The “Shakespeare Rebooted” evening at the Martin Luther King Centre on Tuesday 14th November at 6.00pm
A special event!
This is an event for MEL, BCA and AWG members.
Seven very well-known modern novelists responded to the challenge launched by the Hogarth Press
in 2015 : rework, re-invent, rewrite one of Shakespeare’s plays.
How did each writer take up the dare and tweak the plots, the characters, the themes and the
imagery to fit in with our times and concerns ?
Caroline Di Miceli (University of London, University of Montpellier, Agregée de l’Université) who has
a Phd in English Drama of the 16th and 17th centuries and who has taught literature at the University
of Montpellier and in Hypokhâgne, will provide some insight into this creative proces.
The Hogarth Press Shakespeare initiative invited distinguished authors (including Margaret Atwood,Tracy Chevalier, Jo Nesbo) to take a Shakespeare play (of their choosing) and re-write it for a modern audience as a novel. There were 7 novels that were developed within this initiative, and Carolyn took us through them all during our informative and interesting session, punctuated by Shakesperean quotations from Macbeth (a notable rendering of the Three Witches “When shall we three meet again” spoken by Karen, Evette and Carolyn, and from A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest (“Our revels now are ended”).
For those present, with varying degrees of knowledge of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, it was an enlightening experience. Carolyn knows her Shakespeare, and we were taken through the plays that had been chosen by the authors (The Tempest; Winter’s Tale; The Taming of the Shrew, amongst others) and how each author had taken the story and re-written it for a modern audience. For example, Howard Jacobsen set his re-telling of the Merchant of Venice in Manchester, UK. Tracy Chevalier’s re-telling of Othello was set in an elementary school playground in the USA in 1974.
The overall feeling amongst the people who attended was that they wished to read each novel in the Hogarth Press series – several of these books are available in the MEL collection, kindly donated by Carolyn.
Many thanks to MEL – Virginia Durandt and Philippe Marchand were the show-runners – and to Carolyn for a well-researched and illuminating presentation.
Shakespeare at school was never so enjoyable.
Drinks and nibbles allowed participants to chat afterwards.
Report from Katharine Claringbull
