Updating Shakespeare

Updating Shakespeare has recently become a mini-industry. With the current production of Henry V at the National equipped with flak jackets ands video screens, and The Comedy (or “Bombitty”) of Errors finishing its run as a wildly successful rap comedy in the West End, Shakespeare has never seemed more accessible. Yesterday, BBC2 began a series by the historian Michael Wood exploring the life of our greatest writer – following hard on the heels of Anthony Holden’s popular biography of him. Last year we had an Othello as a police officer in a TV drama. The Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park currently has punk fairies and a Bottom complete with mobile telephones in its production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However little we really know about the man, the works are undergoing a Renaissance, dressed up and skewed round to fit modern needs and questions.

Small wonder he gets plundered. Horror films, action movies, historical novels and romantic comedies were all practically invented by Shakespeare. He can make your flesh creep, your adrenaline pound and your ribs tickle like nobody else –which is why he was the most successful playwright of his time, in an age when the brightest people were all competing to have a hit play on stage. Purists may object to the use we now make of his plays, but it’s an irony he himself would have appreciated, for Shakespeare himself was an inveterate snapper-up of other people’s stories. King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors and more were all originally plays or histories that scholars have traced to a variety of classical and contemporary sources.

In Shakespeare’s day, your ingenuity was tested not by coming up with new stories but in putting spins on old ones. Reworking someone else’s plot, as Jonathan Bate points out in The Genius of Shakespeare, was thought quite proper for a writer to do at the time – what Elizabethans called the “lively tuning” of familiar material. For them there was no higher mark of artistic excellence than to give an old plot new life. If everyone from Hollywood scriptwriters to West End directors is now doing the same thing with the Bard himself, it is only continuing a Tudor tradition.

The most famous example of a Bard update, at least until Leo di Caprio appeared in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, was West Side Story. Shakespeare’s tragedy about star-crossed lovers was turned into an electrifying musical by Leonard Bernstein, and transposed to 1950s Chicago, where immigrant teenagers have divided, like the Montagus and the Capulets, into the Jets and the Sharks. Luhrmann’s film is more romantic, and captures the sweet confusion of adolescence, but Bernstein’s version is fuelled by the passionate hatred that underlies Shakespeare’s original. Compared to Zeffirelli’s faithful rendition of the same they look not only more daring but more vital.

Because he created characters who live in our imaginations, modern novelists and playwrights have felt free to imagine the perceptions of minor characters, or to see the story from different angles. John Updike’s recent novel, Gertrude and Claudius is a prequel to Hamlet; Tom Stoppard, having launched his career as a playwright with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, imagined what inspired Romeo & Juliet in the film of Shakespeare in Love. Last year, John Gross published After Shakespeare (OUP), quoting all the myriad uses novelists, poets and playwrights have made of his plots, characters and verse.

If you look at modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s plays it’s interesting to note how nearly all of them come from America. Perhaps they are less reverent, or more daring. As far as I know, the only British “update” besides my own is Jilly Cooper’s Octavia, based on The Taming of the Shrew. It’s one of her best romantic comedies, but if you compare it to Ten Things I Hate About You, you’ll see how much funnier and richer the film is. The director, Gil Junger has transposed it to an American high school – a place where issues of virginity, popularity and power-play still carry resonance . The scriptwriters of Ten Things have worked in some marvellous rude jokes. But for the Shakespeare-lovers, the interesting thing is what a modern re-interpretation has thrown up about the original. The Shrew is often seen as a play about a proud and witty woman having her will broken by a strong-minded husband, or at least being seduced by him. The musical, Kiss Me Kate, restaged last year, concentrated on this aspect too. In Ten Things, you can see that in fact, the play is the opposite of anti-feminist. It’s about a girl who’s much cleverer and more honest about what she likes/dislikes than her peers. Kat won’t give her heart to any man who isn’t equally honest and independent. Her Petruchio, played by the gorgeous .Heath Ledger, is a guy whom everyone is scared of, but in courting her actually becomes his best self instead of the sulky, grungey boy he was before. They each tame each other. This is by far the most intelligent interpretation of the play, and the most satisfying for an audience.

Sometimes, novels drawn from Shakespeare’s plays can deliver thrilling shocks. Why do two of King Lear’s daughters, Goneril and Regan, hate him so much? It doesn’t make sense to say that they’re just greedy. About ten years ago, Jane Smiley, won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel called A Thousand Acres. It transposed King Lear into the American Mid-West, and told its story through the eyes of one of the wicked daughters. The reason why Goneril and Regan hate their father – and I can’t tell you how shocking it is when you find out, and also how plausible – is that both have been repeatedly raped as by him as children. Their younger sister, Cordelia, who still worships their father, has no idea; and they protected her. It’s one of those extraordinary novels that makes you look at the original play with new eyes.

When I came to write Love in Idleness I knew I was taking a big risk. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is probably Shakespeare’s best-known and best-loved play. You can’t improve on it, and yet the challenge of replacing actual magic, such as that used by Oberon and Puck, becomes plausible if you consider the invention of Viagra. In my novel, the fairies are children, and the love-potion they make, which wreaks such havoc on the romantic plans of the adults around them may or may not contain this intriguing drug. Children have precisely the same reaction to sex that Puck has – Lord what fools these mortals be! – which makes the mischief they wreak on a house-party in Tuscany all the more wicked. What I’ve written is not Shakespeare, as one American critic has already kindly pointed out (d’oh!) but working with one of his plots was the best fun I’ve ever had as a writer – and a reader and an audience. Which is, presumably, why we still remain mad about the Bard, and so endlessly fascinated by him.

The Sunday Times, July 2003