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"This Time It's by Shakespeare" |
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The season after Friends premiered on NBC, we found ourselves subjected to endless hoardes of Friends clones on the competitors' fall lineups. There were also a bunch of Seinfeld wannabes, thirtysomething ripoffs, etc. Now we're up to our joy buzzers in primetime game shows, as everyone wants to horn in on Regis' action (Is it just me, or are the first 5-6 questions you get in that show beyond moronic? Really, there were harder questions on Tic-Tac-Dough...). And all of the pundits decried the lack of originality among the networks, that all they wanted to do is recycle what had been proven successful. Poor, misguided lot; they shouldn't have been attacking the networks for copying others' successes; they should have attacked then for doing it badly. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, as they say, and all you have to do is look at how The Addams Family begat The Munsters to how Bewitched begat I Dream of Jeannie to realize that everyone build on the successes of others. No one did a better job of building on other peoples' work than Shakespeare (well, OK, maybe Chaucer). Someone once wrote that there are only seven basic plots on the entire planet, and that all stories fit more or less into one of the seven. Shakespeare would have certainly agreed with the notion; after all, whatever the source of his universal appeal, it most certainly is not originality. Almost all of his plays can be directly traced back to various sources, from Holinshed's Chronicles (the History plays), to Plutarch (the Roman plays), to Chaucer (Troilus and Cressida), to a variety of other plays, many from Shakespeare's own contemporaries--The Taming of the Shrew was based on an earlier play called The Taming of a Shrew. The only play that does not see to have an identifiable antecedent is The Tempest, though certain elements seem to have been drawn from some contemporary news stories. Hamlet is patterned largely after Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy; in fact, the Kyd play--which itself draws on Seneca's Thyestes--sets the basic pattern for almost all Elizabethan revenge tragedies--a treacherous relative, a ghost spurring the protagonist towards revenge, and--perhaps most basic in the revenge tragedy structure--the fact that the revenger must himself die. And while we don't have the play itself, there is considerable evidence that there existed an earlier version of Hamlet (thought to have been composed by Kyd), generally referred to as the "Ur-Hamlet." While the movie makes it seem as though Romeo and Juliet developed out of the events of the play, it has it's antecedents as well. In large part it is based on the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe--whose story the mechanicals relate in A Midsummer Night's Dream. More immediately though, the Romeo & Juliet story appeared frequently in 16th Century Italian literature--in many cases almost identical to the basic plot of Shakespeare.
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