As Thomas C. Foster stated before in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, there is only one real story. Everything else is just branching off of that one story. Apparently, everything is also just branching off of Shakespeare and the Bible as well.
Hundreds of stories, poems, books, plays, etc are incorporating ideas from Shakespeare and the Bible. Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth have been retold countless times in a number of different ways. Yes, each author adds her own variation or twist to the story so it is not exactly the same, but they are still copies of Shakespeare’s original. Same with the Bible. Religious images and themes are seen often in stories although sometimes they can be harder to find. If a reader is nonreligious or unfamiliar with the stories of the Bible, he may not be able to pick out the subtle references to Biblical tales. Sure, there are the easy ones like Adam and Eve and the story of Christ, but others may not be as obvious unless the reader really knows the Bible. What may seem like a regular story, of even a “quest”, could actually be suggesting a Bible story.
While I know Shakespeare and the Bible are incredibly well known and authors will occasionally allude to them, I still wonder- can’t they think of their own stories? Why are there so many novels and stories referring to Shakespeare’s works and the Bible? Maybe it is true that there is really only one story. And it keeps getting retold over and over and over…
In earlier generations, people were much more familiar with Shakespeare and the Bible than they are now. So writers who wrote for earlier audiences wrote with the confidence that a significant portion of their readership would recognize the subtle references, and would appreciate the latest "spin" on a familiar story.
Of course, Shakespeare adapted almost every one of his plays from existing material. And some of the stories in the Bible appear, in recognizable forms, in texts found in other cultures... the flood story is almost universal, for example.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at January 27, 2005 11:43 PM