Anghraine

Thank you! ngl I was very tempted to focus my research on adaptation through an early modern lens—less about how Shakespeare gets adapted and more about how he himself and many of his contemporaries adapted pre-existing works. Sometimes these new works might involve a change of medium or genre (poetry -> drama for instance) that resembles adaptation more than fic, but as far as I've seen, that kind of change wasn't valued in and of itself the way it sometimes now is or even particularly distinguished from the Leir -> Lear type.

Certainly people such as Shakespeare did invent their own characters/storylines sometimes—my feeling, though I haven't done enough research to be 100% sure, is that people were warier about doing this earlier on in this period. You can find early "Renaissance" dramatists apologizing for writing original plays rather than re-telling something already respected—but IMO this was, in general, not a fundamental distinguishing feature in the early modern understanding of genre. The organizational schema of literature was far more likely to be based on comedy vs tragedy (vs history) for drama, and types of verse and subject for poetry (like, a "Shakespeare original" sonnet vs his poem "Venus and Adonis" would be distinguished as love sonnet vs narrative poem, not original work vs Ovid fanfic).

It was just a very different literary culture from ours, and most literary cultures are in fact very different from each other, which is why attempts to generalize about fanfic being fundamentally this or that by nature of being derived from other narratives (rather than looking at the impact of contemporary cultural norms and the outsized effect of US copyright law) is so blatantly ahistorical and annoying as I see it.