The Gap Of Time: Jeanette Winterson Takes On The Winter’s Tale

The Gap Of Time is the first in a series of modern retellings of Shakespeare’s works, planned in homage to the upcoming 400th anniversary of his death next year. Novelists including Margaret Atwood, Gillian Flynn, and Jo Nesbø are each re-crafting a favorite Shakespearean work, illuminating the themes that make it timeless: love, betrayal, loyalty, jealousy, and, of course, the passage of time.
In The Winter’s Tale, the story shifts between King Leontes’ court in Sicilia and Bohemia. Jealousies arise between King Leontes and his queen, Hermione, related to the the visiting King Polixenses of Bohemia. After a dramatic trial at which the Oracle of Delphi declares the queen guiltless of an affair, the mistrustful King nevertheless banishes Hermione. Their older child, Mamillius, dies of grief, but the Queen’s newborn baby daughter, Perdita (meaning “the lost one” in Latin), is spared death by a Bohemian shepherd who raises her as his daughter.
The story picks up again sixteen years after the Queen’s banishment, with Perdita grown. It has a happy ending, as well as perhaps the most famous stage direction of all time (“Exit, pursued by a bear”).
Jeanette Winterson was adopted as a baby by a woman whose grandiose personality and religious fervor could have ruined a different child. She grew from the soil of a strange and intense childhood, and gave us not only her wonderful autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, but also a growing list of important contemporary novels. Of The Winter’s Tale, Winterson said, “It’s a play about a foundling. As I am.”

Perhaps because Winterson’s own history is so unusual, she’s able to deftly combine the bizarre, the coincidental, the unrealistic, and the mundane into a coherent story. Her version draws the reader in immediately with a plot twist: a car crash, a dead man, a baby. It seizes our attention, and never lets go.
An angry millionaire named Leo, convinced his best friend, Xeno, and his wife, Mimi, are having an affair, disputes that the daughter Mimi has given birth to is his own. One of the most satisfying aspects of this retelling is Winterson’s dark explanation of Leo’s maddened jealousy, but that’s best left for the reader to discover. He sends the baby across the Atlantic to a “BabyHatch,” where she’s rescued by Shep, who raises her. A bar owner and pianist, Shep is given new life in Winterson’s retelling, along with a backstory that makes him one of the book’s most appealing and moral characters.
In keeping with the play’s fairytale aspects, there are magical saves and coincidences. In keeping with the modern setting of its retelling, the love triangle between the kings and the queen is overtly sexual, and more complex: in Winterson’s telling, the two men have been friends since youth, but they are also lovers.
There are other clever modern updates: Autolycus is a wily car dealer. The Oracle is replaced by a DNA test. Even that famous stage direction gets its due, with a twist.
Winterson’s sweeping prose is here pulled back to a more clipped style. But the language builds as the story goes on, growing ever more powerful right up to its satisfying conclusion.