• Introduction:Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction
• Graley Herren (bio) and Niamh J. O'Leary (bio)

"Every age creates its own Shakespeare," asserts Marjorie Garber at the beginning of Shakespeare After All. "What is often described as the timelessness of Shakespeare, the transcendent qualities for which his plays have been praised around the world and across the centuries, is perhaps better understood as an uncanny timeliness, a capacity to speak directly to circumstances the playwright could not have anticipated or foreseen."¹ Shakespeare certainly still speaks to spectators, readers, and writers in the 21^st century—but we also talk back. This special issue on "Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction" for Comparative Drama contributes to a larger ongoing discourse of "talking back to Shakespeare."

The first book to use this term explicitly appears to have been Martha Tuck Rozett's Talking Back to Shakespeare (1994). Rozett notes that this practice stemmed from her experiences teaching undergraduate Shakespeare courses. When she started to encounter more and more [End Page 1] resistance from her students who questioned the values, assumptions, and biases they found in the plays, Rozett began devising assignments where students produced "transformations" of Shakespeare in response. She had long noted how theatre practitioners effectively offered such transformations through creative stage adaptations. But she became increasingly interested in the diverse array of Shakespearean transformations from contemporary creative writers. "As I continued to teach and write about Shakespeare," Rozett reflected,

I began to see a kinship, a kind of temperamental and critical affinity, between the talking back that occurred in the classroom and the published transformations I was reading. When writers transform Shakespeare's plays, they challenge the author's perceived intent, or perhaps more precisely, the cultural and critical baggage the text has acquired over time. They talk back to the cultural authority that has been invested in the plays, even as they appropriate that cultural authority as the originating premise for a new imaginative construct.²

Jo Eldridge Carney further elaborates upon this transformative dialectical process in her recent book Women Talk Back to Shakespeare (2022). "Talking back," according to Carney, "typically implies a rebuke to an authoritative position, but it can also be a less accusatory impulse to continue a conversation." The works she examines "are not all unmitigated critiques of Shakespeare's plays but they do insist on reexamination of their aesthetic and ideological terms, and they invite a dialogue in which women and Shakespeare can talk back—and forth—with each other."³

The critics and novelists included in this special issue share the approach articulated so well by Rozett and Carney. The following articles all focus upon a contemporary novel (published within the past fifteen years), which significantly adapts or reinvents a play by Shakespeare. These critical and creative works engage with Shakespeare's drama, neither to praise the bard nor to bury him, but to talk back and forth in a meaningful and mutually enriching dialogue. The articles are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, but here is a brief preview of what you can look forward to reading in "Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction."

In the opening article, Amy Muse argues that Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 historical novel Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague doubles effectively [End Page 2] as "creative criticism." The term was coined in 1910 by J. E. Spingarn, but it has enjoyed a resurgence in the 21^st century. Muse cites as illustrations the exemplary two volumes (2009 and 2013) of The Story about the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, edited by J. C. Hallman. These collections feature writing about literature from celebrated authors like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Cynthia Ozick, and Salman Rushdie. There is a larger lesson to be learned from such writing, namely that, as Graham Holderness puts it in Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions, "the best criticism is actually creative writing."⁴ Creative criticism is an emerging force in Shakespeare Studies as well, witnessed, for instance, in the 2016 special issue on "Creative Critical Shakespeares" for Critical Survey. Muse makes a persuasive case for O'Farrell's Hamnet as the consummate realization of this aesthetic. The novel is not only a captivating work of fiction in its...

• 简介：莎士比亚与当代小说
• Graley Herren（简介）和 Niamh J. O'Leary（简介）

“每个时代都创造了自己的莎士比亚，”玛乔丽·加伯在《莎士比亚终究》一书的开头断言。“人们常说的莎士比亚的永恒性，以及他的戏剧几个世纪以来在世界范围内广受赞誉的卓越品质，也许更好地理解为一种不可思议的及时性，一种直接讲述剧作家无法拥有的环境的能力。预料到或预见到的。” ^{1莎士比亚在 21世纪}当然仍然对观众、读者和作家说话，但我们也会顶嘴。这本关于比较戏剧的“莎士比亚与当代小说”特刊有助于推动“回话莎士比亚”的更大范围的持续讨论。

第一本明确使用这个术语的书似乎是玛莎·塔克·罗泽特（Martha Tuck Rozett）的《回话莎士比亚》（Talking Back to Shakespeare，1994）。罗泽特指出，这种做法源于她教授本科生莎士比亚课程的经历。当她开始遇到越来越多的人[完第1页]由于学生质疑戏剧中的价值观、假设和偏见，罗泽特开始设计作业，让学生对莎士比亚进行“变形”作为回应。她很早就注意到戏剧从业者如何通过创造性的舞台改编有效地提供这种转变。但她对当代创意作家对莎士比亚的各种转变越来越感兴趣。“当我继续教授和撰写有关莎士比亚的作品时，”罗泽特反思道，

我开始在课堂上的顶嘴和我正在阅读的已发表的转变之间看到一种亲缘关系，一种气质和批判性的亲和力。当作家改造莎士比亚的戏剧时，他们挑战了作者的感知意图，或者更准确地说，挑战了文本随着时间的推移而获得的文化和批评包袱。他们对戏剧中所投入的文化权威进行反击，尽管他们将这种文化权威作为新的富有想象力的构造的起源前提。²

乔·埃尔德里奇·卡尼 (Jo Eldridge Carney) 在她的新书《女性与莎士比亚对话》(Women Talk Back to Shakespeare , 2022) 中进一步阐述了这一变革性的辩证过程。卡尼表示，“顶嘴通常意味着对权威立场的谴责，但也可能是一种继续对话的较少指责的冲动。” 她审查的作品“并非都是对莎士比亚戏剧的彻底批评，但它们确实坚持重新审视其美学和意识形态术语，并且它们邀请女性和莎士比亚可以相互交谈的对话。” ³

本期特刊中的评论家和小说家都认同罗泽特和卡尼所阐述的方法。以下文章均关注一部当代小说（在过去十五年内出版），该小说对莎士比亚的戏剧进行了重大改编或改造。这些批判性和创造性的作品与莎士比亚的戏剧相结合，既不是为了赞扬这位吟游诗人，也不是为了埋葬他，而是在一种有意义的、相互丰富的对话中来回交谈。这些文章完全能够为自己说话，但这里是您可以在“莎士比亚与当代小说”中期待阅读的内容的简要预览。

在开篇文章中，艾米·缪斯 (Amy Muse) 认为，玛吉·奥法雷尔 (Maggie O'Farrell) 2020 年出版的历史小说《哈姆内特：瘟疫小说》(Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague)实际上可以兼作“创造性批评” [第 2 页] 。该术语由 JE Spingarn 于 1910 年创造，但在 21 世纪又重新流行^起来。Muse 引用了 JC Hallman 编辑的《关于故事的故事：伟大作家探索伟大文学》的两卷（2009 年和 2013 年）作为例证。这些文集收录了奥斯卡·王尔德、弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫、辛西娅·奥齐克和萨尔曼·拉什迪等著名作家的文学作品。从这样的写作中我们可以学到一个更大的教训，那就是，正如格雷厄姆·霍尔德内斯在《莎士比亚的故事：创意碰撞》中所说的那样，“最好的批评其实是创造性的写作。” ⁴创造性批评也是莎士比亚研究中的一股新兴力量，例如，2016 年批评调查的“创造性批评莎士比亚”特刊就见证了这一点。缪斯为奥法雷尔的《哈姆内特》提供了一个有说服力的案例，作为这种美学的完美实现。这部小说不仅是一部引人入胜的小说作品……