In this series of guest posts, contributors to the eleventh volume of Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies briefly discuss their work, interests, and methods in relation to their published article.
Today, we welcome Philip Goldfarb Styrt as a contributor. Philip holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and is currently an assistant professor of English at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa. His work focuses on early modern drama in cultural and political contexts from the Renaissance to the present day. Philip’s article, “‘Beautified with Our Own Feathers’: The Winter’s Tale, Transformative Works, and Fanfiction” utilizes the analytical language of online fanfiction to offer a new lens through which to view the transformative elements of early modern drama.
In my article, I look at William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and its relationship to Robert Greene’s sixteenth-century romance Pandosto: Or the Triumph of Time, on which it is largely based, through the lens of fanfiction. This connection is well-known and well-studied, which is what makes it a good vehicle for my larger point, which is that the language of online fanfiction is useful for analyzing more than just online fanfiction. No one would contest that The Winter’s Tale is related to Pandosto; what is new in my work is describing and analyzing the play as fanfiction of the romance, rather than as an adaptation, or a recommodification, or any other term.
In analyzing the play as fanfiction, I argue that it is doing something fundamentally similar to what fanfiction does. Obviously, I am not imagining that Shakespeare pulled out his trusty laptop and uploaded his play to Wattpad or Archive of Our Own (“AO3”). There are clear and obvious technological and societal differences between the two. But fanfiction is not just an online phenomenon; scholars of fan studies have consistently traced a lineage back at least as far as printed Star Trek fanzines in the 1960s and alternative Sherlock Holmes stories in the late 19th century. There is nothing inherently (post-)modern or online about the concept of fanfiction, even if it has grown immensely with access to the Internet and dedicated sites. Crucially for my argument, those who write contemporary fanfiction have developed a whole vocabulary of discussing what it is they do to the stories they are writing about (their canons, in those terms), and there is nothing inherently online about that terminology—though it is of course much easier to use if you see it in the tags on a piece on AO3 than it is when you sit down with Shakespeare’s First Folio.
I argue that we can apply this terminology productively to early modern drama more generally, with The Winter’s Tale in the article as a test case. These plays largely draw on previously existing plots and characters, whether from history and mythology or (as in the case of The Winter’s Tale) other fiction from the period. As such, the approaches of fanfiction are just as meaningful for thinking about the reuse and reinterpretation of stories in the English Renaissance as they are today online: examples just from The Winter’s Tale include being out of character (OOC), or in an alternate universe of the original story (AU), and changing who in the story dies or stays dead (somebody lives/not everybody dies). Thinking about the plays these ways is, I argue, different from thinking about them as intertextual, as adaptations, or any previous approach, because it speaks to a different connection between author, audience, text, and source(s).
As you might guess, I came to this approach out of writing and reading fanfiction myself, as well as studying Shakespeare and early modern drama professionally. That means, of course, that I have my own particular approaches to what fanfiction is and how it works. One step that I would welcome following up on this piece is for others, with other perspectives on fanfiction, to take up this idea and run with it: to think about how Shakespeare is or isn’t doing what they do, and how that changes what we think about both.
Image credit: Francis Wheatley and James Fittler. “A shepherd’s cot. Florizel, Perdita, Shepherd, Clown, Mopsa, Dorcas, servants, Polixenes, and Camillo disguised.” Lithograph, Boston Public Library. In A collection of prints from pictures painted for the purpose of illustrating the dramatic works of Shakespeare by the artists of Great-Britain, 1803.