We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
ART FORM AND MATERIAL 263
probably write a novel. Thus the same event as raw material regarded from three different angles can result in three themes, three contents, three forms of art. What mostly happens, however, is that a subject already used in one form of art is adapted to another form — in other words, it would not be the same model sitting to three different artists but rather a drawing made after a painting, or a sculpture after a drawing. This is much more problematic than the other case.
If, however, the artist is a true artist and not a botcher, the dramatist dramatizing a novel or a film-script writer adapting a play may use the existing work of art merely as raw material, regard it from the specific angle of his own art form as if it were raw reality, and pay no attention to the form once already given to the material. The playwright, Shakespeare, reading a story by Bandello, saw in it not the artistic form of a masterpiece of story-telling but merely the naked event narrated in it. He saw it isolated from the story form, as raw life-material with all its dramatic possibilities, i.e. possibilities which Bandello could never have expressed in a novella.
Thus although it is the raw material of a Bandello story that was given new form in a Shakespeare play, there is no trace of the main content of the play in the Bandello story. In that story Shakespeare saw a totally different theme and therefore the content that determined the art form of his play was also totally different.
I would like to mention here a less well-known adaptation, for the reason that the poet who was its author was at the same time an accomplished theoretician who could explain how and why the adaptation was made. Friedrich Hebbel, the German playwright, wrote plays based on the mighty epic material of the Nibelung saga. It would be quite impossible to accuse Hebbel of insufficient respect for the eternal greatness of the Germanic epic and its peerless formal perfection. Hebbel had no intention of improving on the Nibelung saga, nor can any intention of a popularization for money-making purposes be ascribed to this very serious writer. What then were his motives and his purpose in undertaking such an adaptation?