I will probably use my dying breath to defend fanfiction.
That’s hyperbolic, but I do feel very strongly about fanfiction as a subversive space and as a legitimate literary genre.
For one, it’s been around in our literary history longer than it’s had a name. Much, if not all, of what we read and celebrate in Western canon is fanfiction. Paradise Lost is fanfiction. Dante’s Divine Comedy is fanfiction that references yet another fanfiction: Virgil’s Aeneid, which was fanfiction of The Iliad. Shakespeare’s plays are fanfiction—even RPF, in some cases.
Even Disney movies are fanfiction, in that they are retellings of fairy tales that are basically AUs in some cases. The Emmy Award-winning web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a Pride and Prejudice modern AU. Fanfiction is everywhere.
Secondly, modern fanfiction culture—fanfic that is written by fans and posted on the internet or in zines for other people’s free-of-cost consumption—is representative of how we’ve always shared and altered stories, and the genre has its own tropes and traditions, like every literary genre.
What makes fanfiction extra special is that it’s also subversive—it challenges capitalism and publishing norms and is a space where people can write themselves into stories produced by a culture whose mass media largely ignores marginalized identities. Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, once said, “Fan fiction [sic] is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk.”
I read somewhere that, way back at the beginning of the internet, fanfiction was called “speculative fiction.”[1] Whether or not that’s true, it is what fanfiction is all about: People speculating about familiar stories. “What would it be like if…?” “What if this character was…?” “What if instead they did…?” “What if they were FIREFIGHTERS IN SPACE?” “What if these characters, who are actually firefighters in space, were kindergarten teachers who fall in love?”
Books like The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes are kind of where those spaces—the historical appropriation of familiar stories in literary fiction and subversive reimaginings of the text in “fanfiction”—meet, to grand results.
The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet is a prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, given a queer twist. Hermes took Hamlet and asked, “What if everyone was bisexual?” and then UTTER GAYNESS ENSUED. It’s like Shakespeare in Love (1998) only GAY.
Ahem.
This is how folklore and storytelling works. We rewrite stories to fit what we need to examine about our culture now. And if we need to explore the identities and the natures of characters, relationships, and authors in our literary canon—who’s to stop us?
I mentioned the movie Shakespeare in Love. Like that movie, The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet recreates the identity of Shakespeare and the origin of his oeuvre. In this book, Horatio is the true identity of Shakespeare. There are references to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets everywhere in this novel, like little Easter eggs for attentive readers. But they serve a greater purpose than just being fun. Including them implies that Horatio will use these experiences in his work, which will later be known as Shakespeare’s work.
Mostly thanks to Lady Adriane. In an attempt to make him jealous, she creates a rival poet called “Will Shake-spear” and uses Horatio’s own poetry to provoke him. When he tries to catch her in bed with the rival poet, he thinks, “If, in the treasured peak of love, she were to cry the name of Will, would my name not, in that instant’s reckoning, in fact be Shake-spear’s? What’s in a name, I thought, but the intention with which it is spoken and the manner understood?” (282).
And Horatio will, in fact, be called “Shake-spear,” just like he prophesizes here.
In a more meta way, the actual identity of Shakespeare is unclear. All three of the main characters embody this identity at some point. Horatio is the literal poet, Adriane pretends to be the poet Shake-spear when she seduces Hamlet, and Horatio briefly mistakes Hamlet for Shake-spear by assuming that the rival poet is Adriane’s lover. It is implied that Adriane disseminates Horatio’s work at the end of the novel, when she tells his stories to her daughter (Horatio’s illegitimate child), so does that make her Shakespeare?
Either way, Horatio will live on—in his work or his daughter.
There is a lot about legacy in this book, and how stories are formed. Horatio himself recognizes that everything references everything else, when Adriane is praising his poetry:
“It surprised me to discover how seemingly disparate things were linked together in my mind. Sometimes she would be reminded of an image in a sonnet, or some similar turn of phrase in a seemingly unrelated poem. Or she would marvel at my knowledge of some obscure source, only to find the correlation pure coincidence. These odd juxtapositions had a certain poetry of their own, convincing me nothing in human memory was ever lost, but recurred again in unexpected ways, to astonish the world anew” (172).
Huh. Kind of like fanfiction. It’s almost as though fanfiction is just a continuation of the tradition of storytelling…
Horatio promises Hamlet that he’ll write Hamlet’s life story, so he’ll be remembered forever. And Hamlet, true to form, agonizes about how he’ll appear. At one point, he philosophizes about how histories are rewritten:
“You see, I have discovered the secret… Our past is ever being rewritten. In fact, it is the only thing about us that can be, you see? Our future is already set in stone, forever to be our present. We can only be truly alive now—in the past” (194).
This seems to foreshadow the way his story is inevitably going to be rewritten to something completely different. The story we know of Hamlet is nothing like the one Hermes summarizes for us in the epilogue—in which Hamlet lives a long life and has children. But it is implied in the end that Adriane pieces together a different story from Horatio’s poetry, and that is the story we know from Shakespeare’s play.
So this book is about two men who love each other, yes, and the obstacles to their love (Hamlet—Hamlet is the obstacle), as is tradition in fanfiction narratives, but it’s also about transformative storytelling—both within in the narrative and as part of its metanarrative commentary on fanfiction. All stories “recurred again in unexpected ways, to astonish the world anew.”
Shakespeare undeniably wrote fanfiction. And now people write fanfiction about Shakespeare, the same way Dante wrote fanfiction about Virgil (self-insert fanfic, no less!). And isn’t that amazing? Isn’t the way we tell and transform stories just awesome? Isn’t it cool how we can take stories and make them relevant to us and our experiences, and that’s always been part of our storytelling traditions? Isn’t it amazing how we can use this as a tool to understand our world and our place in it?
Humans are fascinating.
This book was fun. And, true to form for Shakespearean narratives, the language was fun. Horatio broke down words every once in a while to their linguistic origins—to an effect similar to what Lemony Snicket does—which was a fun reference to his identity as Shakespeare and the fact that Shakespeare’s English formed much of the English we know and love/hate today. There is a reason we teach Shakespeare in Western English classes. Shakespeare created a lot of neologisms that are just part of our normal speech today. His influence is everywhere in Western culture. It’s inescapable.
It’s in our fanfiction. And neither is going away any time soon.
Speaking of fanfiction, here’s a starter fanfic for you. You’re welcome.[2]
The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet was published in 2010. Here is Myrlin A. Hermes’s website. The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet and her other novel Careful What You Wish For are available for purchase. Support your local bookstore if you can, or visit your local library!
[^1] Really not sure where I read this. “Speculative fiction” has always meant “science fiction,” but for some reason, I swear I’ve seen this claim before.
[^2] LOL Got you. Can we call this “Groot Rolling”?
Further Reading
- The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction by Stephanie Burt
- Why we’re terrified of fanfiction by Constance Grady
- A guide to fanfiction for people who can’t stop getting it wrong by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and Aja Romano
- What a professor on Tumblr thinks about fanfiction
- Rebecca, Rowena, Puppies, Fanfic by Foz Meadows
- The Fanlore entry
- In TV’s Dull Summer Days, Plots Take Wing on the Net by Amy Harmon
