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Comment by RheingoldRiver | Hacker News Reader

Is it an act of cultural vandalism to stage a modernized production of Shakespeare so that the audience can empathize with the plot & characters better?

Be angry at copyright, not at the decision to attempt to modernize a work of art; without copyright, both versions could be circulated concurrently (and of course this is why you see both traditional & modernized Shakespeare productions, unlike Broadway where every tour is authorized and a replica (some exceptions for school versions and such)). Art is a product of its times, and imo it's completely reasonable to want to update a version to what makes sense in the modern day and what children can now empathize with, and see themselves reflected in.

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It's one thing to advertise something as a modernized version and another to advertise it as the original work of the authors. Isn't it worth preserving how things were in the past? If not how will we understand where we came from? How will we know how to learn from mistakes if they're just erased?

That's an interesting point. I would agree that the attribution should clearly state "Revised in 2023 by Puffin" or something along these lines.

As for:

> Isn't it worth preserving how things were in the past?

Oh, yes, absolutely, and this is why archivists and librarians have such an important profession; and also why copyright law sucks so much. Do be angry at copyright law, don't be angry at the decision to modernize the texts.

"Why do we lie to children in the places and times we do" is its own fascinating topic, but are we expecting anyone encountering Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for the first time to be reading it through a lens of "how things were in the past" lens?

I'm not sure. Bright children might indeed notice some things and ask questions about them. My childrens' first encounter with Matilda was via me reading it to them, at the ready for any questions they might have had, and also (great nerd that I am) probably trying to provoke questions and answer ones that were never asked.

This is a difficult topic. It's complicated.

>Be angry at copyright...

Yes---while it's tempting to think of a particularly popular and beloved work of art or literature as part of some shared communal heritage, the reality of our legal system is that such works are private property unless they pass into the public domain.

In real property, there is the idea of legally declaring property as a historical site as a way to limit the private owner's rights when there is a strong community interest in the property. No such concept exists in copyright law.

Yep. I read a blog post once about how the Marvel Cinematic Universe ought to be the shared collective "mythology" of American society the way ancient Greek myths (Zeus, Hera, etc) existed. But, it can't be, it never can be, it never will be, because of copyright. No one gets to publish their own stories about Iron Man and Captain America.

Regardless of your opinions about the MCU and whether you actually feel this is part of your culture or whether you'd like it to be, I think this point is very salient. We're deprived of a collective mythos because of IP law.

We can just create a different collective mythos around characters not protected by copyright law. Like "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters".

I think the 80's and 90's answer to this issue is to make their own expies (e.g. Homelanders, DC/Marvel mutually inspired characters, etc.)

Might be well and good to make open source characters? Licensed as public domains and able to be used by anyone?

> No one gets to publish their own stories about Iron Man and Captain America

Here are 49400 stories people have published set in the MCU [1]. 15600 include Captain America and 21400 include Iron Man. There's even 1300 where Captain America and Iron Man are in a romantic relationship with each other. This excludes stories that are crossovers between MCU and something else.

Here's another 397000 stories in the MCU (although there is probaby some overlap with the ones above) [2]. That list I've filtered down to stories that are in English and complete. 124000 include Captain America and 121000 include Iron Man. 67000 include them both. 24500 of them have those two in a romantic relationship

People seem to be doing fine at building a shared collective MCU mythology, and even taking it in some directions the Marvel would probably not approve of.

[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Avengers/?&srt=1&r=10

[2] https://archiveofourown.org/works?work_search%5Bsort_column%...

This is a good point. While fan fiction authors generally don't have a legal right to make derivative works, the copyright owner isn't obligated to sue them, either. This article is a good overview of the copyright issues around fan fiction: https://blog.jipel.law.nyu.edu/2021/04/is-fanfiction-legal/. It notes

"While on their face, these fanfiction communities may seem like harmless outlets for fans, existing copyright doctrine actually renders much of these works as infringements of copyright. The problem is that most fanfiction could be characterized as derivative works of other already existing original works, as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101."

Marvel clearly tolerates online fan fiction to an extent, but I imagine if someone tried to publish an illustrated anthology of Marvel fan fiction and sell it on Amazon, or make and release a film based on it, they would probably find the limit of that tolerance.

I’m pretty sure they can do under the banner of fan fiction if they don’t seek to profit off it.

One thing is making a Shakespeare play, another is changing a book. These are two different things, and theater directors are just doing that.

Given that, I agree with you about publishing houses and copyrighted literature.

> Be angry at copyright

But this isn't about copyright, they're changing it to appease to the woke authoritarian cult.

>Is it an act of cultural vandalism to stage a modernized production of Shakespeare so that the audience can empathize with the plot & characters better?

I'm a bit lost here - my experience with Shakespeare productions is that (whether they're staged in modern times or not) they generally don't change the language. Things like the Reduced Shakespeare Company notwithstanding, of course.

The irony here is that it's a redacted Shakespeare that gives us the root of "bowdlerization".

Ah, the language no. To me, that's enough to completely re-imagine the play though. I mean, they'll use guns instead of swords, talk to each other on cell phones, everyone is wearing suits, sometimes they're talking to a gaggle of reporters when giving the news to each other...it's a radically different experience if you see a modernized & traditional production of the same play.

I've seen many--and even performed in!--versions of Shakespearian works that did, in fact, change the language. (Hell: we had an R2 unit playing Polonius in our production of Hamlet on the Moon, so he was just out there beeping and blooping all of his ridiculously verbose advice.)

Why not just come up with a new story? It's definitely not Shakespeare's intended story any longer. Call it something new, perhaps with attribution to being inspired by the original story. There's no reason for that, other than it's too hard and therefore not profitable. Hence the bastardization of the past marches on.

It seems different to me to stage a revised version of a play for which one can still easily find an un-revised text. The same way one can cover a song in a unique style and not erase the original.

Is it an act of cultural vandalism to stage a modernized production of Shakespeare so that the audience can empathize with the plot & characters better

Yes, if "the audience" is a tiny population niche (but massively overrepresented in cultural and artistic power) of white, middle-class liberals (because it normally is) being offended on behalf of people they seem to feel need taking care of for whatever condescending and other psychological motivations that drive them.

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