‘Beautified With Our Own Feathers’: The Winter’s Tale, Transformative Works, and Fanfiction
The connection between early modern drama and contemporary online fanfiction is frequently mentioned — on both sides — but rarely analyzed in detail. In particular, the rich analytical language developed by online fandom for issues of adaptation, transformation, and intertextuality has been rela...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
2024-01-01
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| Series: | Ceræ |
| Online Access: | https://ceraejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Vol.-11-3-Styrt.pdf |
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| Summary: | The connection between early modern drama and contemporary online fanfiction is frequently mentioned — on
both sides — but rarely analyzed in detail. In particular, the rich analytical language developed by online
fandom for issues of adaptation, transformation, and intertextuality has been relatively neglected and
underutilized by literary scholars. This paper uses William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and its
relationship to Robert Greene’s Pandosto to show how this analytical language can help us better understand
the relationship between play, source, and audience in ways that go beyond traditional source analysis.
Since the connections between The Winter’s Tale and Pandosto have been extensively studied, what
this article contributes is not original research into how Shakespeare used Greene’s play, but rather a new
analytical approach that draws on the terminology and approaches of online fandom. In doing so, it
demonstrates how we can better understand Shakespeare’s adaptation of Greene through this lens: for example,
how the pacing of the play can be viewed as a function of canon-divergent fanfiction, or how the play’s reversal
of Greene’s Bohemia and Sicilia relates to alternate universe fanfiction. In demonstrating the usefulness of this
new lens for existing observations about the connection between the two works, this article distinguishes the
fanfictive reading from other related interpretations, highlighting the value of adding this approach to those
already used to analyze early modern texts. |
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| ISSN: | 2204-146X |