Works of literature do not necessarily finish with their final page — they can also have a life beyond it. Shakespeare’s plays frequently engage with issues of great interest in his time, but when we see the plays performed it is rarely as a period piece with actors in Elizabethan dress. Instead, the settings of the plays are generally updated to a different era or location. Often, they will be made relevant to the contemporary zeitgeist — a German word meaning ‘spirit of the times’. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1986 production of Henry V clearly referenced the Falklands War, while Ralph Fiennes’ film version of Coriolanus updates the play to a world of modern politics and warfare. In a similar manner, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary updates and references the work of another literary household name, Jane Austen. These are all instances of literature’s modified ‘cultural reception’ — a term often used to refer to the processes by which texts are acquired, referenced and reworked by other writers and readers, and how they can enter wider society and popular culture.
It is not just Shakespeare and Austen who are open to reinvention by popular culture. The afterlife of few literary characters has been as eventful as that of Count Dracula, and updates of Sherlock Holmes continue to illustrate our society’s fascination with crime and forensic science. But of all the literary characters to have entered the popular imagination, few can claim to be as enduring as that created by Ian Fleming.
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