Bitely 1

"AN IMPROBABLE FICTION":

HOW FANS REWRITE SHAKESPEARE

Amelia Bitely

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Research Honors Program in the Department of English

April 22, 2008

Marietta College

Marietta, OH

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Table of Contents

Introduction 3 Chapter One 8 Chapter Two 16 Chapter Three 27 Chapter Four 39 Chapter Five 54 Epilogue 70 Appendix A 74 Appendix B 76 Works Cited 78

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Introduction

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own. - Carol Burnett

Some of William Shakespeare's most intriguing tales are the ones that the Bard

never told. In Twelfth Night, did Malvolio ever get the revenge he promised, or did

Olivia live happily ever after with the stranger she married? Does King Lear work as

anything other than a tragedy? What would Romeo and Juliet be like in the twenty-first

century? In Hamlet, what was Ophelia really thinking? And where do all of the pirates

come from, anyway? While performances can begin to answer some of these questions,

other story-seeds have found fertile ground in the minds of both adapters and the authors

of derivative works. Since the seventeenth century, these directors and writers have

produced and published countless variations on the theme of Shakespeare—but, more

recently, the Internet has provided a venue for sharing derivative works without formal

publication. On the Internet, fiction that derives from a published or filmed source goes

by the sleek moniker "fanfiction," and this broad genre includes works that derive from

Harry Potter, Star Trek, the anime "Gundam" series, and even William Shakespeare.

Reading this fanfiction grants both academics and aficionados an insight into how the lay

reader accesses and then interrogates Shakespeare.

For well over a century, critics have studied mainstream Shakespeare adaptations;

for a quarter of a century, critics have conducted preliminary studies on the fanfiction

culture. Despite the clear overlap between these two fields, though, the critical body has

not yet tackled the world of Shakespeare fanfiction in any depth—indeed, analysts of

fanfiction in particular mention Shakespeare only to contrast the so-called "art canon" of

high culture with pop-culture fanfiction darlings such as Star Trek (Jenkins 53). In doing

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so, these critics fail to acknowledge that Shakespeare's works have been appropriated in

much the same way that pop-culture works have.

For example, one of the most frequently referenced Shakespeare adaptations is

Nahum Tate's 1681 History of King Lear. Sonia Massai carefully examines the

alterations that Tate made to his source texts, noting not only the newly comedic ending

but also the addition of Cordelia and Edgar's romantic subplot, the reduction of Lear's

indecent madness, and the removal of the fool's censure. Although such actors as David

Garrick and George Colman partially restored Shakespeare's lines to Tate's overarching

framework, by and large, the performers and audience members of the eighteenth century

tended to prefer the "judicious emendations" of a Tate Lear (Samuel Derrick, qtd. in

Harris 62). Tellingly, although some audience members considered Tate's Cordelia

annoying and Shakespeare's language more beautiful (Harris), the Tate adaptation served

as the principle text for performances until Shakespeare's full restoration in 1838 (Green

259). From the 1680s until the 1830s, something very much like fanfiction was receiving

thunderous applause.

In the twentieth century, Tom Stoppard made revisions on an even broader scale

in his first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. While this play keeps the basic

structure of Hamlet intact, it inflates the narrative of the minor characters who give the

Stoppard play its name—the story becomes not Hamlet's tale, but the un-Aristotlean tale

of "two insignificant persons" (Thomsen 1234). While its initial performances in the late

1960s "stimulated violent partisanships" among academics and critics alike (Trussler

175), it also inspired still more derivative writing. In a letter to the editor, one person

actually assumed the persona of Shakespeare himself in order to weigh in on the play

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with such apoplectic grief that he was "beyond anger or sorrow" ("Beyond Anger").

Because this writer, like present-day fanfiction writers, used a pseudonym, he or she has

thus far eluded identification.

Although Shakespeare derivatives clearly exist, recent study of fanfiction avoids

detailed discussion of the fanfiction community's own Shakespeare derivatives. Roberta

Pearson does make a case for further study of the Shakespeare "fan," noting that part of

the reason for the dearth of data in the field is that Shakespeare "fans" resist that "semi-

derisory" label, but she does not actually undertake this study (98). In fact, prominent

fanfiction analyst Henry Jenkins set the bar for the Bard's role in the discourse when he

used Shakespeare to justify critical acceptance of the primary fan focus: television shows.

Because television-show fans frequently draw derision for their "obsessive" cataloguing

of the minutiae of their favorite programs, Jenkins suggests that academics should view

fans' critical mindsets tolerantly rather than with condescension. He asks, "Would …

close attention, careful re-reading, intense discussion … be read as extreme if they were

applied to Shakespeare instead of Star Trek?" (Jenkins 53). Jenkins further contends that,

like the eighteenth-century adapters, Shakespeare's contemporaries considered his plays a

part of the public discourse rather than an elevated "art canon" (53). By cementing this

dichotomy of "high art" versus popular culture, though, Jenkins privileges the Star Treks

of the world over the Shakespeare in their discussion of fan culture. Francesca Coppa

follows Jenkins's lead, using the trope of different performances of Hamlet solely to

illustrate the legitimacy of different fan "performances" of Star Trek fiction. When

fanfiction scholars admit that writers love to revise Shakespeare, the scholars merely

refer to the published derivatives and ask, "What are … Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are

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Dead or John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius but Hamlet fanfics?" (Young). The

differences between published works and fanfiction, though, prove to be manifold.

Fanfiction writers began to develop a self-aware culture during the 1970s, when

they self-published "fan magazines" or "zines" dedicated to their favorite pop-culture

media (Kustritz 371). These "zines," generally focused on television or film media, and

they contained—among other items—fan-written fiction about the media's characters.

While the "zine" culture still exists, it has to some degree fallen out of favor due to the

rising prominence of the Internet as a medium for fan self-publication (Denn). Although

maintaining a personal website can prove costly, large-scale archives such as

FanFiction.Net allowed would-be fanfiction writers to archive their stories online at no

cost. Other services, such as discussion forums and Yahoo! Groups, gave fanfiction

writers a space in which to communicate with elective groups of fans all but

instantaneously. As Rebekah Denn phrased it, "the fan-fiction genre has stratospherically

exploded along with the rise of the Internet."

As fanfiction gained prominence, though, authors such as Orson Scott Card

responded—not by proxy, as Shakespeare had to, but with the more threatening

reminders that they held copyrights to their intellectual property. Fortunately for writers

of Shakespeare fanfiction, his public-domain status ensures that the question of copyright

infringement does not arise, but the larger fanfiction-writing community does not share

that security ("Originality"). By 2003, there had "been no definitive case to decide the

legality of fan fiction" (Denn), but the highly self-conscious fanfiction community has

recently founded the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) in order to combat

any future challenges to the legality of "all fannish works" ("About Us"). Perhaps most

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importantly, the OTW considers fanfiction a valuable form of creative expression

because it is transformative—that is, it causes substantial change to the meaning of the

source material. The organization thereby seeks to unify the broad spectrum of

participants in the fanfiction culture under a common action: responding to media in a

meaningful, individual way by creating a narrative that grows from the source.

Shakespeare fanfiction does have roots in the long tradition of professional

Shakespeare adaptations and derivatives; however, it differs from them substantially in

that it owns the label "fan" and identifies itself as a participant in the shared-knowledge

community of fanfiction. Like any other type of fanfiction, Shakespeare fanfiction has a

transformative quality; it allows valuable insight into the ways in which both individual

and communal readers of Shakespeare respond to their reading experiences by

transforming Shakespeare's plays into new stories. These responses, though, are deeply

embedded in the conventions of the fanfiction world, and scholars must therefore choose

either to ignore those conventions or else to navigate them like an insider.

Writing and reading Shakespeare fanfiction may be a subcultural hobby, but it

also performs valuable functions that should be studied and even encouraged. Both

writing and reading fanfiction can increase basic competence with Shakespeare's style

and content, as well as encourage critical thinking and community discussion. In this

paper, I will first focus on Shakespeare fanfiction writers' conscious adoption of

fanfiction styles, then move on to examine how fanfiction demonstrates audience

responses: fanfiction as a familiarization of Shakespeare, fanfiction as an expansion of

the extant text, fanfiction as a critical analysis of prevailing themes, and fanfiction as a

cornerstone of a larger discursive community.

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Chapter One

You might want to warn people that there is an obvious Mary Sue in this fic. - quamp

The summaries and reviews for Shakespeare stories often prove daunting to the

uninitiated. Even a brief immersion may leave new readers wondering who this "Mary

Sue" is and why everyone seems to hate her, as well as whether a "slash" story is as

violent as it sounds. In order to discuss Shakespeare fanfiction, therefore, we must first

situate it as fanfiction—we must understand not only why it adopts customs that differ

from mainstream writing practices, but also what those customs are. Across the Internet,

different fanfiction archives share many of the same slang terms, and they present works

of fanfiction in similar manners. Despite these similarities, though, some archives yield a

wider variety of fan reactions to Shakespeare than others.

The most persuasive reason to consider a work of Shakespeare fanfiction as such,

rather than as a piece of literature derivative of Shakespeare, is that the writers

themselves designate their pieces as fanfiction. Indeed, where writers do not outright

label their works "fanfiction" in authors' notes, they imply the label by choosing to

archive their work on websites that solicit fanfiction submissions—albeit in the

Shakespeare subsections. This behavior creates elective enclaves in which readers and

writers share the same interest in works derivative of Shakespeare's plays, as well as the

same level of familiarity with the text. As one reviewer phrased it, "[W]e're Othello fans

over here ... [a]s a general rule, people reading your fic will have read the original script"

(Freya Sacksen).

Although the comfort of a well-versed audience does provide strong incentive to

consider derivative works "fanfiction," writers often have other motives, as well. Most

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crucially, the vast majority of Shakespeare fanfiction writers also participate in other

fanfiction cultures. For example, FanFiction.Net user "Evita the Akita" writes not only

Shakespeare fanfiction, but also stories set in the universes of Frankenstein, Sweeney

Todd, RENT, and the television show Pushing Daisies. Such writers associate the

process of creating derivative narratives with the "pop-culture" phenomenon of fanfiction.

The form of each piece of writing also influences the decision to label it fanfiction;

although some fanfiction writers do eventually publish their Shakespeare derivatives, the

fanfiction community outpaces the publishing world for acceptance of "drabbles" (very

short pieces, sometimes called "flashfiction"), emotionally-charged vignettes, and

"outtakes." Fittingly, these brief works constitute the majority of all pieces of fanfiction.

Because the online community of Shakespeare writers dubs its work "fanfiction,"

we must learn the language of fanfiction in order to acculturate ourselves fully. Initially,

the term "fanfiction" itself requires consideration. Although academics frequently use the

term "fan fiction" (see Coppa, Jenkins, and Pugh, among others), writers themselves

generally prefer to eliminate the space and call their work simply "fanfiction"—when

they do not use the more informal "fanfic" or even "fic." Current writers can seldom

explain their preferences, citing aesthetics, laziness, or even "common useage [sic]"

(Cabari). Moreover, the terms "fanfic" and "fic" can refer both to the concept of fan-

written derivative works and to individual works themselves. While this instance

illustrates the slipperiness of language within a fanfiction-writing community, if the bold

reader wishes to traverse a fanfiction archive with any success, he or she will need to

understand a few key terms. Appendix A contains a partial glossary, while I have

defined the terms that I use most frequently below.

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The term "fandom" refers to a group of individuals who participate in the fan

culture for one specific media item, as well as the productions created by those

individuals (Kustritz 371); for example, "Shakespeare fandom" refers not only to the fans

of Shakespeare, but also to the full body of Shakespeare fanfiction, fanart, and fan

analysis. Therefore, "fan" refers to a participant in a particular fandom or fandoms. Fans

refer to their source material as the "canon," a term which has been appropriated from

literary and religious circles; in the case of Shakespeare fanfic, all of Shakespeare's plays

and sonnets constitute the "canon." However, some writers consciously deviate from the

assumptions on which canon rests, and these deviations are called "Alternate Universes"

or "AUs." AUs generally take two forms. In the first form, the author alters the events of

the canon narrative; he or she explores, for example, what might have happened had

Romeo and Juliet survived. In the second form, the author transplants the entire plotline

into a new time period or physical location. A "crossover" makes a similar movement

away from the assumptions of canon; this term refers to a combination of characters and

scenarios from two or more different sources. Crossovers may occur within the

Shakespeare canon, but they may also include outside elements; for example, several

crossovers combine Romeo and Juliet with Titanic. Other stories may instead contain

"original characters" ("OCs"), or characters invented by the fanfic writer to interact with

canon characters. These original characters, though, can occasionally be "Mary Sues" or

"Gary Stus": perfect, "wish-fulfillment" characters who defeat all evil, fall in love with

the most attractive protagonist, or reform the antagonist through affection; "Mary Sue is

often the [idealized] embodiment of the author" of the fic (Byrd 58).

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Not only do fanfic writers use the same terms to discourse with one another;

archives contain many points of commonality, as well—especially in terms of their

formatting. The most obvious similarity between different archives comes in the form of

a header, or an introduction to the fic. While headers differ from archive to archive, they

usually contain a few common elements of "metadata": title; author name or penname;

author-determined rating—usually using the MPAA system, although some archives use

the FictionRatings.com system; summary; and an option to leave feedback. Some

additional components occasionally crop up, as well, such as fandom identifications,

pairings, warnings, authors' notes, upload dates, languages used, and disclaimers.1 For

automated websites, such as FanFiction.net and Slash Cotillion, headers remain fairly

fixed; on the gift-exchange-based Yuletide Treasure archive, moderators format headers

for their members. On LiveJournal communities and personal webpages, however,

writers feel freer to customize their headers or even avoid them completely. For

examples of some examples of headers for Shakespeare fanfiction, see Appendix B.

Just as each archive adopts a different presentational style, each archive has

advantages and disadvantages for a researcher who seeks to understand the reader

reactions embedded in Shakespeare fanfiction. FanFiction.Net, for example, has the

largest archive of Shakespeare fics with 1,044 archived works; because this site also has

such an intuitive name, readers and writers can locate it easily. The standardized header

also increases the ease of discerning general trends in the fandom. Unfortunately,

FanFiction.Net also attempts to prevent the publication of such items as "lists," "one or

1 Many fanfiction authors view disclaimers as a legal defense; they are designed to "disclaim" legal ownership of the concepts and characters used in the fic. However, since Shakespeare fic-writers do not need legal protection, their disclaimers are often ironic: "Disclaimer: I do not own Romeo and Juliet. If I did... well, I wouldn't be alive right now, would I?" (Erilis)

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two liners," "MST [Mystery Science Theater]: comments inserted in between the flow of

a copied story," "second person/you based" narratives, and "chat/script format" ("Content

Guidelines"). These restrictions not only limit creative responses; they also explicitly

forbid writers from using a format imitative of Shakespeare's own scripts—however,

many FanFiction.net writers simply ignore the restrictions. In many fandom circles, as

well, writers consider FanFiction.Net such a hive of bad writers that former and non-

FF.N-ers refer to it as "The Pit" or "The Pit of Voles" (Alexandria2000).

Slash Cotillion, unlike FanFiction.Net, does not place the restrictions on the

format or length of submissions. This allows writers to express themselves in the style

that they consider most appropriate—with one caveat: all fics submitted to this site must

be slash-related or show a tendency in that direction. Readers at this site also tend to bias

their readership and feedback based on their love for slash as a subset of fanfiction.

The Yuletide Treasure archive takes a rather unique approach to soliciting

fanfiction: every year, individuals request plots or character combinations in rare

fandoms as "yuletide" presents. Writers who have proved their mettle by submitting

stories to the moderators can write yuletide gifts based on the prompts provided. On the

one hand, the heavy quality control ensures that reading on the Yuletide archive will

yield more technically proficient works than on less moderated websites; on the other

hand, the same careful control of both content and quality severely hampers individual

writers' self-expression. Additionally, both this website and Slash Cotillion have very

small archives of specifically Shakespearean fanfiction.

LiveJournals and LiveJournal communities provide perhaps the widest variety of

fics; because LiveJournals are essentially blogs, users can control content on them as

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easily as they could control personal websites. For this reason, LiveJournal Shakespeare

fanfics range in length from one sentence to chaptered epics. Moreover, LiveJournal

users can join communities—including communities oriented toward Shakespeare

fanfiction—in order to share their works with others. Although these communities are

seldom censorious, they still suffer from many of the same limitations as Slash Cotillion

and Yuletide Treasure. Many communities favor very specific writing styles or content;

for example, Shakespeare140 favors extremely short fiction, whereas the Bard_Slash

community contains slash stories, and the highly-specialized MoV_Slash community

archives only Merchant of Venice slash stories. On the other hand, some communities

may seem far more exclusive than they truly are; the RareLitSlash community, for

example, accepts all manner of fanfiction from rare literary fandoms, including but not

limited to slash. Because of these specializations and confusing misnomers, Shakespeare

fanfiction proves difficult to locate on LiveJournal. Adding to the confusion are varying

levels of "locks" that LiveJournal allows users to place on their works; for example,

writers can allow only friends or other community members to view their fics. For these

reasons, while LiveJournal has the potential to be as comprehensive a Shakespeare

fanfiction resource as FanFiction.Net, it lacks the organization that makes FanFiction.Net

easily searchable.

Personal websites grant fanfiction writers the most control over content and

formatting; however, they also prove all but impossible to locate. They frequently do not

appear on Google searches, which privilege the larger-scale archives listed above.

Moreover, the search for personal fanfic websites in the Shakespeare field often offers

little reward; generally, individuals who archive their fanfiction on personal websites also

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post it on larger archives, as well. For this reason, while personal websites might provide

the clearest window on reader reaction, that window unfortunately remains difficult to

access.

Just as archives share many general features, works of fanfiction also share

several characteristics across the board. The data in this document come from a

quantitative and qualitative study of 200 works of fanfiction on various archives, which

illustrates not only similarities in revisionist technique but also similarity in subject

matter. Of these works, a full 27.5% reinterpret Romeo and Juliet, while 11% rewrite

Macbeth and another 21% revise Hamlet. In light of Peggy O'Brien's contention that "the

[high school] curriculum has been stuck on Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth,

and Hamlet," the fact that 63.5% of analyzed online fanfiction draws from those four

sources should come as little surprise (41).2

The results of this study will furnish the statistics used in this discussion; however,

overall statistics may prove misleading due to the very different natures of the archives

on which writers post their stories. For this reason, where differences between archives

have a substantial impact on the statistics, I will cite both the overall frequency of each

tactic's use as well as outlying frequencies. Additionally, because fanfiction writers often

use pennames to maintain anonymity and personal safety on the Internet, this discussion

will respect writers' wishes and cite their works by penname rather than given name even

when given names are available.

2 Readers also should not be surprised at the low percentage of fanfiction for the Roman plays and the Histories; fanfiction writers frequently confess discomfort at writing or reading fanfics about historical figures. Julius Caesar still makes the top six with 4% of total fanfics, but even that low number represents a surprisingly high count for a play about real people.

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Writers of Shakespeare fanfiction create and archive these works consciously,

using a language and a presentation style characteristic of fanfiction rather than

Shakespeare criticism. They approach these works as subjects for fan review, placing

them on public archives and accepting public critiques. For the researcher who wishes to

use Shakespeare fanfic to distill true audience reaction, though, every unique archive has

its benefits and disadvantages.

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Chapter 2

Certain scenes of [Romeo and Juliet] told hilariously via IM. Don't ask me how they have cell phones, they just do. - Cassie Winchester

My youngest sister first encountered undiluted Shakespeare at the tender age of

thirteen, when she listened to me reading aloud from The Merchant of Venice. She gave

me a serious look when I had finished the passage, then said, "You know that poem 'The

Jabberwocky'?" I nodded. "That's what that just sounded like," she concluded, before

moving on to non-Shakespearean pursuits. My sister's reaction illustrates one of the

primary conundrums for new, twenty-first-century readers of Shakespeare: despite the

audible melody of the language, the text remains impenetrably unfamiliar. Before any

reader can begin to expand upon or analyze a work of literature, he or she must first

become conversant with the content and the language used to convey it. Fanfiction often

helps to create familiarity between reader and text, as well as competence with the text's

conventions.

In the Shakespeare fanfiction community, writing fics serves two primary

functions in facilitating familiarity. First, it allows readers to prove their basic

comprehension of the plot and characters; readers usually accomplish this by translating

the content in its totality or in summary into modern3 language. Second, writing stories

that imitate the language or the dramatic verse of Shakespeare allows readers to explore

the most basic tools with which the writer built his content. These two familiarizing

tactics—bringing Shakespeare closer to the reader's experience, and bringing the reader

closer to Shakespeare's—create a link between reading and understanding.

3 Although my use of "modern" here appears ahistorical—Shakespeare was, after all, writing on the cusp of the early modern era—I choose the term because writers of fanfiction refer to their twenty-first century language as "modern language."

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One common tactic that fanfic writers use to make Shakespeare familiar is to

"translate" Shakespeare into modern language. For example, in "Julius Caesar School

Edition," author Malacandra gives the second scene of Julius Caesar a high-school

update. Cassius remarks in the original that

[I]t is very much lamented, Brutus,

That you have no such mirrors as will turn

Your hidden worthiness into your eye,

That you might see your shadow. I have heard,

Where many of the best respect in Rome—

Except immortal Cæsar—speaking of Brutus,

And groaning underneath this age’s yoke,

Have wish’d that noble Brutus had his eyes. (I.ii.61-69)

In Malacandra's translation, though, Charles (Cassius) simply tells Mark (Brutus), "[A]

mirror cannot show your worth … You are well respected at the school, and some people

wish you understood certain things." Befuddled, Mark comically responds, "What’s that

have to do with a mirror?" Although Malacandra does not duplicate the play line for line,

she nonetheless playfully translates the text into a form that her twenty-first century,

largely high-school-age audience might easily comprehend (see Thomas 229 and Collins

36 for age demographics in other fandoms).

Malacandra's example highlights some of the hallmarks of the translation or

summary fanfic—these works not only reword Shakespeare into modern language, but

they almost always condense the language to the barest bones of meaning. These works

do occasionally include the poetic tropes of their source plays, but they usually do so in

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order to parody the affected dialogue. Finally, modern-language summaries and

translations sometimes relocate the plays in modern contexts, as well. This act of

translation, moreover, is fairly widespread; while only 7% of studied works use this tactic,

on FanFiction.Net, 13% of studied works take the form of modern-language translation or

summary.

Fanfiction authors, though, do not restrict their modern-language storytelling to

translations. In fact, in "Decay," SteelNeko explores Ophelia's growing madness in

language better suited to the twentieth century as to the seventeenth. For example, rather

than using the informal, Elizabethan "thou" with her servant, SteelNeko's Ophelia uses

the customary "you" of contemporary English; she only slips into thee/thou construction

when she sings. Despite these grammatical choices, though, SteelNeko displays a firm

grasp of each character's mode of speaking, which the author demonstrates most clearly

in the following exchange:

"What is buried there?" Ophelia asked, the curiosity bubbling up in

her. "No one will tell me."

The gravedigger smiled, revealing his yellowed and crocked [sic]

teeth. "A bagpipe."

Ophelia completely wasn't expecting that answer. "A bagpipe?"

"Oh yes." The gravedigger nodded to emphasize his point. "Never

before has Elsinore seen such a windbag that whined so much with so

little to say. I doubt we ever will again."

SteelNeko has noticed that Ophelia speaks fewer and shorter lines than other characters

do when she is "sane," which linguistically disempowers her, and also that the

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gravediggers delight in humorous and morbid circumlocution (see especially I.ii and V.ii).

By using the language of the present day, SteelNeko renders these subtle elements of

characterization accessible to a modern reading audience. This tactic has a strong

following in the fanfiction world; modern-language stories that make no attempt to

imitate Elizabethan English constitute a full 70% of studied fanfics, and a further 15%

use Elizabethan English only for dialogue.

"Decay" illustrates the trend toward more recent language, but it also illustrates

fanfiction writers' strong tendency to make Shakespeare more familiar by writing in prose

rather than verse and dramatic format. Part of the "Jabberwocky"-like quality of

Shakespeare arises from the regular iambic cadence of most lines, which some readers

may find as intimidating as the relatively unfamiliar format of a script. Peggy O'Brien

notes a kind of reluctance toward or even prejudice against treating Shakespeare as a

performance text in the classroom; she considers this teaching method unfaithful to the

dramatic character of Shakespeare's plays. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that

students seldom learn to read plays at all in secondary-school English classrooms, and

that when they do, they are taught to read them as literature rather than performance; this

may impact young fanfiction writers' choice to avoid the script format. Tellingly, 65% of

analyzed works of fanfiction are written in prose rather than in verse or in script.

While language usage and writing style do help writers to place Shakespeare

within a familiar framework, some writers thrust Shakespeare's plays into a more

contemporary context through the Alternate Universe (AU). Just as Malacandra transfers

the politically-charged atmosphere of Ancient Rome into the more comfortable arena of

high school politics, Fae reconstitutes The Merchant of Venice in decidedly less

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comfortable Nazi Germany. For Shakespeare, the uneasy truce between the Venice

ghetto and Venice proper was one of the most current contexts for exploring anti-

Semitism; in our own historical context, as Efraim Sicher phrases it, a modern audience

"cannot but see in the degradation of Shakespeare's villain [Shylock] the despair of the

concentration camp victim" (59). Sicher also rightly notes that Nazis used many of the

same stereotypes of usury and bloodthirstiness that existed in Shakespeare's time. In

Fae's "I Stand Here for Law," transplanting The Merchant of Venice in Nazi Germany

produced a two-part result: it allowed her to place anti-Semitism into a referential

framework with which she was familiar, and it vividly demonstrated the ways in which

characters' biases could alter their reactions to one another. "I Stand Here for Law" has

some company in the world of fanfiction; 13% of studied fanfics transferred the events of

their source plays into the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

Although some writers make Shakespeare's work familiar by changing the context,

many writers simply refuse to take the man's work seriously—15% of studied

Shakespeare fanfics are outright parodies. Parodic fanfiction allows readers to laugh at

Shakespeare, knocking him down from the high-culture pedestal on which critics such as

Jenkins place him and making his plays a source of newfound popular entertainment. For

example, in a story ironically entitled "The Fantastically Awesome and Totally True

Account of Severall Episodes from the Life of William de la Pole, afterward the Fourth

Earl of Suffolk," author Roz McClure details a drink supposedly created by this minor

character in Henry V: "'The Harfleur': two parts champagne, one part brandy. Spit a

naked cherry upon a pick and dash it against the sides of the glass, meanwhile howling to

break the clouds as did the wives of Jewry at Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.

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Serve over ice." Through her use of over-the-top simile and her ironic juxtaposition of

cocktails and warfare, McClure invites her readers to view Henry V as a play with room

for hilarity as well as history. Perhaps more interestingly, parody often appears in other

types of familiarizing fanfics; Malacandra's high-school Caesar contains heavy elements

of parody, which make the summary more palatable to readers who have already

mastered the content of the play.

While these attempts to relocate Shakespeare in a familiar context have merit,

they complement efforts in the other direction: relocating fanfiction authors in

Shakespeare. Few writers choose to imitate Elizabethan grammar, measured verse, and

dramatic format at once; still fewer writers make those imitations over an extended

narrative, instead limiting their "Shakespearean" language to dialogue. However, several

fanfiction authors do try to imitate some of the characteristics of their source material.

Unfortunately, these authors do not always meet with success.

The most fundamental component of any work of literature is the words that the

author uses to craft meaning; indeed, Aristotle devoted several paragraphs of his Poetics

to the nature of words. Because words have such importance, The Penny Pen's

"Fortinbras's Soliloquy" and Soujin's Shakespeare fanfics have a distinct value as

exercises with Elizabethan language and grammar. In The Penny Pen's monologue,

Fortinbras addresses the crown of Denmark:

"Lo! the bloodied crown of tyrants and fiends. So

golden and bejeweled; thou hast been crafted as

if thou were made’st to be a star. How shall I

bear thee?" (Penny Pen)

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The Penny Pen does manage to catch the difference between subject and object in the

second person informal; the author, however, has an imperfect grasp of the conjugations

associated with each person. While one might successfully argue that Shakespeare

wreaked merry havoc on conjugation in the name of meter, the Pen has no such excuse.

Each line does have approximately five stresses, but each line also has a varying number

of unstressed syllables inconsistent with poetic alteration of syntax; Penny Pen appears to

have cut lines arbitrarily in order to make them look as though they are of similar lengths.

Penny Pen finally loses all but the general sense of the language later on in the

monologue: "'Twas it his [Hamlet's] compassion or damnation that / doth made thee a

burden?" Notably, though, this soliloquy represents Penny Pen's first published

experiment with imitative language; Soujin dedicated almost two years to imitating

Shakespeare's language, with far better results.

On her personal website, Quid Stellae Signant, Soujin first began posting fanfics

in contemporary language without dialogue in February of 2005. By May, though, she

had begun narrating dialogue without quotation marks, again using contemporary or at

least not visibly uncontemporary language. At last, in June, Soujin attempted

Shakespearean dialogue. Like Penny Pen, Soujin stumbled over "thou":

"Thou wert fighting with angels, my Lord." [said Horatio.]

"Horatio!" The Prince leapt to his feet imperiously, and looked

down at Horatio. "'Twas no angel!"

"Thou didst not see them," Horatio murmured, looking up. "Angels.

Couldst not see them? Neither could I, but—they were singing, in the

wind, my Lord." ("Tricks of the Wind")

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Here, Soujin's conjugation bests Penny Pen's, but she remains uncertain of when to use

"thou" versus "you"—although she establishes Horatio as a boy who speaks formally, and

although Horatio never uses "thou" to address Hamlet in the play, only Hamlet uses

"you" as a form of address in Soujin's story. By October of 2006, though, Soujin was

making careful use of the formal "you" in her story "Pretty Lady" in order to show a

formal distance between Much Ado about Nothing's Hero and Don John. Although

Soujin proposes a world in which the erstwhile ingénue and antagonist fall in love, Don

John "is not a lover … He will always be so terse and sharp." Therefore, it is fitting that

when Don John inquires about Hero's feelings for him, he asks, "What do you think of

me?" to which Hero respectfully replies, "You are my lord" (Soujin, "Pretty Lady").

Through the long process of working Shakespeare's language into her dialogue, Soujin

had learned to use that language to support her portrayals of the characters. Because

approximately 15% of studied Shakespeare fanfic writers use imitative language, further

study might reveal a similar progression in other habitual writers.

Imitating Shakespeare does not consist solely of memorizing one's "thees" and

"thous," though; format also plays an important role in conveying meaning. While a

majority of fanfic writers do prefer prose, one fifth of studied Shakespeare fanfics take

the form of scripts. Ironically, nearly all of these are posted on FanFiction.Net, the only

archive that outright bans the script format. Cassie Winchester's "Romeo and Juliet

Instant Messenger" does provide a glimpse of FanFiction.Net's rationale for this decision,

but on the other hand, Godsown's "Macbeth: A Better Choice" begins to utilize the

potential of dramatic literature. In Winchester's story, which she wrote to fulfill an

English assignment, she translates Romeo and Juliet into an electronic communication

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carried out via instant messaging services and cell phones. This story does serve as an

interesting exploration of both modernization and parody—of particular note is

Mercutio's disdain for Benevolio's persistent, correct grammar as opposed to the other

characters' Internet shorthand—but as a script, "Instant Messenger" does not make a

meaningful connection with the source text. At one point, OXcapulethoneyXO (Juliet)

asks Loverboy135 (Romeo), "ummm, BTW y r u IMing me when we’re across from each

other?"—in a blatant acknowledgment that this "script" does not lend itself well to

performance, Cassie Winchester's Romeo replies, "b/c it’s free. ur in my network, rite?"4

Although Godsown also wrote a script for an English assignment, he connects

more closely with the performative nature of Shakespeare's text. In "Macbeth: A Better

Choice," Godsown proposes an alternate ending for Macbeth by allowing his Macbeth to

consider and then reject his Lady's murderous plot in an aside. By using this technique,

Godsown acknowledges that Shakespeare's characters delivered asides in order to give

their audiences a glimpse into their thoughts. In the same way, he utilizes a kind of

dramatic irony very much in keeping with Shakespeare's own. Although Godsown's

characters have no way of knowing that the original Macduff first draws attention to

Duncan's murder by shouting, "Ring the alarm bell! Murder and treason!" (II.iii.55), his

reading audience noticed and commented that Godsown had ironically placed those

words in Macbeth's mouth. While Godsown employs far more stage directions than

Shakespeare ever did, he has nonetheless explored the plays as dramatic works by

imitating the dramatic format.

4 Translation: "Um, by the way, why are you instant-messaging me when we're across from each other?" "Because it's free. You're in my network, right?"

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As Cassie Winchester and Godsown illustrate, high school teachers have helped

to increase the overall use of fanfiction as an effective familiarizing agent. For example,

in "Shall We Bury Caesar or Praise Him?," Stacey Sklar recalls a lesson plan for

teaching Julius Caesar that adopted many of the strategies of familiarizing fanfiction.5

First, she asked her high-school students to ask their parents about assassinations that

they remembered, which placed the play's content into a recent context. Next, she

encouraged the students to perform a scene in a style of their choice—even encouraging a

"rap" delivery style which students might find more familiar than a standard reading (38).

These efforts bear shades of the modern-day alternate universe and contemporary

language usage. Some teachers, however, have outright encouraged their students to

write fanfiction to prove their reading comprehension; of the Shakespeare fanfics studied

on FanFiction.Net, 18% began as class assignments. The statistics suggest not only that

high school Shakespeare study connects with and inspires students, but also that teachers

are beginning to recognize familiarizing techniques such as fanfiction as a way for

students to connect with Shakespeare. This trend toward creative reinterpretation of texts

only underscores the necessity of understanding fan-created derivative fiction.

While teachers have warmed up to the familiarizing techniques of fanfiction,

writers and readers themselves remain divided on stylistic issues. Some writers idealize

imitative forms: a writer who uses the pseudonym "Sasha Ivanova" inserts an author's

note into one story to defend the imitative script form against FanFiction.Net's censors,

whereas interviewee Tom Manion claims that he does not write Shakespeare fanfiction

because he "feel[s] like it ought to be in [i]ambic [p]entameter, and [he] can't do that."

5 Sklar's approach, however, is far from faultless; she mistakenly claims that Julius Caesar proves problematic for students because present-day Americans know very little about "the history of Ancient Greece" (37).

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On the other hand, a writer who uses the pseudonym FrenchPea consciously chooses not

to imitate stylistic elements of Shakespeare. "[Romeo and Juliet i]s just a story!!"

exclaims FrenchPea in an author's note. These divided mindsets represent a psychic rift

in the fanfiction community; while all fanfiction writers acknowledge that they are not

Shakespeare—and often write disclaimers stating it outright—some writers feel

personally obliged to write as though they are. While this may appear to be a case of

"bardolatry," readers and writers must recognize that both conscious imitation and

conscious divergence can serve the same function: creating competence with

Shakespeare's plays. Furthermore, the very act of making a derivative work demonstrates

that the fanfic writer possesses both sufficient desire to connect with the source text and

sufficient irreverence to alter it. This irreverence actually expands on Erin Presley's

argument that "spirited play" is beginning to occur in the online Shakespeare academic

community; it indicates that even the lay readership has begun to de-sanctify and re-

popularize the mythologized "bard." That de-sanctification process can help to create

familiarity between twenty-first century readers and sixteenth-century texts.

Fanfiction does help writers become familiar with the source material. Fans

master the content of Shakespeare by transferring his plays to a modern way of speaking

or a modern context; they learn the nuances of how Shakespeare shapes meaning by

imitating his style. Once they have acquired the most essential building blocks of

Shakespeare's plays, fanfiction writers can then begin to build new, expansive additions

to the canon.

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Chapter Three

I thought Mercutio has a pretty clear personality, too. Then I started watching movies and listening to readings and such and discovered Mercutio can be interpreted convincingly as a queen, a raging schizophrenic, a boisterous young man, or most probably anything else along the line. - Sir Gawain of Camelot (penname)

Perhaps one of the most tantalizing pieces of Shakespeare lore is a set of three

words penned in 1598: "Loue labours wonne." These words have excited debate since

the mid-eighteenth century: was Love's Labors Won a sequel? An alternate name for an

extant play? A lost play that had nothing at all to do with Love's Labors Lost? Critics

such as Richard Farmer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and E.K. Chambers have theorized

that Love's Labors Won could be any work from Taming of the Shrew to All's Well That

Ends Well to Troilus and Cressida (Metz). However, perhaps the most creative

expansion upon the three words aired in the BBC television program Doctor Who. In the

episode "The Shakespeare Code," Doctor Who—an alien from the planet Gallifrey—

visits Shakespeare just before the first production of Love's Labors Won. Hidden amidst

Shakespeare's own words, though, is a verbal code that will trigger an alien invasion

(Roberts). While this television show represents an extreme form of expanding the text,

it nonetheless reveals some of the primary goals of expansive fanfiction: it departs from

the words that our culture possesses in order to go beyond the text, making it new and

strange.

While familiarity with Shakespeare does help readers to interact with the text's

content and style, over-familiarization can have a detrimental effect on any cognitive

process. For example, in a study on how humans use logic to make judgments on safety,

Stefano Occhipinti and Michael Siegal allude to the danger of over-familiarization. They

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explain that, in a situation for which people do not have a culturally pre-scripted set of

responses, individuals are more likely to use "cautious, material conditional" logic

(Occhipinti and Siegal 517). In this case, material conditional logic implies testing the

truth of the consequent of a logical statement, or more specifically, trying to discover

whether what is said to be true matches up with what truly is. This means that people are

more likely to ask probing questions, seek out new ways of answering questions, and

make individual judgments about how to respond to the new and unfamiliar stimulus.

Similarly, in studying Shakespeare, readers may be more inclined to test the validity of

their own views when they allow themselves to become unfamiliar with the texts that

they read. Fanfiction can help to make Shakespeare less familiar by allowing the readers

to test the limits of the text, creating documents that expand the purview of the plot and

provide room for them to experiment with their conclusions. A writer who calls herself

LillieOz explicitly connects this expansive technique with the character development

practiced by actors, claiming that "writing and reading fanfic is a way to do character

work [and] explore performance possibilities without actually performing or seeing a

show." Most frequently, these expansions take four forms: glimpses into characters'

minds, further narrative about minor characters, sequels and prequels to Shakespeare's

plays, and AUs.

Fanfic writers who explore characters' minds have a precedent in their source

plays; Shakespeare himself has provided the model with his characters' self-reflective

soliloquies. Just as Hamlet works through his sentiments on death in the ubiquitous "to

be or not to be" soliloquy, Horatio organizes his thoughts on Hamlet's death in

Missfortune's "Soliloquy of the Faithful." As Missfortune expands the text to locate

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Horatio's sentiments, she examines the elements of the play as Horatio might

retrospectively perceive them. The author attempts to negotiate a viable response to

Hamlet's often contradictory behavior toward Horatio; at times, the prince insists that he

wears Horatio in his "heart's core," and at other times, the faithful companion can only

utter a dutiful "Ay, my lord" as Hamlet waxes eloquent about another. To Missfortune,

the most probable response is jealousy and a sense of betrayal: her Horatio demands of

Hamlet, "Why have you forsaken me? … You would mourn poor Yorick but of Horatio

feel naught?" The choice of wording also has larger implications of betrayal; when

Horatio asks, "Why have you forsaken me?" he echoes Jesus on the cross, who was made

to suffer an unbearable agony in order to convey the message of God. Missfortune's

Horatio draws a parallel between the selfless suffering of Christ and his patient anguish,

and he likewise expresses the ultimate betrayal of knowing that his God-figure Hamlet

will not return to end the suffering. This incarnation of Horatio, though, has neither the

patience nor the selflessness to endure misery for another's sake. After his reproach of

Hamlet's neglect, Horatio in turn neglects Hamlet's injunction against suicide and stabs

himself with the poisoned sword that had taken Hamlet's life. By implication, this

portrayal suggests that Horatio's loyalty throughout the play has proceeded not from the

objective and unselfish fealty that one man feels for his "Lord," but from the affection of

a man who wishes to be worn in another's "heart of hearts." Therefore, in Missfortune's

depiction, Hamlet's order that Horatio subdue his emotions and serve as storyteller

became an invalidation of Horatio's emotionally-charged loyalty.

Missfortune is not alone in her efforts to expand the text with new character

monologues; 30% of the works in this study used first-person narrative to give voice to

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characters' fears, and desires, and motivations. Although the majority of these works

took the form of unconscious internal monologues, 30% of these first-person fanfics were

consciously performative: many included epistolary correspondence between characters,

and seven purported to be character diaries. Although the character monologue fanfic is

by no means exclusive to the Shakespeare fandom, many Shakespeare fanfic writers do

deviate from standard practice by labeling first-person monologues "soliloquies," as in

"Fortinbras's Soliloquy" and "Soliloquy of the Faithful." They have begun to redefine the

soliloquy in this way; they suggest that a soliloquy does not need to be performed in

order to share the character's thoughts in an intimate conversation with the audience-

reader, and that prose suffices as the soliloquy's locution. This labeling convention

further connects fanfiction's exploration of character mentality with Shakespeare's own,

suggesting that soliloquists consider their work a minor expansion on the text.

Horatio's soliloquy, however, not only allows further insight into a character's

mind; it also expands upon a secondary character who spends an entire act completely

absent. Fanfiction writers frequently devote attention to the narratives of the minor

characters, broadening their stories in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead fashion.

In "Apple Blossoms and Laurel Leaves," for example, Sister Coyote questions

Hippolyta's seeming acceptance of Theseus's suit in A Midsummer Night's Dream. By

arranging an extra-textual meeting between Hippolyta and Titania, Sister Coyote uses the

fairy queen to remind the duchess—and readers—that Hippolyta was born an Amazon,

and that unlike the lovers at the heart of the play, Hippolyta cannot be satisfied with a life

of domestic affection. This meeting shows a keen understanding of dramatic convention

as well as the Greek mythology on which Midsummer is loosely based; because

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Hippolyta and Titania are frequently double-cast, the encounter in "Apple Blossoms and

Laurel Leaves" represents a meeting between Hippolyta's courtly and wild selves, with

the wild self emerging triumphant.

It is difficult to quantify how many fanfics focus on minor characters, due

primarily to the shifting definitions of "minor" between plays. For example, although

Hamlet is unquestionably the main character in his play, one could classify Ophelia,

Polonius, Laertes, and Fortinbras as either main or secondary—in Fortinbras's case, even

tertiary—characters, with an array of named minor characters from Reynaldo to

Marcellus to Osric beneath them. In Othello, on the other hand, while Othello, Iago, and

Desdemona are unquestionably the main characters, and Roderigo and Cassio secondary,

Brabantio could be counted as a secondary or tertiary character depending upon whether

one uses influence or stage time as the determining factor. I have tried to use influence

on the plot, stage time, and present-day cast lists in conjunction in order to determine

which characters are "main" characters and which are supporting, eschewing the

secondary/tertiary debate entirely. Based on these criteria, 35% of studied fanfics focus

on minor characters. Fanfiction author Rebecca Maxfield explains the reason for both the

difficulty of classifying characters and the importance of exploring their narratives: "In

Shakespeare, nearly all the characters have some relation to the protagonist or main

plotline, but they don't all have their stories filled in." She implies that understanding and

expanding upon even the smallest of roles becomes essential to understanding the larger

whole, because Shakespeare interweaves his narrative so that minor relationships

between primary and tertiary characters have major impact.

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A convention related to minor character expansion is the insertion of characters so

minor that they did not, in fact, appear in the play at all. These characters are frequently

called "original characters" because the fanfic writer has invented them him- or herself,

and the tactic can succeed or fail based on the author's skill at inserting the original

person into a faithful rendering of the source. Thus, a piece of fanfiction that explores the

like of a scullery maid during Richard III may well serve as a valuable and enlightening

expansion upon the action of the play, especially if the author populates the story

primarily with the lower-class original characters with whom the maid might logically be

expected to interact in the context of the play. On the other hand, if the scullery maid

motivates Richard's meteoric rise to kingship, and if he promises her that she will be his

beautiful and well-educated queen and that they will rule together justly, this would

represent an unfaithful rendering of the source text—and, perhaps more crushingly,

fanfiction readers might term the haplessly perfect scullery maid a Mary Sue. Fanfiction

writers appear to judge an original character's merit based on the degree to which he or

she could plausibly enter the source text without disturbing the original narrative.

Efforts to add implied or missing monologues and minor-character narratives,

while significant as expansions of Shakespeare's text, seem small extrapolations when

compared with fanfiction sequels or prequels. Sequels, by far the more popular form of

narrative expansion, occasionally display cogent understanding of the unresolved

tensions within the plays. Such works include Arkaidy's series of Midsummer Night's

Dream sequels, entitled "Autumn," "Winter," and "Spring," in which she explores both

the fairy world's relationship to the human world and the long-term consequences of

enchanted love between unconsenting partners. Fairies need humans, in Arkaidy's

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version, because they once were human, and they lack the ability to generate anything

truly new. They must instead borrow and meddle as a way of reclaiming their lost

identities—and their meddling can have dangerous consequences. In the end of this

series, Helena seeks more fairy magic to maintain her husband's love, and Bottom dies at

an advanced age, still pining for Titania. By illustrating the insupportable nature of

artificially-imposed affection, Arkaidy takes the fairy deus ex machina to task and

ultimately denounces it as a heartless, both inhuman and unhuman means of supporting

the play. She demonstrates a thorough understanding of the logical and causal

progression of events within the play, and she adds further events to the chain in order to

expand that logic across the ensuing years.

Prequels, though, use the same expansive reasoning in order to project a causal

series of events backwards in time. In "And Having Sold Buyeth," Quillori expands

Antonio's melancholy in The Merchant of Venice into the recent past. Just as Michael

Radford grounds Shylock's experience of anti-Semitism in fact by depicting Antonio

spitting on him, Quillori establishes a supporting context for the play in her prequel. This

author embeds Antonio firmly within Venice's elite society, making him privy to

conversations about the health of the Doge and placing him at extravagant parties. This

contextualizing effort, though, serves only to heighten Antonio's sense of his own

displacement and estrangement among his mercantile peers; indeed, Antonio wonders as

his friends drag him into a political discussion, "[H]ow did he come to have such an

unreasonable number of friends?" (Quillori). His only solace is the more carefree

company of Bassanio, whose presence he so enjoys that he remarks, "I suppose I must

just accept that my only virtue lies in not thinking the pleasure of your company is

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something for which you yourself should be paying" (Quillori). In this prequel, Quillori

establishes Antonio's ever-increasing loans to Bassanio as his own attempt to lift himself

from the petty money-grubbing of the marketplace and into a mutually satisfying

camaraderie. Much of Merchant details what Antonio does for Bassanio; "And Having

Sold Buyeth" provides readers with a clearer idea of what Bassanio does for Antonio.

These exercises in expanding narrative logic have an especially strong

relationship to making Shakespeare unfamiliar; they work to test Shakespeare's premises

on increasingly distant ground from that occupied by the source text. The sequel and the

prequel together make up a third of studied fanfiction. A further 14% of fanfics, though,

reject even the narrative logic of the plays, altering the endings and events of the texts

themselves to create new narratives. Such fanfics exist in order to discover whether less

familiar endings are possible given the contexts and the characters involved. These

represent still another form of AU: the event-based alternate universe.

Earlier, we examined "Macbeth: A Better Choice" as an example of dramatic text;

this document also perfectly illustrates how the event-based AU can function in a play

heavily dependent on fate. Throughout this fanfic, Macbeth must constantly negotiate

between his fate on the play's terms—his fate to kill King Duncan—and his fate on the

Wyrd Sisters' considerably less specific terms. Banquo highlights the naked tension

between these two sorts of fates when he asks, "Now, good Macbeth, you are thane of

Glamis and Cawdor both. Dost thou not remember the third prophecy?" (Godsown).

Macbeth simply responds, "Ay, I do, my dear Banquo. But Cawdor was granted with no

action from me. Will not that last prophecy be fulfilled in kind?" Indeed, shortly after he

and Banquo have asserted their freedom from the play text, Macbeth discovers Donalbain

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in the act of murdering his brother and the king, and in the ensuing struggle, Donalbain

dies. With the entire royal family of Scotland dead, the thanes decide that Macbeth's

steadfast defense of the throne has earned that throne for him. Thus, the outcome of this

fanfic draws on both Macbeth's reluctance to kill the king and the nonspecific nature of

the witches' prophecy in order to create an equally plausible, logically consistent outcome

for what many critics consider an overdetermined play.

The AU can be the fanfic writer's most powerful tool for expanding,

defamiliarizing, and subsequently interrogating the text. While this type of story does

acknowledge its own divergence from canon, it does so by acknowledging canon's own

powerful debt to contingency. Had Macbeth chosen not to submit to his wife's

persuasion to regicide, perhaps Macbeth would have been a very different—and

substantially shorter—play. Therefore, AUs encourage readers to view the events of

even the most predetermined play as ultimately subject to contingency, character choice,

and authorial power.

In a sense, crossovers are also a variation on the AU. They combine two or more

canons to create a composite canon that contains characters and situations from each; for

instance, Romeo and Juliet and Titanic crossovers exist, as do Macbeth and Picture of

Dorian Gray crossovers. Within the Shakespeare fandom, though, crossovers between

Shakespeare's plays have the greatest potential to comment upon the action in the extant

text, simply because these crossovers comment on the action in two texts. These

crossovers explore how characters would act and interact in an entirely new context,

freed from the limitations of their own canons.

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One example of crossover fanfiction is Karla_Yonit's "Che nel pensier rinova la

paura," a Hamlet and King Lear crossover AU in which Hamlet arrives in England with

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, thirteen years after he had visited the land and met

Edmund there. In this story, Hamlet's narrative and Edmund's narrative intertwine:

Hamlet joins Edmund's efforts to repulse the French invasion, and their connected plots

highlight the similarities and differences between their source plays. In the world of King

Lear, Hamlet can become the bastard who shatters his family and shakes up the

household. Hamlet-with-Edmund can actively repel an army as he could not repel the

Norwegians; he can speak with a fool who can answer back, even if Lear's fool only

speaks in grim, sarcastic puns. When an English soldier saves Hamlet's life, and the

Dane recognizes that this deviates from the death that Claudius had scripted for him,

Hamlet "knows the man would have killed him, perhaps he did in another life, and he

cannot help but feel that there is a divinity that shapes a man's end" (Karla_Yonit).

However, in a startling twist of the narrative knife, Karla_Yonit snatches away both

Hamlet's agency and his divine aid to reveal that Edmund had slated Hamlet to die from

the moment his boat reached England—perhaps even from the moment when Hamlet

unwisely spoke to Edmund in a too-familiar manner, thirteen years ago. As Edmund cuts

Hamlet's throat, Hamlet realizes that while he remembered switching his false letter for

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's, the memory was only "a false memory" (Karla_Yonit).

This acknowledgment of Hamlet's malfunctioning mind brings the inter-play commentary

full circle; it identifies Hamlet more strongly with the mad King Lear than the pretended-

mad Edgar. These madmen, Karla_Yonit tells us, "maketh [their] own grave[s]" by

letting their madness dominate them. By placing Hamlet into the King Lear context,

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therefore, Karla_Yonit can make a host of comparisons and speculations that

meaningfully interrelate the two plays.

Fanfiction writers have varying perspectives on the value of expansive fanfiction.

Soujin prefers using this form to explore the boundaries to which she can push the play's

events without invalidating any of the text; she explains that "it was a challenge, to add

more [to Shakespeare's plays]—if that makes sense and doesn't sound too

presumptuous—without changing what already existed." Conversely, Rebecca Maxwell

enjoys using fanfiction to reshape the extant text and ultimately to push beyond it:

"I think in a sense there's a lot of freedom in writing fic for Shakespeare,

because the source material itself is so, well, formulaic; in tragedies

everyone dies and in comedies everyone except Antonio gets married, so

backstory and behind-the-scenes and AU are correspondingly more

interesting."

LillieOz, for whom fanfiction provides a unique opportunity to build character, explains

where the interest lies. "I like AUs (the 'what if so-and-so happened instead of such-and-

such' kind), seeing what the characters would do in different situations," she maintains.

Writing these stories allows her to access the character of the play without being limited

to the character of the author, and she can convey what she learns through what-if

exercises to her portrayal in performance. She learns which moments are fraught with

indecision, which events motivate a decision more toward one eventual outcome than

another, and why, in each separate case, the "formula" of Shakespeare works.

Fanfiction is in its element when it expands upon the events in the source text,

adding characterization to major and minor characters alike and projecting the narrative

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backwards and forwards in its timeline. By making the source play as unfamiliar as it is

familiar, expansive fanfiction encourages writers to think critically about how the author

interweaves character, plot, and motive. This careful attention to detail can be useful as

writers stray closer to the conventions of mainstream academic criticism.

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Chapter Four

The thing that's unique to Shakespearefic, I suppose, is the amount of criticism that's out there on Shakespeare already. - Kylee Adams

Antonio is secretly in love with Bassanio. In fact, The Merchant of Venice begins

with Antonio unable to come to terms with his unrequited love for the other man, and

over the course of the play, he finds his ardor frustrated at every turn. Even if Bassanio

returns his feelings, though, the young nobleman feels constrained to keep silent because

society has pressured him to marry. Eventually, Bassanio has to decide which he values

more: Antonio, or his own wife. While this scenario sounds like the summary for a slash

fic, Steve Patterson reminds us that it actually represents a dominant trend—what

Patterson calls a "modern cliché"—in criticism of Merchant of Venice (9). Fanfic writer

Kylee Adams articulates the connection between critical practice and fanfiction: "A lot of

those critics have the imagination of fic writers." More interestingly, fic writers often

have the imaginations of critics.

Although only a small percentage of the Shakespeare fandom participates in

mainstream academic discourse, the process of crafting a critical analysis bears a distinct

resemblance to the process of constructing fanfiction. In both cases, the writer must

prove a working knowledge of the source material as well as an interest in discovering its

outer limits; in both cases, the writer must understand cultural, interpersonal, and

contingent causation as they function within canon. Fanfiction can even propound and

support a thesis—defined in the MLA Handbook as the "answer to the central question or

problem [one has] raised"—although convention in the fanfiction community favors

implicit rather than explicit answers (Gibaldi 50). While previous fanfic examples have

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provided ample evidence of critical thinking, though, they do not illustrate the startling

degree of correspondence between mainstream schools of criticism and thematic schools

of fanfiction. Unfortunately, just as the diversity of critical perspectives defies the scope

of any one paper, so, too, does the diversity of critical works of fanfiction defy the scope

of this thesis. Therefore, with the caveat that many other perspectives exist, this

discussion will instead highlight only four critical readings and rewritings: the

gender/queer, the post-colonial, the deconstructionist, and the new historicist.

Queer Theory and Gender Studies

Queer theory and gender studies provide two useful but problematic models for

the interrogation of Shakespeare's plays, especially the comedies. Laurie Shannon

reminds us that Shakespeare's England often privileged same-sex affection or "amity"

over heterosexual marriage, giving that marriage an uneasy and subordinate place in the

"homonormative" culture of the day (1). In performance, though, the convention that

males played female roles created more nuanced forms of gender-subversive eroticism.

As Valerie Traub notes, male actors performing female roles who often in turn performed

male roles created a theatrical culture of fluid sexual identity, by which "homoerotic

energy is elicited, exchanged, negotiated, and displaced" (705). In this way, even the

comedic marriages of such cross-dressing characters as Rosalind and Viola become

"neither heterosexual nor homoerotic, but both heterosexual and homoerotic" (Traub 709).

By drawing attention to these complex constructions of gender and desire, gender-

focused and queer readings of Shakespeare's plays seek to understand the latticework of

normative and transgressive sexuality that underlies even the most conventional comedy.

In much the same way, the fanfiction subgenre of "slash" reconstructs homosocial

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relationships in the source text with a "homoerotic" twist (Jenkins 3). These fanfics

occasionally serve as pure, erotic wish-fulfillment for the predominantly female authors

(Jenkins 62), but often, a cogently-written piece of slash fanfiction can pry open the

anxious eroticism of a male/male or male/"male" relationship.6 One such work is "The

First Twelve," a fanfic by Thingswithwings that explores the gendered and re-gendered

erotics of Viola's relationships with Orsino and Olivia.

"The First Twelve" opens with an erotic misadventure that underscores Viola's

and Orsino's discomfort with their societally-prescribed gender roles. Indeed, in the

initial paragraph, Thingswithwings refers to neither participant by name; they are only

"him" and "her," a pair of gendered entities engaged more in awkward conflict than in

romance: "he pokes her in the eye with his thumb (trying to gently brush her hair out of

the way), she knees him in the balls (trying to sweetly slide her leg against his), and they

manage, via team effort, to roll somewhat vigorously off the bed." Even when the

married pair manages a less brawling love, the awkwardness remains; they "move gently,

slowly, softly, carefully, delicately, cautiously, tenderly, and sensitively," with

"methodically" thrown in for good measure, for a total of nine adverbs and twenty-seven

syllables. Where the action of the play does not separate the lovers, the narrative voice

makes their relationship tedious both to live and to read. As "him" and "her," their

marriage appears doomed.

Fortunately for Viola and Orsino, Feste then arrives to remind them obliquely of

the socially-constructed nature of gender:

"My lord," he says, bowing ostentatiously to Orsino, then turning

and bowing to Viola. "My new-made lady."

6 Although female/female slash fanfiction exists, the male/male variety greatly outnumbers it.

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"I was a lady before I became his lady," Viola answers, playing

along.

"But he was your lord before he became your lord, and yet the

sense is different," Feste replies. (Thingswithwings)

Viola then has an opportunity to revisit her male identity—which, as Traub reminds us,

corresponds most neatly to the performer's true identity—by performing briefly as her

brother as a favor to Olivia. Viola assumes the garb of her masculine other self, and as

soon as she has done the last button, Thingswithwings refers to Viola as "he." Olivia

even assures Viola that, but for the lack of a penis, "You play the part of my husband

nearly perfectly" (Thingswithwings). Masculine and feminine identity become mere

costumes that Viola can don or discard at will, equally artificial and equally true: valid

because s/he performs in them and requiring no further validation. Armed with this

knowledge, Viola returns home to seduce his/her husband in the guise of Cesario.

A new gender identity marks a change for the better in Viola/Cesario's

relationship with Orsino. As two men who are simultaneously man and wife, they can

share in an idealized amity bond which heterosexual marriage does not threaten. Their

flirtations have more laughter than conflict; when Cesario teases that Orsino has missed

"his manly embrace," Orsino only laughs and calls him an "asshole" (Thingswithwings).

That they can tease each other also suggests that Viola and Orsino have found a way to

overcome amity's greatest threat to the ruling class: because amity requires "equality," a

ruler in a perfect friendship risks corruption (Shannon 128). Laurie Shannon warns that

the conventions of amity consider same-gendered friends "one person in two bodies," but

that a political leader must keep his body politic from other persons—lower-class

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persons—to avoid corruption (126). Because man and wife are two people in one legal

body, though, the friend-wife poses no threat, and Orsino can enjoy an equal friendship.

This equalizing of partners also evokes a trend that Anne Kustritz has noted in slash

fanfiction in other fandoms: the privileging of the "equal" same-gender relationship over

the "conquest"-centered different-gender relationship of the traditional romance narrative

(377). Viola's and Orsino's next erotic encounter contrasts sharply with the adverbial

mayhem of the first half of the story; it requires only three adjectives, and less than a fifth

as many syllables. This marked simplicity also characterizes the final line of the fic: "On

their twelfth night of marriage, Viola and Orsino call for a tailor" (Thingswithwings).

This work of fanfiction carefully critiques the gender model of the traditional

comedy, which sets male friendship at odds with male/female marriage. In Viola, who

embodies both man and woman, Orsino finds simultaneous satisfaction of his

heteronormative need for a marital partner and his homosocial and even homoerotic need

for a male companion. Thingswithwing's fanfic demonstrates that, far from eradicating

"postmarital male homoerotic desire," Viola's and Orsino's union may actually allow it to

flourish (DiGangi 271).

Postcolonial Criticism

Postcolonial criticism has its origins in the responses of subaltern groups to a

dominant, hegemonic culture: the reaction of the colonized to the cultural oppression of

the colonizer. Shakespeare proves a fit subject for postcolonial consideration, not only

because several of his plays—The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest in

particular—address conflicts between dominant and subject peoples, but also because the

English colonial machine has used Shakespeare's plays as agents of acculturation

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(McDonald, "Postcolonial" 777). The Tempest, in particular, illustrates the uneasy

relationship of dependence and fear upon which colonial powers construct their

dominance. The play both acknowledges Propero's claim to the island that he rules and

undermines that claim; it illustrates both that Prospero cannot trust the inferior morals of

accused-rapist Caliban, and also that Prospero's aristocratic helplessness leaves him

"completely dependent" upon native labor (Barker and Hulme 787). The play does

ultimately restore Prospero to his "rightful" dukedom and displays Caliban as a drunk and

ineffective insurrectionist. However, as Prospero leaves the stage, he delivers what might

as easily be a postcolonial plea for clemency from the formerly-enslaved Ariel as an

address to the audience: "Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project

fails … As you from crimes would pardon’d be, / Let your indulgence set me free"

(V.i.365-6, 373-4). For all of these reasons, Thomas Cartelli explains, The Tempest has

such an archetypical construction as a work of colonialist literature that a "critical

practice of applying Tempest paradigms to postcolonial literature" has begun to emerge

(84). In the same way, Koanju applies postcolonial paradigms to the Tempest in the

fanfic "Stymied in Rock."

The fanfic "Stymied in Rock," which spans a mere 385 words, retells Prospero's

account of the crudeness and lechery of Caliban from Caliban's own perspective. In an

implicit but clear reference to the "Indian"-encounter narratives of Christopher Columbus

and John Smith, with their delineations of the gifts and aid that Native Americans gave,

Koanju explains that Caliban "had helped [Prospero and Miranda], shown them his

shelter and his food, given them the gifts of grain and wood." Koanju also creates a

belief system for Caliban that centers around the freely available bounty of the "Divine

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Tree" in which Ariel dwells as a captive. However, the interloper Prospero claims sole

ownership over the tree and enslaves its spirit. This blatant appropriation of Caliban's

property, though, does not prove sufficient for Prospero; he also works with Miranda to

strip Caliban of his culture.

Miranda's efforts to acculturate Caliban to a European mode take a less

domineering form than her father's. She offers Caliban fine clothing, which he wears

although he considers it impractical; "The clothing was his prize," he decides, "because

they came from her" (Koanju). Prospero, on the other hand, considers the bond

developing between the native and his daughter a dangerous one. To prevent their

fledgling affection from growing into full-fledged miscegenation, he tells Miranda that

"Caliban was evil and low" and drives Caliban from the land of his birth. In a covert

reference to the traumatic Christianization process, Prospero then proclaims, "'You are a

creature of Earth and lesser than human,' … in a booming voice that scared Caliban, as

though the blue sky was speaking from above" (Koanju). Not only do Miranda and

Prospero give Caliban a new culture, though; they also give him a fixed role within it.

This role, Koanju implies, is a subordinate one at odds with Caliban's innate

humanity. The author establishes from the very beginning that she considers Caliban

more human than animal; her title draws from Caliban's accusation of Prospero: "here

you sty me / in this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me / The rest o'th'island"

(I.ii.344-6). Caliban insists that he has been "stied" like an animal, but Koanju lets him

be "stymied" like a man at his reduction to a penned beast. The dehumanizing

subjugation that Caliban experiences at Prospero's hands parallels the experience of

colonized people across the world: "[Caliban] only knew that the sorcerer was taking

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from him, taking and taking, taking and never giving anything back. He was forced to

sleep on the rocks across the island, forced to exchange the clothes the daughter had

given him for something else, something much rougher, forced to do labor for the

sorcerer" (Koanju). Broken by this ill-treatment, Caliban learns to idealize Miranda as

the paragon of all things beautiful—Miranda, an agent of European acculturation.

This fanfic addresses the very real concerns of subaltern groups across the world,

many of whom still face a cultural war of attrition that destroys their belief systems and

their rituals and replaces them with another culture's. Worse yet, the process of

subjugation causes these people to question their own humanity. In this succinct fic, the

author reinserts issues of counter-discourse, cultural and material appropriation, and fear

of racial mixing into the original text—interrogating it adroitly through a post-colonial

lens.

New Historicist Criticism

For the reader who seeks to put Shakespeare's plays into a historical and social

context, new historicist criticism provides an appropriate critical mindset. A new

historicist perspective favors understanding the exchange between cultural forces and

works of literature; just as a culture influences the literature its members produce, so, too,

does the literature articulate and alter that culture. As Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine

Gallagher explain it, the guiding principle of this critical lens "is to imagine that the

writers we love did not spring up from nowhere and that their achievements must draw

upon a whole life-world and that this life-world has undoubtedly left other traces of

itself" (12-13). New historicist readers of Shakespeare hunt for those other traces as

gateways into the text's meaning, ferreting out the philosophies and interpersonal rituals

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contemporary with Shakespeare to better recognize the plays' commentary on those

cultural elements. The Michael Radford adaptation of The Merchant of Venice took this

approach as it attempted to place the play in the Venice of the turn of the seventeenth

century; it included prefatory notes and DVD commentary which detailed the director's

choice to costume Shylock in the red cap of a Venetian Jew and to bare the breasts of the

prostitutes in the film. Similarly, Quillori's fanfic "And Having Sold Buyeth" uses

sectional epigraphs and political context in order to situate this version of Antonio in the

rhetorical culture of the early seventeenth century.

Quillori hints at this approach from the very beginning, opening the story with an

epigraph drawn from William of Apulia and Daniel Price. While William predates The

Merchant of Venice by a fair half a millennium, and Price's sermon postdates the play by

fewer than ten years, they nonetheless work together to ground the story in both a

location—Venice—and a time—the end of the sixteenth century. In the same way,

Quillori's subsequent epigraphs draw from contemporaneous sermons on marriage and

usury, the King James translation of the Bible, and sixteenth-century Italian poetry to

create a pastiche of artistic and religious voices influencing and influenced by The

Merchant of Venice. Indeed, some of these epigraph texts appear in full form in The

Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts, part of a series of supplements that Natasha

Korda calls "primarily new historicist in nature" (323). However, other epigraph texts do

not appear in this book, which suggests a coincidental rather than referential relationship.

The texts that Quillori chooses all make valuable points, as well, about the play.

For example by including quotations from Daniel Price's sermon "The Merchant"—"And

surely manie great wonders hath god made known unto men, in precious pearles," and

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"the kingdome of heauen is compared to a wise diligent, seeking, finding, buying, selling,

exchanging marchant"—Quillori highlights Merchant's frequent comparison of

interpersonal and spiritual comfort with material wealth. This gesture recalls the ever-

increasing rise of the capitalist economy during the period, as well as the growing

conflation of the pursuit of God and the pursuit of wealth in the era. By drawing out this

relationship between The Merchant of Venice and its historical context, Quillori suggests

that Antonio's merchant nature and his anti-Semitism have a deeper connection than his

own dislike of usury. God and mercantile success exist in harmony with one another;

therefore, by inference, to oppose the Christian God means to oppose a merchant's

material success. Without even mentioning Shylock, Quillori nonetheless weaves his

narrative into the subtext of her fic.

Shylock is not the only character who receives shorter shrift than he is due;

throughout the fic, Quillori frequently foregrounds Venice and backgrounds Antonio.

She opens the story with a sentence in which Antonio serves only as a hasty afterthought:

That afternoon the rain slanted down steadily, making all of

Venice grey, excepting only the canals themselves, the dark waterways

turned to streets of beaten silver as if by alchemy, an attractive effect to

which Antonio was oblivious as he hurried down the steps of the Rialto in

the direction of St Marks.

Antonio tumbles through the geography of canals and cathedrals to the Merceria, which

overflows with costermongers and shopkeepers to such an extent that it crowds him out

of the ensuing sentence and appends him to the last in the paragraph, as a mere fleeting

observer and impeded traveler. Even when Antonio reaches his appointment with the

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high-powered merchants of Venice and their aristocratic friends, their conversation

concerns only their fortunes in Mexico, Henry of Navarre's shows of contrition, and the

Doge's failing health. By relegating Antonio to the margins, Quillori indicates that the

act of being a public figure in Renaissance Venice could easily minimize a small-scale

merchant's sense of personal worth. "I never felt the dignity of the Republic was

enhanced by a doge who needed to be propped up," remarks one merchant; he adds, "I

grant old da Ponte looked quite proper, and sleeping through receptions may show

wisdom of a kind, but as Antonio ... where is Antonio?" (Quillori).

"Where is Antonio?" summarizes this tale neatly; Quillori subordinates the

character to the context. Antonio may venture opinions and perspectives on his Venice,

and that city has shaped his own view of the merchant's trade, but he constitutes only a

small part of a larger cultural picture—and he feels that marginalization keenly. As a

new historicist reading of a cultural context's impact on the narrative, "And Having Sold

Buyeth" gives readers an opportunity to explore Antonio's world as a familiar character

knows it.

Deconstructionist Criticism

Although deconstructionism has been a major critical movement in the twentieth

century, "some of its adherents ... object to the very notion that it can be described like

any other theoretical position, or discussed using the tools of analysis and logic" (Ellis

259). John Ellis nonetheless outlines the primary characteristic that he has observed in

practiced deconstructionism: an effort to subvert or undermine the overt, recognized

reading of a text by demonstrating how the text "says the opposite (or: also says the

opposite) of what it means to say" (262). The text can accomplish this feat by implying

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the gap between signifier (what is said) and signified (what is), and also by drawing

attention to the way that signifiers tend to denote the absence of what they signify

(McDonald, "Hamlet" 38). David McDonald uses these general techniques of

deconstructionist criticism in order to examine how Hamlet predicates its action upon a

present absence: the ghost as present absence of the old king, the court's lackeys as

present absences of Claudius, all of whom Hamlet faces in an attempt to reach the absent

signifieds that they represent. Moreover, McDonald examines how the absence of a

signified constantly provokes the need for signs—even if they are only "signifiers

signifying other signifiers"—in his analysis of the frequent calls for speech within the

play (43). In the same way, Ji deconstructs the interwoven signifiers of Hamlet in the

fanfic "Horatio on the Dignity of Man."

Ji opens the story with the word "You": a signifier for both the reader and Horatio,

doubling him/you as simultaneously the subjective discourser and the object of discourse.

This use of the second-person narrative disturbs the assumed bond between signifier and

signified; while some characteristics of "you" apply to both signifieds, others apply solely

to Horatio. While this doubling occurs in most second-person narratives, it nonetheless

bears exploration within this fic. "You" functions as an unstable indicator of identity, and

therefore, so does "him" when Ji asks, "But you have a life, surely, an independent

existence, apart from him? … pages in which you recognized something of this self

which you own, somewhere part-time, between the lines?" "You" signifies the reader

and Horatio, just as "him" signifies both Horatio and Hamlet; this pronoun slippage

doubles Horatio as internal subject and object, just as "you" took on those roles

externally. In this text, the différance or verbal deferral and differentiation is ironic; "you"

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and "he" attempt to define themselves in relation to and in opposition to each other, when

in fact they often duplicate one another instead. Through this verbal conflation of the

reader, Horatio, and Hamlet, Ji tacitly gives assent to McDonald's reading of Horatio "as

the [reappearance] of the absent Hamlet"—the storyteller who gives him presence in

absence—while at the same time drawing the present-but-absent audience in as a crucial

component of the signifying process (37). All three participants in this process must

negotiate sign and meaning in an attempt to reach the signified reality.

Unfortunately for those who seek the true signified, Ji also draws attention to both

the imperfect relationship between signifier and signified and the presence of absent

discourse. This author's Horatio, the "H-oratio" that McDonald had suggested would

speak the play back to a base state ripe for fresh deconstruction (51), attempts to report

Elsinore exactly as it exists to Hamlet. Horatio/you feel/s that "If Germany is not perfect,

then Denmark must be"; he/you require/s a perfect relationship between expressed and

extant reality (Ji). He/you at first attempt/s to "create ... catalogue Elsinore" by

developing a system of signifiers in exact correspondence to the events and locales of the

castle: "you will build a library of the mind. There will be little drawers with keys and

cards that say: pull here. And when you open a drawer, inside will be a room, just as he

left it; in that room, the room as it is now, without him" (Ji). Ji reveals this effort as a

twofold trap, though; not only does Horatio's/your extratextual existence undercut any

attempt at a complete textual representation of a location, the most present statements of

the fic prove dialogically absent. Horatio at one point meets Ophelia for dinner, and the

impolitic remarks that they refuse to say actually delineate their conversation:

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"This provides a framework for discourse, and in the end there is honesty

in it, because you know what you will not say, and you know that she

knows, and she knows what she will not say, and so on, and so the

unsayable becomes a bridge between you." (Ji)

The presently absent signifier indicates negation of the voiced signifiers via its present-

absence; paradoxically, what remains unsaid falls closer to the truth because it refuses to

create the gap between signifier and signified. Hamlet is fit for deconstruction because

this play cries out for speech; Ji implies that only a text that declines to construct

signifiers can escape deconstruction.

In a fanfic in which "you" like "the order, the structure of being. The established

conventions," the author deconstructs the very structure of identity and discourse in both

the play and the derivative. Even the trinary of "I/you/he" grows tangled, negotiating but

rejecting a différance as the persons refuse to differentiate; text cannot help to undo the

tangle, because signifiers cannot fully represent the extant world. Ji most blatantly

articulates this navigation and subversion of the verbal structures of the play in a

throwaway reference to the philosophy of winter frost. "Perhaps everything is together, a

pair of a pair of a pair," Ji writes; "Perhaps ideas flourish in reference. / And in

opposition." Just as words gain their only meaning in reference to and in opposition to

each other, so does this work of fanfiction gain meaning in derivation of and critical

conversation with Hamlet.

There are some major drawbacks to couching one's thesis in the implicit form that

fanfiction requires rather than the explicit form of the mainstream academic paper; the

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primary problem is that works of fanfiction seldom use citations to bolster their

arguments. The academic community upholds the citation as a gesture toward an extant

critical discourse, and it privileges forms of discussion that make this gesture. Because

fanfiction usually does not reference either secondary sources or primary sources beyond

the original source text, this critical community has difficulty making material

contributions to the legitimized discourse of academia.

Despite these drawbacks, as Cornel Sandvoss notes, "[f]an studies have … eroded

the boundaries between audiences and scholars, between fan and academic" (20). The

untrained reader has begun to take on the role of textual analyst, expressing that analysis

in a fictional mode. Although fanfiction does not cite sources, it does engage in a critical

discourse with its source texts; it analyzes the dominant themes of each work in relation

to its characterization, causation, and context. Moreover, writers of fanfiction often use

these critical thinking skills in order to develop subtle theses about the Shakespeare

canon. Like the academic theses of the Shakespeare scholastic community, the fanfiction

community's theses often break down into mainstream theoretical approaches. Also like

the scholastic community, fanfiction writers applaud or reject different critical

approaches through a system of community dialogue and peer review.

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Chapter Five

"You ingrates! I must punish everyone who makes a mockery of the great Willaim [sic] Shakespeare! Especially twelve-year-old girls who write about their crushes and claim it to be based on the story Romeo and Juliet." - Aayla

If Shakespeare knew how fanfic writers were using his work, claims Aayla, he

would be annoyed enough to rise from his grave. This is the premise of "Resting

Unpeacefully," a story in which a zombie Shakespeare visits the FanFiction.Net offices to

complain. He has two concerns, which he relates to the overwhelmed staffers: first, he

would like to see some higher-quality fanfiction—and none of that Shakespeare in Love

film rubbish—and second, he would like FanFiction.Net to classify fanfiction for his

works as play fanfic rather than book fanfic. Satisfied that his demands have been heard,

he then goes on to hunt down the bad fanfiction writers one by one (presumably, after he

had written a sharp note to the New York Times denouncing Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern Are Dead). Aayla's morbidly funny metafictional story, while insulting to

the fanfiction community on its surface, has nonetheless received six positive reviews

from FanFiction.Net's readers. This indicates not only that she was sufficiently

integrated into the community to mock it, but also that she has touched on a few broad

truths about the Shakespeare fanfiction world: it is a self-aware community of writers

who are also responsive readers, it identifies itself as a participant in the textual and

performative discourse of Shakespeare, and it knows a real stinker on sight.

Fanfiction builds a complex community centered around the participants' shared

familiarity with both Shakespeare and fanfiction. This community assumes audience

familiarity with Shakespeare's plays, but it also creates an environment free to reference

film, stage, and textual adaptations, as well as mainstream academic discourse and

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Shakespeare's own sources. Within the various communities associated with each

archive, a system of review and commentary allows personal interaction between fanfic

writers and readers, permitting fanfic writers to forge interpersonal bonds, request new

pieces of fanfiction, create collaborative works, and even determine what constitutes

"good" fanfiction.

As Aayla's fic suggests, Shakespeare fanfiction writers are usually aware that

their source material fits within a performance tradition. While FanFiction.Net still

categorizes Shakespeare fanfiction as "book"-based ("Books"), on August 4, 2003, Slash

Cotillion moved to redefine the works on its Shakespeare archive as "play"-based. In an

extension of this movement, many fanfiction writers have begun to identify their works

as based on individual performances of Shakespeare's plays rather than the plays

themselves. For example, an author who calls herself Liz Skywalker claims that her short

Hamlet poem "No More" was inspired not merely by Shakespeare, but specifically by

Ethan Hawke's portrayal of the Danish prince. Likewise, Piratemistress chose to situate

the Romeo/Mercutio slash story "Brawling Love" in Romeo+Juliet's Verona Beach,

rather than the Verona of Shakespeare's play. These references to multiple Shakespeares,

which implicitly validate performers' and directors' adaptive choices, square well with

Sheenagh Pugh's contention that fanfiction operates like different performances of a play.

Not only does every adaptation create a functionally discrete version of a play, it also

expands the definition of the play's "canon" for future adapters. For some Shakespeare

adaptation aficionados, this ever-expanding canon inspires them to become versed in the

adaptive history of the plays; LillieOz, an avid collector of Twelfth Night musicals, has

audio recordings of five such musicals and researches those that she does not own. While

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such efforts may appear obsessive or acquisitive, Times reviewer Benedict Nightingale

admits that he has seen forty Hamlets in performance and "reviewed 35 of them"; as stage

actors continue to perform Shakespeare's plays, the performative canon will continue to

expand for both theatre reviewers and the fanfiction-writing community.

While familiarity with the growing Shakespeare canon helps to situate fanfic in a

larger, performative discourse, many writers also work to expand the canon by

performing in Shakespeare's plays themselves. Often, fanfiction follows on the heels of

performance; for example, fanfiction-writer and roleplayer Snowyofthenight so enjoyed

playing Miranda that, once the play's run ended, she found herself missing the characters

that she and her co-stars had crafted. Therefore, she began to write Tempest fanfiction

and to roleplay Miranda in an online community in order to perpetuate their adaptation.

Like Snowy, Hana Li enjoyed the theatrical process, but for her, inspiration came from

the in-jokes of the "BakerShake" performance community. To immortalize the backstage

banter, she compiled the cast and crew's quips into yearly, much-anticipated trailers for

Cymbeline, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew. Such writers as

these indicate that the fanfiction community not only recognizes the performance

community's efforts, it contributes to the staging of Shakespeare and "re-performs" each

writer's own theatrical interpretation in a new venue.

Just as FanFicton.Net clings to a literary classification of Shakespeare, some

writers situate their works in textual or critical communities.7 As the wide array of

7 Although the term "textual community" usually has a religious connotation, Anne M. Blackburn's description of the "textual community" proves useful in widening the definition to include readers of fanfiction or published derivative fiction: "a group of individuals who think of themselves to at least some degree as a collective, who understand the world and their appropriate place within it in terms significantly influenced by their encounter with a shared set of written texts or oral teachings based on written texts, and who grant special status to literate interpreters of authoritative written texts." (12)

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published Shakespeare derivatives suggests—Overbooked provides John Updike's

Gertrude and Claudius, Elizabeth Nunez's Prospero's Daughter, and Alan Gordon's

Thirteenth Night: A Medieval Mystery as only a few examples—many writers take

advantage of Shakespeare's public-domain status to see their own narratives in print.

Works of fanfiction can also participate in peer-reviewed, legitimized forms of discourse;

one fanfic author claims that her poem about Ophelia was published in the University of

South Carolina's literary magazine (Lynch). While such writers place their works in

published textual communities, other writers create bonds between their own fanfiction

and more famous works through mimicry of other writers' titles, styles, or themes. In a

far-ranging display of intertextual performance, "The Secret Diary of Puck" not only

references A Midsummer Night's Dream, but also borrows its style from the "Very Secret

Diary" Lord of the Rings parodies written by Cassandra Claire. The "Very Secret

Diaries" have gained international Internet fame—a Google search for the term in

quotation marks reveals 19,800 results and a Wikipedia page—but the "VSDs"

themselves borrow their style from Bridget Jones's Diary. By extending a stylistic hand

toward the VSDs, "The Secret Diary of Puck" touches a network of interconnected

textual communities in other fandoms and in the published world.

Just as some works of fanfiction make subtle gestures toward a larger world of

textual discourse, a few notable works annotate their fanfiction as an overt gesture of

association with the critical discursive community. In "With No Less Terror Than the

Elements: Notes toward Uncovering Act IV, Scene ii of Richard II," their annotated,

homoerotic revision of Richard II, writers Commodorified and Angevin2 follow the story

itself with 2,143 words of critical footnotes. These notes run the gamut between

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quotations from the play with analytical glosses, references to early primary sources by

writers such as Holinshed and Froissart, application of Michel Foucault and Jonathan

Goldberg's theoretical frameworks of power and sexuality, allusions to various

productions of Shakespeare's plays, and a Monty Python reference for good measure.

"Because we are Serious Scholars," the authors claim in their introduction to the

footnotes, "[we] are therefore compelled to wear our methodology on our sleeves for fans

to peck at" (Angevin2 and Commodorified). This careful attention to detail helps to

situate these authors in relation to a critical discursive community—to say nothing of a

community of Monty Python fans.

As these collaborators' playful extratextual notes remind us, many of the most

valuable interactions in the world of fanfiction occur outside the stories themselves; these

interpersonal contacts can occur on discussion communities or in personally-run forums,

but they can also cross over into "the real world." Each fanfiction archive provides both

author contact information and a medium for personal communication, although on most

archives respondents are limited to response forms that generate left-justified "reviews"

or "comments." While FanFiction.Net also allows members to build communities with

discussion forums, the Shakespeare fandom has so far only used this option to discuss

favorite plays and solicit advice on writing like Shakespeare. Of all of the forums for

Shakespeare discussion, LiveJournal hosts the most active discussions. Because the

website allows respondents to create "comment threads" (see fig. 1) in which the

response forms automatically indent each new reply to a parent thread, discussion

participants can identify and respond to individual points in a discussion and thereby

create visually distinct conversations. Moreover, individuals who reply to comment

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threads also provide links to their personal journals with every response, further

personalizing the discussion. For these reasons, LiveJournal provides some of the most

detailed and lively conversations about fanfiction and Shakespeare, and these

conversations often result in "real-world" contact between members of the fanfiction

community.

Fig. 1. A comment thread; note the indented response to an individual comment.

On LiveJournal communities, individuals form relationships predicated on the

Shakespeare fandom, and in turn, participation in the Shakespeare fandom becomes

predicated on interpersonal relationships. The Shaksper_Random community, on which

Angevin2 and Commodorified posted their work, boasts 160 members and 141 distinct

discussion topics which break into over 2000 comments. Included in these threads are

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group laughter over parodic supply-lists for Macbeth productions, links to comics

depicting "King Lear as performed by dinosaurs," and discussions of which characters

deserve to be eaten by bears—all conversations more geared toward amusing other

participants than shedding light on Shakespeare's works. Just as these relationships

become a goal in and of themselves within the fandom, the deterioration of interpersonal

connections can also lead some participants to leave the fandom altogether. Soujin, who

had devoted so much time to mastering the conventions of writing Shakespeare,

ultimately "stopped [writing Shakespeare fanfiction] because … [her friend] Zara stopped

being around." She has since moved on to the Arthurian legend fandom, where she

devotes the same energy to learning the canon's conventions that she had once devoted to

the Shakespeare canon. These examples illustrate that personal connections are not only

an incidental product of fandom participation; they are an essential facet of it.

While topical conversations such as Shaksper_Random's have a place in the

community of the Shakespeare fandom, the community structure also lends itself to

collaborative production of fanfiction. In collaborative works, between two and several

dozen writers share inspiration for or even authorship of texts, which they craft through

extratextual conversations. Collaborative works tend to take one of three forms: requests

and challenges, co-authored works, and role-playing communities.

Requests and challenges are by far the most common form of collaborative

fanfiction; indeed, the request is the premise for the Yuletide fanfiction archive.

Although the term "request" can refer to a plea for any extant works based on a particular

premise, the terms "request" and "challenge" can also be used interchangeably to refer to

an indirect and inspirational rather than directly collaborative relationship between

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writers. When a reader or writer makes a request or issues a challenge, he or she

provides a very basic outline of a fanfic that he or she wants to read, and then one or

more authors use this outline to create a work of fanfiction. These outlines range from

the most basic—"Morning," or "something with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the

word 'Socrates'"—to elaborate setups that dictate characters, plot, and governing

assumptions. In one challenge of medium leniency, writer Saint_Kit requested a fic in

which "Tybalt and Mercutio discuss the rain, cats and dogs … must include: reference to

Reynard the Fox (story from which Tybalt the cat originated), kittens, a stable, jealousy,

rain." The degree of freedom that a prompt presents does not necessarily dictate the

likelihood that a writer will take an offered challenge; while this somewhat lenient

premise went unwritten, a writer did fulfill Saint_Kit's more complicated request for a

story in which Mercutio does not die in his duel with Tybalt, but instead goes to hide in

an abbey to recover from a wound, while Tybalt hunts down the priest who married

Romeo and Juliet. In a fandom where a significant proportion of fanfiction stems from

class assignments—nearly a full quarter, on FanFiction.Net—the prominence of

challenges should not be surprising. Challenges and requests such as these allow readers

to find stories that they like without writing them themselves, while they also provide

inspiration for writers who need prompting in order to create.

While digital muses help to stimulate production in the fanfic world, as Angevin2

and Commodorified demonstrate, fanfiction writers do at times collaborate intensively on

their works. Not only did they construct "With No Less Terror Than the Elements"

together, joking that they respectively comprised the "Bawdy Politic" and "Bawdy

Natural," they have also extended their co-writing efforts to a historical novel. Because

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fandom interactions are so often purely text-based, conducted via LiveJournal comment

thread or instant messaging programs such as AIM, authors such as these two women can

collaborate with relative ease. Unlike their predecessors in pre-digital eras, each writer

can instantaneously respond to or edit the other's work, creating a document that is as

much a dialogue between the writers as it is between the characters. In her case study of

a Lord of the Rings fanfiction community, Angela Thomas highlights this method of

cooperative creation and deems it one of the most distinct aspects of a functioning

fanfiction-writing community. Thomas uses another word for the process, though:

roleplaying.

Angela Thomas cites roleplaying, in which authors take on the personas of

distinct characters and act out their dialogue and actions, as a prominent collaborative

strategy. As common as roleplaying might be in communities such as the Lord of the

Rings fandom, this strategy has special significance in a fandom devoted to theatrical

works; fittingly, Shakespeare roleplaying games and characters abound. Fandom

roleplayers generally have one of two goals: either they are working to create a piece of

fanfiction with equal contributions from multiple participants, like Thomas's roleplayers,

or they are merely assuming character roles for their own enjoyment without the eventual

goal of distributing their playing logs in story form. Although hard data is difficult to

obtain in this circumstance, most people who identify as roleplayers appear to fit into the

latter category.

This form of roleplaying has also gained substantial popularity in the fandom. On

the LiveJournal web community, at least six distinct roleplaying communities contain

Shakespeare characters, ranging from the modern-day Hamlet alternate universe of

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Elsinore_XX to the multi-fandom literary roleplaying game Desperate Fans. In these

communities, writers take Shakespeare's characters from a specific point in their source

plays and introduce them into a context determined by the premise of the game. For

example, in Desperate Fans, the game centers around the Mansion, a building of

indeterminate temporal and spatial location. Characters simply appear there and begin to

interact with their surroundings; when Miranda of The Tempest appeared, her player

introduced her thus:

[A girl, younger than she looks and older than she seems. She takes in her

surroundings with undisguised wonder, her hands pressed to her heart. The

awe unflagging, she begins to explore, expressing no reservations about

touching, lifting, feeling everything she sees that is curious to her.]

Such games frequently tend toward the theatrical. As her introductory post demonstrates,

Miranda uses the brackets of stage directions to convey her actions, and other players

frequently call "Scene" like actors and directors to indicate that they consider a scene

between their characters complete. Roleplaying also serves two valuable purposes for

acting-inclined Shakespeare fans: first, it allows these fans to explore the characters in an

environment over which they have only partial control, and second, it lets them do so in

the company of other writers with the same interests and knowledge of source material.

This shared knowledge base also allows writers, readers, and roleplayers within

the fandom community to create an implicit set of standards for what constitutes a "good"

piece of fanfiction. While fanfiction writers do provide each other with friendly

commentary and criticism (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar), they can also respond with

effusive praise and offers of marriage or else with expletive-laden "flames." In order to

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determine how well or badly a work has succeeded, a helpful rule of thumb is to check

the number or the length of comments that it has received. On archives such as

FanFiction.Net, which forces readers to choose a fandom in which to read fic before

permitting access, it is not uncommon for a work to receive only one review; on the

Yuletide Archive, however, the practice of listing all works in all fandoms

simultaneously leads to more omnivorous reading practices, which results in a higher

review count—an average of eight reviews per work—overall. On all archives, though,

an above-average number of reviews or else a few lengthy reviews suggest that the story

has either gained acclaim or else received heavy condemnation. Because commenting

requires a time commitment in excess of the time committed to reading a work of

fanfiction, fic readers generally will not leave feedback unless they felt strongly about the

work or its author. But what elements generate these strong feelings? Reviews for two

works exemplify the characteristics that readers highlight as "bad" or "good" for both

fanfics and their authors.

In Indiana13's fanfic "Hamlet and Adalena," a fierce-tempered, golden-eyed,

well-educated woman comes to Elsinore and at first battles with and then captures the

heart of the Danish prince. As reviewer quamp pointed out in the second posted review

of the piece, this woman serves as a textbook example of the dreaded Mary Sue. They

are a relatively common phenomenon, despite the bad press; Mary Sues appear in around

13% of studied works. Reviewer Pierre Gringoire, though, provides insight as to what

makes a Mary Sue so heinous in his own 383-word response to "Hamlet and Adalena."

The primary problem with a Mary Sue, the reviewer explains, is that she warps canon in

order to serve the wish-fulfillment needs of the author rather than the source narrative.

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Pierre Gringoire therefore advises Indiana13 to "[f]ollow the action of the play ... The

play won't be stopped in its tracks just because Adalena is there. That's one of the tell tale

signs of a Mary Sue." Unwillingness to expand upon the canon in a meaningful way

therefore proves a major source of reader disdain.

Pierre Gringoire also draws imitative flaws to the writer's attention, questioning

her characterization of Hamlet in his interactions with Adalena. As the reviewer

interprets the prince's character, "Hamlet's a self-centered person who wouldn't care if

some court woman's brother passed away. He's got his own issues to deal with." While

other reviewers might instead argue that a tragic death would provide Hamlet with an

occasion for a grandiloquent soliloquy on the briefness of life, the thrust of Pierre

Gringoire's argument relates less to Indiana13's specific characterization than to a general

approach to characterization in fanfiction. In general, fanfic readers prefer stories that

interpret canon characters in a way that is—if not their personal interpretation—at least a

plausible interpretation based on the available canon. The same standard of plausibility

applies to imitation of Shakespeare's language. While one could debate whether Adelena

should use "you" or "thou" to speak to a man she does not respect, her mash-up of poetic

syntactical inversion and modern idiom merited comment. At the beginning of the fic,

Claudius entreated Hamlet to "Come you in!"; by the middle though, Gertrude was

muttering, "Too bad, Too bad." Pierre Gringoire also considered the language usage "too

bad," and counseled the writer, "Elizabethan talk? Not necessary. The only writer who

can pull that off without being pretentious or unintentionally humorous is William

Shakespeare." In other words, badly-imitated Shakespeare was less palatable than no

imitation at all. The general criteria for a bad Shakespeare fanfic, therefore, appear to be

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threefold: a bad fanfic impedes the canon narrative without good reason, it eschews

plausible imitation of canon character traits, and it hampers its own legibility through

botched imitation of canon language.

Although Pierre Gringoire's review provides an illustration of the fanfiction

community's standards for bad fanfiction, the thirty-one comments on Ellen Fremedon's

"Yule Morning, or, Malvolio's Revenge" provide a corresponding picture of the standards

for good fanfiction. This play-length fanfic, written in blank verse and imitative

Elizabethan English, speculates on how Malvolio could have attempted to fulfill his vow

to disrupt the happy couples at the end of Twelfth Night. Contrary to Pierre Gringoire's

contention that only Shakespeare can really write Shakespearean verse well, Gray

Cardinal waxed enthusiastic over this piece: "I have seen enough blank verse in my time

(and played at writing snippets of it just often enough) to know that however easy it may

look, it's fiendishly, diabolically difficult to pull off Shakespeearean [sic] pastiche in

practice. But this pulls it off ingeniously indeed." Other reviewers noted how carefully

Ellen Fremedon had drawn the styles of her puns from the text that she imitated, creating

believable Festian one-liners and making "the obligatory riff on 'nothing'" ("Comments").

Moreover, Teka Lynn praised the "entirely believable (and funny!) characterization" that

the author had employed, indicating that Ellen Fremedon had not overstepped the

boundaries of plausible characterization. Indeed, Askmehow exulted that the author had

"also allowed the characters' arcs to evolve to their logical conclusions beyond the

dictates of" the comedy genre into which Twelfth Night fit. In a fanfictional play in

which Sebastian runs off with Antonio, these comments are high praise indeed.

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Still more importantly, the readers considered "Yule Morning" not only a viable

but a necessary extension of canon. Just as "The First Twelve" explored the dangerous

but valid notion that all was not well between Illyria's sheets, "Yule Morning" drew

critical attention to what Rymenhild called "the Sebastian/Antonio undercurrents [and]

the queerness of Orsino and Viola's relationship." Vissy even went so far as to suggest

that the relationships in Twelfth Night had been so broken by mistaken identities and

hasty decisions—also two major plot points of "Yule Morning"—that the play actually

required "repairing." To Vissy, Ellen Fremedon's restoration of Antonio's and Sebastian's

love and her exploration of the relational triangle between Orsino, Viola, and Olivia

constituted "the real meaning of fanfictional fixer-uppery." For these readers, "Yule

Morning" is the ultimate "good" Shakespeare fanfic: it imitates the source in a skillful

rather than illegible manner, it characterizes plausibly, and it uses these tools to craft a

meaningful commentary on the themes and plot arcs of the play. As Nyssa23 said, such a

carefully-constructed sequel "is precisely what one wishes to find in fanfic—something

that could stand on its own."

Although well-executed pastiche does garner praise, fanfiction readers frequently

make their peace with Pierre Gringoire's candid assertion that only Shakespeare can

really write like Shakespeare, and they offer similar praise to less imitative works.

Soujin's "Tricks of the Wind" gained ten reviews, largely because of her distinctive

present-tense prose style, and many of them compare favorably to the reviews of "Yule

Morning." Said Miarr, "This is, bluntly, the most beautiful Shakespeare fanfiction I've

ever had the priviledge [sic] to read." Blademistress concurred, calling "Tricks of the

Wind" "the most beautiful Shakespeare" that she had ever read—indeed, reviewers use

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"beautiful" and synonyms for it nine times to describe the story. This praise of what

Soujin does uniquely, though, should not overshadow the equal accolades that she

receives for imitation. Dreadypoi approved of the character choices that Soujin has made,

dubbing them not only plausible but correct: "You've got everything right, from

Gertrude's pride to Horatio's quiet piety to Hamlet's fierce protectiveness sliding towards

madness." Liadlaith also found Soujin's imitation of Hamlet's wordplay convincing, even

though it took the form of prose rather than verse. While this discussion has earlier noted

a few errors in Soujin's conjugation, these do not impede readers' enjoyment of the piece

itself. Once again, the general principles of reviews apply; readers prefer plausible

imitations of plot, character, and language, and they will forgive purposive deviations.

While this analysis makes much of the interaction between readers and writers

and between members of reader communities, it does not take into account what may be

the largest single demographic in the Shakespeare fandom: the silent readers. Because

none of the studied archives track "hits," or number of times that someone accesses each

fic, the proportion of readership to reviewership is difficult to determine. When silent

readers reveal their presence, they refer to themselves as "lurkers," and they generally

cease lurking only when they sense the winding-down of a work or community that they

have been following. They usually hope that, by their intervention, the writer or

community will gain the necessary inspiration to continue. Apart from these

announcements, though, lurkers do not participate materially in the discourse on

Shakespeare fanfiction; even so, they must be considered members of the community

because they consume fanfiction and share in the community's expertise on the subject.

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Fanfiction writers may imitate, expand upon, and critique Shakespeare, but they

do not perform these actions in a vacuum. Within a vibrant discursive community,

fanfiction writers perform their texts onstage, in print, and online. They draw on other

works of theatre, works of fanfiction, and works of criticism, and they weave their

sources together with the encouragement, the inspiration, or even the help of fellow

writers. Most importantly, in a community united by its shared love of Shakespeare's

works and its shared openness to their reinterpretation, fanfiction writers can establish

their own standards for what fanfiction in its best form can be.

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Epilogue

Shakespeare derivatives have taken many forms over the centuries: adaptations,

rewritings, sequels, prequels, modern updates, plays, books, and films. In the past ten

years, though, the Internet has provided us with glimpses of the "offstage" versions of

these derivatives. In fanfiction communities, Shakespeare adapters work within the

framework of the fanfiction culture in order to post and critique their own derivative

fictions. Shakespeare fanfiction creates a medium that both validates individual readers'

responses and allows these readers to receive responses to their own interpretive works.

These readers-turned-writers adapt to a changing and expanding Shakespeare canon in

order to deliver personal and group insights on that canon; in that sense, their stories truly

are "transformative" works.

Although most fanfiction might not qualify as "good literature," the process of

crafting Shakespeare fanfiction nonetheless has valuable net effects. On the one hand,

writing Shakespeare fanfiction can serve a pedagogical purpose: writers must

demonstrate awareness of the source play's characters, themes, and manner of

communicating in order to create a successful fanfic. Therefore, writing fanfiction allows

writers to become familiar with the content and form of the plays. Perhaps more

importantly, though, writing and reading fanfiction fosters an awareness of Shakespeare's

plays as constructed narratives which depend on contingency to create a coherent plot.

By creating an expanded, auxiliary space in which readers can manipulate contingency,

fanfiction writers gain an increased appreciation of how destiny and consequence

function in Shakespeare's work. Fanfiction can also serve as both a form for conveying

critical readings of the text and an opening gambit that invites more detailed discussion.

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Because fanfiction is the province of people familiar with Shakespeare's work, it anchors

sprawling discursive communities in which participants work together to extract meaning

from both original texts and derivatives. Most importantly, though, writing fanfiction

forces readers to view Shakespeare afresh with every rereading, searching the text not for

the bare bones of meaning but for the points at which the narrative arc remains malleable.

While Shakespeare fanfiction can serve familiarizing, expansive, critical, and

community-building functions, these broad generalizations neglect more subtle functions

that each fanfic can perform. For this reason, both Shakespeare scholars and fanfiction

scholars should make a concerted effort to understand how Shakespeare fanfiction moves

between these two communities. For example, while scholars of Shakespeare might take

an interest in how "The First Twelve" responds to the problem of reconciling homosocial

amity and heterosexual marriage, scholars of fanfiction might instead question how this

piece responds to the panfandom trend toward feminizing one male participant in a slash

relationship (alluded to in Kustritz and Jenkins). Deeper analysis of individual works and

their context would create a more complete picture of how fanfiction operates.

In order to understand these complex responses, scholars should conduct case

studies of fanfiction writers. In other fandoms, case studies already offer more complete

pictures of fanfiction writers and their writing processes. For example, Angela Thomas

has worked intensively with members of the Lord of the Rings fandom to uncover how

community-building works in tandem with the creation of fanworks. Kelly Chandler-

Olcott and Donna Mahar have conducted a similar case study in anime (Japanese

animation) fandoms to explore multiliteracy learning styles in action in fan communities.

However, thus far, the Shakespeare fandom has not generated any major case studies. In

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order to learn how individual fanfic writers actually construct and workshop their work,

such case studies will prove invaluable.

While researchers are delving into the mind of the individual fanfiction writer,

they should also measure in concrete terms whether fanfiction and fandom participation

are effective pedagogical tools. Although some individuals show marked increases in

familiarity with the source plays as they become more heavily involved in the

Shakespeare fandom, these individual successes do not necessarily indicate a correlation

between writing fanfiction and comprehending Shakespeare. Because so many teachers

have begun to instruct their students to write Shakespeare fanfiction, researchers must

conduct controlled studies to compare the efficacy of this familiarization technique with

that of other study methods.

The responsibility for further study does not rest with researchers alone, though;

the Shakespeare fandom must also become a more self-reflective community. Despite

the thousands of extant Shakespeare fanfics, many newcomers to the fandom claim that

they had never imagined a Shakespeare fandom could exist. On panfandom discussion

communities, where participants comment on the nature of their interactions as fandom

consumers and as fanfiction writers and readers, the Shakespeare fandom never makes an

appearance. Even on discussion communities such as Shaksper_Random, the discussants

seldom reflect on their own roles in the expansion of the Shakespeare canon. Until the

fandom itself becomes more self-aware and self-reflective, it will not be able to

participate in the nascent discourse on Shakespeare fanfiction.

Finally, though, scholars should try to meet fanfiction on its own terms.

Fanfiction can be a revelatory commentary on a centuries-old play; it can also be a

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personal joke between the writer and a select group of readers, or even a titillating piece

of fluff fiction. It encompasses the full range of human reactions to a canon that daunts

and fascinates the reading and viewing audience. We should therefore read fanfiction not

as an "improbable fiction" but as the logical intersection of human curiosity and

creativity with an inspirational body of work.

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Appendix A

Unless otherwise cited, all definitions are the author's.

Alternate Universe (AU) — A deviation from the assumptions on which canon rests;

AUs generally take two forms. In the first form, the author alters the events of the

canon narrative; he or she explores, for example, what might have happened had

Romeo and Juliet survived. In the second form, the author transplants the entire

plotline into a new time period or physical location.

Canon — This term has been appropriated from literary and religious circles to refer to

the source material from which fanfiction draws; in the case of Shakespeare fanfic,

all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets constitute the "canon."

Crossover — A combination of characters and scenarios from two or more different

sources; crossovers may occur within the Shakespeare canon, but they may also

include outside elements; several crossovers combine Romeo and Juliet with

Titanic.

Fan, plural fans or fen — A participant in a particular fandom or fandoms

Fandom — A group of fans who participate in the fan culture for one specific media item,

as well as the productions of those fans (Kustritz 371); for example, "Shakespeare

fandom" refers not only to the fans of Shakespeare, but also to the full body of

Shakespeare fanfiction, fanart, and fan analysis.

Fanon — Something that most fans generally accept to be true, although debates or

differing portrayals do occur; for example, although canon suggests that Hamlet's

emotional crisis stems from numerous sources, in fanon, he has an Oedipal desire

to kill his father and marry his mother that makes him sympathize with Claudius.

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Gen — No romantic relationship

Het — See Pairing.

Mary Sue/Gary Stu — A perfect, "wish-fulfillment" original character who defeats all

evil and falls in love with the most attractive protagonist or reforms the antagonist

through affection; "Mary Sue is often the embodiment of the author" of the fic

(Byrd 58)

Original character — A character invented by the fanfic writer and placed within a

canon's context to interact with the canon characters.

Pairing (also, sometimes, ship, deriving from "relationship") — A romantic matchup

between two or more characters (Kustritz 379). Usually, authors designate these

relationships in the summaries of their stories with a / (for example,

Romeo/Juliet), although FanFiction.Net briefly forbid /s in story descriptions; in

this case, authors either implemented an x or a + (RomeoxJuliet, Romeo+Juliet)

or simply disregarded the lack of /s (RomeoJuliet).

Het — Heterosexual relationships

Slash — Homosexual relationships; these were originally the only relationships

described with the / character, leading to the name (Kustritz 372)

Poly — A polyamorous relationship, or a relationship with more than two people;

while these will occasionally include love triangles, "poly" usually refers

to multiple people involved in a mutually committed relationship

Poly — See Pairing.

Slash — See Pairing.

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Appendix B

FanFiction.Net

Slash Cotillion

Yuletide Treasure

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LiveJournal Community (Shakespeare140)

Personal Webpage (Quid Stellae Signant)

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Works Cited

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Pierre Gringoire. Review of Indiana13. "Hamlet and Adelena." FanFiction.Net. 19 Nov.

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Epilogue

Chandler-Olcott, Kelly, and Donna Mahar. "Adolescents' Anime-inspired 'Fanfictions':

An Exploration of Multiliteracies." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy

April 2003: 556-66. Academic Search Complete. 25 Feb. 2008

.

Kustritz, Anne. "Slashing the Romance Narrative." The Journal of American Culture

Sept. 2003: 371-84. Academic Search Complete. Marietta College, Marietta, OH.

1 Sept. 2007 .

Thomas, Angela. "Fan Fiction Online: Engagement, Critical Response, and Affective

Play through Writing." Australian Journal of Language & Literacy 29 (2006):

226-39. Academic Search Complete. 1 Feb. 2007 .

Appendix A

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JSTOR. 26 Jan. 2008 .

Kustritz, Anne. "Slashing the Romance Narrative." The Journal of American Culture

Sept. 2003: 371-84. Academic Search Complete. Marietta College, Marietta, OH.

1 Sept. 2007 .

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