Not an expert on ye medeevles, but suspect he is RONG there too

[oursin]

If we see fanfic as "the reworking of another author's characters" then this form really only appears for the first time in history with the invention of legal authorship in the 18th century through copyright and intellectual property laws, after the invention of the printing press.

Er.

Greek drama? (a lot of which probably counts as 'Homer fanfic', no, by this definition?)

Even Shakespeare, did not own the stories in his plays. A patron would commission him to retell a story and he was paid in royalties.

Somehow this does not accord with my assumptions about the economics of writing for the theatre in the Jacobethan period... Plus, is there not a more interesting tale to be told about dramatists of that period riffing off other people's revenge tragedies, mashing up diverse elements (shine on, Cymbeline, that crazy diamond): see also, Restoration drama. (Oh gosh, and John Dennis and stealing his thunder!)

We think Mr Morrison (o dear, just look at his moody young man photo at the head of that article) is missing so many points that my Naked Hedgehog icon would probably be appropriate. Like, just how much story-telling is picking up stuff that's already there and reworking it and giving it a different spin and adding in something else.

Pretty much everything derives from something.

Comments

[legionseagle]

He's certainly wrong in attributing "the invention of legal authorship" to the Statute of Anne 1710 - there are concepts of (a relatively modern formulation of) copyright coming out of the Brehon laws of pre-Conquest Ireland and there's a statute from about 1420 in Venice; both of these and the Statute of Anne protect the economic interests in copyright. The concept of authorship is not necessarily or wholly identified with a concept of right to profit economically, and the droit d'auteur thinking which includes the right to be named as the author and not to have works wrongly attributable to one has a different pedigree.

Also, bollocks was Shakespeare paid in royalties. "Share of the gross" that is, box office receipts if the play was performed by his company, but bugger all if someone else went off and did it.
ETAAlso "It's tempting to get caught up in paradigm-shift apocalypticism" - tempting to whom, precisely, Mr Morrison?

[clanwilliam]

"To every cow its calf and to every book its copy".

Aka "why St Columba went to Iona".

[oursin]

See also, 'most postmodern and aesthetically bankrupt'.

Via Guardian comments

[mme_hardy]

The same author on ACTA. I'll be 5225.9 miles away waiting for your head to explode.

[sheenaghpugh]

I managed, unusually, to restrain my "someone is wrong on the internet: must comment" reaction, because he was wrong so many times, it was hard to know where to start.

[oursin]

Well, yes, one could spend a great deal of time and wear out a large number of fish.

[gillo]

He's talking bollocks. In any case, I'm not at all convinced the definition of fanfic is "the reworking of another author's characters" - it's more about playing in someone else's created universe. I've seen Middle Earth fanfic without a single Tolkien character, for example, but it's still in his universe.

As for the Shakespeare stuff, that's utter and complete garbage.

[dichroic]

He might be right, if he gets to make up his own definition of fanfic, and if it's something like "retelling stories or making up new ones with characters *legally owned* by someone else. But if it's just setting new stories (or retelling old ones) with existing universe or characters, then you don't even have to wait for Homer fanfic because Homer himself (and all his fellow dramatists) were retelling stories from existing myths and history.

[legionseagle]

As far as I can see he's screwed anyway, because he's not only having to make up his own definition of fanfic, he's making a statement which conflates "having copyright recognised as a property right" with "the concept of an individual authorship of a work being recognised" and it's just nonsense; everyone knew the Frogs was by Aristophanes whether or not he could sue if someone else put their name on the parchment.

[jesuswasbatman]

I thought that the point he was groping towards was that "fanfic" doesn't exist in any way separate from fiction in general until you get Romantic ideas of the author as lone creator of genius who has some kind of moral ownership over their characters and plots. Which in the UK tradition is legalised in terms of copyright as a property right, but isn't really the same thing.

I was more irritated by his weird combination of appreciation, prurience and moralistic revulsion about the sexuality of fanfic.

[legionseagle]

I thought that the point he was groping towards was that "fanfic" doesn't exist in any way separate from fiction in general until you get Romantic ideas of the author as lone creator of genius who has some kind of moral ownership over their characters and plots

Yes, but to do this he has to ignore several hundred if not a couple of thousand years of literary history; for example, the stories the individual pilgrims tell in The Canterbury Tales may (mostly) be based on the folkloric tradition which he's talking about, but that doesn't mean that "the Wife of Bath" becomes a character out of folk-lore as opposed to a character with a very clear genesis and authorship.

[liadnan]

Cervantes actually makes a joke about what looks like fanfic in the intro to Part II of Don Quixote (how Part I has been such a success that someone else has already written and published a sequel, and then how the books exist in the same world as the characters in them).

Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516) is quite explicitly a continuation of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (1495) and itself was followed by a work in the 1550s by one Laura Terracina and works of Lope de Vega at the very beginning of the 17th century (all of them specifically referring to and drawing on the plots and character traits of their predecessors, rather than being independent riffs off the Matter of France).

[oursin]

Also came to mind, the phenomenon well-documented by E S Turner in Boys Will Be Boys, whereby if one boys' paper had its Sexton Blake, all the others would have their Blake clones, with boy assistant (Blake's USP differentiating him from the original Holmes), and similarly their Greyfriars school chums imitation - and in several instances, these themselves evolved into independent and different mythoses (mythoi?) quite unlike the initiating one. (I have forgotten which one mashed up the two and had Blake-clone at Greyfriars-clone fighting crime among the schoolboy highjinx.)

Sexton Blake (and other series detectives) was written by many hands, some of whom became noted thriller writers, e.g. Leslie Charteris, and we do wonder if their series protags occasionally got to re-enact some plot originally devised for Blake.

[nineveh_uk]

A little later, but I am particularly fond of WM Thackeray's introduction to his Ivanhoe fanfic, Rebecca and Rowena, belonging to the genre now known as fix-it fic:

"My dear Rebecca, daughter of Isaac of York, has always, in my mind, been one of these; nor can I ever believe that such a woman, so admirable, so tender, so heroic, so beautiful, could disappear altogether before such another woman as Rowena, that vapid, flaxen-headed creature, who is, in my humble opinion, unworthy of Ivanhoe, and unworthy of her place as heroine. Had both of them got their rights, it ever seemed to me that Rebecca would have had the husband, and Rowena would have gone off to a convent and shut herself up, where I, for one, would never have taken the trouble of inquiring for her.

But after all she married Ivanhoe. What is to be done? There is no help for it. There it is in black and white at the end of the third volume of Sir Walter Scott's chronicler that the couple were joined together in matrimony. And must the Disinherited Knight, whose blood has been fired by the suns of Palestine, and whose heart has been warmed in the company of the tender and beautiful Rebecca, sit down contented for life by the side of such a frigid piece of propriety as that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena? Forbid it fate, forbid it poetical justice! There is a simple plan for setting matters right, and giving all parties their due, which is here submitted to the novel-reader. Ivanhoe's history must have had a continuation; and it is this which ensues."

It is without a doubt out of the same stable that kills of Ron and Ginny Weasley so that Harry and Hermione can live happily together.

[naryrising]

I think this post is apropos.

[oursin]

Indeed yes!

[legionseagle]

It's still propounding one of Morrison's central confusions, though. That is, if you take this paragraph here:

Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)

you'll see the author conflating lack of originality of plot with lack of original characters with lack of textual originality (or originality of treatment, if you prefer that). And the degree to which each was valued at any given time fluctuates, but it isn't a nil value. Here, for example, is a reproduction of the folio cover of Nahum Tate's King Lear of 1681 which is referred to as "Revived with alterations". Now, that's a clear acknowledgement (probably clearer than that given by Andrew Davies with his recent travesty of a South Riding) that this is a derivative work, and Tate isn't claiming to have gone back to Gerald of Wales or whoever did the original Lear (though actually the happy ending comes from there and the tragic ending is Shakespeare's innovation) but he's saying, "Here's this original work - by Shakespeare - and here's my adaptation of it."

[kindkit]

It entertains me that someone as obviously, hopelessly unable to punctuate as Mr. Morrison would choose to be snobbish about other people's writing.

[smw]

I'll be over here, chin propped on fist, wondering why folks think it takes so little research to understand the massive and multidimensional thing that is fanfic and the fan community.

[sartorias]

Wow, is this guy wrong.

Wotwotwot?

[mme_hardy]

"We should not consider EL James an author in the conventional sense for the same reasons that we wouldn't call someone from before the invention of copyright an author."

Re: Wotwotwot?

[legionseagle]

And he thinks copyright was invented in 1710. That's one huge step for literature.

Re: Wotwotwot?

[caulkhead]

I missed that gem. I think my head must have exploded before I got that far.

[angevin]

*tears hair* SHAKESPEARE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!

...seriously, while it is true that basically none of Shakespeare's plots are what modern people would call "original" -- there are only two plays that don't have an immediate source for their plots -- early modern playwrights wrote what they thought would sell to a mass audience. While theater companies did receive aristocratic patronage -- legally, it was required for companies to have the sponsorship of someone important -- and there are a couple of cases of Shakespeare taking on subject matter because of the interests of the monarch (assuming the story about Elizabeth requesting another Falstaff play is true) -- I'm not aware of any cases of aristocratic patrons intervening at that level.

Incidentally, Troilus and Cressida almost didn't appear in the 1623 Folio because of a copyright issue -- the compilers of the Folio had trouble getting the rights to it from the printers of the quarto. The rights seem to have been secured fairly late in the process; the play doesn't appear in the table of contents.

[legionseagle]

Deposit at Stationers' Hall and the complications of having to have publications (and definitely plays!) passed by Government censors are clearly wrinkles Morrison can't handle.

[cassandre]

There were no fans in the middle ages, and there were also no authors.

OH WHAT BOLLOCKS. Concepts of authorship in the Middle Ages are not identical to modern concepts of authorship. That doesn't mean there were no authors.

In England The Romance of the Rose was the paradigmatic example of the medieval form

Silly me! I thought the Romance of the Rose was written IN FRANCE, IN FRENCH.