In honour of Shakespeare’s birthday: Barnard versus The Bard – two alternative versions of a classic tale.
Perhaps
that headline is slightly misleading.
Or, at least, the “versus” part of it is. When I first set about writing The
Ghostly Father, it was never my intention to set up in direct
competition with the great Mr Shakespeare.
In fact, at the time, it was never even my intention that the book would
ever be read by anyone other than myself, and perhaps my nearest and dearest if
they were really interested. I was, in
essence, writing the book which I’ve always wanted to read: a version of Romeo & Juliet
in which the eponymous star-cross’d lovers don’t die.
Ever since I first saw Franco Zeffirelli’s
beautiful 1968
film of Romeo & Juliet, I’ve
been haunted by the question: This is the world’s greatest love story – so why does it have to
end so badly? A series of individual and seemingly unrelated
events all combine to add up to a catastrophic outcome. Each of those
single events might, in isolation, have been manageable – but the whole was
most definitely far, far greater than the sum of its parts.
For years – decades, even – I wondered: what if just one of
those contributory events had been different? How might that have
affected what ultimately happened? This point was made very forcefully in
Baz Lurhmann’s 1996 film version of the story – and also, much more recently,
in Carlo Carlei’s 2013 film adaptation.
In both cases, the tragedy is given a further ingenious and heartrending
twist. In the suicide scene, Juliet wakes from her trance just as Romeo
takes the poison, but she’s too late to prevent him from swallowing it.
So why, I asked myself, shouldn’t there be another version of
the story – one where things work out differently? And the answer came
straight back: Why not indeed? And if
that version of the story doesn’t already exist, then go ahead and write it.
Even then, it took a while for the project
to get off the ground. I’d dabbled with
Creative Writing in the past, and had taken a few courses on the subject, but
I’d never attempted to write anything longer than poems, or short stories, or
the occasional stroppy letter to The Times. The thought of
tackling a full-length novel, even one on a subject about which I felt so
strongly, was a daunting prospect. When I did eventually power up the
laptop and start writing, I was writing the book mainly for myself, because it
was the outcome which I’d always wanted.
But when I’d finished the first draft (which took about six months), I
showed it to a couple of close friends.
One said “I know what I like, and I like this.” The other said “You really ought to take this
further. It could even be a best-seller.”
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The book’s title, The Ghostly Father,
is based on a quotation from the play (it’s how Romeo addresses the character
of Friar Lawrence), and the story (which is a sort of part-prequel, part-sequel
to the original tale) is told from the Friar’s point of view. I’ve often
wondered why, in the play, he behaved as he did – and by giving him what I hope
is an interesting and thought-provoking backstory, I’ve tried to offer some
possible answers. Plus, of course, I wanted to reduce the overall body-count,
and give the lovers themselves a rather less tragic ending. And, judging
by the number of people who have now bought and enjoyed the book (yes, it did
become an Amazon best-seller on pre-order figures alone!), it sounds as though
I’m not by any means the only person who secretly thinks that, at long last,
the star-cross’d lovers deserve a bit of a break.
Author Links
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sue.barnard.7
Twitter: @SusanB2011
Crooked Cat Publishing author page: http://crookedcatpublishing.com/our-authors/authors-a-e/sue-barnard/
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