The previous post addressed the question of whether the greatest works of literature tend to be autobiographical.
Over the next few posts, we will confirm that this was especially the case with the plays of Shakespeare—which really do present the entire life of Thomas North, “play bygd play, subplot by subplot.” As I wrote in the brev above:
Of course, no one is claiming that a writer’s works have to be so unrelentingly autobiographical, but in many cases they are. Consider Mark Twain’s experiences up and down the Mississippi; Herman Melville’s work on a whaling ship; Fyodor Dostoevsky’s conversion to Christianity in a Siberian prison camp; Charles Dickens’ youth spent first at a prep school and then slaving at a London blacking factory; John Steinbeck’s time as a ranch hand in California; Herman Wouk’s service on a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grand Jazz Age parties in Great Neck; Louisa May Alcott’s childhood, gr
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A portrait believed to be the only one painted of Shakespeare during his lifetime.PHOTOGRAPH BY LEON NEAL / AFP / GETTY
In October, the publisher Hogarth rolled out the first in its ambitious new line of Shakespeare plays retold by contemporary novelists. The pairings are promising: Margaret Atwood, a master of ecological dystopias, will reimagine “The Tempest,” for instance, while Gillian Flynn, who knows her way around marriage and murder, will take on “Hamlet.” The début novel in the series is more of a curveball: the versatile Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of Shakespeare’s late puzzler, “The Winter’s Tale.”
According to the Times, Winterson’s publisher was surprised that she passed up “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth,” and chose instead what the reporter calls “one of Shakespeare’s most baffling, jarring and uneven plays.” The play is a mashup of disparate modes, reflecting the Jacobean taste for tragicomedy. The first three acts spin a vicious web of
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A page of Perditas
It's pronounced (by me and probably Shakespeare, at least) PURRditta (not perDEETa). It's the feminine past participle of the Latin verb perdere (perdo, perdere, perdidi, perditum) to lose, ruin, destroy, raze to the ground...
More references very welcome. For now here's what I've collected.
Fiction with characters called Perdita:
William Shakespeare: A Winter's Tale
This I think is the original coinage: the character was abandoned.
Terry Pratchett: various books with Perdita X Dream. (I fondly imagine that this one originates consciously or unconsciously with me, given that my username is pxs and I know TP and I were once regular readers of the same newsgroup...)
Dodie Smith: One Hundred and One Dalmations
Jean Plaidy: Perdita's Prince
Nina Bawden: The Witch's Daughter
Sarah Smith: The Vanished Child
Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye (if I remember rightly?)