earticle

영어

Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time is the first novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare Series which imagines Shakespeare’s plays in modern settings for a 21st-century audience. As a cover version of The Winter’s Tale, The Gap of Time transplants the familiar story of a foundling to contemporary London and a fictional American city called New Bohemia. Though it is quite a faithful rendition of the original play in terms of the storyline, The Gap of Time inverts the structure of the play to focus more on the hopeful message of “whatever is lost will be found” and on the theme of forgiveness which is epitomized by Perdita, the little lost one. Also, The Gap of Time is enriched with detailed backstories which, for example, find a homoerotic charge in the relationship between Leo (Leontes), a hedge fund CEO, and Xeno (Polixenes), a gay game designer, by making them former lovers at their boarding school. Leo’s destructive jealousy becomes more convincing with these complicated backstories. Herself a modern foundling, Winterson gives the last word to Perdita who will redeem the past and live the future as an endless journey. Time can’t un-happen, but it can be un-lost.