Retellings, Intertexts, Symbionts, Signifying, and Parodies: a few examples

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The Dover Bitch
A Criticism of Life (1967)

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc."
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.

 

Other examples of retellings
(and more? email me and let me know)

John Keats, "Lamia" and La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (poems) / A. S. Byatt, "A Lamia in the Cévennes" (short story)

Shakespeare, King Lear / Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (also film)

Romeo and Juliet / L. Bernstein, West Side Story; Jeanne Ray, Julie and Romeo (and several other films)

Hamlet / Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead

Macbeth / Akira Kurosawa, Throne of Blood

Henry IV, Part I / Gus Van Sant, My Own Private Idaho

The Tempest / John Fowles, The Magus . . . plus

W. H. Auden, "The Sea and the Mirror"
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day
Robert Browning, "Caliban on Setebos"
Aimé Cesairé, Une Tempete (A Tempest)
Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban
Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos
Forbidden Planet (sci-fi film)
Peter Greenaway, Prospero's Books (film)
The Taming of the Shrew / Five Things I Hate about You

Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus / Goethe, Faust; Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax; Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

Homer, The Iliad / Derek Walcott, Omeros; Ethan and Joel Cohen, O Brother Where Art Thou? (film)
The Odyssey / Jame Joyce, Ulysses

The Book of Genesis / John Milton, Paradise Lost

The Story of Noah, The Song of Songs / Geoffrey Chaucer, The Miller's Tale (in CT)

Beowulf / John Gardner, Grendel, Michael Creighton, Eaters of the Dead; The Thirteenth Warrior (film)

Malory, Morte Darthur / T. H. White, The Once and Future King . . .plus

Lerner & Lowe, Camelot (film)
Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (also film)
Alfred Tennyson, The Idylls of the King
Mary Stewart, the Merlin Trilogy [also dozens more films, books, poems]
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe / Michel Tournier, Friday
J. M. Coetzee, Foe
James Gould Cozzens, Castaway (film; plus other films)
Muriel Spark, Robinson

Samuel Richardson, Pamela / Henry Fielding, Shamela

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre / Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (also film)

R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / Valerie Martin, Mary Reilly (also film)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein / Brian Aldiss, Frankenstein Unbound
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (film) [and other films]

The Thousand and One Nights / Edgar Allen Poe, "The Thousand- and- Second Tale of Scheherazade"

Giacomo Puccini, "Madama Butterfly" / David Hwang, M. Butterfly (play)

Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven (film)

Pinocchio /Stephen Speilberg, AI (film)

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