This thesis examines representations of motherhood in key contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale, namely Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2017), Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), E.K. Johnston’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear (2016), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (2015). I examine how these selected novels negotiate the category of mother and ultimately demonstrate how the novels themselves are producing new representations of motherhood that are responsive to and indeed constitutive of, the times we live in. To support my analysis, I draw on three dynamic fields: adaptation studies, feminist Shakespeare studies, and motherhood studies, which can, I argue, provide mutually illumining insights. Adaptation has emerged as a dynamic subgenre of Shakespeare criticism and this thesis situates itself within an expanding body of work that variously revises, challenges, and indeed extends the boundaries of original play texts. Feminist criticism of Shakespeare is a well-established field in its own right, but I have identified a significant gap in the critical literature pertaining to motherhood in contemporary Shakespeare(s). Throughout the twenty-first century, same sex marriage, adoption, reproductive rights, and more recent reproductive technologies that distinguish the gestational and genetic mother have expanded the territory of motherhood. The novels analysed here traverse this new territory to reflect the diversity of mothering practise in the twenty-first century while simultaneously revealing new insights and engagements with the subterranean maternal energies within the plays. When explored alongside one another and understood as a network of adapted Shakespeare sister-texts, these novels are shown to trace missing motherlines within and between texts that ultimately demonstrates the scope of intertextual, intersectional Shakespeare analysis.