"The Little Mermaid" was my favorite Disney film as a young girl. Little did I know at the time that its roots are based in Shakespeare's "The Tempest"!
I was reading a little bit about Shakespeare and his influence and presence in modern popular culture, and found an interesting passage in Shakespeare and Appropriation by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer: "By appropriating Shakespeare, "The Lion King" and "The Little Mermaid" - as films target at children, adolescents, and their parents - manage not just patterns of desire, but also cultural attitudes towards "growing up" and entering culture." (189)
The article goes on to cite several more instances of Shakespearean influence on Disney works, including "Aladdin" and "The Quest for Camelot."
According to Douglas Lanier's Shapespeare and Modern Popular Culture: "Popular culture is one of the forces that have produced the Shakespeare of out time, and studying its appropriations prompts us to turn our attention towards broad questions about Shakespeare's place, past, present, and future, in the politics of culture." (20)
Shakespeare has led to an offshoot of entertainment productions that have hints of, or even sometimes are entirely based off of his works. According to Lanier, " one of the more curious Shakespop phenomana of recent years has been the appearance of Shakespeare fan fiction." (82)
This type of appropriation by the masses shows that Shakespeare is not only a writer for scholars to admire, but also for the masses to enjoy. "Claims that Shakespeare is a source or analogue for popular culture do more than merely establish a dialogue between specific pop and Shakespearean works. They have also become a way of defending the value of popular sulture in general, of suggesting its cultural importance, its worthiness of close study, its artistic value. Idetifying Shakespearian elements in pop culture . . . asserts the fundamental continuity between high and popular culture." (Lanier 95)
As was asserted in Elizabeth Abele's "Whither Shakespop?" article and my previous post, Shakespeare has gone through a transformation: from entertainment for all types of people, to a scholarly pleasure, and is now coming to a hybridization of sorts, where the scholar and the casual consumer can enjoy the byproducts of Shakespeare's work, thereby bringing us closer to the Elizabethan popular culture view of Shakespeare; as a bard for both the rich and the poor.
