azdak

I know I've missed the boat on this, but I've been away for a while and come back to the very tail end of the fanfic vs profic debate, and I cannot resist sticking my oar in on one tiny point. Over and over again I've read the claim that "Shakespeare wrote fanfic". People, he didn't. I don't care if he based some of his plays on historical or even literary works by other writers, because the important part of the word fanfic is not the "fic" it's the "fan". Drawing inspiration from other works isn't enough to make something fanfic. The crucial factor is that fanfic is written by fans for other fans – by and for people with a deep, perhaps even abiding, love for a created world or character(s). And that world, those characters, are recognisable to the reader. Fanfic draws on shared knowledge – it may subvert that knowledge, in the form of an AU or a missing scene or a reinterpretation of canonical events, but it doesn't work as fanfic without that shared knowledge. Please note that this says nothing about the quality of the writing, either of fanfic or of non-fanfic, but it does have a profound impact on form, because in fanfic the shared knowledge is left out – has to be left out, because who would bother to wade through a piece that tells you in detail who all the characters are? But Shakespeare doesn't assume that shared knowledge, let alone that shared affection for particular characters in his plays. Audiences didn't go to watch Macbeth because they'd loved Macbeth in Holinshed so much – hell, they didn't even go to see Henry V because they admired him as a historical figure. They went - hmm, Macbeth probably isn't such a stunningly good example here - because experience told them that Shakespeare could make a thunderingly good play out of the material. Drawing from other sources doesn't make a work fanfic, what makes it fanfic is the fannish element (for this reason I would also question whether even something like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead counts as fanfic, even though it uses characters that were created by someone else, – you don't got to see RaGaD because you love R&G so much that you want to imagine more about their lives, but because of the witty way Stoppard uses well-known minor characters to address certain philosophical issues. And the fact that they're minor is important here – lots of people have fallen in love with Hamlet, no-one ever thought much about R&G before Stoppard put them centre stage).