I'm usually irritated by the people sneering about fanfic insisting it is just intrinsically inferior to early modern writers raiding Ovid or Chaucer or the news or each other or whomever. I've never seen anyone have a decent rationale beyond early modern writing is intrinsically Art and fanfic is intrinsically Not Art, because of reasons (the artistic purity of working within early modern patronage and censorship, I guess?).

I'm not talking Shakespeare specifically (though Lear <3). He was by no means alone in borrowing characters and plots from previous sources and then doing his own thing with them. A lot of my favorite plays of the time re-purpose established stories in this way.

But also, it comes around to kind of funny when people are not only insisting that fanfic is definitionally Not Art and in some way totally different from the usual kind of borrowing that goes back millennia, but also that fanfic is somehow morally degenerate and harmful and unhinged in a new and shocking way.

Because if early modern English literature is defined by anything, it's being absolutely fucking unhinged.

I mean! The Revenger's Tragedy?? The White Devil (borrowed directly from the murder headlines)??? My best beloved 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (pretty obviously a spin on Romeo and Juliet But Now With Incest and Even More Murder)? These things are batshit. And fantastic! I love them! But holding them up on some pedestal of artistic and moral purity is just bizarre IMO.

There are differences between what they did and contemporary fanfic because we live in different eras and cultures, in some ways radically so, because copyright and intellectual property work so differently now and have affected storytelling so much, because of the effects of things like genre romance and the Internet and AO3, because patronage and censorship now work very differently in a lot of ways, because educations and literary norms are so different, and so on.

But is fanfic in some way uniquely trashy and shocking by contrast to what those men were thinking up? Nah.