ABSTRACT
Adaptation and appropriation are dependent on the literary canon for the provision of a shared body of storylines, themes, characters, and ideas upon which their creative variations can be made. The spectator or reader must be able to participate in the play of similarity and difference perceived between the original, source, or inspiration to appreciate fully the reshaping or rewriting undertaken by the adaptive text. There are particular bodies of texts and source material, such as myth, fairy tale, and folklore which by their very nature depend on a communality of understanding. These forms and genres have cross-cultural, often crosshistorical, readerships; they are stories and tales which appear across the boundaries of cultural difference and which are handed on, albeit in transmuted and translated forms, through the generations. In this sense they participate in a very active way in a shared community of knowledge, and they have therefore proved particularly rich sources for adaptation and appropriation. The following two chapters will consider myth and fairy tale in greater detail, but before turning to them, it seems crucial for any historicized study of the adaptive process to touch base with the playwright whose oeuvre functions in a remarkably similar way to the communal, shared, transcultural, and transhistorical art forms of myth and fairy tale: William Shakespeare.
