ABSTRACT
Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time is the first of a series of reworkings of the great plays, planned by The Hogarth Press to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 2016. The writer herself has explained that her choice of The Winter's Tale as the hypotext of her novel stemmed from the deep appeal she has always felt for the foundling baby Perdita. In The Winter's Tale, Perdita is cast away by her father Leontes, king of Sicily, because he is convinced that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful to him. In an authorial metacomment at the end of The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson writes that Othello and The Winter's Tale are both about "a man who would rather murder the world but change himself", with the difference that, in the latter, Shakespeare gives this man "a second chance", thus moving from the topoi of "Revenge and Tragedy to Forgiveness".
