First in the Series 
 The Hogarth Press has announced a series of novels commissioned from celebrated writers, each adapting a Shakespeare play. Announced authors include Howard Jacobson (The Merchant of Venice retold as 
 Shylock Is My Name 
 ), Anne Tyler (The Taming of the Shrew retold as 
 Vinegar Girl 
 ), Margaret Atwood (The Tempest), Edward St. Aubyn (King Lear), and Jo Nesbo (Macbeth). In a way, it sounds like the Canongate Myths series, except that the source materials of these are already literary masterpieces in their own right. One wonders how so many authors can find ways of making something new out of these stories without traducing the originals. Well, Jeanette Winterson, who opens the series with her "cover version" of The Winter's Tale, offers a convincing demonstration of one approach: by renouncing slavish imitation and transporting the action to a totally modern milieu--and by making it personal. 
 The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's last plays, all exploring the concept of forgiveness over time. He sets up a plot very similar to that of Othello. King Leontes of Sicily believes that his wife Hermione has been having an affair with his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, and that the child she is carrying is his. So he orders Polixenes to be murdered, the bastard girl child to be exposed to die, and Hermione to be sent to prison, where it is believed that she also dies. But this only takes us to the end of Act II. Shakespeare then sets himself the task of finding whether he can pull back from this savage tragedy and give the play a happy ending. For this, he has to wait eighteen years, until the baby, Perdita or "lost one," who has been rescued by a kindly shepherd, has come of age--and has fallen in love, all unknowing, with the son of Polixenes, the supposed adulterer. The huge break in the middle of the play is one of several meanings* of Winterson's title, The Gap of Time. 
 One of the most surprising things comes towards the end when, without declaring a formal afterword, Winterson suddenly introduces herself into the action, and shows us why it is so personal to her. As she has explained in her memoir, 
 Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 
 , she too is a foundling, a lost child, and she too has many things in her life that she had to sort out and forgive. She makes the story personal, too, reinterpreting it through her own interest in sexual identity, by giving a bisexual overtone to the relationship between the two kings (here, rival CEOs) that explains the irrational behavior of Leontes as well as anything could. Making no obeisance to Shakespeare the poet, she writes in her own clipped no-nonsense Manchester voice, transposed to the world of high finance, computer games, popular music, and streets at night: 
 The hotel with its hookers hanging round the lobby. The nightman giving them coffee. The 24/7 laundromat steamy and bright-lit. A child awake too late, his mother holding his hand. He falls every third step and she rights him, a nylon luggage bag over her shoulder. Broken zipper. She's talking to him all the time but she's looking straight ahead.A boy telling his girl how it is. She's on her phone.A nun waiting for the night-bus. Bus comes. Nun gone.But does it work? For the most part, yes. Winterson opens out of sequence with the finding of Perdita by a couple of black musicians in New Bohemia, clearly a pseudonym for New Orleans; it is an exciting and remarkably moving passage. Her contrast between the old and new worlds works well for Sicily and Bohemia in the play. Her decision to make Xeno (Polixenes) a computer game programmer adds a layer of virtual reality that helps enfold some of the more mystical elements in the play (though she relies on it too much). Even her liberal use of obscenity for Leo watching his wife and friend through a concealed security camera, though way over the top, is not inappropriate for the vengeful insanity that seizes Shakespeare's Leontes. I could have wished that she had gone further in showing what the Gap of Time had done to Leo over the years; to my mind, he is insufficiently changed by the end of the book. But the transformative return of the still-living Hermione (here a once-famous singer) is movingly handled in the end. And, though mostly* eschewing poesy, Winterson is certainly capable of quiet magic of her own: 
 In this night-soaked bed with you it is courage for the day I seek. That when the light comes I will turn towards it. Nothing could be simpler. Nothing could be harder. And in the morning we will get dressed together and go.*Although I praise Winterson for avoiding poesy by and large, there are some passages where she just tries too hard, especially the number of variants she tries to wring out of the theme of time. I'm sure they are meant to be intriguingly philosophical, but too many of them just sound hollow.