelling of Hamlet, with rather a neat and original twist: the story is told by Hamlet while still inside his mother's womb, privy to the murderous plotting of his mother and uncle. This highly unusual point of view, combined with the fact that I have a weakness for all things Hamlet, was what made me buy the book.

Gertrude becomes Trudy and Claudius Claude, but apart from this the book is less faithful to the plot of the play than to its language and occasional rambling bouts of philosophy. Hunting these down was, for me, half the pleasure of this book, but it is well-told and well-written (though sometimes almost unnecessarily graphically) in its own right. Some reviewers have described the book as a 'thriller,' which seems to me something of an overstatement, but it is genuinely suspenseful.

A great deal of the play's language is neatly worked into the fabric of the novel. This is sometimes bold (the re-working of the "What a piece of work is a man" speech), more often subtle (Hamlet's descriptions of his mother, father and uncle), occasionally defiant (the last line of the book is "The rest is chaos"). The book's title, of course, comes from Hamlet's "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."