Top 10 reimagined classics

Ronald Frame is the author of thirteen internationally published works of fiction, and is an award-winning television and radio scriptwriter. His debut novel, Winter Journey, was the joint winner of the first Betty Trask Prize for Fiction. The Lantern Bearers was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize and won the Saltire Award for Scottish Book of the Year. Frame's latest novel is Havisham.

He named his top ten reimagined classics for the Guardian. One title on the list:

Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

Mary McCarthy once likened Macbeth and his spouse to denizens of American suburbia, circa 1962, ambitiously cutting a swathe through their set of martini drinkers and greens-players. Ideally (for me) we would have been in New England, within recent memory, for this prequelling of Hamlet. But it's convincingly done, in (approx.) late-medieval terms, with the bonus that the characters don't act quite according to Shakespeare's template.

Read about another book on the list.

Gertrude and Claudius is one of Matt Haig's top 10 novels influenced by Shakespeare.

--Marshal Zeringue