"The world to me is but a ceaseless storm": Pericles, The Porpoise, and the Resistance of Exile

Abstract

T adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays into fiction has a long history. Early on it was considered a useful way to introduce the stories of the plays to children, as in Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and more recently, Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories. However, contemporary authors have seen an opportunity to adapt and expand the stories of and within the plays in more sophisticated and mature ways. The most high-profile examples of this trend come from the Hogarth Press’s series of “retellings” begun in 2016, which features adaptations by such giants of contemporary fiction as Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler, Jo Nesbø, and Jeanette Winterson. There is a clear advantage to having a familiar story to work with, and Hogarth authors were given the freedom to choose the play on which to base their work. The authors involved, it is fair to say, represent a range of talent and genre as well as literary heft. The plays chosen also largely represent Shakespeare’s major works. However, the novel on which I focus in this essay, Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise (2019), takes a slightly different tack by adapting one of Shakespeare’s lesser known, collaboratively (and thus unevenly) written late romances, Pericles.