“What’s in a Name?” Authorship as (Micro)Genre in the Paratext of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

1 Modern prose adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have crossed many borders – generic, cultural, temporal – and the novels commissioned and published as part of Penguin Random House’s Hogarth Shakespeare project are no exception: they involve a series of such recontextualisations of Shakespeare’s work. In the project, which is still ongoing, a series of novelists was commissioned to retell a Shakespeare play in prose form. The series began with the publication of Jeanette Winterson’s version of The Winter’s Tale , The Gap of Time , in 2015, and it will be concluded with the publication of Gillian Flynn’s retelling of Hamlet . Three novels were published in 2016: Howard Jacobson’s Shylock is My Name (a retelling of The Merchant of Venice ), Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl ( The Taming of the Shrew ) and Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed ( The Tempest ); in 2017 Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy ( Othello ) and Edward St. Aubyn’s Dunbar ( King Lear ) were released, and Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth was published in 2018. Continuing “a lengthy history of Shakespearean reconceptualisations”, the project also contributes to the current tendency of “updating Shakespeare’s works and substituting a modern idiom for Shakespeare’s” (Cavanagh 99; Lanier 230). 2 The commissioned authors and the popular conceptions of their work as representative of a certain form of writing play a particularly important role in the process of establishing a new generic framework for the modern reworkings of Shakespeare’s plays: the adaptation process involves not only a recontextualisation of the material from the genre of drama to that of prose, but the choice of author to adapt it may also serve adaptation in very specific subgenre, or microgenre, defined by the and The novels commissioned and published as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project involve a series of recontextualisations of Shakespeare’s work, not only from the genre of drama to that of prose or a range of established subgenres, but the choice of author to adapt it may also serve to locate the adaptation in a very specific microgenre defined by the connotations engendered by the modern author’s oeuvre – and frame its reception accordingly. The article discusses how this process finds expression in the Hogarth Shakespeare project paratexts, which are seen as ways of making creative use of the popular conceptions of the modern authors evoked by their very names to reframe, revise and re-energise Shakespeare’s work for new audiences, in part through the specific form of (micro)generic recontextualisation that they bring about. centrale dans ce procédé : l’apparition du nom de Jo Nesbø sur la couverture de Macbeth , les arguments des critiques de Edward St. Aubyn qui relatent à nouveau l’histoire du Roi Lear , ou l’utilisation de Gillian Flynn pour adapter Hamlet sont des façons d’exploiter de manière créative les conceptions populaires des auteurs modernes évoqués par leurs appellations pour redéfinir, réviser et redynamiser les travaux de Shakespeare pour un nouveau public, en partie par la forme spécifique de recontextualisation générique qu’elles apportent.