Comparative Drama

"Every age creates its own Shakespeare," asserts Marjorie Garber at the beginning of Shakespeare After All. "What is often described as the timelessness of Shakespeare, the transcendent qualities for which his plays have been praised around the world and across the centuries, is perhaps better understood as an uncanny timeliness, a capacity to speak directly to circumstances the playwright could not have anticipated or foreseen."¹ Shakespeare certainly still speaks to spectators, readers, and writers in the 21^st century—but we also talk back. This special issue on "Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction" for Comparative Drama contributes to a larger ongoing discourse of "talking back to Shakespeare."

The first book to use this term explicitly appears to have been Martha Tuck Rozett's Talking Back to Shakespeare (1994). Rozett notes that this practice stemmed from her experiences teaching undergraduate Shakespeare courses. When she started to encounter more and more [End Page 1] resistance from her students who questioned the values, assumptions, and biases they found in the plays, Rozett began devising assignments where students produced "transformations" of Shakespeare in response. She had long noted how theatre practitioners effectively offered such transformations through creative stage adaptations. But she became increasingly interested in the diverse array of Shakespearean transformations from contemporary creative writers. "As I continued to teach and write about Shakespeare," Rozett reflected,

I began to see a kinship, a kind of temperamental and critical affinity, between the talking back that occurred in the classroom and the published transformations I was reading. When writers transform Shakespeare's plays, they challenge the author's perceived intent, or perhaps more precisely, the cultural and critical baggage the text has acquired over time. They talk back to the cultural authority that has been invested in the plays, even as they appropriate that cultural authority as the originating premise for a new imaginative construct.²

Jo Eldridge Carney further elaborates upon this transformative dialectical process in her recent book Women Talk Back to Shakespeare (2022). "Talking back," according to Carney, "typically implies a rebuke to an authoritative position, but it can also be a less accusatory impulse to continue a conversation." The works she examines "are not all unmitigated critiques of Shakespeare's plays but they do insist on reexamination of their aesthetic and ideological terms, and they invite a dialogue in which women and Shakespeare can talk back—and forth—with each other."³

The critics and novelists included in this special issue share the approach articulated so well by Rozett and Carney. The following articles all focus upon a contemporary novel (published within the past fifteen years), which significantly adapts or reinvents a play by Shakespeare. These critical and creative works engage with Shakespeare's drama, neither to praise the bard nor to bury him, but to talk back and forth in a meaningful and mutually enriching dialogue. The articles are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, but here is a brief preview of what you can look forward to reading in "Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction."

In the opening article, Amy Muse argues that Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 historical novel Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague doubles effectively [End Page 2] as "creative criticism." The term was coined in 1910 by J. E. Spingarn, but it has enjoyed a resurgence in the 21^st century. Muse cites as illustrations the exemplary two volumes (2009 and 2013) of The Story about the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, edited by J. C. Hallman. These collections feature writing about literature from celebrated authors like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Cynthia Ozick, and Salman Rushdie. There is a larger lesson to be learned from such writing, namely that, as Graham Holderness puts it in Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions, "the best criticism is actually creative writing."⁴ Creative criticism is an emerging force in Shakespeare Studies as well, witnessed, for instance, in the 2016 special issue on "Creative Critical Shakespeares" for Critical Survey. Muse makes a persuasive case for O'Farrell's Hamnet as the consummate realization of this aesthetic. The novel is not only a captivating work of fiction in its...