Mosquito in Amber
Every few years or so, a producer gets the compulsion to plunge a needle deep into the preserve of the Canon until it reaches the delicate corpse of a Shakespearean text.
The Shakespearean text, then, gets life after death; though, the life comes in the form of a clone whose alternate environment must shape its behavior attributes in a way quite different from its predecessor. Thus, with Shakespeare, we get 10 Things I Hate about You and The Lion King.
Despite it’s slightly reconfigured DNA, the “Shakespeare meme,” has done a remarkable job of proliferating and surviving. In some ways, one could say that it has become one of the most adaptable and persistent of the memes in our cultural history.
Blood sucking fiends. Or is the canon more like the mosquito that sucks the blood of our culture, thereby preserving our values in beliefs for later generations to replicate?
But has it done so on its own, or has it preserved and pilfered every so often through the convention of the canon?
Furthermore, how well might a meme (preserved in canonical amber) survive once cloned and introduced into an cultural environment altogether different from the environment that witnessed its initial prosperity?
Meme theory might ask: is “Shakespeare” the meme, or are his stories? The difference is between idolizing the Bard as a figure, and latching onto his narratives as an example of something deeper and more trasncendent. The latter puts us more into Joseph Campbell/C.G. Jung territory, but it could also serve as an explanation.