Quote:
“There be some sports are painful, and their labour Delight in them sets off. Some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead And makes my labours pleasures.”
I am ALMOST done with my University studies... Just these last scraps of final work for my Advanced Studies in Shakespeare and that's it! We've done "The Tempest" and all it's major adaptations over the intervening years, for this course, and I've had so many revelations. For example...
Disney's "The Little Mermaid" is NOT just based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale, or the old Germanic fable that even his was based off. Instead, Disney has included several key points and parts of The Tempest to draw from for their more modern retelling... For example: Ariel (the mermaid in the original fable is not named Ariel) is the name of the WATER SPRITE/SPIRIT that the mage king Prospero works with. Prospero is essentially king Triton, as his teenage daughter DOES see and fall in love with the "human prince" (who is in The Tempest actually the prince song of the King who banished Prospero after usurping his throne) Ferdinand (not Eric, as in TLM) on first sight, much to her father's distress and rage. Eric/Ferdinand DOES then end up having to prove his love, but in The Tempest this is merely because of Prospero/Triton's mistrust of him causing the mage king to challenge him in his pursuit of the fair princess.
The deviations in this love story between princess and prince come from a need to "PG-ify" the content for kids and that fact that "The Tempest" was a secondary influence, used to "fluff up" the content of the original Little Mermaid fable such that it would have enough content to fill the movie's run time.
So, Disney borrowed from Shakespeare the opening sequence from The Tempest, a long with using some of it's plot as "unseen backstory". The sea witch (who was actually representing Indigenous Peoples of the time in Shakespeare's story with her son Caliban [who survives while his mother is killed by Triton/Prospero prior to the play's beginning]) isn't even alive in Shakespeare's original; instead, Prospero (Triton) uses his power to cause the storm. In Disney's version, Ursula causes the storm (is implied to by her causing exactly that at the end of the movie for the finale) that originally wrecks Prince Erik's ship.
The BIGGEST difference, of course, is that Disney's focus is on the love story, where as Shakespeare's focus was on the tragedy and resolution to the pre-existing tragedies and contexts of the story itself (IE: Prospero's being rightful king, having been over thrown and the way this has impacted the natural order to cause chaos - the love story between Ferdinand and the princess serves as the "finish line" then, as it is in their love that the story's true resolution is to be found, uniting the two warring sides with marriage and love).
