Every couple of days, I get an email from my good friend Jonathan Harker. He’s on a work trip right now, visiting Transylvania to help this Count out with a real estate deal. Things are getting weird—he’s pretty sure the Count doesn’t actually have any staff at his giant, crumbling castle? The Count threw Jonathan’s mirror out of a window and called it a “bauble to man’s vanity.” And there was also the part where the Count climbed down the side of the castle like a lizard.
Of course, I’m talking about the book Dracula, by Bram Stoker. But the mention of emails might have thrown people off. Dracula via email? I subscribe to an email newsletter called “Dracula Daily” which emails you the text of Dracula as it happens in real-time. Dracula is an epistolary novel, written in letters and diary entries. With Dracula Daily, you get the May 5th entry of Dracula on May 5th, the May 12th entry on May 12th, and so on. It’s a new way to look at this iconic text that's only possible because Dracula is in the public domain.
The public domain consists of creative works that do not have any intellectual property rights attached. This means that the works can be reproduced, remixed, or reworked without having to pay any rights-holders or wade through any copyright quagmire. The American copyright system is VERY complex, but to paint an incredibly broad stroke, a work is under copyright for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years.
And in my opinion? That’s a huge bummer.
Because you don't have to pay anybody to rework something in the public domain, those stories are ripe for reinterpretation. You could focus on a minor character in the original text, as Geraldine Brooks does in March, which focuses on the absent father of the March sisters in Little Women. You could reinvent the text for a modern audience. The main crux of The Secret Garden, a story of a girl who learns to love nature and flourishes as a person, still holds value today, but the phonetic dialogue and dated references of the time might be a bit too much for a young reader. The Secret Garden on 81st Street by Ivy Noelle Weir and Amber Padilla takes the structure of the novel and sets it in modern day New York. You could write a sequel to the original text or put it in a new genre entirely: Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James does both, as a sequel to Pride and Prejudice turns into a murder mystery shortly through the book.
You don’t even have to keep the text itself but can instead rework the book into something new. There are plenty of classic texts adapted into graphic novels. The Secret Garden on 81st Street is one, but if you’re in the mood for something more adult? There’s Frankenstein, adapted by horror manga legend Junji Ito. You could take the text and rework it into a film. The past few years have been banner years for Dracula adjacent movies: The Invitation, Renfield, Hotel Transylvania: Transformania, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and Monster High: The Movie all benefit from Dracula’s public domain status.
And if you want? You can get even more unconventional with it. One of my favorite public domain reworkings is Rhythm Action Gatsby, a video game that re-interprets The Great Gatsby the way it’s meant to be: a two minute minigame that you can play in your computer browser.
These works aren’t cheap cash-grabs made to tie into an existing property. By reworking the text without fear of censure or fines, authors can bring the original work into a new conversation. The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys examines the very white, very British world of Jane Eyre through a post-colonial lens. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard uses two minor characters from Hamlet to explore concepts like the intersection of art and life. Both works received critical acclaim and have entered the literary canon themselves, to the point where students study them in high school or college. To that point, both were in my AP English curriculum.
So next time January 1 rolls around, why not look at what new works are entering the public domain? Every year, on that day, the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain celebrates Public Domain Day and lists the notable works entering the public domain—here's a link to 2023's offerings. Who knows: maybe you’ll find inspiration for your next great novel, horror film, or two minute browser based rhythm game within their contents.
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