I want to add onto this because the way stories and adaptations work are SO cool, and I love seeing how different people interpret things, and it’s something that’s always happened when people are telling stories. The story changes as it’s told and retold because each person who hears the story interprets it a little differently. This is why so many myths and stories have so much drift, even when it’s not something that’s been codified. I remember standing in a bookstore and looking at the Magnus Chase books, and a man I didn’t know walked up and pointed to Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and told me “If you want to read some real myths, you should read that.” I was more amused than anything else, because there’s no one true version of stories that old. I mean, even more recently, if you look up Robin Hood stories, or even King Arthur, the retellings are all over the place. Is Mordred King Arthur’s nephew? Was Robin Hood a noble? Depends on who’s telling the story!

And one really good example of this is with Shakespeare’s plays. I took a class on staging them and the very first thing the professor told us was that “Shakespeare is a plural noun,” meaning that the plays have many contributors and, if you look at it a certain way, many authors. The First Folio, where we got a lot of the plays, was compiled after Shakespeare’s death. Two guys put together all the actors’ lines (each actor only got their lines and cues) into a book that people could buy. But even before that, actors would sometimes write down what they remembered of people’s lines and sell them. This, among other things, is why we have like five different versions of Hamlet, some of which tell pretty different stories. And this isn’t even considering that the plays were living works, in a way: the actors regularly improvised, and the lines changed a lot. We have two versions of King Lear, and from my understanding, it’s thought that this is because Shakespeare went back and changed the lines. Not to mention that printers made mistakes sometimes when reproducing the works, which led to more possible changes in the text.

(Going even further back, Shakespeare himself was adapting existing stories. King Lear is a retelling of an older tale, and Shakespeare completely changed the ending. I can’t think of other retellings off the top of my head, but I know at least one story he adapted appears in The Canterbury Tales (which also has people telling slightly different versions of known stories but I’m not gonna get into that. The Wife of Bath, anyone?)

And staging! There were no stage directions, which is why you sometimes see characters describing what’s going on (“Look! She moves!) to give actors instructions on what to do. Everything not in the text is up to the director (or, in a more traditional Early Modern troupe, the actors themselves) and the choices made in staging can completely change the meaning of a scene and the play overall. Characters’ tone, clothing, and movement alter the audience’s understanding of what’s going on. I remember hearing about one production of Hamlet where a lord took off his hat (as one would do for their ruler) in front of Hamlet, a tacit acknowledgement that he thought Hamlet had declared himself the king. That action gave us a different understanding of how the character was acting–since he took off his hat, we understand that he’s trying to play along with what he probably thinks is a mad prince. It’s not in the text, but it’s how that actor retold that story.

For a bigger example, the plot of Much Ado About Nothing involves a scene where a maid dresses up as her lady Hero (who’s engaged to Claudio) to meet another man. Things are set up so that Claudio sees the meeting and believes Hero is cheating on him. Most productions show this scene to the audience, maybe silently. Why? Because there are no lines for that scene. Because that scene isn’t in the text. It’s only spoken about, never shown. Showing the scene affects the audience’s understanding of what happens next–if the maid looked nothing like Hero, then Claudio is a jealous jerk eager for a reason to hate Hero. However, if the maid looks like Hero, then the audience might think Claudio is more justified, or at least sympathetic. They might see how he could be fooled. But not showing the scene means that the director doesn’t have to make the choice, and the audience’s interpretation of Claudio is more up to their personal feelings.

(And I remember a story I read in an anthropology course where an anthropologist was retelling Hamlet to a group of men in West Africa. Through the whole story, they corrected her telling and interpretation. They had a completely different understanding of what happened and why, due to the differences in culture. Hamlet was a very different story to them than it was to the anthropologist.)

I’m trying not to let this turn into a full essay, so I’m gonna try to wrap it up. Basically, with Shakespeare, pretty much everything is canon! Paulina in The Winter’s Tale being a witch is just as canon as Paulina not being a witch. Depends on what play you’re seeing! A lot of Shakespeare’s plays like to explore the relationship between what we see and what we think we see, and that’s a cool meta thing considering how his plays ended up! It’s all about what the audience understands! Recently I realized one of my own characters is a trans dude, and one of my friends informed me that she’d thought he was trans for a long time! Even if I’d never said anything, he would’ve still been trans in her head. People interpret stories based on how they read them, and everyone reads them differently. And that’s SO COOL.

TLDR: People’s interpretations and retellings of stories have always been a huge part of storytelling, and Shakespeare’s plays (and their origins and adaptations) make a pretty good case study. I love how every story is different to each person who experiences it.