Authors Intentions

Garreth said: >>I don't think shakespeare ever intended for his work to be "reinterpreted". ...Which is an interesting assumption, because a HUGE percentage of Shakespeare's work is material that HE himself had reinterpreted from other sources! With only a few exceptions, he did not invent the plots of his plays. Hamlet & Pericles were retellings of old stories; R&J, Othello, and Much Ado were retellings of contemporary Italian writers; As You Like It and Winter's Tale were play adaptations of contemporary prose stories. The Roman and the English history plays were interpretations taken from historical events (or rather, interpretations of other people's translations of historical events). Lear, Cymbaline and MacBeth were from legendary tales from remote history. Sometimes Shakespeare was writing a play based on other existing plays that had already covered the material...for instance, there was already a play about King Lear, and one about Henry V. And then, within the content of his plays, Shakespeare is consistantly referring to, paraphrasing, or sometimes directly quoting other people's work...from contemporaries like Christopher Marlowe, to poets like Homer and Ovid, to the writings by historians he had read, and of course, to the Bible. Today we think of Shakespeare mainly as an author, because his writings have survived and become a literary genre of their own, and we place them in our current paradigm of a 'script' that is written with the intention of others to produce. But in his own time, he should probably be considered more a 'Play Maker'. He was there, on the stage, creating the end product which would be viewed by a particular contemporary audience. He usually directed his own plays. In some cases, he took roles as an actor as well. His 'scripts' were nothing more than draft writings, simply a tool to be used in the production process, not intended as a piece of standalone work. Often actors were only given their individual parts. The 'scripts' that WERE collated into a single body were annotated with stage directions, edits, notes,...essentially a working prompt-script for the production. Nothing was really kept or published until years after his death, when the First Folios were collected and re-arranged into script form by publishers and drama historians...it's only then that such a thing as 'a Shakespeare script' could even be said to exist. In effect, Shakespeare was actually the production team, not the original author, and he was re-interpreting work that existed before, by turning it into drama. His use of dramatic writing and verse was a tool he used to help him reinterpret 'his version' of those stories. I would even suggest that, even though he knew his value as a writer, he held less regard for his 'scripts' than any of us do today. I believe he cared more about the end product, which was the collaboration between his actors, his words, his direction, and his audience. And this simply shows that it is OUR modern interpretation of 'what a script is' that has created what we 'think' Shakespeare intended. His actual intention is still clear...he intended to create plays. But you can see how we have re-interpreted the whole scenario by even including him in this argument about what a playwright IS, or intends. The message has been given meaning by those who read it. Cheers, Craig ~<8>-/====\---------