A Shakespearean Cinematic Universe

Shared universes are all the rage in Hollywood these days. I’ll admit to being a huge Marvel fanboy (but then, I won a No-Prize as a kid, and have all the original issues of Not Brand Echh, so I was on board at Tony Stark’s ringtone).

But now everyone’s trying to build a multi-character franchise. The MCU. Universal’s Dark Universe (is that still happening?). Sony’s, uh, Venom-verse, I guess. And then there’s the (ahem) DCEU. Oh, but there Arrowverse is fun!

We all get why they do it. It’s the same reason comics do crossovers, and actors from one TV show have cameos on others. The producers are shouting, “Hey! You like this one thing? Here’s something kinda related to it! Like it too!”

Done right, it’s a natural sell. I’m not a huge Ant-Man fan, but I’ll go along with the fun heist flicks because, a) Paul Rudd, and b) they’re part of the MCU. Whereas if they weren’t, I might not go. Love Will Smith, but I skipped Suicide Squad entirely.

Now, franchises are nothing new. Basil Rathbone made 12 Sherlock Holmes movies, and there were 6 Thin Man films, let alone the Bond franchise. But everyone seems to think this “shared universe” idea is something new. It’s not.

Like everything else in modern storytelling, Shakespeare did it first, and better.

There’s a secret built into Shakespeare’s Italian plays. He gives hints at relationships between them all. In Romeo & Juliet, for example, there are two explicit references to The Taming Of The Shrew. After Romeo crashes the party in a mask, Capulet asks a relative when the last time they went masked to a party:

Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet;
For you and I are past our dancing days:
How long is ’ t now since last yourself and I
Were in a mask?

Second Capulet (sometimes Old Capulet) tells Cap it’s been thirty years since they crashed a party in masks. Cap disagrees:

What, man! ‘ tis not so much, ‘ tis not so much:
’Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio,
Come Pentecost as q uickly as it will,
Some five and twenty years; and then we mask’d.

So Capulet and Old Capulet were at Lucentio and Bianca’s wedding (which raises its own problem, seeing as those two were wed in secret). Then, as Romeo is being dragged…