Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

The revived Hogarth Press, in London, with ambition and audacity and what must also be a very large fund for advances, has commissioned a series of novels by famous novelists that retell tales from Shakespeare. The novelists include Howard Jacobson, who has done “The Merchant of Venice” (as “Shylock Is My Name”); Anne Tyler, who’s done “The Taming of the Shrew” (as “Vinegar Girl”); and now Margaret Atwood, doing “The Tempest” (as “Hag-Seed”). Retelling Shakespeare’s stories, albeit in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, seems an odd enterprise at first, given that Shakespeare grabbed his stories more or less at random from Holinshed’s history of Britain and Plutarch and old collections of Italian ribald tales. As the “ordinary poet” of a working company of players, he sought plots under deadline pressure rather than after some long, deliberate meditation on how to turn fiction into drama. “What have you got for us this month, Will?” the players asked him, and, thinking quickly, he’d say, “I thought I’d do something with the weird Italian story I mentioned, the one with the Jew and the contest.” “Italy again? All right. End of the month then?” These were not the slow-cooked stories and intricately intertextual fables of the modern art novel.

One thing Shakespeare certainly never did is what all the novelists adapting him for Hogarth must have done, and that is worry at length about whether or not it would be an interesting artistic challenge to adapt a classic. Homer, Plutarch, Holinshed, Menander—Shakespeare just did them and dropped them. (Though, like the novelists, he was surely glad to get paid once he had got it done.) And then the story content of a Shakespeare play is the least content it has. Saluting Shakespeare with new versions of his stories is a bit like saluting Mozart by commissioning Philip Glass to write a new opera to the plot of “Così Fan Tutte,” with its disguised Albanians and absurd coincidences. Shakespeare’s music counts for far more than his material. Adaptations of Shakespeare, from “West Side Story” to “The Boys from Syracuse,” have flourished from time to time, but it is notable that the early, more strongly plotted plays are remade most persuasively: the musical adaptation of “Othello” (which starred, of all people, Jerry Lee Lewis) remains a memorable oddity. “The Tempest” has been retold many times, from science fiction (“Forbidden Planet”) to dense philosophical poetry (Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror”), but the retellings all tend to force one back to the original.

Most of the authors in the Hogarth series, to their credit, aren’t so much “reimagining” the stories as reacting to the plays. They’ve taken on not the tale itself but the twists in the tale that produced the Shakespearean themes we still debate: anti-Semitism in “Merchant of Venice,” the subjugation of women in “The Taming of the Shrew,” art and isolation in “The Tempest.” Each of the novels gives us a revisionist account of the central Shakespearean subject, and asks us to think anew about that subject more than about the story that superintends it.

Howard Jacobson, who is famous as a sort of English Philip Roth (though often making one more grateful than ever for the American one), was a natural for Shylock. His version of “Merchant” has a plotline so complicated, so overpopulated with players and ideas and unrelated riffs, that I will confess I had to go back and reread it before I could make sense of it. We meet both a contemporary British Shylock, an art collector named Simon Strulovitch, and the original Shylock, teleported forward to our time, into whose monologues we peer, and with whom Strulovitch has intense exchanges about money-lending, circumcision, and Jewishness generally. The dramatis personae, augmented by these twin Shylocks, include an English professional footballer who has disgraced himself, as some French footballers have done in life, by offering the “quenelle,” the ambiguously inverted Nazi salute. The central action turns on the footballer’s proposal to Strulovitch’s daughter, and on Strulovitch’s insistence, as a conscious parody of the demand of Shakespeare’s Shylock for a pound of flesh from Antonio, that the Gentile athlete be circumcised. There is a large cast of secondary, mostly Jewish-British characters, including an irresistible Nigella Lawson-like figure named, in a Joycean sideswipe, Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Jacobson has an unmatched reputation in his homeland as a humorist, but not all of it translates for an American reader, since the jokes seem to depend more on extreme aggravation of tone than on close observation of life. Everything in Jacobson sounds as if it should be read out loud by Alan Rickman, as when Strulovitch speaks to Shylock about his daughter’s suitor:

Here I’ve been steeling myself against the next over-principled, money-hating, ISIS-backing Judaeophobe with an MA in fine art she’s going to bring back from college and she hits on someone who’s probably never opened a book and certainly never heard of Noam Chomsky—a hyper possessive uneducated uber-goy from around the corner. I’ve no idea how or where she met him. At a wrestling match, is my guess, or at the dodgems. . . . If I hadn’t frightened her off Jewish boys by telling her she had to find one she might have met a nice quiet embroiderer of skullcaps.

At one point, Jacobson uses the word “sarcastic” to describe a speaker’s tone, and he is often sarcastic, instead of, in Roth’s American way, mordantly ironic; his tone can become tetchy and irritable as a result. Irritability is an odd trait for literature, but it seems a dominant one in contemporary English fiction, at least that written by men. We even have, in Glen Duncan’s “Bloodlines” trilogy, an irritable werewolf.

The best things in the book are often the most discursive, the philosophical-historical exchanges between Strulovitch and Shylock. Shylock has a wonderful riff, concerning Strulovitch’s art dealing, about why words are, for Jews, always more fundamental than images: “God had spoken the world into existence—Let it be—he had not painted it. Had God been a painter the world would have been other than it is. Better or worse? Well, less disputatious and declamatory, which might not have suited Shylock.” (A reader may have the satisfying suspicion that Jacobson, like a few other contemporary novelists, would actually rather be a magazine writer, since the riffs are usually more compelling than the relationships.)