One of my favorite Roxy Music songs is 1980’s “Same Old Scene” from their seventh album “Flesh + Blood” (1980). The specific reason I keep coming back to this more than their other songs is because I think the lyrics, “When I turn I the corner/I can’t believe/It’s still the same old movie/That’s haunting me” capture that gut wrenching feeling of realizing you can’t outrun the past, even if you try. 

I think that these lyrics can apply more broadly to our obsession of retelling the same stories over and over again, like they are a ghost haunting us. To quote another lyric from the song, “Trying to revive/The same old scene.”

Throughout human history, we can see instances of retellings of certain stories or themes. The oral tradition has forever been intertwined with storytelling. A group of friends sit around a campfire telling ghost stories that they have heard from their parents who heard it from theirs. 

Last semester, I took an English class where at the beginning of every class a student would come in with a ghost story that either happened to them or a family member.

The ancient Greek poet Homer’s epics “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” have their origins in being told orally. In my copy of Robert Fagles’ 1990’s translation of “The Iliad,” he gives insight into how he chose to approach translating the text.

Fagles writes in the Translator’s Note, “So the great translator of Homer, no doubt unknowingly, set at odds the claims of an oral tradition and those of a literary one, as we would call the two traditions now. Homer’s work is a performance, even in part a musical event.”

While doing background reading for this article, I came upon something written for the University of Chicago Library called “Homer Before Print” that documents how the journey the poems would have gone through to end up as the written word. It is from their 2014 exhibition titled, “Homer in Print: The Transmission and Reception of Homer’s Work.”

The section reads, “The texts—written on papyrus or parchment, and later on paper—were copied by scribes multiple times over the course of two millennia.The long journey from manuscript to printed book resulted in numerous losses and the introduction of many variations in the texts along the way, some accidental and others deliberate.”

There is a comfortability in retelling the same stories because we always know what will come next. We know who will save the princess and slay the dragon. With every retelling of Cinderella (and there are so many), she will always have the glass slipper fit, marry the prince and leave her evil stepmother and sisters. 

If you would like to know what my favorite retelling of Cinderella is, it is the 2008 version, appropriately named “Another Cinderella Story,” starring Selena Gomez and Drew Seeley.

The Bard himself, William Shakespeare, based his tragic tale of star-crossed lovers “Romeo and Juliet” (written between about 1594-1596) took inspiration from the narrative poem “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” (1562) by English Arthur Brooke. 

Brooke’s poem was a translation of the French story “Histoire troisième de deux Amants, dont l’un mourut de venin, l’autre de tristesse” by Pierre Boaistuau, which in itself was a translation of one of the stories from “Novelle” by Matteo Bandello.

Shakespeare in many of his plays utilizes mythology as inspiration because he would have been educated in the classics. The article “Introducing Shakespeare and Greek Myths: Theseus and Hippolyta” by Emma Poltrack from the Folger Shakespeare Library provides fascinating background information on what Shakespeare would have read.

Poltrack writes, “Scholars have identified Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The liues of the noble Grecians and Romanes, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Homer’s Iliad as among the likely sources of Shakespeare’s work. His classical education as a schoolboy would have further exposed him—like much of his audience—to stories of wayward gods, goddesses, nymphs, and heroes that could then be referenced to great poetic effect within the plays.”

Shakespeare plays are so universal in nature that each generation has retold them and we still connect to the characters and stories. There are the more faithful adaptations, such as 1968’s “Romeo and Juliet” and the modern retelling of “The Taming of the Shrew” in “10 Things I Hate About You” (1999).

My first real memory of watching anything Shakespeare related was the movie adaptation of “West Side Story” (1961). The first time I ever experienced a live Shakespeare play was the university’s theatre department’s version of “The Tempest.”

Jane Austen, like Shakespeare, still has had a grip on our pop culture. Her books are still adored by readers today and straight adaptations to the ones that modernize Austen work for a new audience who probably never thought to pick up one of her novels. 

“Clueless” (1995), the coming-of-age reimagining of Austen’s “Emma” (1815), is probably one of the most well known retellings of her work.

Retelling stories introduces the beloved classics to a new generation and brings us closer together as people.