Four Levels of Adapting Public Domain Works

How can you take public domain and make it your own?

Public domain can be a fraught situation to navigate, but it’s also worth looking into as you’re writing your own work. Below we’ll look at four different levels of adaptations of public domain work, with examples, so you can see what it looks like to adapt, reimagine, and take inspiration from previously published works.

Republish It

Public domain is public domain. You can use anything in the public domain, for free, without asking permission of the original publisher. This is how you end up with more than 10,000 options when you search Amazon for Pride and Prejudice.

When it comes to creative storytelling, though, this isn’t it. It’s great for, say, learning how to format a book in InDesign. But it isn’t writing a book, so we’ll leave that here.

The Pride & Prejudice & Zombies Treatment

This level of public domain adaptation is to keep the original text, but with insertions of your own. The most famous of these, I think, is Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, where the original text exists alongside the adapter’s additions of, well, zombies. Elizabeth Bennet retains her goal of marrying well, but has one more obstacle to overcome in reaching it.

Another kind of adaptation I would put at this level is writing an annotated version of a public domain work. This is fantastic if you are qualified to write an annotated edition of something, and might even be fun to write an annotated version that’s footnoted by a fictional narrator to change the book, but again, this isn’t really adapting the material so much as supplementing it.

Finally, movie adaptations of books fall into this category for me. From the BBC adaptations of classic Jane Austen works, to the 1993 Much Ado about Nothing that takes the text and cuts and rearranges it, to the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, to the 2020 Emma, these adaptations stay true to the material while adapting it for a new medium: in this case, film or television.

Adapt the Material with Changes

For me, this is where the majority of adaptations fall. They are clearly using the source material as scaffolding, but building it out in such a way that it is substantially different from the original.

With this creative freedom, we also see a lot of variation in what we can do with the source material. Let’s look at a few case studies.

Romeo & Juliet (1996)

This adaptation of Romeo & Juliet splits the difference between a standard adaptation and reimagining. It is unique in that it keeps the dialogue from Shakespeare, but it updates it to a modern setting. Swords become guns, and the director is liberal about changing where dialogue is set. We get swimming pool scenes and a lot sexier of a story than Shakespeare had, while still remaining true to the original dialogue and, thus, the cast of characters as well. The intense differences in the non-dialogue parts of this movie push it into this broader category of an adaptation with changes, for me.

On the far end of this spectrum of adaptation with changes, we have one of the greats in teen movies: Clueless.

Clueless (1995)

It’s almost impossible to tell from the trailer — which is, I think, part of its genius — but Clueless follows Jane Austen’s Emma almost beat for beat. There’s some updates and simplifications, but it’s one of the more flawless “contemporary” adaptations, I think. It leans in to the new setting and how the characters change there, becoming what critics have since called a time capsule of the essence of the 1990s.

Between the updated Romeo & Juliet that’s obvious about what parts of public domain it uses and Clueless’s scaffolding that’s really only there if you look lie a plethora of other adaptations. Just to keep on the 90s/early 00s teen movie road, we have 10 Things I Hate about You, She’s the Man, A Cinderella Story, and more that all rely on source material that’s changed to fit a new setting.

But there’s a level beyond this, too, that goes from keeping the plot and the characters to leaving behind the plot altogether. Let’s take a look.

Fanfic by Any Other Name

Okay, so hear me out as someone who got her start in writing with actual, online, community-based fanfic.

So much of modern entertainment comes from intellectual property, that is, IP. Some of it is still copyrighted and so it needs permission, but the whole of both the MCU and DC expanded universe is essentially sanctioned fanfiction. We have comics they’re based off of, and retellings that come into play with a new Spider-Man every few years. The stories contradict themselves at times, ret-con things, pretend others never happened.

In a lot of ways, superheroes are the twenty-first century’s Arthurian legends, and the Renaissance’s Bible. Personally? I think that’s pretty cool.

You’re using characters you didn’t invent to tell a story you did.

Because of public domain, there are sandboxes anyone can play in, if MCU superheroes themselves are still only allowed in sanctioned fanfic. But we have a horror film spinoff featuring Winnie the Pooh coming. There’s the spinoff from Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

I was about to use Maleficent as an example of Disney giving their own work the fanfic treatment. Then I remembered almost all of classic Disney is glorified fanfic — adaptations of public domain stories. Usually with sanitized endings.

Right there with Disney is Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose extensive collection of musicals, from Cats to Jesus Christ Superstar to Phantom of the Opera, to his newest Bad Cinderella, are all treatments of public domain works.

For a different look at combining IP (although, again, some of this had to be done with permission — Max Martin’s work is not public domain), the new musical &Juliet starts with a list of #1 hits, mashes them up with Shakespeare, and, from what I’ve heard, goes, “What if we make it queer instead?”

As for myself, I’ve found public domain a great place for ideas, even as they become more and more my own. From writing poems imitating public domain ones for my novel-in-verse, to asking “Who was the enchantress who cursed a prince into a beast,” to my 2022 NaNo project that uses Much Ado about Nothing as scaffolding, I find it’s a great way to get started with writing something original.

After all, as the saying attributed to Pablo Picasso goes,

Good artists copy; great artists steal.

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