In the effort of seeking perfection in any art, we of course look to the old masters to draw inspiration. For those of us whose art of choice is the written word, who better to seek the guidance of other than the bard himself? The following female authors have all drawn inspiration from William Shakespeare in their work, whether it be a rewritten plot, a wholly new story with familiar characters, the life of Shakespeare, and even more. Writing and storytelling is an inherently collaborative practice, so let’s see how we can collaborate with someone from hundreds of years ago.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
In this pseudo-biographical story of the life of William Shakespeare and his family, Maggie O’Farrell has taken a different approach than what the usual definition of “Shakespeare-Inspired” describes. The characters are renamed, but their home in Stratford-upon-Avon is enough of a wink and a nudge to persuade the audience of whose life bears influence over the narrative. O’Farrell manages to explore the concepts of familial love and grief through the eyes of one of history’s greatest playwrights.
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Lady Macbeth by Susan Fraser King
Lady Macbeth is one of English literature’s most powerful female leads. In Susan Fraser King’s novel, we follow her story as it unfolds instead of her husband’s. With characters as deep and layered as Shakespeare’s, there is so much to be drawn from within them, even an entire novel’s worth of material. Some of the most brilliant literature exercises come in the form of exploring the inner worlds of the characters within a work. The story is still Macbeth, but through a fresh POV, felt by a different heart, and driven by different motives.
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Two Wrongs Make a Right by Chloe Liese
Everybody has their own tastes and, for many readers, they prefer to read according to modern sensibilities. Much like how the film Clueless is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma for a modern audience, Two Wrongs Make a Right is written masterfully to appeal to those who love the love and nonsense that are characteristic of Much Ado About Nothing, one of Shakespeare’s most famous comedies. Think Shakespeare but with a fake-dating trope paired with sarcastic banter.
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We That Are Young by Preti Taneja
In this rewritten King Lear, three daughters in contemporary India are set to inherit the estate, and hopefully the pride, of their wildly wealthy father. In this adaptation, we see the ability of modern writers to take the seeds sewn by Shakespeare and sprawl the story against a wholly new backdrop. By setting the story in India in the modern era, it allows Preti Taneja to both explore new themes that might ring more relevant today as well as emphasize the universality of Shakespeare’s words.
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Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma
Taming of the Shrew has maintained its popularity in history by many factors, but most can appreciate its familial meddling, insane circumstances, and the chemistry that blooms between two characters who cannot help but argue. Nisha Sharma takes inspiration from a widely-beloved and adapted play to show just how much there left is to explore within the literary world of Shakespeare’s work. By giving the two love interests more down-to-Earth motivations than their antiquated counterparts, the romance is allowed to flourish in a way that really drives the reader to root for their fake-date to become true fate.
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Ophelia by Lisa Klein
In Ophelia, we explore the inner world of one of literature’s most misunderstood ladies. Have you ever had a character that you know so well, and hold so dear, only for everyone else who reads a book to get the character completely wrong? Lisa Klein decided to set the record straight by putting Ophelia at the center of her own story, instead of leaving her to the sidelines of someone else’s. Authors take heed, no story is written in stone, and it can be a source of great inspiration to both your own work as well as the cravings of an audience to do justice to a character done wrong by time.
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Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
In Vinegar Girl, we are able to explore the Taming of the Shrew in a less absurd light than the original play, but still including all the family hijinks that makes the story great. This take on the novel explores the struggles of being a child running the parent’s household, as well as the pressures that deportations put on people and their families. The benefit of having an established framework to adapt for authors is that they are able to take a context that readers know and love, and use it to say something new and important.
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Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
Placing the actual play The Tempest within a modern adaptation of that very same tale is the exact type of literary witchcraft that we can expect from the mind of Margaret Atwood, but she is far from the only author to tackle the feat. It can get complicated to place both stories as parallel without getting too beat-for-beat with the plot, but that is both the challenge offered and the fun with the craft. Authors who love to use their work to wink and nudge while still paying homage to the greats that came before could most definitely do wonders with the work of Shakespeare.
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These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
An adaptation of Shakespeare need not be a modern rendition, and Chloe Gong takes all of the intrigue and clan rivalry of the original Romeo and Juliet and places it within the historical fiction context of 1920’s Shanghai. Instead of rival royal families, our star-crossed lovers now belong to rival gangs both dueling for supremacy over the city, while a diseased madness simmers beneath the surface. By setting our stage just far enough in the past to be out of reach for most readers, Gong has given herself an opportunity for creative freedom where needed for the health of the narrative, but setting it in Shanghai still settles enough in reality that readers today can still find themselves there with the characters.
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Ramón and Julieta (Love & Tacos) by Alana Quintana Albertson
This take on Romeo and Juliet casts the romantic leads as rival restaurateurs in San Diego. Instead of separating the two lovers by blind, generational familial rivalry, Alana Quintana Albertson decided to deviate and have her leads both hopelessly infatuated with one another as well as have their own, personal rivalry and history that keeps them apart. The authorial power here comes from not entirely sticking to the main premise of Shakespeare’s work, but instead bending it a little to the left and exploring what new path an author could take readers down with just one small tweak to the premise.
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