US novelist Gillian Flynn to rewrite Hamlet for 21st century

Gillian Flynn, whose thriller Gone Girl explored a dark and twisted tale of revenge within a marriage, is set to give her own spin to perhaps the most famous story of revenge in literary history: Hamlet, The Guardian reported.

The American novelist has been signed up to retell the play which is often described as Shakespeare's best as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, which is asking major writers to reimagine Shakespeare "for contemporary readers". With Scandinavian bestseller Jo Nesbo taking on Macbeth, Margaret Atwood The Tempest and Tracy Chevalier Othello, Flynn said that Hamlet had "long been a fascination of mine: murder, betrayal, revenge, deceit, madness ‒ all my favourite things."

The novelist added that Hamlet featured "some of Shakespeare's most intriguing, curious characters ‒ from the titular brooding prince to rueful Ophelia".

"What (slightly cheeky) writer wouldn't be tempted to reimagine it?" she asked. Flynn is not the first author to offer a new take on Hamlet (a story Shakespeare himself is believed to have drawn from retellings of the Norse legend of Amleth, from around the 13th century) with tales from Disney's The Lion King to James Joyce's Ulysses all drawing inspiration from the seminal text.

Flynn has topped bestseller lists since 2012 for Gone Girl, her third novel, in which she writes of the disappearance of a woman first from her husband's perspective, and then from the woman's own diaries. Like Hamlet, who hesitates endlessly over how to approach the situation he finds himself in, Flynn's creation Nick Dunne obfuscates, and feels he is playing a part. "I felt myself enacting Concerned Husband," he says. "I wasn't sure what to say now. I raked my memory for the lines. What does the husband say at this point in the movie? Depends on whether he's guilty or innocent."