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Chuck's answer below is short and sweet and correct . . . so I'll be verbose and take it in another direction . . .A) There are more writers than ever before (probably too many, in fact) and they're as a class better read and as imaginative and capable of intellectual gymnastics as any cadre of authors in history. So they're all looking out for ways to express themselves and their ideas that are in some sense novel, which leads to:
B) Creative artists seeking these forms of expression have independently written and collectively evolved a number of what have become genres. And one of them, which has become relatively common over the last 30 years, is the refashioning, retelling, or rewriting of established works with or without commentary in a way that reflects contemporary sensibilities, philosophy, etc. (Probably the prototype was Borges' "Pierre Menard..." in which he posits that even identical words written in two different eras can have far different meanigns by virtue of their associations). This movement permeates the arts: Postmodern architecture; Andy Warhol's duplicated Mona Lisas, "West Side Story," John Gardner's "Grendel," Kazanzakis' "Last Temptation of Christ," lots of examples in music (by request), etc. And the borrowings take many forms from almost verbatim transcription, to updating, to recastings of various degrees, to cracked-mirror re-lookings-at.
c) So why Shakespeare? To get the reverberations to mean anything to people, you use icons: Shakespeare, Leonardo, Chaucer, Beethoven, Schubert, Palladio. Otherwise the reference is lost. (Note to T.S. Eliot: If you're going to write a work for the ages that depends for understanding on people being familiar with the work of Jessie Weston, you better be damn well sure that people are still going to be reading Jessie Weston 50 years from now.) Shakespeare, as Chuck said, contains a large percentage of all possible basic plots, and has become as entrenched in Western (and some non-Western) consciousnesses as much as just about any body of work (Bible included).
D) And, yes, in some cases there are commercial consdierations. Robbins & Bernstein thought they could genuinely tell an R&J story in dance and music in a way that hadn't been done before (and make money); Cole Porter thought that he could fashion a nifty (and money-making) musical around "Shrew" -- and Shakespeare still "sells."
There's a dissertation in there somewhere.
cheers --
Posted by JTJ on March 27, 1997 at 07:44:08
In Reply to "modern works based on the themes of Shakespeare" posted by fumet on March 27, 1997 at 00:51:10
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