"Money's a Meddler": Jeanette Winterson's Cover Version of The Winter's Tale

First published in October 2015, Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time is the inaugural volume in a “Hogarth Shakespeare” series of prose retellings commissioned from acclaimed novelists with the ambitious aim of reimagining Shakespeare’s entire dramatic canon for a present-day readership. If the relocation of The Winter’s Tale to a contemporary setting was part of the editorial remit, however, what is striking about Winterson’s “cover version” (her definition) is the apparent ease with which Shakespeare’s tragicomedy lent itself to be re-translated into a contemporary tale about our own market-saturated 21st-century environment. As if taking her cue from the trickster Autolycus’s acknowledgment that “money’s a meddler / that doth utter all men’s ware-a”, Winterson brings out the strong monetary undercurrent in The Winter’s Tale, delving into the potential of Shakespeare’s narrative of loss and gain, revenge and redemption for a critique of our late-capitalist world and its all-pervasive monetary ethos. In this sense, her creative intervention is aligned with the more recent economic criticism of Shakespeare’s work; but Winterson’s distinctive contribution to this debate, as I argue in this paper, is in her special emphasis on the economic aspects of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical discourse. In The Gap of Time the sustained self-reflexivity of The Winter’s Tale, culminating in the inset performance of Hermione’s resurrection, is refocused in economic terms, pointing to the commodification of art and its deep entanglement with money as a powerful latent theme in Shakespeare’s play and a key aspect of its continued relevance today.