Carmen. Now that’s art.
Nor is the Shakespeare adaptation phenomenon restricted to the stage and screen. Jane Smiley rethinks
King Lear in her novel A Thousand Acres (1991). Different time, different place, same meditation upon
greed, gratitude, miscalculation, and love. Titles? William Faulkner liked The Sound and the Fury.
Aldous Huxley decided on Brave New World. Agatha Christie chose By the Pricking of My Thumbs,
which statement Ray Bradbury completed with Something Wicked This Way Comes. The all-time
champion for Shakespeare references, though, must be Angela Carter’s final novel, Wise Children. The
children of the title are twins, illegitimate daughters of the most famous Shakespearean actor of his age,
who is the son of the most famous Shakespearean of his age. While the twins, Dora and Nora Chance,
are song-and-dance artists—as opposed to practitioners of “legitimate” theater—the story Dora tells is
full to overflowing with Shakespearean passions and situations. Her grandfather kills his unfaithful wife
and himself in a manner strongly reminiscent of Othello. As we saw in the previous chapter, a woman
seems to drown like Ophelia, only to turn up in a hugely surprising way very late in the book like Hero in
Much Ado About Nothing. The novel is full of astonishing disappearances and reappearances,
characters in disguise, womenp. 40dressed as men, and the two most spiteful daughters since Regan and
Goneril brought ruin to Lear and his kingdom. Carter envisions a film production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream more disastrously hilarious than anything the “rude mechanicals” of the original could
conceive of, the results recalling the real-life all-male film version from the 1930s.
Those are just a few of the uses to which Shakespeare’s plots and situations get put, but if that’s all he
amounted to, he’d only be a little different from any other immortal writer.
But that’s not all.
You know what’s great about reading old Will? You keep stumbling across lines you’ve been hearing
and reading all your life. Try these:
To thine own self be true
All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet
What a rogue and peasant slave am I
Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
Get thee to a nunnery