Critical Survey

Shakespeare’s sonnets have been subject to myriad creative and critical responses from the first instances of their partial publication in 1599 (two sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrime), in 1609 (the first edition of Shakespeares Sonnets, which included A Lover’s Complaint), and in 1640 (the first edition of John Benson’s Poems. VVritten By Wil. Shakespeare. Gent.). Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, editors and commentators felt comfortable manipulating the order of sonnets as printed in the 1609 quarto, often in order to arrive at a presumed authorial intention, or to demonstrate more clearly the ways in which the sonnets tell the story of Shakespeare’s life and times. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a different, but related phenomenon: a set of creative reimaginings, adaptations, and appropriations that attempt not only to bring Shakespeare’s sonnets into new contexts, but also to respond to the sonnets while still remaining in their purview. This article explores these responses, especially instances in which poets, directors, dramatists, and film-makers seem to want to create something of their own but still remain faithful to Shakespeare in one way or another. My own interest is in exploring that dual desire, and it seems only fair, after exploring several versions of it, to offer one of my own.

Amongst fans and the academics who study them, it is generally accepted (perhaps even a truth universally acknowledged) that a good portion of what we consider canonical literature – including Shakespeare – also fits the broadest definition of fanfiction, in that it is clearly written in response to or adapting a specific source text. Transformative fiction (also known as fanfiction, fanfic, or, most commonly among those who write and read it, fic) offers an alternative form of both close-reading and contextual criticism when applied to premodern writers, just as it does for contemporary media properties, and in many ways allows for the inclusion of otherwise marginalised voices. This article, therefore, combines traditional criticism with two different pieces of Shakespeare-based fanfiction in order to illustrate the potential and versatility of this type of textual engagement.

Beatrice hated Mr. Lear. In fact the only person she hated more than Mr. Lear was Benedict and that was only because she hated everything about Benedict—especially his face. Her current rage, however, was because Mr. Lear had turned their spring play—the jewel of the drama club—into two one acts. Mr. Lear insisted Romeo and Juliet was a play about the “titanic struggle of love and family” and Benedict had agreed with him like the snake-in-the-grass suck up he was. Beatrice had helpfully pointed out Romeo and Juliet were thirteen and choosing an outfit was a titanic struggle for thirteen year olds, but Mr. Lear had been less than amused and thus her chance to perform the leading role in a Shakespearean tragedy was ripped from her grasp. Everyone knew Mr. Lear punished you if you didn’t tell him how awesome he was.

It was only some hours later, after she’d made her report back at the station and returned to her apartment, that Meg recalled why that had worried her so horribly – Richard hadn’t even looked at his brother once. All his attention had been focused on her reaction. Almost as if he’d planned for it.

Almost as if …

But it didn’t make any sense.

She typed Richard York’s name into Google and clicked on his law firm’s website. There wasn’t anything she hadn’t already known. He’d graduated from Harvard Law summa cum laude and taken a job at Neville & Warwick, where, in just three years, he’d become the darling of their criminal defense group. And, considering the scum he’d defended, it was maybe not that surprising that he’d stoop to trying to kill his own brothers.

The question was, why?

Echo and Narcissus, or, Man O Man! is the only surviving fragment of an early dramatic work of Shakespeare’s, perhaps his first – some critics argue it was composed before he left home and saw his first play performed. It shows signs of immaturity in its stagecraft. (Though a well-funded contemporary production could work technological magic with the pool in which Narcissus sees his mirror image and, perhaps, hears his mirror voice. Or sees his mirror-voice.) Shakespeare would return to Ovid for material more than once in his career (Carroll, 1985), and his wry, choric clowns are often taken, as here, from folk culture, but the sense of imminent catastrophe evident in even the casual opening lines of his tragedies is missing in this early effort, as is the barely suppressed power struggle of the initial exchange in his first completed Ovidian comedy Midsummer Night’s Dream. Greenblatt has suggested that this fragment, apparently abandoned, was sketched by the young playwright during detention, as a display of nonchalance intended to frustrate an embittered Latin teacher (Shakespearian Negotiations, 1989).

This is a work of creative fiction that imagines an alternate universe in which a fragment of the enigmatic lost play The Plantation of Virginia has miraculously survived to the present.

This photographic essay documents an original-ish practices staged reading of Shakespeare’s Othello. The essay argues that such productions, in their rough approximation of early modern roughness, potentially offer a critique of – at the least an alternative to – modern productions of Shakespeare that are rehearsed for minute nuance and psychological detail. Moreover, this style of production, the essay further argues, this embracing of what Jeremy Lopez has called early modern drama’s ‘potential to be ridiculous or inefficient or incompetent’, has the potential to unearth aspects of Shakespeare’s plays that might be elided or eschewed by more polished and normative contemporary productions.