Download the full version of the ebook at

https://ebookultra.com

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling Early

Twentieth Century Transmedia Story Worlds 1st
Edition Matthew Freeman

https://ebookultra.com/download/historicising-
transmedia-storytelling-early-twentieth-century-
transmedia-story-worlds-1st-edition-matthew-
freeman/

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookultra.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Global Convergence Cultures Transmedia Earth 1st Edition

Matthew Freeman

https://ebookultra.com/download/global-convergence-cultures-
transmedia-earth-1st-edition-matthew-freeman/

ebookultra.com

Role Playing Game Studies Transmedia Foundations Sebastian

Deterding

https://ebookultra.com/download/role-playing-game-studies-transmedia-
foundations-sebastian-deterding/

ebookultra.com

Toshié A Story of Village Life in Twentieth Century Japan

1st Edition Simon Partner

https://ebookultra.com/download/toshie-a-story-of-village-life-in-
twentieth-century-japan-1st-edition-simon-partner/

ebookultra.com

Street Meeting Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early

Twentieth Century Los Angeles 1st Edition Mark Wild

https://ebookultra.com/download/street-meeting-multiethnic-
neighborhoods-in-early-twentieth-century-los-angeles-1st-edition-mark-
wild/
ebookultra.com
The Experience of Modernity Chinese Autobiography of the
Early Twentieth Century Janet Ng

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-experience-of-modernity-chinese-
autobiography-of-the-early-twentieth-century-janet-ng/

ebookultra.com

Paranoia The 21st Century Fear 1st Edition Daniel Freeman

https://ebookultra.com/download/paranoia-the-21st-century-fear-1st-
edition-daniel-freeman/

ebookultra.com

Developing Story Ideas The Power and Purpose of

Storytelling Michael Rabiger

https://ebookultra.com/download/developing-story-ideas-the-power-and-
purpose-of-storytelling-michael-rabiger/

ebookultra.com

Music from the Early Twentieth Century The Oxford History

of Western Music 4 1st Edition Richard Taruskin

https://ebookultra.com/download/music-from-the-early-twentieth-
century-the-oxford-history-of-western-music-4-1st-edition-richard-
taruskin/
ebookultra.com

Twentieth Century Crime Fiction Lee Horsley

https://ebookultra.com/download/twentieth-century-crime-fiction-lee-
horsley/

ebookultra.com
Historicising Transmedia Storytelling Early Twentieth
Century Transmedia Story Worlds 1st Edition Matthew
Freeman Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Matthew Freeman
ISBN(s): 9781138217690, 1138217697
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.15 MB
Year: 2016
Language: english
Historicising Transmedia Storytelling

This book is an important contribution to the study of transmedia story­

telling. With the aim to historicise transmedia storytelling, it offers an origi­
nal point of view on the topic. In these pages transmedia practices become
key to re-reading in an innovative way the history of twentieth century
popu­lar culture.
—Paolo Bertetti, University of Siena, Italy

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically

branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape—this book
provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional
­stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the story
worlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan and Superman, the book
reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing and governmental
policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of trans­media
storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the
growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media
convergence, popular culture and historical media industries.

Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at

Bath Spa University, UK, and Director of its Media Convergence Research
­Centre. He is the author of Industrial Approaches to Media (2016), and the
co-author of Transmedia Archaeology (2014).
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

90 Technologies of Consumer Labor

A History of Self-Service
Michael Palm

91 Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender

Transcultural Perspectives
Edited by Bettina Hofmann and Monika Mueller

92 Materiality and Popular Culture

The Popular Life of Things
Edited by Anna Malinowska and Karolina Lebek

93 Girlhood, Schools, and Media

Popular Discourses of the Achieving Girl
Michele Paule

94 The Creative Underground

Arts, Politics and Everyday Life
Paul Clements

95 Subjectivity across Media

Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
Edited by Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon

96 The Rise of Transtexts

Challenges and Opportunities
Edited by Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa

97 Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising

Edited by James F. Hamilton, Robert Bodle, and Ezequiel Korin

98 Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth

Hard Times Today
Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall

99 Historicising Transmedia Storytelling

Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds
Matthew Freeman
Historicising Transmedia
Storytelling
Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia
Story Worlds

Matthew Freeman
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Taylor & Francis

The right of Matthew Freeman to be identified as author of this work

has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-1-138-21769-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-43952-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
For Carley
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Why Historicise? 1

Part I
Defining Transmedia History

1 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling: Character-building,

World-building, Authorship 21

2 Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling: Industrialisation,

Consumer Culture, Media Regulation 43

Part II
Exploring Transmedia History

3 1900–1918: From Fin-de-Siècle to Fairy-Worlds: L. Frank Baum,

the Land of Oz and Advertising 69

4 1918–1938: From Fairy-Worlds to Jungles: Edgar Rice

Burroughs Inc., Tarzan and Corporate Authorship 108

5 1938–1958: From Jungles to Krypton: DC Comics,

Superman and Industry Partnerships 145

Conclusion: Crossing the Shifting Sands 189

Index 207
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgements

When I was younger I was never particularly keen on studying history.

Things change, I suppose, although not entirely. The work of this book
is not really one of history. As I like to tell those who will listen, this book is
about historicisation – taking the phenomena of the present moment and
reimagining them through the lens of a bygone past. There is something
genuinely exciting about digging into the past, not just to examine that past
per se, but also to better understand the workings of the present. That, in
fact, is what I am doing here.
And if this book represents the workings of my own present, then this
too has a history, one filled with people without whom this work would
not have been possible. People are central to this book. I mean that both in
the sense that history has a funny way of revolving around the actions of
individuals even as events rely on other factors relating to bigger incidents.
But people are central to this book in another way, too, and here I mean in
terms of the people whose lives I have crossed paths with over the past five
years. Simply, I am indebted to a whole network of individuals, and I would
like to briefly acknowledge those individuals here.
For the sake of time I cannot possibly list all of these people, but I must
highlight the select few whose influence and contribution have been invalu­
able. First, I start by acknowledging Paul Grainge at the University of
­Nottingham. When I applied to do my PhD (from which this book derives)
at Nottingham, Paul was my first point of contact, and his kind, generous
and encouraging emails were more invaluable and are far more appreci­
ated than he knows. Also at the University of Nottingham I thank Elizabeth
Evans for her positive support of the project, and I wholeheartedly thank
Roberta Pearson and Paul McDonald, who co-supervised the PhD on which
this book is based. Their generous support, guidance, ideas, discussions and
even gentle telling-offs once in a while are the bedrock of this research;
I thank you both.
Special thanks must also go to Henry Jenkins for his constant support
and enthusiasm for my work. I first met Henry – whose seminal work into
transmedia storytelling inspired this entire book – in 2012, and since that
time he has quietly watched and guided the development of this project,
offering generous support and ideas in my PhD Viva as well as in numerous
x Acknowledgements
email exchanges before and since. My thanks, also, to Peter Hanff for taking
the time to answer so many questions about all things Wizard of Oz with
such precision and enthusiasm, to the many reviewers who all provided use­
ful comments about my work during peer-review processes and equally to
the countless faces who gave invaluable tips at various conferences.
Some of the ideas in this book benefitted from being published in
other forms in journals whose editors also deserve my thanks. Portions of
­Chapter 3 emerged out ‘Advertising the Yellow Brick Road: ­Historicising the
Industrial Emergence of Transmedia Storytelling’ in International ­Journal of
­Communication 8 (2014), while elements of Chapter 5 built upon ideas
iterated in much earlier forms as ‘Up, Up and Across: Superman, the ­Second
World War and the Historical Development of Transmedia S­ torytelling’
in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35:2 (2015). I there­
fore thank editors Arlene Luck and James Chapman respectively for their
time, efforts and thoughtful suggestions. I must also thank Carlos A. Scolari
for helping me publish and write my first co-authored book, and equally
Rebecca Feasey at Bath Spa University, mainly for her support and conti­
nued friendship.
The final people who deserve thanks are my family. As ever, I am for­
ever grateful to my Dad, David Freeman, whose generosity and friendship is
unwavering. And a special mention goes to my Mum, Susan Freeman, who
sadly passed away in 2012. She is sorely missed.
But this book is dedicated to my wife, Carley Freeman, for a great many
things. For one, and not least of all, for simply putting up with me when
I needed to hide in dark rooms during the more intense writing periods of
the PhD, of which were there countless, and for supporting me throughout
that time in just about every way a person can be supported. I could not
have accomplished this book without her, and now that it is finished I can­
not thank her enough.
Introduction
Why Historicise?

In 2012, Warner Bros. publicised the release of The Dark Knight Rises –
the final blockbuster installment in Christopher Nolan’s iconic Batman
trilogy – with an online campaign that was designed to promote the film
far and wide. New websites were created where audiences could ‘Go inside
Gotham City’, as it was billed, and read editions of the Gotham Observer –
a faux newspaper taken from the fictional story world that published news
reports about key story events leading up to those in the film. These websites
­exemplify transmedia storytelling, a term coined in 2003 by Henry ­Jenkins
to label the spread of entertainment across multiple media. Transmedia
story­telling, as Jenkins defines it, is the telling of ‘stories that unfold across
multiple platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to
our understanding of the [story] world’ (Jenkins, 2006: 336).
Since Jenkins defined the term, transmedia storytelling has gained signi­
ficant academic and industry presence over the last decade or so. The Dark
Knight Rises encapsulates the way in which stories now ‘play out seamlessly
across platforms from film to television, from videogames to websites or
comic books’ (Kushner, 2013: online). More recently Jenkins observes that
‘over the past few decades, Hollywood and the games industry have begun
to develop more sophisticated tools for modelling and rendering synthetic
worlds’ (2014a: online), drawing particular attention to the roles played
by ‘art directors and production designers,’ not to mention ‘DVD extras
and web-based encyclopaedias’ on the development of transmedia story­
telling (2014a: online). The proliferation of content across multiple media is
now so commonplace that the contemporary creative industries – be it the
entertainment industries, the advertising industry or consumer and heritage
­sectors – are now calling upon transmedia consultancies to more effectively
engage their audiences across multiple media. In 2010, the Producers Guild
of America sanctioned a Transmedia Producer credit for film, television and
interactive projects. Since then dozens of transmedia production companies
have emerged worldwide – such as Miranda Studio, Starlight Runner Enter­
tainment and Fourth Wall – while new careers in creative strategy, content
producers, intermediary agencies and digital marketing all reflect the neces­
sity to adapt to a transmedia future. In Canada, for instance, funding for
films and television programmes is now restricted unless producers develop
2 Introduction
transmedia extensions such as websites. Australia, Holland, Switzerland,
Brazil, Colombia and the UK have since followed suit. Indeed, the BBC now
makes extensive use of intermediary transmedia producers to develop its
programming – including everything from Doctor Who to the 2012 London
Olympics – into transmedia content. Many US television shows commence
production with designated Transmedia Teams in place.
With his eye on the future, Jeff Gomez, president of the a­ forementioned
Starlight Runner Entertainment, a company founded specifically to m ­ aximise
the value of entertainment properties by preparing fictional story worlds
for extension across multiple media, insists that transmedia storytelling is
‘something that the Digital Age is now demanding of us all’ (2013: online).
That demand may be true, but examples like the Gotham Observer are
by no means specific to the Digital Age. Carlos Scolari once argued that
‘transmedia storytelling proposes a new narrative model’ (2009: 586), and
yet over a hundred years before The Dark Knight Rises even reached cine­
mas, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 was extending its own story
across multiple media. That tale’s magical Land of Oz story world included
The Ozmapolitan, also a mock newspaper. The Ozmapolitan, released as a
giveaway item in select newspapers in 1905, was brimming with new nar­
rative details relating to key events from inside this magical fictional story
world, offering readers ‘in-universe’ interviews with its characters as well
as revealing a variety of previously undisclosed plot points that sparked the
ensuing story events from the pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the
first place.
Clearly there are parallels between Gotham Observer and The Ozmapoli­
tan. For all intents and purposes, both of these pieces exemplify transmedia
storytelling, since both of these mock newspapers expanded their respective
story worlds as part of an array of other media forms. And yet these two
examples – crafted well over a century apart, drawing on different media
forms and technologies and produced in different ways – indicate that trans­
media storytelling has been informed by different industrial configurations
and strategies over time.
But what are the strategies that afford transmedia stories? What are
the industrial determinants or contingencies that underpin those strategies
over time? And what are the characteristics of stories that are told across
multiple media? In answering these questions, the aim of this book is to
re-­contextualise transmedia storytelling as a product of the early ­twentieth
century, and in doing so to enhance scholarly understandings of this pheno­
menon. As The Ozmapolitan shows, transmedia storytelling has perhaps
always existed, but the means by which the stories are told across media are
historically conditioned. This book is about understanding that historical
conditioning, and intends to serve as a valuable contribution to the growing
field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergen­
ces, popular culture and indeed the historical workings of media industries.
This book is the first full-scale attempt to re-conceptualise the ostensibly
 Introduction 3
contemporary phenomenon of transmedia storytelling as a historical prac­
tice of media production. I argue that only by looking to the past can we
fully see the contingencies of the present, and that searching for historical
precedents can force us to be far more nuanced in describing what is truly
specific to our present media moment.
It is an appropriate time to describe such nuances, for as Louisa Ellen Stein
asserts, ‘academic and popular understandings of what exactly we mean by
“transmedia” are in flux’ (2013: 405). Says Stein: ‘The term has been put to
different purposes with different end goals depending on who is using it and
in what context’ (2013: 405). But if ‘transmediality’ most broadly describes,
as Elizabeth Evans defines, ‘the increasingly popular industrial practice of
using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single
fictional world through a range of textual forms’ (2011: 1), then this book
specifically examines the industry strategies of transmedia storytelling – by
which I mean the strategies for holding fictional story worlds together across
multiple media and for pointing audiences across those media.1
At the present moment, it is digital or industrial convergences that hold
transmedia story worlds together while pointing audiences across media.
Media industries and their various technologies, practices and systems of
operation have become more aligned and networked in recent decades, pro­
viding a clear model for extending stories across multiple media. As ­Jenkins
writes, media convergence – emerging as a concept around the start of
the Internet era in the early 1990s – is ‘the flow of content across multi­
ple media, … the co-operation between multiple media industries, and the
migratory behavior of audiences’ (2006: 2), which for Jenkins makes ‘the
flow of content across media inevitable’ (2003: online).
But convergence is really only an umbrella term for making sense of the
proliferation of interconnected screens and media texts that dominate our
contemporary media culture, and in this case refers to convergences on the
levels of both industry and technology. Industrial convergence, as James Hay
and Nick Couldry assert, suggests a ‘new synergy amongst media companies
and industries’ (2011: 473), and designates the levels of ownership within
the media conglomerates emerging in the late 1950s and flourishing in the
1980s. Technological convergence, meanwhile, refers to the ‘hybridity that
has folded the uses of separate media into one another’ (Hay and C ­ ouldry,
2011: 493). One example of the latter would include watching television on
a mobile phone, an activity that exemplifies the changes brought about by
new digital media technologies and advances such as the rise of the Internet.2
There are claims to suggest these two different aspects of convergence have
led to two slightly different models of transmedia storytelling. Andrea P ­ hillips
(2012) expresses differences between East Coast and West Coast transmedia.
For Phillips (2012: 13), West Coast transmedia follows the logic of industrial
convergence, where mass-media pieces of story (via films, television series,
videogames, etc.) are orchestrated across major US studios and corporations.
Phillips brands this model the ‘Hollywood or franchise transmedia’, and is
4 Introduction
associated with ‘big-business commercial storytelling’ (2012: 13). East Coast
transmedia, meanwhile, follows the logic of technological convergence, and
is made up principally of digital platforms such as email, social media and
blogs. Phillips discusses this model of transmedia storytelling as being ‘more
interactive, and much more web-centric’ (2012: 14).
However, while it is certainly tempting to regard industrial and techno­
logical advances as implying revolutionary shifts in transmedia practices –
bringing different media into closer proximity and dialogue in ways that
allow for a flow of storytelling across media – it is equally as important to
recognise the extent to which distribution and consumption models have
remained bound to more traditional means of production. Convergence has
certainly accelerated the ability for a story to be extended across media, but
I argue throughout this book that it is the strategies behind the production
of transmedia storytelling – rather than the specifically converged structures
of contemporary media industries and technologies – that ultimately hold
transmedia story worlds together and point their audiences across media.
Phillips, nevertheless, does begin to hint at the different models under which
transmedia storytelling can work, and this thinking is important to con­
sidering the further different models under which transmedia storytelling
operated throughout the past. In other words, the models of trans­media
story­telling today are not the only ones. If The Ozmapolitan and the
Gotham Observer exemplify transmedia storytelling at different points in
time, then the industrial strategies used to create the Oz and Batman story
worlds must differ radically.
And yet the perceived newness of transmedia storytelling – or rather
the perceived importance of newer convergences on the rise of transmedia
story­telling – has left a sizable gap in scholarly literature about its longer
histories. Indeed, in his short essay on transmedia history, Derek Johnson
rightly points out that ‘one of the newest dimensions of contemporary trans­
media entertainment is our recognition of it as such’ (2013: online). I shall
now briefly examine the small amount of academic literature that engages
with the history of transmedia storytelling, using this literature to justify my
own focus and period of investigation.

Transmedia History Scholarship

Critical debates around the idea of transmedia history tend to consist mostly
of occasional asides and consideration. Evans hints at the importance of
recognising the ‘historical precedents of these developments’ in her research
(2011: 19), but there has been very little concerted research into actually
doing this. Johnson alludes to possible transmedia history both in his contri­
bution to the Spreadable Media project and in his Media Franchising book.3
In the former, Johnson acknowledges ‘a much longer history’ and points to
rather speculative images of the mythological narratives of Ancient Greece.
Here, Johnson proposes that oral traditions drawn in the visual artistry of
 Introduction 5
pottery might be theorised as an ancient incarnation of transmedia story­
telling (2013: online). In a similar vein to Johnson’s approach, Roberta
­Pearson turns to the Bible as one possible example of a pre-historical form
of transmedia storytelling. Pearson observes how the narrative architecture
of Jesus Christ has been passed down across many centuries through a com­
plex combination of the written word, drama, religious paintings, stained-
glass windows, symbolic icons and so forth (2009).
Tellingly, neither Johnson nor Pearson considers the practices or processes
involved in actually spreading such narrative architecture across multiple
forms – a consideration that is almost entirely absent from the ­scholarly
literature on this subject. Jenkins has also made occasional historical
­references in his own research, most prominently in Denise Mann’s Wired
TV volume. Here, Jenkins turns to literary figures such as Lewis Carroll and
J. R. R. Tolkien, discussing the ‘structures of old myths’ in Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) as possible
ancestors to transmedia storytelling (2014b: 248–254). Elsewhere, Jenkins
has hinted that transmedia storytelling is perfectly viable without using new
digital technologies, and that the latter have mainly been used as facilita­
tors by the modern creators of transmedia universes, but again very little
consideration has been afforded to actually understanding how transmedia
storytelling could have worked in the past (Gallarino: online). An exception
to this rule is Shawna Kidman, who considers a pre-digital history of trans­
mediality via the American comic book industry. Kidman rightly observes
that ‘stories have long been able to exist in multiple forms simultaneously,
and media has in the past become a site of both contestation and affiliation’
(2012: 42). Kidman points to factors like copyright and low production
costs in the comics industry in order to explain why ‘comics developed as
innately transmedial’ (2012: 42). These factors will be further interrogated
in this book, since comics indeed play a vital role in the industrial history of
transmedia storytelling. But whereas Kidman’s work is limited to the comic
book industry, I will position comics as just one medium amidst a wealth of
broader industrial-cultural contingencies that altogether shaped the work­
ings of transmedia storytelling in the past.
Elsewhere, both Johnson and Jenkins do acknowledge the key role played
by licensing on achieving historical practices of transmedia storytelling;
licensing is of course an industrial practice that continues to be used today
and will be examined in more depth in the historical context of the 1920s
and 1930s in Chapter 4. Given that licensing, in which rights are trans­
ferred between parties, came before any industrial convergence and also
works to extend intellectual property across platforms, it is understandable
why it features in Jenkins’ and Johnson’s indications of transmedia history.
Building on these claims, Avi Santo establishes the basis for exploring how
‘transmedia branding’ operated under this rubric of licensing in the past
(2010: 2015). Santo looks at the differing cultural and economic values of
The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet between 1930s and the 1960s,
6 Introduction
exploring the ‘shifting values and roles of character licensing across a num­
ber of intertwining cultural industries – most notably, radio, television, film,
comic books, comic strips, and toys’ (2015: 6).
Relatedly, Michael Kackman uses the licensed merchandise produced
for the Hopalong Cassidy television show (1952–1954) to contemplate the
workings of a ‘transmedia commercial intertext’ (2008: 98). I aim to build
on both Santo’s and Kackman’s explorations of how licensing developed
certain transmedia practices by looking at how licensing served as one of
a series of interconnected practices associated with corporate authorship’s
managerial function to specifically afford transmedia storytelling in the
early twentieth century. Since when considered across history, the relation­
ship between transmedia storytelling and licensing is a rather slippery and
ever-changing one. For example, though Jenkins argues that related licen­
sing practices such as merchandising ensure that such products are mostly
peripheral to the process of building a story world in today’s culture (2006:
107), Chapter 4 shows how in the 1930s merchandise functioned not
peripherally to a story world but as the driving force behind how that story
world expanded across media.4
Besides these select studies on comic books and licensing, understand­
ings of the historical practices of transmedia storytelling are indeed ­limited
and often speculative, and quite typically revolve around studies of char­
acters. Like Johnson and Jenkins, Evans also points to myths such as King
Arthur and Robin Hood as possible instances of historical transmediality
(2011: 19). Similarly, Paolo Bertetti has called for the need to find new
analytic categories for deciphering the ways in which fictional charac­
ters are formed across media, arguing: ‘It is the case of legendary heroes
or of m­ odern serial characters, from Tarzan or Zorro to Harry Potter …
[that character] forms itself among and through texts … never completely
enclosed in a single text’ (2014: 16). I would also add the form of the fairy-
tale to this discussion, whose tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and Jack
and the Beanstalk have been re-articulated, extended and expanded, almost
endlessly reappearing across different media for centuries. Most recently,
Karin Fast and Henrik Örnebring (2015) acknowledge a historicised under­
standing of trans­media storytelling by analysing the mechanics of how story
worlds may move across media platforms, focusing partly on the pulp char­
acter The Shadow from the 1930s. This allows for an understanding of how
character elements transform over time.
Characters may in fact be fundamental components of all transmedia sto­
ries, as Chapter 1 will show, but what were some of the industrial strategies
for actually building those characters across media in the past? What does
it actually mean to understand the industrial contingencies and practices of
historical transmedia storytelling? And how have those industrial strategies,
practices and contingencies evolved and differed across time? Mark J. P.
Wolf (2012) perhaps comes the closest to engaging with these questions
by tying a history of telling stories across media to his study of building
 Introduction 7
imaginary worlds. But as I point out in Chapter 2, Wolf tends to neglect
consideration of the cultural or industry practices that were specifically
used to build imaginary worlds in the past, be it the pre-industrial fictional
islands of Homer’s Odyssey or the industrially produced story worlds of the
mass media.
Of course, the ability to identify ‘the first’ strategies of transmedia story­
telling is well and truly beyond the scope of this book, and the specu­lation
that I said surrounds much of the aforementioned scholarship admittedly
stems from the fact that many of the examples this scholarship cites tend to
predate the days of industry. Conceiving of the industrial history of trans­
media storytelling is therefore enormously important, for Johnson suggests
that ‘conceiving of transmedia entertainment in historical terms [can] …
help articulate a longer history of production and consumption’ (2013:
online). And as I argue above, only by understanding those longer histories
of production and consumption can we begin to make sense of the contin­
gencies and the affordances of our contemporary transmedia landscape.
This focus on production and consumption is precisely why I begin my
historicisation at the turn of the twentieth century in America. ­Transmedia
storytelling always depends upon certain alignments of media, indus­
try, audiences and technologies that spread a story world across multi­
ple media. But as this book will also demonstrate, those alignments have
varied signi­ficantly from those of today. Both industrial and digital con­
vergences may well underpin configurations of transmedia storytelling
during the present moment, but industrialisation, consumer culture and
media regulation all worked to form alignments across media during the
early to mid-twentieth century, which underpinned transmedia storytelling
at that time. This alignment of industrial and even cultural contingencies
concerning industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation influ­
enced much more specific determinants that drove transmedia storytelling
in particular historical eras. And so Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will show how
advertising, corporate authorship and industry partnerships respectively
each built transmedia story worlds and steered audiences across media in
the twentieth century.
Since I will argue throughout this book that both the industry strategies
and contingencies informing transmedia storytelling vary substantially over
time, it is necessary to theorise a different conceptual model for examining
transmedia storytelling as part of the industrial-cultural configurations of the
past, rather than trying to apply its present model to the industrial-­cultural
configurations of the past. This book is therefore in no way a ‘corrective’ to
any particular scholarly understandings of transmedia storytelling. Rather,
it is a direct expansion of those understandings, adding new information,
insights and perspectives that illuminate the characteristics of this important
phenomenon as it evolved across history.
Looking forward a little, then, three overarching themes link the chapters
of this book. The first theme concerns the importance of conceptualising
8 Introduction
transmedia storytelling as a system of building variation on sameness.
­Insofar as it works to extend existing stories and expand established fic­
tional worlds, transmedia storytelling is on the one hand about sameness –
since all of the various stories in a given story world are somehow required
to ‘feel like they fit with the others’, as Jenkins puts it (2006: 335), as parts
of the same fictional story world. But on the other hand transmedia story­
telling is simultaneously about variation – since each of the various stories
in a given story world must also expand that same story world, telling dif­
ferent events about that world. As will be shown throughout this book, this
balance between variation and sameness typifies transmedia storytelling in
some regards; this particular understanding of the transmedia phenomenon
helps to see why certain industrial strategies and configurations of the past
were most effective at building transmedia worlds.
The second and third themes that link the book’s chapters are more
specifically about the models of production required to achieve transmedia
storytelling in and across different historical periods. Across ­Chapters 3,
4 and 5 I assess not one but three different production models for craft­
ing transmedia stories during the first half of the American twentieth
­century, each historically conditioned. The first model, occurring during
the 1900s and 1910s and informed by major developments in industriali­
sation, would offer wonderful fictional adventures for audiences to follow
across media but often failed commercially. The second model, occurring
during the 1920s and 1930s and driven by the rising consumer culture,
would often succeed commercially but occasionally by fragmenting story
worlds into competing versions that failed to point audiences across media.
And the third model, occurring the 1940s and 1950s and underpinned by
media regulation policies specific to that era, afforded both profitability
and transmedia stories that pointed audiences across media but charac­
teristically relied on contingencies of war or else operated in the margins
of industries.
The third theme, lastly, concerns the importance of individual agency
on telling transmedia stories during all of these historical periods. I high­
light how only a small number of creative personnel were integral to
crafting expansive story worlds across media. That is certainly not to say
that only a handful of individuals were responsible for the industrial rise
of transmedia storytelling; on the contrary, throughout the pages of this
book I will point to many authors, companies, studios and networks in
my attempt to assess transmedia storytelling historically. But I do stress
that the various strategies, practices and industrial configurations under­
pinning transmedia storytelling in the past can only be understood by
recognising the role played by individuals. For example, as Chapter 3 will
argue, advertising may have provided an industry model through which
transmedia stories could materialise in the early twentieth century, but
that industry model was still conditional on the creative and innovative
role of authors.
 Introduction 9
Towards Transmedia Archaeology
Having laid out this book’s rationale and positioned myself with respect to
the existing research on the history of transmedia storytelling, I must now
outline the methodology of the study. In short, this book takes a media
archaeology approach, one that seeks to reconsider historical media so to
illuminate, disrupt and challenge our understandings of the present. In its
broader sense, media archaeology serves to understand how the media pre­
dating today’s more interactive and digital forms were in their own time
contested, adopted and embedded. As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka
insist, ‘by revisiting “old” media it provides a richer horizon for understand­
ing “new” media in their complex and often contradictory roles in con­
temporary society and culture’ (2011: 2). Alongside Huhtamo and Parikka,
scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum share this view that the significance
of media archaeology resides in its assertion that ‘to be understood prop­
erly, media must be viewed from less progressivist and more “non-­linear”
perspectives’ (2008: 32). As such, I argue that to understand transmedia
storytelling properly we must similarly look past notions of convergence
and adopt less causal approaches. As I have said already, and as I shall show
throughout this book, past tellers of transmedia stories operated under a
very different series of industrial-cultural determinants than those of tech­
nological or industrial convergence – and so digging into how those older
determinants worked can bolster understandings of transmedia storytelling.
However, this archaeological approach raises one notable problem.
If transmedia storytelling is indeed closely linked to twenty-first century
media culture and its industrial configurations, then how can one go about
classifying earlier forms of media culture and divergent industrial configura­
tions as the same phenomenon? Doing this successfully really means under­
standing transmedia storytelling according to a few general characteristics
that can be seen in both the media of the past and of the present, with
only the industrial configurations informing those characteristics varying
one from period to another. In other words, if transmedia storytelling can
be understood by characteristics, as Chapter 1 will showcase, then what
remains to be understood is how such characteristics manifested under the
configurations of the past.
So, what exactly are these general characteristics of all transmedia
­stories – be it past or present? Earlier I suggested that transmedia storytelling
is a system of producing narrative variation on sameness. Insofar as it must
ultimately work to expand established fictional story worlds and extend the
arcs of characters and plots across multiple media, transmedia storytelling
might therefore be understood in terms of the following three characteristics:

(1) Character-building; (2) World-building; and (3) Authorship

I will elaborate on each of these three characteristics in Chapter 1, explain­

ing in much greater depth how these characteristics manifest in transmedia
10 Introduction
stories, but for now each can be summarily defined: Character-building is the
construction and development of a fictional character, including via things
such as backstory, appearance, psychology, dialogue and interactions with
other characters. World-building, meanwhile, according to Jenkins concerns
‘the process of designing a fictional universe … that is sufficiently detailed
to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each
story feels like it fits with the others’ (2006: 335). Of course character is
a part of any story world, as I also demonstrate in Chapter 1, and there­
fore world-building is in some sense a much larger category of character-­
building – world-building being about developing the fictional settings of a
given story world so that new characters can populate it. Authorship, lastly,
refers most broadly and most simply to the governing role played by a central
author figure over the extensions of a story across media, be it a sole writer, a
company or something in between. In short, if character-building is an aspect
of world-building, then authorship is crucial for achieving both of the former.
This book will present a set of three case studies that allows me to explore
how each of these three aforementioned characteristics were determined by
particular industrial workings in the past. And I show how the strategies for
holding the past’s transmedia story worlds together and indeed for pointing
audiences across those multiple media were informed largely by different
determinants and configurations from one case to another, from one era to
another.
For seeing the historical strategies used for world-building I examine
the Land of Oz, the story world first established in L. Frank Baum’s The
­Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel in 1900. Baum wrote a total of fourteen Oz
novels over the next eighteen years; the tales of Oz also formed a ‘narrative
sprawl’ (Kelleter, 2012: 26) across newspaper comic strips, promotional news­
papers, theatre productions, films and other materials. Across these various
media iterations of the Oz story world many different characters appeared,
none of whom was the constant hero. In fact, only one thing remained a true
constant across the many Oz adventures of the period: The story world itself.
The Land of Oz was a playground of fantasy where a whole host of char­
acters could roam and where different adventures could be told. As Frank
Kelleter acknowledges, the Land of Oz is ‘a wide and constantly expanding
realm of interlocking, transmedially active, mass-­addressed commercial
stories’ (2012: 26). As such, the Land of Oz affords an ideal opportunity to
not only to explore this particular case study as an exemplar of historical
world-building, but also to identify the industrial and cultural determinants
that proved integral to accomplishing those world-building strategies.
To examine the role of authorship I turn to Tarzan as a case study, and
more specifically the modes of that character’s textual production across
multiple media under the ownership of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. As I
explain in Chapter 4, Burroughs was the first author to successfully incorpo­
rate himself, and in so doing exemplifies the corporatisation of transmedia
storytelling as the stories of Tarzan came to be extended across multiple
 Introduction 11
media. Indeed, Tarzan’s adventures spanned the likes of pulp magazines,
radio serials and films under Burroughs’ corporate authorship, and so ­Tarzan
exemplifies how authorship could thereby work to guide audiences across
multiple media throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
And in order to illuminate the historically conditioned ways through
which transmedia character-building was achieved in the past, I draw on the
character of Superman, ‘a progenitor in the pop folklore of the twentieth
century’ (Arnold, 1978: 11). Since the character’s inception in 1938 and
through his rise in cultural prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, Superman
cut across a range of media industries. His iconic red cape swooshed across
everything from comic books and newspaper strips to radio serials, from
the cinema to television. Superman’s proliferation across so many different
media, at a time predating convergences, is invaluable for identifying and
understanding the configurations and determinants required to extend a fic­
tional character’s stories across media at that time.
This book will therefore present a close investigation of these three trans­
media story worlds, each of which exemplify complex alignments between
industrial configurations, cultural developments and production practices
that in turn enabled stories to be told across media. Separately, each of the
examined story worlds looks at one of the noted characteristics of transme­
dia storytelling; taken together, the Land of Oz, Tarzan and Superman can
be seen to exemplify the industrial history of transmedia storytelling in the
US between 1900 and 1958:

The Land of Oz (1900–1918), Tarzan (1918–1938) and Superman

(1938–1958)

Now, having laid out what I propose to do, how exactly will I go about
doing this? Methodologically, I will first trace the histories of these story
worlds, examining the points of transmedial development on the levels of
world-building, authorship and character-building, respectively. These char­
acteristics will be framed in relation to three larger determinants – ­advertising,
licensing and industry partnerships. This will enable me to understand the
various ways in which different strategies worked to build transmedia stories
in the past. But these three determinants will also be framed in relation to
an even larger cultural setting or context, for I shall identify the points of
intersection between the cultural moment of a given historical period and its
influence on industrial practices of transmedia story­telling. Accordingly, I do
not dwell extensively on frameworks of user-generated content or participa­
tory fandom that often features in many studies of transmedia story­telling
today.5 Scolari et al., for example, suggests that transmedia storytelling
should be considered in terms of ‘Media Industry (Canon) + Collaborative
Culture (Fandom)’ (2014: 3). However, while this book pays some attention
to the ways in which audiences navigated historical transmedia stories in
the past, it is my proposition that we must first more fully understand the
12 Introduction
industrial and cultural infrastructure of the past that enabled for the emer­
gence of historical transmedia stories in the first place. And so an overarching
industry studies framework is thus the crucial place to begin interrogating
transmedia history. Looking at individual authors, companies, studios and
their perceived audiences, this book is grounded in reports of who did what,
where and when – explaining the reasons for the emergence, development
and challenges of transmedia storytelling from the perspective of industry.
Defining who did what, where and when requires research across a mul­
titude of American media industries during the first half of the twentieth
century – spanning theatre, newspapers, magazines, comic strips and comic
books, novels, cinema, radio and television. I make extensive use of histo­
rical newspaper clippings; these resources provide insight into how media
texts, authors, institutions and entire industries were culturally positioned.
­Historical newspapers also provide an invaluable tool for understand­
ing how certain audiences and critics comprehended any given story as it
began to migrate across multiple media. The research also draws on a wide
selection of industry trade papers, with a notable emphasis on the motion
picture and broadcasting industries. Supporting these sorts of resources
are more consumer-based papers, such as The Public Opinion Quarterly,
among others, which I use to develop a broader picture of how the practices
of the media industries impacted upon everyday American attitudes and
behaviours. This sort of information is important for mapping the migration
of audiences across media in historical contexts. And all of these resources
are complemented by a small number of interviews and archive materials.
A formal but conceptual point about the approach of this book: Why
the sole focus on the US? I take this approach not necessarily to elicit any
kind of general explanation about the industrial history of transmedia story­
telling everywhere. I am aware that at least some of the contingencies cru­
cial to this industrial history were connected with what was also happening
in other capitalist economies – particularly with those in Europe and its
own traditions of serial fiction in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth
century newspapers.6 Be that as it may, it is also true that many of the
broader ­industrial-cultural transformations that I frame in this book as the
­contextual backdrop of transmedia storytelling – transformations rooted
particularly in industrialisation and consumer culture – have been most
typically defined according to the American landscape.7 I understand the
history of the US to be a central hub for many of the defining cultural and
economic changes that exemplify what I see to be the crucial industrial-­
cultural determinants of transmedia storytelling in the past.
While I have therefore explained why I will begin my historicisation at the
turn of the twentieth century – a time when defining cultural and economic
changes concerning industrialisation, consumer culture and media regula­
tion became most apparent in the US – one important question still remains:
Why end this historicisation at 1958? This particular date is actually equally
significant, for it marks the point at which a number of American media
 Introduction 13
industries became more fully industrially converged. For example, by this
point MCA (Music Corporation of America), originally founded in 1924
as a music booking agency, had acquired television production subsidiaries,
partnered with NBC and its affiliated Decca Records, and bought the United
Studios film lot. Of course, that is not to suggest that there were no indus­
trial convergences prior to 1958. As Chapter 5 demonstrates and as Michele
Hilmes has argued extensively elsewhere, many film studios, record compa­
nies, radio and television networks had started to become increasingly col­
laborative and integrative throughout the mid-part of the twentieth century,
preceding the rise of convergences (1999). Importantly, this book therefore
ends at the point where most studies of transmediality typically begin.

The Structure of the Book

In terms of chapter structure, the book is divided into five chapters.
­Chapter 1 engages with the wider body of scholarly literature on trans­
media storytelling so to further develop my conceptual understanding of
how character-building, world-building and authorship each function as the
characteristics of transmedia storytelling, be it in any period. The rest of the
book traces the industrial-cultural determinants that informed these char­
acteristics, picking up on the divergent historical conditions that afforded
transmedia storytelling in particular eras.
Chapter 2 sets up the larger industrial and cultural transformations
through which transmedia storytelling emerged industrially. I stress the fore­
most importance of industrialisation, consumer culture and media regula­
tion as the larger underpinnings of transmedia storytelling during the first
half of the twentieth century. If Chapter 2 presents an overview of the his­
torical context through which transmedia storytelling first took shape and
developed as part of the economic fabric of American media industries, then
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 trace the impact of industrialisation, consumer culture
and media regulation in turn, demonstrating how these larger contingencies
gave rise to new forms of advertising, corporate authorship and industry
partnerships, which each drove strategies for achieving the characteristics
of transmedia storytelling. In other words, the three case study chapters
effectively illustrate the conceptual and historical groundwork that I lay out
in the first two chapters, respectively.
Chapter 3, the first of these case studies, positions The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz as emblematic of the turn towards industrialisation in the US at the
turn of the twentieth century. I show how industrialisation brought new
industrial strategies of advertising. And in driving transmedia storytelling
at that time, advertising facilitated world-building strategies. By looking at
this context of industrialisation between 1900 and 1918 – a time of high-
rise billboards, comic strips and cinema screens – I show how the emergence
of new forms of advertising provided the backdrop for enabling authors to
develop transmedia story worlds.
14 Introduction
Chapter 4 moves on to demonstrate how the rise of consumer culture
further impacted upon twentieth-century transmedia storytelling. Looking
at the period of 1918 to 1938, I map the corporatisation of transmedia
story­telling, showing its development from the workings of an individual
entrepreneur to the ownership of a company. As I discuss in this chapter,
1918 was a significant date in this regard, since licensing became far more
­prevalent in this year when the Supreme Court tightened trademark legis­
lation laws. While examining the different ways that licensing and indeed
other related practices associated with corporate authorship’s manage­
rial function operated during this time – exploring the products based on
­Tarzan in relation to their conditions of production and distribution under
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. – I explore how these various corporate author­
ship practices equipped Burroughs with a heightened author-function that
brought new strategies for building transmedia story worlds.
Last, Chapter 5 draws on Superman to examine industrial strategies
of character-building across multiple media industries between 1938 and
1958. I begin in the late 1930s for these years marked the beginnings of
the Second World War, and I show how the war worked to enforce media
regulation – specifically, government intervention policies – that in turn
accelerated industry partnerships across multiple media industries. I show
how these industry partnerships afforded transmedia storytelling during this
time, which led to new strategies of character-building across media as a
character like Superman began to cross multiple media.
If transmedia storytelling is dependent on certain industrial alignments
that together work to spread a fictional story world across multiple media,
pointing the audience from one medium to the next, then already one begins
to see how those alignments have varied significantly from those of today.
This book’s particular contribution to the growing field of transmedia s­ tudies
is that in re-conceptualising the ostensibly contemporary phenomenon of
transmedia storytelling as an innately historical practice of production, dis­
tribution and regulation, it will also reveal the contingency of contemporary
configurations and the story worlds that they engender. In mostly conceptu­
alising transmedia storytelling as part of digital or industrial convergences,
it is fair to say that many scholars have thus far had a tendency to neglect
the workings of the past – thus leaving us all with a limited and narrow
understanding of what is actually a far longer, far broader and far more
complex historical development. Until now.

Notes
1. Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling may be the prevailing one that
I use as a springboard, but do note that several other scholars have also con­
tributed parallel discussions to the academic discourse and definitions of trans­
mediality. Concepts such as ‘cross-media’ (Bechmann Petersen, 2006), ‘multiple
platforms’ (Jeffery-Poulter, 2003), ‘hybrid media’ (Boumans, 2004), ‘intertextual
commodity’ (Marshall, 2004), ‘transmedia worlds’ (Klastrup & Toska, 2004),
 Introduction 15
and ‘trans­media interactions’ (Bardzell, Wu, Bardzell & Quagliara, 2007)
are effectively all variations on the same phenomena of transmediality within
a context of media convergence and thus sit alongside this same conceptual
discussion.
2. See Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, Media Convergence: Networked
­Digital Media in Everyday Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
3. See Derek Johnson, “A History of Transmedia Entertainment,” Spreadable
Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (n.d.), accessed
April 2, 2013, http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.UpsNJdiYaM9;
Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the
Culture Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
4. Merchandising is in this way an example of what Eileen Meehan has called
a ‘commercial intertext’ – a branded sequence of interwoven texts, associ­
ated products and promotional practices that collectively constitute the pro­
cesses of cultural exchange around a media figure. See Eileen Meehan, “Holy
­Commodity Fetish, Batman! The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext,”
in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Super-hero and His
Media, ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge,
1991), 47–65.
5. User-generated content and participatory fandom may not be the focus of this
book, but Carlos A. Scolari has begun to historicise participatory forms of
story­telling. Scolari argues that many of the ‘low-cost commercial productions
located on the periphery of the publishing industry of the 19th century,’ where
‘small publishers, unknown artists, and not particularly skilled artisans’ exem­
plify ‘a gray zone between ‘official narrative and user-generated content.’ See
Carlos A. Scolari, “Don Quixote of La Mancha: Transmedia Storytelling in the
Gray Zone,” International Journal of Communication (SI: Transmedia Critical:
Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling) (8)
August 2014, http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc.
6. For an exemplary exploration of this kind of British serial fiction of the
mid-­nineteenth century (specifically the work of Charles Dickens), see
Anthony Smith, “Media Contexts of Narrative Design: Dimensions of Speci­
ficity within Storytelling Industries” (PhD diss., University of Nottingham,
2012), and ­Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and
Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of
­Kentucky, 1997).
7. See, for example, Daniel H. Borus, Twentieth-Century Multiplicity: ­American
Thought and Culture, 1900–1920 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield ­Publishers,
Inc., 2009); Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Eco­nomy and
Print Culture, 1865–1915 (North Carolina: The University of North C ­ arolina
Press, 2008); Anne M. Cronin, Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Bibliography
Arnold, Gary. “Hollywood’s Super Holiday.” The Washington Post, December 10,
1978.
Bardzell, Shaowen, Wu, Vicky, Bardzell, Jeffrey and Quagliara, Nick. “Transmedial
Interactions and Digital Games.” Paper presented at the International Conference
on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 2007.
16 Introduction
Bechmann Petersen, Anja. “Internet and Cross Media Production: Case Studies
in Two Major Danish Media Organizations.” Australian Journal of Emerging
Techno­logy and Society 4:2 (2006): 94–107.
Bertetti, Paolo. “Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International
­Journal of Communication (SI: Transmedia Critical: Empirical Investigations into
Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling) 8 (August 2014): http://ijoc.org/
index.php/ijoc.
Borus, Daniel H. Twentieth-Century Multiplicity: American Thought and Culture,
1900–1920. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.
Boumans, Jak. Cross-media, E-content Report 8, ACTeN – Anticipating Content
Technology Needs. (December 10, 2004). http://www.acten.net/cgibin/WebGUI/
www/index.pl/cross_media.
Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.
Cronin, Anne M. Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Evans, Elizabeth. Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life.
New York: Routledge, 2011.
Fast, Karin and Örnebring Henrik. “Transmedia World-building: The Shadow
(1931–present) and Transformers (1984–present).” The International Journal of
Cultural Studies (September 15, 2015): doi: 10.1177/1367877915605887.
Gomez, Jeff. “What Made Oz So Great and Powerful? Starlight Runner’s Jeff
Gomez Tells Us.” Forbes. March 15, 2013. Accessed July 18, 2014. http://
www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2013/03/15/what-made-oz-so-great-and-
powerful-starlight-runners-jeff-gomez-tells-us/.
Hay, James and Couldry, Nick. “Rethinking Convergence/Culture: An Introduction.”
Cultural Studies 25:4 (2011): 473–486.
Hilmes, Michele. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Illinois:
­University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Huhtamo, Erkki and Parikka, Jussi, eds. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applica-
tions, and Implications. Ewing: University of California Press, 2011.
Jeffery-Poulter, Stephen. “Creating and Producing Digital Content across Multiple
Platforms.” Journal of Media Practice 3:3 (2003): 155–165.
Jenkins, Henry, “Transmedia Storytelling.” MIT Technology Review. January 15, 2003.
Accessed February 4, 2013. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/401760/
transmedia-storytelling/.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. “‘All Over the Map’: Building (and Rebuilding) Oz.” Acta University
Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 9 (2014a): 7–29. http://www.acta.sapientia.
ro/acta-film/C9/film9-1.pdf.
Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia: A Prehistory.” In Wired TV: Laboring over an Inter-
active Future, edited by Denise Mann, 248–254. New Jersey: Rutgers University
Press, 2014b.
Johnson, Derek. “A History of Transmedia Entertainment.” Spreadable Media: Cre-
ating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. Accessed April 2, 2013. http://
spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.UpsNJdiYaM9.
Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Cul-
ture Industries. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
 Introduction 17
Kackman, Michael. “Nothing on but Hoppy Badges: Hopalong Cassidy, William
Boyd Enterprises, and Emergent Media Globalization.” Cinema Journal 47:
4 (Summer 2008): 76–101.
Kelleter, Frank. “‘Toto, I Think We’re in Oz Again’ (and Again and Again): Remakes
and Popular Seriality.” In Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions:
Remake/Remodel, edited by Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, 19–44.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Kidman, Shawna. “Five Lessons for New Media from the History of Comics Cul­
ture.” International Journal of Learning and Media 3:4 (2012): 41–54.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
Klastrup, Lisbeth and Tosca, Susana. “Transmedial Worlds: Rethinking Cyberworld
Design.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Cyberworlds, IEEEE
Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 2004.
Kushner, David. “Rebel Alliance: How a Small Band of Sci-Fi Geeks Is Leading
Holly­wood into a New Era.” Fast Company. May 2008. Accessed September 21,
2013. http://www.fastcompany.com/798975/rebel-alliance.
Marshall, David. New Media Cultures. London: Arnold Publishers, 2004.
Meehan, Eileen R. “Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman! The Political Economy of a
Commercial Intertext.” In The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to
a Super-hero and His Media, edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio,
47–65. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Meikle Graham and Young, Sherman. Media Convergence: Networked Digital
Media in Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Mizruchi, Susan L. The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture,
1865–1915. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Nicoll, Benjamin. Review of Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications,
and Implications, by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Digital Culture and
Education, November 15, 2013. Accessed August 29, 2014. http://www.
digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/nicholl_html/.
Pearson, Roberta. “Transmedia Storytelling in Historical and Theoretical Per­
spectives.” Paper presented at The Ends of Television conference, University of
Amsterdam, June 29–July 1, 2009.
Phillips, Andrea. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate
and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill Edu­
cation, 2012.
Santo, Avi. “Transmedia Brand Licensing Prior to Conglomeration: George ­Trendle
and the Lone Ranger and Green Hornet Brands, 1933–1966.” PhD diss.,
­University of Texas, 2006.
Santo, Avi. “Batman versus The Green Hornet: The Merchandisable TV Text and the
Paradox of Licensing in the Classical Network Era.” Cinema Journal 49:2 (Fall
2010): 63–85.
Santo, Avi. Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licens-
ing. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2015.
Scolari, Carlos A. “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds,
and Branding in Contemporary Media Production.” International Journal of
Communication 3 (2009): http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc.
Scolari, Carlos A. “Don Quixote of La Mancha: Transmedia Storytelling in the
Gray Zone.” International Journal of Communication (SI: Transmedia
18 Introduction
Critical: Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Story­
telling) 8 (August 2014): http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc.
Scolari, Carlos A., Bertetti, Paolo and Freeman, Matthew. Transmedia Archaeology:
Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2014.
Smith, Anthony. “Media Contexts of Narrative Design: Dimensions of Specificity
within Storytelling Industries.” PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2012.
Stein, Louisa Ellen. “#Bowdown to Your New God: Misha Collins and Decentered
Authorship in the Digital Age.” In A Companion to Media Authorship, edited by
Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, 403–425. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,
2013.
Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Sub­creation.
New York: Routledge, 2012.
Part I

Defining Transmedia History

This page intentionally left blank
1 Characterising Transmedia
Storytelling
Character-building, World-building,
Authorship

In the introduction I began to argue that when stripped to its essence

­transmedia storytelling can be understood according to three characteris­
tics: character-building, world-building and authorship. This chapter will
elaborate on how each of these three overarching characteristics – which
are more or less true of all stories – make up transmedia storytelling by
engaging with the wider body of scholarship on this subject, explaining how
further specific principles of transmedia storytelling identified by Jenkins
manifest in transmedia stories. Doing so will enable me to historicise these
three characteristics in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively, showing how the
past’s industrial configurations worked to build transmedia story worlds.
So, to re-cite Jenkins’ earlier definition, transmedia storytelling is the
telling of ‘stories that unfold across multiple platforms, with each medium
making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story] world’
(2006: 334). This is not to be confused with cross-media, in which content
(news, music, text, images, etc.) is published in multiple media forms.1 One
example of cross-media might include reading a newspaper article online
rather than in print. Thus with cross-media, and unlike transmediality, con­
tent is simply relocated across other media with little concern for expanding
that content, or its story, or its story world.
Much the same is also true of adaptation. Admittedly the process of
adapting a story from one medium to another does involve some variation
on sameness, not least of all because a story may well need to change in order
to work within the medium it is presented in.2 And yet adaptation – as in
William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet from the sixteenth century
being made into the 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet – is
primarily about using the affordances of a different medium to tell a differ­
ent version of the same story, but not to expand that story. Evans (2011: 27)
asserts this distinction clearly: ‘Transmedia [storytelling] does not involve
the telling of the same events on different platforms; [it] involves the telling
of new events from the same storyworld.’ Or as Wolf (2012: 245–246) puts
it: Whereas adaptation is ‘translation’ (‘when a story existing in one medium
is adapted for … another medium, but without adding new material to a
world’), transmedia storytelling as ‘growth’ (‘another medium is used to
present new material of a world’). But beyond these straightforward distinc­
tions, how else can transmedia storytelling be characterised?
22 Defining Transmedia History
Let’s use the point that transmedia storytelling is about expansion
and extension as a starting point and go from there. This idea evokes the
­imagery of building, of adding something to something else. Conversely,
while Jenkins’ highly influential notion of convergence – itself the most com­
mon framing for transmedia storytelling – speaks of a situation where media
now circulates or where ‘media content flows fluidly’ (2006: 332), the word
‘convergence’ itself seems to denote multiple pre-existing elements of media
content all coming together. However, this chapter argues that transmedia
storytelling is not so much about multiple pre-existing textual forms ‘con­
verging’ as it is about multiple textual forms being built in the first place –
one component being added to another and another. Imagine a series of new
extensions that are added onto the same building to make a larger house.
A transmedia story is built up in a similar way, which can be equally char­
acterised in terms of building outwards.
This admittedly subtle shift in thinking is quite important. It is also in
line with more recent thinking on transmedia storytelling. For example, Fast
and Örnebring argue that rather than limiting conceptions of transmedia
storytelling to ‘planned, strategic aspects of creation’ (2015: 2), it is equally
as important to ‘emphasise the many disjunctions and contradictions that
almost inevitably follow when extending transmedia worlds across/between
media’ (2015: 2). Here, the focus is on ‘the emergent (as opposed to planned)
nature of the narrative aspects of transmediality’ (2015: 2). The rationale
behind Fast and Örnebring’s thinking and this push to understanding trans­
media storytelling in terms of the ‘accrued characteristics that are more
ad hoc/contingent than planned’ (2015: 2) is based on the fact that many
transmedia story worlds are created over many years, by many people. And
approaching transmedia storytelling from this more emergent and contin­
gent perspective will allow me in the later chapters to show the importance
of certain industrial configurations of the early twentieth century on the ways
in which stories began to be told across multiple media during that time.
At this stage, however, allow me now to elaborate on each of my
three characteristics of transmedia storytelling in turn, engaging with the
­scholarly literature available on the topic to further reinforce this general
significance of building as well as to show the various forms that this takes.
I start with my first characteristic – character-building – which again can
be defined most simply as the act of both constructing and developing a
fictional character.

Character-building
Most simply, understanding transmedia storytelling according to a small
number of general characteristics means starting with a guiding ­principle –
in this case the working motto of Starlight Runner Entertainment, a com­
pany that brands itself as the world’s leading creator and producer of
successful transmedia franchises. And for Starlight Runner Entertainment,
 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling 23
with transmedia storytelling, ‘it all starts with story’ (‘What Is Transmedia’,
2010: online).
Let’s take this motto as a kind of mantra for characterising transmedia
storytelling and begin with the basics. If transmedia storytelling all starts
with story, then what exactly is a story? For Roberta Pearson and Máire
Messenger Davies, who give a usefully succinct and minimal definition,
a story ‘arises from the combination of characters, settings, and events’
(2014: 128). All three of these factors are key to telling stories, and in more
complex ways each of these factors also work to hold transmedia story
worlds together and point audiences across media. Fictional characters, to
examine the first of this trio, can certainly hold transmedia story worlds
together and point audiences from one medium to another. Reiterating
­Bertetti, for instance, character ‘forms itself among and through texts …
never completely enclosed in a single text’ (2014: 16). Hence Bertetti argues
that ‘it is necessary to add the concept of transmedia character to the notion
of transmedia storytelling’ (2014: 3344). Says Bertetti: ‘This concept indi­
cates a fictional hero whose adventures are told in different media platforms,
each one giving more details on the life of that character’ (2014: 3344).
Here’s a good example of a fictional character whose adventures are told
across different media: Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Carib-
bean story world, embodied famously by actor Johnny Depp in the film
series. In response to a brief from The Walt Disney Company, who faced
something of a problem when trying to make their lucrative Pirates of the
Caribbean story world attractive to a child audience which may not have
even been allowed to see the PG-13-rated film series, Starlight Runner Enter­
tainment suggested a series of chapter books for younger readers. The books
featured younger versions of Jack Sparrow. ‘It was the same story world,’
Starlight Runner’s Jeff Gomez insisted, ‘just years earlier’ (2014: online). The
Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow Series therein functioned as
‘the perfect gateway for kids to enter the storyworld’ (Gomez, 2013: online).
In this case, the concept of character was central to the process of extend­
ing the Pirates of the Caribbean story world across media as an ongoing
transmedia story. Specifically, this example exemplifies a key point about
transmedia storytelling that I alluded to above – that transmedia s­ torytelling
must ultimately produce a series of media texts that function not as versions
of the same fiction, as in adaptation, but rather as continuing extensions
of the same story. As Geoffrey Long puts it, ‘transmedia stories build nar­
rative references to each component (the TV show chapter, the film chap­
ter, the video game chapter, etc.) to direct audiences through the system of
the franchise’ (2007: 10). In other words, it was not simply the fact that
Jack ­Sparrow reappeared in both the Pirates of the Caribbean films and
the Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow books that served to
construct a transmedia story world; rather, it was the fact that the latter
­children’s books built upon the former films, with both the books and the
films working together to build the character across both media.
24 Defining Transmedia History
It was character, then, that worked to build narrative references between
the films and the books, connecting both media texts as components of a
larger story world. But this begs a more fundamental question that needs
addressing: What exactly is a fictional character? Understanding the basic
components of what makes a fictional character a fictional character is
important, for this will allow me to identify the industrial configurations
and strategies of the past that have worked to build characters across mul­
tiple media. I do not have the space to engage in this narratological debate
fully, so for the purposes of my argument I offer a simple definition: Fictional
characters are imaginary beings built up of particular physical, psychologi­
cal and environmental components. Pearson and Davies propose a number
of key components that they argue work to construct a fictional charac­
ter, including appearance, dialogue, interactions with secondary characters,
psychology, and backstory (2014: 154–159). In other words, a ­character
is built using all or at least some combination of these components. But
if character is one way of holding a transmedia story world together, and
­specifically character-building as I have proposed, then what might under­
pin this process?
Indeed, what configurations underpin these character-building compo­
nents across media more generally? Answering this question means turning
to Marsha Kinder. In scholarly terms, the critical foundation of trans­media
storytelling actually first appeared in Kinder’s 1991 study of children’s
media, which she used to define an ‘ever-expanding supersystem of mass
entertainment’ that was organised across the film, television and video­
game industries (1991: 40). In using the term ‘transmedia intertextuality’ to
explain how the media content produced by these industries moves across
other media, Kinder acknowledges the importance of intertextuality on what
would later be called transmedia storytelling. Intertextuality harks back to
Roland Barthes and, most explicitly, Julia Kristeva, who argue that multiple
media texts exist and operate in relation to others (1980). Barthes quite
similarly argues that a media text is ‘a multidimensional space in which a
variety of writings … blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations’
(1977: 48). In other words, intertextuality can be more than mere allusions
or references; it can also expand those allusions and references. And in see­
ing intertextuality as itself an expansion of story across different texts, as
Caselli and Lesnik-Oberstein (2004) also propose, intertextuality creates a
scenario where the meaning of a story may be built in relation not only to
the individual text and story in question but also in relation to a range of
other texts and stories that may be invoked in the reading process.
By way of example, literary theorist Lubomír Doležel argues that multi­
ple stories are both linked and expanded within a given intertextual story
world specifically by character(s). For in intertextual theory, Doležel argues,
characters can ‘extend the scope of the original storyworld by adding more
existents to it, by turning secondary characters into the heroes of their own
story, and by expanding the original story though prequels and sequels’
 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling 25
(2010: 207). Doležel (2010: 207) demonstrates how this process of char­
acter construction works by pointing to the example of Wide Sargasso Sea,
a novel written by Jean Rhys in 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to
Charlotte Brontë’s famous 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Rhys’ novel followed the
life of Antoinette Cosway, the first wife of Mr. Rochester in the Brontë novel,
who was indeed a secondary character in Jane Eyre that was turned into
the hero of her own story. Like an assemblage of ‘extensions’ that become a
core part of a larger proverbial ‘house’, Wide Sargasso Sea exemplifies how
intertextuality can work to build a fictional character across additional texts
or additional media forms – via sequels and prequels.
Most simply, sequels and prequels, both serialised formats – essentially
tell stories that, as Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg define, offer a
‘chronological extension of a precursor narrative’ (1998: 7–8). But Jason
Scott (2009: 35) expands upon this definition by again emphasising the role
of characters, noting that sequels ‘most commonly continue the story of
the protagonist(s)’, utilising ‘a second generation of related characters, and
arguably prequels are a reverse chronological extension.’ For example, the
Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow Series was a prequel to the
Pirates of the Caribbean films, telling stories about the earlier adventures
of Jack Sparrow. Its status as a prequel built the Jack Sparrow character
across media via his interactions with secondary characters, appearance and
backstory.
In turn, the importance of things like prequels and sequels to how char­
acters may be built across multiple media highlights two bigger – and even
more important – principles for how transmedia storytelling works. The
first, as Jenkins has shown, is seriality: ‘Transmedia storytelling has taken
the notion of breaking up a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or
instalments within a single medium and instead has spread those dispa­
rate ideas or story chunks across multiple media systems’ (2009: online).
­Serialised forms such as prequels and sequels are adopted in transmedia
­stories so to build characters across multiple media, expanding on traits
such as appearance, backstory and interactions with other characters.
However, it is important to nuance the complexity of how seriality under­
pins cases of transmedia storytelling. Ben Singer defines seriality as that
which ‘extends the experience of the single … text by division, with the sell­
ing of the media product in chapters’ (1990: 90). But in some sense, ­Jenkins’
definition of transmedia storytelling is in direct opposition to ­Singer’s under­
standing of seriality: ‘Each [textual] entry needs to be self-contained so that
you do not need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa’
(2006: 98). Rather than operating as a simple process of selling serialised
chapters, then, transmedia storytelling is perhaps better theorised as either
a strategic or an emergent/contingent form of expansive intertextuality –
using things like characters and their components to link stories together,
offering audiences new added insights into characters in ways that consti­
tute a sequel or a prequel, and doing so by quite often switching from one
26 Defining Transmedia History
character’s point of view to another as one moves from one medium to
another. Or as Jenkins puts it, transmedia storytelling is about subjectivity –
that is, ‘exploring the central narrative through new eyes, such as second­
ary characters or third parties. This diversity of perspective often leads fans
to more greatly consider who is speaking and who they are speaking for’
(2009: online).
Consider the various texts emerging from The Matrix film (1999), which
Jenkins selects as his transmedia storytelling exemplar. This case consists of
three films, a collection of anime shorts called The Animatrix, a comic book
series, and a videogame titled Enter the Matrix, all of which were linked via
character. In ‘Final Flight of the Osiris,’ one of The Animatrix shorts, for
instance, a protagonist called Jue sacrifices herself in order to send a mes­
sage to the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, an event that is referred to in The
Matrix Reloaded (2003). In that same film, Niobe, at this point a secondary
character, rescues central characters Morpheus and Trinity in the middle of
a freeway chase. This is a rescue that players of the videogame had encoun­
tered as a specific mission, where, just like with Doležel’s Wide Sargasso Sea
example, a secondary character is turned into the hero of his or her own
story (Jenkins, 2006: 104–106). Notably, the stories told in each of these
various Matrix texts are linked by overlapping characters, which worked to
serialise each of the different stories as expansive intertextual components
even though each of these Matrix texts are indeed self-contained narratively.
By shifting the subjectivity across each of the texts, the films, videogame and
anime shorts all add new pieces of information that builds those characters.
Again, transmedia storytelling is rather like the idea of extensions being
added onto a house, with the subjectivity of each room lending new perspec­
tives to the experience of the house.
In reference to another case Jenkins goes into more detail that shows
some of the other forms that this process of transmedia character-­building
can take. Discussing the television series Heroes (2006–2010), Jenkins
points to the series of Heroes web-comics, each of which were published on
a weekly basis to coincide with the broadcast date of the televised episodes.
The television series referenced the existence of this comic in the world of
the television series in an overtly intertextual way as characters are seen
actually reading the comic book throughout particular episodes, using it to
unlock narrative mysteries. The comic served, Jenkins notes, to ‘flesh out
secondary characters, fill in back story, and provide missing scenes which
round out the action depicted on the screen’ (2007: online). For example,
the comics expanded on one character’s relationship with his father. Jenkins
points out how scenes ‘overlapped between the comics and the television
series, enough that we can see how the parts fit together … taking us in dif­
ferent places and telling us different things’ (2007: online).
So, fleshing out secondary characters and filling in backstory via the serial
forms of prequels and sequels can be understood as the two key strands of
how character-building takes shape in transmedia storytelling. The former
 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling 27
strand can be demonstrated via something like The Dark Knight Rises: The
Official Novelization (2012), a tie-in novel to The Dark Knight Rises film.
Despite sharing the same basic plot as the film, the tie-in novel expanded the
known narrative surrounding the Joker character, revealing this character’s
fate for the first time via shifting the perspective and thus the subjectivity of
the story. And the latter strand can be seen in something like 24 (2001–2010),
a television series whose second and third series were bridged by the story
of 24: The Game (2006), which filled in the backstory between those series,
offering a sequel to season 2 and a prequel to season 3. But character most
explicitly linked the television series with the game, with the stories being
‘self-contained so that you do not need to have seen the [television show] to
enjoy the game, and vice versa’ (Jenkins, 2006: 98). Gamers discovered how
hero Jack Bauer met Chase, a secondary character from the television series,
building those characters and their relationship across media. And so even
as I position character-building – the building of a fictional character via the
use of backstory or biography, appearance, dialogue, interactions with other
characters, psychology, etc. – as a characteristic of transmedia storytelling,
the various examples cited above indicate just how many strategies may be
used to achieve this particular characteristic.
What’s more, which combination of media works best to build charac­
ters across multiple media – and how has this process of character-building
evolved over time? For that matter, which industrial configurations of the
past have informed particular strategies of character-building across multi­
ple media? Intertextuality has a very long history, of course, and as I argue
in Chapter 5, character-building across multiple media during the 1950s
meant forging industry partnerships across the margins of media industries.
Yet character-building is still only one characteristic of transmedia storytell­
ing. I will therefore now move on to elaborate on the s­ econd ­characteristic –
world-building – which in some ways is a much larger category of the
former characteristic, and broadly describes ‘the process of designing a
fictional universe’ that can hold multiple stories together across multiple
media (­Jenkins, 2006: 335).

World-building
Earlier I implied that transmedia storytelling is not so much about stories
converging as it is about stories building – operating, as Fast and Örnebring
argued previously, as often from emergent contingencies is it does from stra­
tegic planning, rather like a series of extensions that are eventually added
onto a building to make a larger house. But what exactly is the ‘house’ in
this metaphor? Put simply, the house is the fictional story world.3 And the
concept of a fictional story world is in fact central to Jenkins’ definition of
transmedia storytelling. For Jenkins, the story world is that which holds
together multiple stories across different media (2006: 103–110). As Jenkins
remarks, ‘a good character can sustain multiple narratives and thus leads
28 Defining Transmedia History
to a successful movie franchise. A good world can sustain multiple charac­
ters (and their stories) and thus successfully launch a transmedia franchise’
(2003: online).
In sustaining multiple characters, therefore, a story world is essentially
a far bigger analytical category of character. Hence some of the strategies
of character-building identified earlier – prequels, sequels, the expansion of
backstory, etc., not to mention larger principles of seriality and subjectivity –
may also be used to build a story world and contribute to ‘an ever-­expanding
and richly-detailed fictional world’ (2007: online). Characters, as Jens Eder,
Fotis Jannidis and Ralf Schneider have acknowledged, are themselves ‘enti­
ties in fictional worlds’ – and as I shall now demonstrate, transmedia story­
telling is most effectively the process of building not just characters but also
entire fictional story worlds, ones where many different stories can take
place and where many different characters can roam free (2010: 17).
Important to this thinking is the way that Dudley Andrew understands
story worlds to be similarly intertextual structures that persist across multi­
ple texts across media and afford many stories to unfold and many characters
to roam: ‘The storyworld of [Charles] Dickens is larger than the particular
rendition of it which we call Oliver Twist … In fact, it is larger than the
sum of novels Dickens wrote, existing as a set of paradigms, a global source
from which he could draw’ (1984: 55). In some ways, the ability to some­
how build a fictional story world across multiple media is arguably the root
of the perceived complexity or sophistication that lies at the heart of so
much scholarly literature on transmedia storytelling. Jenkins has argued that
transmedia storytelling – ‘the art of world-building’ (2006: 166) – immerses
audiences in a story’s universe, providing a comprehensive experience of a
complex story’ (2003: online). Echoing this idea of a ‘complex’ story, Carlos
A. Scolari insists that transmedia storytelling’s ‘textual dispersion is one of
the most important sources of complexity in contemporary popular cul­
ture’ (2009: 587). And yet when Scolari hints at transmedia storytelling’s
so-called contemporary-rooted sense of complexity, he is prone to over-­
emphasise the role played by convergence, with the implicit assumption here
being that media conglomeration or digital convergences have speci­fically
afforded more detailed, more sophisticated and more integrative fictional
story worlds than if produced outside of convergent contexts.
Conversely, what is arguably most ‘complex’ or ‘sophisticated’ about
transmedia storytelling is surely its ability to build and sustain vast imagi­
nary story worlds across multiple media, regardless of different industrial,
cultural or historical contexts. And as Wolf has shown, imaginary story
worlds might well be traced back as far as the fictional islands of Homer’s
Odyssey (2012). The historicised nature of Wolf’s work on this subject in
itself suggests that very different strategies have been used over time to build
equally complex story worlds. And so if one was to simply ask ‘what are
story worlds and how do they relate to transmedia storytelling?’ it seems
that the answer once again requires an understanding of story.
 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling 29
Let’s therefore turn back to Pearson and Davies’ earlier cited definition
of story, described as that which ‘arises from the combination of characters,
settings, and events’ (2014: 128). I have already outlined the role of char­
acters on developing stories across media, but quite similarly settings also
play a pivotal role in this transmedia process. While Andrew offers a some­
what vague description of story worlds, defining them as ‘comprehensive
systems that comprise all elements that fit together within the same horizon’
(1984: 54), Anthony Smith defines the concept of story world more precisely
as ‘the spatio-temporal model of story that a given narrative evokes, and
which incorporates sequences of events, the characters who instigate them …
and the settings that contextualise these events and characters’ (2012: 29).
Put simply, a story world is built up of characters, events and settings –
just like any story. For as Marie-Laure Ryan points out, ‘the ability to create
a world – or more precisely the ability to inspire the mental representa­
tion of a world – is the primary condition for any text to be considered a
narrative’ (2013: online). Yet what differentiates a basic story world that
exists in any story from the process of world-building across multiple texts
and media is the way that the spatio-temporality of a given story world
becomes expanded across media by using those additional media forms to
add new aspects of world mythology, or to expand the timeline of the story
world to include new events, or to explore new fictional settings, etc. In this
same vein, according to Tim Kring, creator of Heroes, world-building is
‘like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side’
(Kushner, 2008: online). For The Lord of the Rings, for example, Tolkien
penned entire backstories spanning thousands of years of fictional history,
even naming the forests and rivers while developing new languages for the
inhabitants of Middle Earth. Across this text, its appendices, and its pre­
decessor story The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien expanded the timeline of this
story world, narrating earlier or parallel events that occurred in the back­
ground or tangentially to the primary story. Such world-building activity
was in this case done via both the basic principles of story – character,
events and settings – and also via maps and other paratextual documents,
indicating the point that, as Wolf states, the act of building story worlds is
often ‘transmedial in nature’ (2012: 68). More to the point, the building of
transmedia story worlds is about forging a careful balance between what
Jenkins describes as spreadability versus drillability: ‘Spreadability refers to
a process of dispersal – to scanning across the media landscape in search
of meaningful bits of data [while] drillability refers to the ability for a
person to explore, in-depth, a deep well of narrative extensions when they
stumble upon a fiction that truly captures their attention’ (2009: online).
As I will argue in Chapter 3, for instance, world-building at the turn of the
twentieth century was rooted in the spreadability of visual materials such
as printed maps and posters, while colour and other forms of spectacle
equally became effective ways to allow audiences to drill down into a story
world’s extensions.
30 Defining Transmedia History
But world-building manifests in other ways, too. Jenkins (2009: online)
suggests that the building of fictional story worlds across media is equally
characterised by the way that a given story world can fully immerse its audi­
ences as if it were a real space, and provide various opportunities for those
audiences to extract pieces of that story world. For Jenkins (2009: online),
‘in immersion, the consumer enters into the world of the story (e.g. theme
parks), while in extractability, the fan takes aspects of the story away with
them as resources they deploy in the spaces of their everyday life (e.g. items
from the gift shop).’ Consider the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The
Making of Harry Potter, for example. This attraction, based in Leavesden,
allows audiences to visit the sets, props and costumes created for the films.
As well as seeing the spaces from the story world in person, such as Privet
Drive, the home street of Harry Potter – fully immersing audiences in the
world of Harry Potter – those audiences can also extract many of the physi­
cal artefacts from the story world by purchasing the likes of Butterbeer,
Gryffindor scarfs, Hogwarts mugs and wands.
However, this begs a further question: Even if a story world becomes
linked together in some way – presented as both a spreadable, immersive
fictional sphere that affords opportunities to drill down into an array of
narrative extensions, each with extractable artefacts – how exactly are audi­
ences encouraged to migrate from one story to another and to partake in
these activities of drillability and extractability? If each story in a given story
world needs to be self-contained, as Jenkins insists of transmedia story­
telling generally, then what actually directs audiences towards the others?
Considered from an industrial standpoint, building a story world means
both building adjoining products and simultaneously selling products as
individual proverbial ‘rooms’ of the larger ‘house’. Part of the conceptual
breakthrough, then, of theorising transmedia storytelling has been to com­
prehend it simultaneously as storytelling in and of itself and equally as pro­
motion for further storytelling. For as Jenkins asserts, ‘creating transmedia
story worlds’ is itself the very process of ‘understanding how to appeal to
migratory audiences’ (2008: online). Thus more promotion-centric materi­
als like trailers and online adverts must play a vital role in the building of
transmedia story worlds today.
In this vein, Jonathan Gray usefully expands upon this relationship
between storytelling and promotion in the contemporary context in his
Show Sold Seperately book. Gray studies the way in which promotional
materials for texts operate not exclusively as apparatus for selling but rather
for selling via ‘advancing and developing [the] narrative’ of a text (2010a: 5).
For Gray and what he terms media paratexts, the meaning of a series such
as Heroes is not located solely within the actual text but also extends across
multiple media forms including DVDs and online materials. Such materi­
als may actively serve to build the story world and steer audiences across
media, for as Tim Kring elaborates: ‘Transmedia storytelling ultimately lures
the audience into buying more stuff – today, DVDs; tomorrow, who knows
 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling 31
what?’ (Kushner, 2008: online). In building a fictional story world across
multiple media, transmedia storytelling hereby increases appetite for fur­
ther consumption of that story world, adding new entrypoints. Consider, for
example, the Harry Potter story world as a case in point. To promote Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part II (2011), Warner Bros. created faux
Facebook pages for a number of the film’s central characters, publishing
snippets about the spells these characters have learned. This developed an
audience’s understanding of the rules of magic and mythology that govern
that particular story world.
In another instance, this time to promote The Dark Knight (2008),
­Warner Bros. launched a new viral campaign called ‘I Believe in Harvey
Dent’. After registering on the website ibelieveinharveydent.com, audiences
then followed a national tour campaign over the course of the weeks leading
up to the release of the film. The website published news stories about a van
driving around and rallying the citizens of Gotham City to campaign for
Harvey Dent to be District Attorney. Come the start of The Dark Knight,
Dent had been elected. Such examples, as Gray elaborates, work to ‘open up
a history … they put you into the world. They’ve given you an experience
of that world … the narrative, in other words, has begun’ (2010b: online).
And in enabling the transmedia narrative to have begun and to develop
in this way, clearly the likes of promotional websites and related paratexts
are crucial to the way in which transmedia storytelling works. For Bennett
and Woollacott (1987: 248), the likes of ‘film publicity, posters, fanzine arti­
cles, interviews with stars, promotional stunts, etc.’ do far more than merely
‘organise expectations in relation to a particular film.’ In fact, Bennett and
Woollacott (1987) propose the concept of inter-textuality to describe the
complex ways in which fictions may exist in the gaps in between their tex­
tual exploits, with those ‘in-between’ pieces working to reshape how audi­
ences read texts, adjusting their meaning. In their study of the James Bond
phenomenon, for example, Bennett and Woollacott explore ‘the respects in
which, in adding to “the texts of Bond”, [the films] contributed to a reorgan­
isation of the inter-textual relations to which both the films and the novels
were read’ (1987: 142).
In it in this way that the earlier identified intertextuality is distinguished
from inter-textuality: ‘Whereas Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality refers
to the system of references to other texts which can be discerned within the
internal composition of a specific individual text … the concept of inter-­
textuality refers to the social organisation of the relations between texts
within specific conditions of reading’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 45).
In other words, whereas the former refers to purposeful references within a
text to other texts, the latter is used to explain how popular characters like
James Bond seemingly escape their textual constraints and exist in the gaps
in between their textual exploits. Both intertextuality and inter-textuality
are important aspects of transmedia storytelling, and the distinction between
these two concepts will be fleshed out at different points throughout this
32 Defining Transmedia History
book to show how transmedia stories materialised both textually and ori­
ented culturally throughout the past.
At this stage, however, suffice to say that transmedia storytelling is really
the folding in of text with paratext. Gray’s concept of the paratext – itself
an intertextual form found in the fuzzy threshold that exists between the
textual story world and the inter-textual cultural spaces around that textual
story world – lies in between products and by-products, between ownership
and cultural formation, and between content and promotional material. Put
simply, the folding in of the paratextual apparatus into the diegesis of the
media text epitomises the blend of intertextuality and inter-textuality that is
itself key to all transmedia storytelling.
At the present moment, therefore, it is digital platforms that most
emphati­cally and most frequently build fictional story worlds across media;
online promoters exploit digital tools like social media and film websites
to plant in-universe artefacts about a given story world. But as I show in
­Chapter 3, in the past other forms of industrialised advertising were key to
world-­building; the arrival of new colour printing technologies around the
early twentieth century similarly worked to build story worlds and point
audiences across various media. It is in that sense that it makes sense to
understand character-building as a smaller category of world-­building,
with the latter able to draw on a larger pool of strategies to connect
­stories together as parts of a story world. That being said, the components
of ­character-building and world-building highlighted thus far – prequels,
sequels, the expansion of backstory, the addition of storyworld mythology,
the expansion of the known timeline, the exploration of new fictional set­
tings, etc. – all require creative ownership, be it strategically planned or
otherwise. And so these components signal the importance of a third char­
acteristic not yet discussed: Authorship. I will now move on to elaborate on
this third characteristic, which broadly concerns the governing role played
by a central author over a transmedia story world.

Authorship
In his elaboration of the term transmedia storytelling Jenkins defines it
as ‘a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systemati­
cally across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified
and coordinated entertainment experience’ (2007: online). This definition,
as Louisa Ellen Stein observes, ‘places the emphasis on official authorial
control, be it in the hands of a larger corporate entity, a small transmedia
production group, or an individual transmedia auteur’ (2013: 405). More
recently, Jenkins has offered a slightly more open-ended definition, in which
transmedia storytelling comes to describe a ‘logic for thinking about the
flow of content across media’ (2011: online), hence Fast and Örnebring’s
shift to more emergent logics of transmedia storytelling. As I showed in the
introduction, however, this logic tends most often to concern the role played
 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling 33
by media convergence, with industrial and technological connections pro­
viding a model for how to extend stories across multiple media. But, again,
this convergence model is not necessarily the only logic. Though conver­
gence, as Stein notes, ‘recognizes the expanse of audience authorship,’ this
participation of audiences is most notably an affordance of digital media
specifically rather than a general characteristic of transmedia storytelling
itself (2013: 405).
And so in understanding how transmedia storytelling worked under a dif­
ferent logic besides the digital participatory model of contemporary techno­
logical convergences, it is key to re-emphasise the importance of authorship
on transmedia storytelling.4 Emphasising what Stein calls ‘official authorial
control’ may seem retrograde at first glance, especially in the context of
such an expansive and media-traversing subject like transmedia storytelling.
At worst, even, the very idea of transmedia storytelling being contingent on
such official authorial control might be seen as harking back to the excesses
of the auteur theory, arguably ignoring the production contexts that inform
authorship. But as I said in the introduction, in actual fact I am doing quite
the opposite, showing that the strategies and configurations of transmedia
storytelling in the past can only really be understood by acknowledging the
agency of people.
Indeed, in any case, when extending existing stories and expanding estab­
lished story worlds across media, an authorial figure remains crucial,5 for as
was stressed earlier, transmedia storytelling must ultimately produce media
texts that function not as versions of the same story but rather as extensions
of the same story. Or as Evans puts it, transmedia storytelling ‘tells different
stories, or at least different parts of a larger story’ (2011: 38). As I shall
argue throughout the different historical contexts of this book, transmedia
storytelling helps to make authors – be it TV showrunners, novelists, film
directors, etc. – more visibly significant to the way in which stories are con­
sumed across media as story worlds. As Gray puts it, ‘these individuals add
their voice to the audience’s understanding of the story’ (2010a: 108).
Put simply, in telling different parts of the same larger story, it is authors
who of course dictate characters and entire fictional story worlds, build­
ing both of these aspects across multiple media. Once again the analogy of
building comes to the forefront, and all acts of building will always require
the hands of a good builder. For example, when looking at how transmedia
storytelling worked in the aforementioned case of The Matrix story world,
Jenkins highlights the central role played by the Wachowskis, the films’
writer/directors:

The Wachowski brothers played the transmedia game very well, put­
ting out the original film first to stimulate interest, offering up a few
Web comics to sustain the hard-core fan’s hunger for more informa­
tion, launching the anime in anticipation of the second film, releasing
the computer game alongside it to surf the publicity, bringing the whole
34 Defining Transmedia History
cycle to a conclusion with The Matrix Revolutions, and then turning
the whole mythology over to the players of the massively multi-player
online game. (2006: 97)

While many of these Matrix extensions were inevitably produced by other

creative personnel – including Japanese anime specialists and videogame
designers, to name only a few – the Wachowskis remained the central autho­
rial hands across the different media iterations: ‘The brothers personally
wrote and directed content for the game, drafted scenarios for some of the
animated shorts, and co-wrote a few of the comics’ (Jenkins, 2006: 113).
In fact, for Jenkins, the Wachowskis’ ‘personal engagement made these
other Matrix texts a central part of the “canon”’ in the eyes of audiences
(2006: 113). Industrial convergence may have ‘provided a context for the
Wachowski brothers’ experiment’ (Jenkins, 2006: 110), but throughout
this book I will show the different industrial configurations through which
authors have crossed media and extended stories across industries, as well
as the cultural influences that made such media-crossing activities possible
before contemporary convergences.
Regardless of the industrial context, however, what is important to stress
at this stage is that an author can indeed hold a fictional story world together
(or even break it apart). One of the ways that this power occurs is in the link
between an author and the perceived ‘canonicity’ of given texts – that is, its
acceptance in the minds of certain audiences as a legitimate extension of a
story world as opposed to an unauthorised or illegitimate addition, such as
fan-fiction for example (Jenkins, 2006: 321). An author can always dictate
what is canonical and thus holds the power to determine what does or does
not constitute a part of a given story world.
Consider the former days of the Star Wars story world as an example, a
world that stretches back to the late 1970s. On the one hand, and prior to Star
Wars becoming a Disney enterprise in 2012, Star Wars once comprised six
films made between 1977 and 2005 by George Lucas. But over time Lucas’
six films became supported with other novels, comic books and cartoons.
These latter additions were often distinguished from the films according to
their canonised positioning in the Star Wars Expanded U ­ niverse, a phrase
that implies a certain degree of separation from the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’
films. Occupying a position within the Star War Expanded U ­ niverse, for
example, was Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, a series of novels set five
years after the events of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983).
Yet despite working to expand the Star Wars story world and build its core
characters such as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in ways that I have iden­
tified already as characteristics of transmedia storytelling, Zahn’s Thrawn
trilogy complicates those former two characteristics insofar as Star Wars,
unlike The Matrix or Heroes, was not necessarily always promoted as a
transmedia story. The reason for this is simple: The Star Wars world lacked
the hand of consistent authorial control across media, which resulted in a
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The petition addressed by Suero de Quiñones to King John
of Castile ran thus—“It is just and reasonable that
prisoners and bondsmen should wish to recover their
liberty. Even so it is with me, your Majesty’s vassal and
subject, who have long been the captive of a lady, in
token of which captivity I wear every Thursday round my
neck a collar of iron. This fact is notorious in your
Majesty’s court and throughout all this kingdom, as well as
in foreign parts, where my heralds have proclaimed it. But
now, most powerful Prince, I have in the name of the
Apostle St. James, devised a plan for effecting my
deliverance, in this present year, of which this is the first
day. My proposal is to break three hundred lances, with
such knights and gentlemen as may accept my challenge
—breaking three with every and each knight or gentleman
who enters the lists;—the first blood drawn to be counted
as one lance broken. The combats to be maintained
during fifteen days prior to the festival of the Apostle St.
James, (the guide and defender of your Majesty’s
subjects) and during fifteen days after the said festival,
unless my ransom be accomplished before the expiration
of that period. The lists to be planted on the high road,
along which most persons pass on their way to the city
wherein is the Saint’s sacred sepulchre,[79] and that it be
certified to all the foreign knights and gentlemen who may
there assemble that they will find at the place of
encounter, armour, horses, and above all lances with
points of such good Milan steel, that it will require no light
stroke to shiver them. And I pray that it be notified to
every virtuous lady of rank, who may be in the vicinity of
the scene of combat, that she must summon a knight to
perform a passage of arms in her behalf, under pain of
forfeiting her right hand glove. All these propositions I
pray may be agreed to;—saving two conditions, which are
—that neither your Royal Majesty nor the most noble

Á
Señor Constable, Don Álvaro de Luna, take part in these
encounters.”
The petition having been assented to by the King, Suero
de Quiñones, accompanied by nine knights his followers,
set out on his romantic enterprise. He proclaimed himself
the defender of the Honroso Paso of the Bridge of Orbigo.
Sixty-eight adventurers, and not seventy as stated in the
Buscapié, combated for the conquest of the Honroso Paso,
and Suero, on being declared the victor, presented to the
Umpires of the Field a petition, which was responded to in
the following manner:—
“Virtuous Knight and Señor, we have heard your
proposition and appeal, and it appears to us to be just.
Considering that we ought no longer to delay pronouncing
our judgment, we hereby declare that your arms have
been triumphant and that your deliverance has been
bravely purchased. And moreover, we hereby notify to
you, as well as to all others here present, that of the three
hundred lances specified in your petition to the king there
remain only a few unbroken, and that there would not be
even those few, but that on several days there could not
be any passage of arms by reason of no knights having
presented themselves to oppose the challenger. We
accordingly decree that you be released from the iron
collar, which we forthwith order the King-at-Arms, and the
Herald to remove from your neck; and we declare that you
have duly accomplished your emprise, and that you are
henceforth delivered from bondage.”
In obedience to the command of the Umpires, the King-at-
Arms and the Heralds descended from the platform and
before the eyes of all present, took from the neck of Suero
de Quiñones the iron ring which he wore as the sign and
token of his bondage.
 The records of Spanish chivalry mention numerous
adventures, no less whimsical and extravagant than that
of the doughty knight who was the hero of the Honroso
Paso.—Several instances of the same kind are narrated by
Hernán Pérez del Pulgar in his Claros Varones de Castilla.
(Illustrious men of Castile).

(O).
“Have you not heard of the adventure of the Canon Almela who was
at the conquest of Grenada, with two horsemen and seven followers
on foot. He wore girded at his side a sword which he affirmed had
belonged to the Cid Ruy Díaz.” (Page 126).
The individual referred to in the above passage is Diego
Rodríguez de Almela, who ultimately attained the
ecclesiastical dignity of Arcipreste (Archpriest). He was a
native of the city of Murcia, and the author of some
learned historical works, one of which is entitled: El
Valerio de las estorias escolásticas é de España.—(The
Valerius of the Scholastic History and of Spain). The first
edition of this work is exceedingly rare, and at its close
appears the following note.
“To the glory and honour of our Blessed Savior and
Redeemer, the printing of this book, called El Valerio de
las estorias escolásticas é de España was finished in the
noble city of Murcia, by maestre Lope de la Roca, a
German and a printer of books, on Thursday the sixth day
of November, in the year one thousand four hundred and
eighty-seven.”
In the certificate of the King-at-Arms attached to the royal
letters patent conferring the rank of nobility on Don
Francisco Xavier de Almela i Peñafiel, there is a paragraph
relating to the lineage of the Almela family. It is there set
 forth that “Diego Rodríguez de Almela, Canon of the Holy
Cathedral Church of Carthegena, Chaplain to the Catholic
Queen, and Her Majesty’s Chronicler, who served
personally with two esquires and six men on foot at the
conquest of Grenada, presented to the Catholic King[80]
the sword of the Cid Ruy Díaz.”

(P).
“The Great Emperor finding himself challenged with all the solemnity
of the laws of the duelo, took counsel of his cousin, Don Diego, Duke
del Infantado, as to the course he ought to pursue.” (Page 128).
The letter addressed on this occasion by the Emperor to
the Duke del Infantado, and the Duke’s reply to it, are
mentioned but not given by Sandoval, in his History of
Charles V. These two letters are printed in an exceedingly
scarce work, entitled, Diálogos de contención entre la
milicia y la ciencia.[81] by Francisco Núñez de Velasco. The
following extract from the Duke’s letter, precisely verifies
that passage of the Buscapié to which this note has
reference.
“Truly, Señor, it would be a fine example, if the great debt
which all the world knows is due to you from the King of
France, were to be paid by a challenge to your imperial
person. Such a proceeding, if sanctioned by your Majesty,
would go far to establish throughout your dominions a law
to the effect that all debts may be paid by recourse to
arms; which would tend more to the shedding of blood
than to the vindication of justice and mercy. All this I write
to your Majesty that you may deliberate on my opinion,
and I beg you will be assured that if, on more mature
reflection I see reason to alter my opinion, I will forthwith
advise your Majesty thereof, with all the fidelity I owe you.
 For this is a matter which concerns my honour, together
with that of all the grandees of these realms.”

(Q).
“Such absurd encounters have no existence save in silly books of
chivalry and in plays which in our time have been taken from them;
but which in the time of Lope de Rueda, Gil Vicente and Alonzo de
Cisneros, would not have been tolerated on the stage.” (Page 128).
Cervantes highly appreciated the genius of Lope de
Rueda, who was a celebrated actor as well as a dramatic
writer. He styles him el gran Lope de Rueda, insigne
varón, &c. Some curious particulars respecting Lope de
Rueda and the state of the Spanish stage in his time are
related by Cervantes in the Prólogo or Preface to his Ocho
comedias y ocho entremeses nunca representadas,[82]
from which the following extract is translated—
“A short time ago, when I was in company with some
friends, our conversation turned on play-writing, acting,
and other matters connected with dramatic
representation. These subjects were so ably discussed and
criticised that in my opinion it would have been difficult to
meet with more clever remarks. One of the questions
under consideration was to ascertain who first stripped
Spanish comedy of its swaddling clothes, dressed it up,
and arrayed it with ornament. I, who was the oldest
person in the company, observed that I had a perfect
recollection of having seen Lope de Rueda act, and that
that extraordinary man was remarkable not only for his
talent as a writer, but also for his power as an actor. He
was a native of Seville, and was by trade a gold-beater,
that is to say, his employment was making gold leaf for
gilding. He was an admirable writer of pastoral poetry, and
in that style of composition no one either before his time,
or unto the present day, has surpassed him. When I knew
him, I was a mere boy, and therefore I could form no well
grounded judgment respecting the merit of his writing;
yet in my present mature age, when I reflect on some of
his verses which my memory retains, I think the opinion I
have expressed is correct. Were it not for the fear of going
beyond the limits of this preface, I would cite some of
Lope de Rueda’s verses in support of my opinion.
“In the time of that celebrated man, all the apparatus of a
theatrical manager could be packed up in a sack. It
consisted of four shepherd’s dresses of white skin trimmed
with gilt leather, four beards and wigs, and four
shepherd’s staffs. The comedies were composed of
dialogues (after the manner of eclogues), between two or
three shepherds and a shepherdess. The entertainment
was augmented, or rather spun out, by two or three
interludes in which sometimes a negro, sometimes a
rufián,[83] a fool, or a Biscayan were introduced. All these
four characters, and many others, Lope de Rueda, acted
in most excellent style, and with the utmost truth to
nature. At that period there was no such thing as stage
machinery; no combats between Moors and Christians
either on foot or on horseback, no figures rising up from
trap doors, and seeming as though they rose from the
bowels of the earth; no descending clouds in which spirits
and angels came down from Heaven. The stage was
constructed of four benches ranged square-wise, and over
them were laid a few planks, by which means the stage
was raised about four spans above the ground. There
were no scenes, but an old curtain was hung across the
back part of the stage, and was drawn by two cords from
one side to the other. A space behind the curtain served
as a dressing-room for the actors. The musicians also
stood there. They sang old romances, but without guitar
accompaniment. Lope de Rueda died at Cordova, and out
of respect for his excellent character and great talent he
was buried in the cathedral of that city, between the two
choirs.”
Further particulars of the life of Lope de Rueda may be
found in Moratin’s Orígenes del Teatro Español, and in El
Teatro Español Anterior a Lope de Vega, by Nicolás Böhl
de Faber.
Of the life of Gil Vicente, the Hispano-Portuguese
dramatist and comedian, who has not inaptly been styled
the Portuguese Plautus, but little is known. No
biographical accounts of him furnish any authentic record
either of the date or the place of his birth. Some describe
him to have been a native of Guimaräes, others assign
Barcellos, and others Lisbon, as his birth-place. Don
Adolfo de Castro, notices a fact which would appear to
have escaped the observation of Gil Vicente’s biographers,
both Spanish and Portuguese, viz.: that he himself
mentions his birth-place in one of his Portuguese autos.
[84] In that piece, one of the characters steps forward and
delivers a sort of address commencing thus:—
Gil Vicente o autor
Me fez seu embaixador.[85]

Then follows a description of the condition and calling of

the author’s grandfather and parents, and Alemtejo is
mentioned as the place of his nativity.
Bouterwek, who furnishes some particulars relating to the
life of this celebrated man, says:—“There is reason to
suppose that Gil Vicente was born within twenty years of
the close of the fifteenth century. He first studied the law,
but speedily relinquished it, and devoted himself wholly to
the dramatic art. It is not recorded whether he was a
regularly pensioned writer for the Court, but he was most
indefatigable in furnishing the royal family and the public
with entertainments suited to the taste of the age. He
constantly resided at Court, where his poetic talents were
held in permanent requisition for the celebration of
spiritual as well as of temporal festivals, and no dramatic
writer in Europe was more admired and esteemed than Gil
Vicente. His early productions were performed with
approbation at court in the reign of Emmanuel the Great,
but his reputation rose higher in the reign of John III., and
that monarch did not, in his youthful years, scruple to
perform characters in the dramas of this favourite author.
We are not informed whether Vicente was himself an
actor, but he was the tutor of the most celebrated actress
of his age, viz.: his daughter Paula.”[86]
Gil Vicente wrote the following epitaph on his wife, to
whom he was most affectionately attached, and who was
interred in the Franciscan monastery at Evora.
Aqui jaez a muy prudente
Senhora Branca Becerra,
Mulher de Gil Vicente,
Feita terra.

Which may be thus literally construed:—

Here lies the most discreet,

Senhora Branca Becerra,
Wife of Gil Vicente,
Turned to clay.

Gil Vicente died in the year 1577, at Evora, and his

remains were interred beside those of his wife, in the
Franciscan monastery. He wrote for his own tomb the
following epitaph:—
 O gran juizo esperando
Jazo aqui nesta morada,
Desta vida tao cauçado
Descançando.

(The great Judgment-day awaiting

Here, in this narrow dwelling-place,
After life’s weary course,
I am reposing.)

In an old collection of Gil Vicente’s works, this epitaph is

given with the addition of the following lines:—

Preguntas-me quem fui eu?

Atenta bem pera ti,
Porque tal fui com’ a ti
E tal has de ser com’ eu.
E pois tudo a isto vem,
O lector de meu conselho,
Tomame por teu espelho:—
Olhame e olhate bem.

(Thou askest what I was,

Attend, lend ear to me;
That which thou art, I was,
What I am, thou wilt be.
Since all to this must come,
Reader, then counselled be,
As the mirror of thy doom,
Look! and look well on me!)

Alonso de Cisneros, a native of Toledo, a famous actor of

the sixteenth century, is less known by his proper name
than by the appellation of el Tamborillo. He received this
nickname because it was a part of his theatrical duty to
beat a drum, which, according to the old Spanish custom,
was sounded in the street, to announce that the
performances were about to commence, and that the
public might assemble in the theatre. It happened that
 this drum disturbed the siestas of Cardinal Espinosa, who
was then officiating as President of Castile, and who stood
high in the favour of Phillip II. The Cardinal, irritated by
the annoyance, and determined to get rid of it, devised
some unfounded pretext for ordering Cisneros to quit
Madrid.
This circumstance came to the ears of the Infante Don
Carlos, who used to be much diverted by the comedian’s
humour and drollery; for at that time the Prince had
withdrawn from the court circle, on account of the
mortification he suffered from the favour shewn by his
father to Rui Gómez de Silva and Cardinal Espinosa.
On hearing of the banishment of Cisneros, and its cause,
Carlos resolved on revenge. He ordered the Captain of his
Guard to beat four drums daily, from two till five in the
afternoon, in front of the Cardinal’s residence. One day
when the Prelate went to pay a visit to the palace, his
unlucky star brought him face to face with the Prince, who
seizing him by his rocket, and shaking him angrily,
exclaimed, “How now, priest!—do you dare to face me,
after having sent away Cisneros? By the life of my father, I
have a great mind to kill you!” Espinosa would doubtless
have been roughly handled, but that, luckily for him, Philip
II. at that moment entered the apartment.

(R).
“Micer Oliver de la Marcha was then living, though in a very
advanced old age. He wrote a book entitled, El Caballero
Determinado, &c.” (Page 135).
El Caballero Determinado, traducido de lengua francesa en
castellana, par Don Hernando de Acuña, y dirigido al
emperador D. Carlos Quinto, Maximo, Rey de España
 nuestro Señor.—En Anvers, en casa de Juan Steelsio.—Año
de MDLIII.[87]
“Cervantes,” observed Don Adolfo de Castro, “has
committed an anachronism in that passage of the
Buscapié, in which it is affirmed that Oliver de la Marcha
was living at the period when Charles V. was challenged
by the King of France. He appears to have confounded the
author of the Caballero Determinado, who lived in the
reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, with the translator of the
work, Hernando de Acuña, who was contemporary with
the Emperor, Charles V. But similar errors are of frequent
occurrence in the printed works of Cervantes, as well as in
the manuscript of El Buscapié.”

(S).
“The whole history is in print as related by Juan Calvete de Estrella.”
(Page 137.)
The following is the title of the work here alluded to—
El felicissimo viage del muy alto y muy poderoso Príncipe
don Felipe, hijo del Emperador don Carlos Quinto Maximo,
desde España à sus tierras de la baja Alemaña, con la
descripcion de todos los estados de Brabante y Flandes,
escripto en quatro libros por Juan Calvete de Estrella. En
Anvers en casa de Martín Nucio, 1552.
(The happy journey of the most high and powerful Prince
Philip, son of the Emperor Charles V., from Spain to his
territories in lower Germany;—together with a description
of all the states of Brabant and Flanders. Written in four
 books, by Juan Calvete de Estrella. Published at Antwerp
by Martín Nucio, 1552.)

(T).
“I know the book you speak of——. It contains nothing but truth,
and that cannot be said of the writings of all historians, some of
whom give currency to falsehood by narrating events which never
took place.” (Page 137.)
To the above passage, Don Adolfo de Castro appends the
subjoined note, which, though bearing no direct reference
to anything mentioned in the Buscapié, is nevertheless
sufficiently curious to claim a place here.
“It cannot be doubted that many unfounded statements,
by dint of being frequently repeated, come to be regarded
as authentic historical facts. An example of this kind which
may be here adduced had its origin in the Marques de San
Felipe’s Comentarios de la guerra de España, e historia de
Su Rey Felipe V. el animoso.[88] In that work we find the
following passage—‘On the 24th of August, 1702, the
combined English and Austrian fleet appeared before
Cádiz. The vessels formed a line along the coast; some
anchoring in the sands, and others slowly plying to
windward. The Prince of Armstad, with five hundred
English, landed at Rota, and the Governor of that town,
after surrendering the place without opposition, went over
to the enemy. His treachery was rewarded by the title of
Marques, conferred on him by the Emperor of Austria. As
soon as the Spaniards regained possession of Rota, the
Governor was arrested. He was condemned to death and
hanged by order of the Marquis de Villadarias, Captain-
General of Andalusia.’
“Such is the Marquis de San Felipe’s account of the taking
of Rota, by the English; and it was repeated by Fray
Nicolás de Jesús Belando in his history of the Spanish civil
war of that period.
“Don Tomás de Yriarte, in his lessons on the History of
Spain (Lecciones instructivas de la Historia de España)
relates the event in the same manner as the two writers
above-named, adding that the Governor was hanged as a
traitor, rather than as a coward.
“Don Antonio Alcalá Galiano, in his recently published
History of Spain conforms, in his account of the taking of
Rota, with the statements of the writers just noticed.
“And, lastly, to speak of myself,” pursues Don Adolfo de
Castro, “in the history of my native city Cádiz, which I
published in the year 1845, I adopted the accounts of the
writers who had preceded me, presuming them to be
correct. But it appears that all have been led into error by
the original misstatement of the Marquis de San Felipe.
The following is the true account of the affair.
“The Governor and Military Commandant of Rota was Don
Francisco Díaz Cano Carillo de los Ríos, who filled that
post from the year 1690 to 1708, when he was appointed
Corregidor and Commandant of the City of Arcos. The
English did not land at Rota, but between Rota and the
Cañuelos. So far from taking part with the enemy, the
Governor of Rota was desirous of putting the city in a
state of defence, for which object he applied for arms and
ammunition to the City of Cádiz and to the Marquis de
Villadarias, Governor of Andalusia. But the required
assistance not being forthcoming, it was declared
impossible to defend Rota, and the Marquis de Villadarias
then ordered the Governor, with the few troops he had, to
withdraw from the town and proceed to Sanlucar. This
order he executed in a manner perfectly satisfactory, and
 after the enemy had left our shores he returned to Rota,
where he discharged the functions of governor until the
year 1708, when he was appointed corregidor of Arcos.
Such are the real facts of the case, founded on documents
of unquestionable authenticity, which have been collected
by the Governor’s son, and published at Madrid in a
volume entitled, Díaz Cana Vindicado. Of this publication
two copies exist in Cádiz; the one belongs to Señor Don
Joaquim Rubio, and the other is in my possession.”

(V).
“On the road he encountered more adventures than ever fell to the
lot of that Monster of Fortune, Antonio Pérez” (Page 138).
Antonio Pérez, Secretary of King Philip II., fell into
disgrace by engaging in an intrigue with one of the King’s
mistresses, and after a series of misfortunes he was
obliged to fly to France. He was the author of many able
works, historical and political, several of which have never
been published.
“That remarkable man,” says Don Adolfo de Castro, “who
during his life was so luckless as a statesman, has been,
since his death, no less unfortunate as an author, for
those of his works which have been printed in foreign
countries are full of errors. I have in my possession MS.
copies of the following works of Antonio Pérez:”—
1. Relaciones i cartas. (“Narratives and Letters.”) This
manuscript is in 434 folios, and was written some time in
the beginning of the seventeenth century.
2. Monstruosa vida del rey don Pedro de Costilla, llamado
comunmente el Cruel.[89] No notice is taken of this history
by the learned Nicolás Antonio, nor by any writer, Spanish
or foreign, who has commented on the Life of Antonio
Pérez.
3. El conocimento de las naciones de Antonio Pérez,
Secretario de estado que fué del Señor Rey D. Felipe II.,
discurso político fundado en materia y razón de estado y
gobierno, al Rey N. S. D. Felipe III. de el estado que
tenian sus reinos y señorios, y los de sus amigos y
enemigos con algunas advertencias sobre el modo de
proceder y gobernarse con los unos y con los otros.[90]
This work was written in the month of October, 1598, and
Antonio Pérez addressed it to Philip III. in the hope of
conciliating the favour of that monarch and obtaining
permission to return to Spain. It is one of the ablest
political essays of which the Spanish language can boast,
and it is to be regretted that it has never been published.
4. Máximas de Antonio Pérez, Secretario del Rey D. Felipe
II. al Rey Enrique IV. de Francia.[91]
Neither Nicolás Antonio nor any other writer notices this
work of the astute politician. In these state maxims, which
were written in May, 1600, Pérez betrays the vexation he
experienced on finding Philip II. disinclined to permit his
return to Spain. In his Conocimento de las naciones, Pérez
intimates to King Philip the designs of the King of France,
and the best mode of defeating them, and in his maxims,
addressed to Henry IV., he recommends to that monarch
various enterprises hostile to the King of Spain.
5. Breve compendio y elogio de la vida del Señor Rey D.
Felipe II.[92] Nicolás Antonio and other writers state that
Antonio Pérez was the author of this work. It is not an
original production but a translation by that eminent man,
and is extracted from a History of Henry IV. of France,
written in the French language by Pedro Mateo.
 (U).
“More malignant than Arcalaus.” (Page 139).
Proper names terminating in us, as Arcalaus, Arcus, and
others, met with in books of chivalry are not in accordance
with the true spirit of the Spanish language. In adopting
Latin words having the terminations us and um, the
Spaniards have transferred them to their own language
through the medium of the ablative or dative case; thus
from tetricus they derive tétrico, from templum, templo,
&c. Don Adolfo de Castro observes that he recollects only
one proper name in which the termination us is retained,
namely, Nicodemus; but the us is changed to os in the
following names;—Carlos for Carolus; Marcos for Marcus;
Longinos for Longinus, and some others.
Not only in proper names do we find the terminations us
and um converted into o, the same change is observable
in compound words; thus cumsecum is converted into
consigo; cumtecum into contigo, &c.
The Latin termination has been preserved in the word
vade-mecum; and modern writers have attempted to
introduce several other words of similar formation, such as
album, consideratum, ultimatum, and desideratum, but
these terminations are quite at variance with the genius of
the Castilian language.

(W).
“A greater Heretic than Constantino.” (Page 139).
Cervantes here alludes to a Spanish Lutheran, named
Constantino Ponce de la Fuente. This martyr to sincere
religious faith is frequently mentioned by the old Spanish
historians, and it may be presumed the few scattered
notices of his life here collected cannot fail to interest the
English reader.
In the beginning of the sixteenth century great alarm was
created in Spain by the rapidly increasing number of
Protestants. In all the principal cities of the kingdom the
Jesuits zealously exerted themselves for the discovery of
heretics as the Protestants were commonly termed. The
crafty brotherhood hoped by this means to recommend
themselves to the common people, and also to induce the
clergy to regard them as the strongest phalanx on which
the Romish Church could rely for upholding the Catholic
religion. In Seville, the doctrines of Luther were secretly
adopted by many individuals distinguished for their rank
and intelligence, and he who laboured most actively and
earnestly for their propagation was Dr. Constantino Ponce
de la Fuente. This celebrated man was a native of the city
of San Clemente de la Mancha, in the Bishoprick of
Cuenca, and he studied in the University of Alcalá de
Henares, with his friend Dr. Juan Gil de Egidio. After
quitting the University, both took up their abode in Seville
where they commenced propounding the doctrines of
Luther, Calvin, and other reformers, but with such well
concerted secrecy that so far from being suspected of
heresy they were regarded as most orthodox and
exemplary Catholics. The fame of Constantino’s learning
and talents induced several prelates to invite him to reside
in their respective dioceses. The Bishop of Cuenca, was
desirous of appointing him magistral canon of his
cathedral, and he wrote several letters urging him to
accept a dignity for which he was so well fitted. But
Constantino declined the proffered honour founding his
refusal on reasons more or less plausible; the real one
however being that his partiality for Lutheran doctrines
made him reluctant. Shortly after this, the Emperor
Charles V., appointed Constantino his Chaplain of Honour,
the duties of which post compelled him to proceed to the
Netherlands, where he resided for a considerable time.
Immediately after his return to Spain he was elected
Magistral Canon of the Cathedral of Seville where he
commenced preaching. His orations, in which Lutheran
principles were artfully veiled, and ingeniously interwoven
with Catholic doctrines, drew crowds of listeners to the
Cathedral. About this time, the Jesuit Father Francisco de
Borja, happening to be in Seville, he went to the Cathedral
to hear from the lips of Constantino one of those eloquent
sermons, the fame of which was resounding throughout
Spain. The Padre was startled on hearing certain
propositions, which in his opinion, were anything but
orthodox, and turning to some persons near him, he
repeated the line: Aut aliquis latet error, equo ne credite
Teucri.
Alarmed at Constantino’s popularity Borja recommended
Father Juan Suárez (then Rector in Salamanca), to repair
to Seville without delay, and there to establish a House of
the Brotherhood of Jesus, for the purpose of checking as
far as possible the progress of Lutheran opinions. Borja
and other learned Jesuits urged the Dominican Friars to
attend in the Cathedral whenever Constantino preached
for the purpose of noting any observations of heretical
tendency in his sermons, and reporting thereon to the
Inquisition. Fully aware that he was an object of suspicion,
Constantino felt the necessity of holding himself on his
guard. On one occasion whilst descanting in the pulpit on
some disputed point of belief, he began to fear that he
was too freely unveiling his opinions, and suddenly
checking himself in the midst of his discourse he said: Me
robaban la voz aquellas capillas. As he uttered these
words he pointed to the vaulted roofs of the lateral
Chapels pretending to the Catholic portion of the
congregation that an echo or some other cause prevented
him from rendering himself audible, but in reality alluding
to the Dominican monks, whose presence he wished his
friends to understand, obliged him to be cautious and
reserved.[93]
Shortly after this Constantino took a step which naturally
excited great astonishment among the Jesuits. He made a
formal application to be admitted as a member of the
College which the brotherhood had established in Seville.
Whether he took this step with the view of evading the
danger of rapidly increasing suspicion; or whether he had
conceived the design of attempting to convert the Jesuits
to Protestantism, it is impossible to determine, but it can
scarcely be imagined he was sincere in his wish to join the
fraternity. Father Santibañez, in his Historia de la
Compañïa de Jesús, furnishes the following particulars
relating to Constantino’s application and its result.
“Constantino came to our college and discoursed with
Padre Bartolomé de Bustamante, then exercising the
functions of Provincial. He declared that his mind was
beginning to be disabused of the world and its vanities; at
the same time he feigned the utmost contempt for all
mundane concerns, and expressed his wish to retire
wholly from them. He declared his resolution to devote
himself to religion, to do penance for his sins, and to
correct the vanity and presumption of his sermons, by
which he said he had gained more applause to himself
than souls to God.—Several days elapsed, during which
the Fathers discussed together Constantino’s proposition,
but without coming to any agreement on the question. In
the meanwhile Constantino’s frequent visits to our college
were observed, and it began to be reported about that
some secret scheme was in agitation. These reports
reached the ears of the Inquisitor Carpio, and he desired
to make himself acquainted with the facts of the case. He
thought it best to address himself privately to Father Juan
Suárez, with whom he was on friendly terms. Accordingly
he invited Suárez to dinner, and during the repast he
turned the conversation on matters concerning the
Jesuits. He asked several questions respecting some of
the probationers; which questions Suárez answered; and
thereupon the Inquisitor said—
“‘I have heard that Doctor Constantino proposes to join
the society.’
“‘He has,’ replied the Padre; ‘but what of that, señor,
though his proposition has been listened to and
entertained, yet we have come to no decision upon it.’
“‘He is,’ resumed the Inquisitor, ‘a person of weight and
influence, and much looked up to by reason of his great
learning;—yet I doubt whether a man at his age, and one
who has always been accustomed to think and act
according to his own will and pleasure, could easily submit
to the restraints of a noviciate, and to the rigour of
monastic rules. Instead of conforming to the regulations
of your society he will, on the plea of his own superior
merit, lay claim to, and possibly obtain some of those
dispensations so odious in religious communities, whose
high character can be maintained only by the perfect
equality of duties and privileges. Believe me, when
Constantino has fairly entered your college, he will give
much to get out of it, and to bid you all farewell. To
permit him to remain there with exemptions, would be a
dangerous relaxation of the religious discipline so
inviolably maintained by your society. It is by this sort of
relaxation that monastic laws lose their force, and thereby
many congregations suffer in the integrity of their
principles. I assure you,’ pursued the Inquisitor, ‘that it
gives me pain to communicate these doubts; but if the
affair concerned me as it does you, I would decline
Constantino’s proposition.’
“These words made a deep impression on Father Juan
Suárez, and they excited in his mind suspicions which
however he very artfully concealed, and he calmly replied
to Carpio—
“‘Your observations are perfectly just, most reverend
señor; the affair demands serious counsel and
deliberation. I shall think well on what you have said.’
“Suárez then took leave of the Inquisitor, and on his
return to the College he related to the Father Provincial
(Bustamente) what had taken place. The next time that
Constantino came to visit the College, Father Bustamente
gave a decided denial to his application for admittance,
and to check any unpleasant rumours that might be
spread by those who either knew or suspected his object,
the Father Provincial begged that he would come to our
college as seldom as possible. Constantino departed much
disappointed and mortified, and shortly after he was
arrested by order of the Inquisition.”
Such are the details of this affair as given by Father
Santibañez, in his History of the Jesuits; but he furnishes
no clue whereby we may arrive at any satisfactory
conclusion respecting the real object which Constantino
had in view. It still remains questionable whether, by
joining the Jesuits, he hoped to conciliate the friendship of
those bitterest persecutors of the Lutherans; or whether,
finding his own doom sealed, he was desirous of bringing
discredit on the College, which, after his reception might
have been regarded by the Inquisition as a cradle of
Protestantism.
Some time after his arrest, and before the investigation of
his case had brought about any result, an accidental
circumstance occurred, which clearly convicted
Constantino of being a Lutheran. A widow named Isabel
Martínez was declared guilty of heresy, and the
Inquisition, according to custom, issued an order for the
sequestration of her property. Through the evidence of a
treacherous servant, it was ascertained that many of her
valuables were concealed in sundry coffers in the
possession of her son, Francisco Beltran. Accordingly Luis
Soltelo, an alguazil in the service of the Holy Inquisition,
was directed to proceed to the house occupied by Beltran,
and there to search for the hidden goods. No sooner had
the alguazil entered the house, than Beltran, without
waiting till a question was addressed to him, said, “Señor,
there appears to be some mistake here! You have
doubtless been directed to search my mother’s house,
where some things are concealed, and if you will promise
that no harm shall befal me for not having revealed this
matter sooner, I will show you where the articles are
hidden.” Without a moment’s delay, Beltran conducted
Soltelo to the house of his mother, Isabel Martínez, and
taking a hammer, he forced open a trap door,
communicating with a cellar. In this cellar were found
hidden a great number of printed books and manuscripts;
the books were the works of Luther, Calvin and other
Reformers, and the manuscripts were in the handwriting
of Constantino Ponce de la Fuente. When denounced by
the Inquisition, Constantino knowing that his books and
papers would go far to convict him, had bethought himself
of this means of preventing them from falling into the
hands of his persecutors. With this view he consigned
them to the care of his friend Isabel Martínez, a woman of
virtuous and honourable character and a Protestant. But
through the indiscretion of her son, both she and
Constantino were sacrificed. Soltelo, not a little surprised
at the booty he had unexpectedly discovered, took
possession of the books and papers, at the same time
telling Beltran that the objects he had been sent to search
for, were his mother’s jewels and money. Beltran was
dismayed by this information, and he then saw, when too
late, the unfortunate result of his precipitancy. Fearing lest
he might expose himself to danger by any further attempt
to conceal these valuables, he surrendered them all into
the hands of the alguazil Soltelo.
Constantino’s books and papers having been conveyed to
the Inquisition and examined, it was found that the
manuscripts were full of the most decided Lutheran
doctrines; treating of the true Church, its spirit and
character, and declaring that nothing could be more
remote from it than the Church of Rome. Some of these
papers contained discussions on the Sacrament of the
Lord’s Supper, and the Sacrifice of the Mass;—others
treated of justification, of pontifical bulls and decrees; of
indulgences; of rewards of grace and glory; of auricular
confession, and various other subjects respecting which
Catholics and Protestants are widely at variance. To sum
up all, Constantino called purgatory, Una cabeza de lobo
inventada por los frailes para tener que comer.[94]
Constantino was now removed from the place in which he
had heretofore been confined, and he was incarcerated in
one of the secret dungeons of the Inquisition. The
manuscripts were shown to him, and he acknowledged
them to be in his handwriting, adding that he fervently
believed all that they contained. The Inquisitors urgently
pressed him to disclose who had been his coadjutors in
disseminating his doctrines in Seville; but all their
endeavours were vain. Constantino firmly refused to
betray his Protestant friends and associates. After a
lingering confinement in a damp subterraneous cell, this
noble-minded man was seized with dysentery, which
disease speedily terminated his life. Mortified at finding
 their victim thus wrested from their grasp, the Inquisitors
circulated among the public a report that Constantino had
terminated his own existence, in order to evade the just
punishment which he knew awaited him.[95]

(X).
“The knights ascertained that the said enchanter dwelt in a palace,
which, being continually enveloped in a hazy cloud, was invisible
even to those who had the courage to seek to discover it.” (Page
140.)
In writing this passage Cervantes would seem to have had
in his thoughts the extravagantly fantastic description of
an enchanted palace, which occurs in a romance called La
Genealogía de la Toledana discreta. Like the invisible
abode of the Magician of Binche, this palace is
represented as inaccessible. Its huge columns were of
transparent crystal with capitals and bases of purest
silver; and on the highest point of its towering arches was
a lofty portal which none could enter save he who knew
the secret.[96] The First Part of the Toledana Discreta was
published in the year 1604, but prior to the appearance of
Don Quixote. The Second Part was never published, and
possibly never written; for the satire dealt out by
Cervantes on books of chivalry might well have deterred
the author from the completion of his task. Almost all the
commentators on Don Quixote state that the last book of
chivalry published in Spain, was La Crónica del Príncipe
Don Policisne de Boecia. But this is a mistake; for the
Genealogía de la Toledana discreta appeared in 1604. The
 name of its author is Eugenio Martínez, and it is one of
the most extravagant of the Spanish libros caballerescos.

(Y).
“And will it be said that there are not other madmen in the world
besides the ingenious Knight of La Mancha, when such as these find
favour in the eyes of emperors and kings.” (Page 142).
A narrative of a visit made to the Netherlands, by Philip
II., (when Infante) in company with his father, the
Emperor Charles V., was written by Don Calvate de
Estrella. This curious work contains an account of the
festivities at Binche alluded to by Cervantes in El Buscapié.
During those entertainments many of the jousts and
tournaments described in books of chivalry were
represented, and great attention was bestowed on the
accuracy of the costumes, &c. The reader will find the title
of Estrella’s curious work quoted, at length, in Note S,
page 213.

THE END.
 FOOTNOTES:
[66] The Spaniards were accustomed to call their South American possessions
Indias Occidentales.
[67] This narrative was published in Madrid in the year 1763, by Father Henrique
Florez, under the title of Viaje de Ambrosio Morales, por orden del Rey Don Felipe
II., a los reinos de León y Galicia, y principado de Asturias, para reconocer las
reliquias de santos &c.—(Journey made by Ambrosio Morales, by command of
King Phillip II., to the Kingdoms of León and Galicia, and the Principality of
Asturias, to discover the reliques of saints).
[68] “Spanish Medicine comprised in the common proverbs of our language.”
[69] Meaning persons who speak and understand the Castilian language, which
was called the Romance.
[70] El primer comentario del muy ilustre señor, Don Luis de Ávila y Zuñiga, en la
guerra de Alemania en el año de MDXLVI, y MDXLVII. Venice 1550, Antwerp 1552,
Venice 1553.
[71] This copy of the Buscapié, Ruidiaz says he read many years prior to the date
of his letter to Vicente de los Ríos. He states that it belonged to the late Conde de
Saceda.
[72] An English translation of this work was published in London, in 1816, under
the following title, “The Inquisition Unmasked”; by Don Antonio Puigblanch.
Translated from the author’s enlarged edition, by William Walton, Esq.
[73] “The history of the very valiant knight, Palmerin of England, son of King
Edward, and of his great prowess; and the history of Floriano of the Desert, his
brother; with some account of Prince Florendos, son of Primaleon.”
[74] “Second Book of the History of Palmerin of England, in which is continued
and brought to an end the story of his love for the Infanta Polinarda, shewing how
he achieved many adventures and gained immortality by his great deeds.” Also
the History of Floriano of the Desert, with some account of Prince Florendos.
[75] “A new system of philosophy, concerning the nature of the human frame, not
known or touched upon by the great philosophers of antiquity, whereby human
life may be prolonged and health improved.” Don Adolfo de Castro states that he
does not know the date of the first edition of this work, but that the second
edition was printed in Madrid, in the year 1588.
[76] Dialogue between Charon and the shade of Peter Lewis Farnesio, son of Pope
Paul III.
[77] Moral Letters by M. Narveza, translated from the French language into
Spanish, by Madama Francisca de Passier, dedicated to Don Pedro Enríquez de
Acevedo, Count de Fuentes. Printed in 1605.
[78] The book of the Paso Honroso which was defended by the excellent Knight
Suero de Quiñones; compiled from an old manuscript book by Juan de Pineda, a
monk of the order of San Francisco.
[79] In the early ages of Christianity the Spaniards claimed St. James as their
Apostle, and alleged that his remains were interred in Galicia, contrary to the
generally received tradition which assigns Jerusalem as his burial-place. Under the
appellation of Santiago, St. James is the tutelary saint of the Spaniards.
[80] Ferdinand and Isabella are the Catholic King and Queen here referred to.
[81] Polemic Dialogues between War and Learning.
[82] Eight Plays and Eight Interludes never performed.
[83] The term rufián is still in use in the Spanish language, though it now bears a
signification widely different from that attached to it by the dramatic writers of the
16th and 17th centuries. Quevedo’s “Gran Tacaña,” the “Rufián dichoso,” of
Cervantes, and the “Rufián Castrucho,” of Lope de Vega, sufficiently show to what
class of characters the term was applied, viz., a compound of the thief and the
bravo. In short, the meaning attached to the term in the old Spanish dramas
seems to correspond precisely with the English word ruffian.
[84] That which bears the title of Auto Chamada da Lusitania. (The Auto called
Lusitania).
[85]

Gil Vicente the author

Makes me his ambassador.

[86] History of Portuguese Literature, by Frederick Von Bouterwek.

[87] The Resolute Knight, translated from the French language into the Castilian,
by Don Hernando de Acuña; and dedicated to the Emperor Charles V., King of
Spain, &c. (Published at Antwerp in the year, 1553.)
[88] “Commentaries on the Spanish war,” and “History of King Philip V.,” surnamed
el animoso.
[89] “Extraordinary Life of King Don Pedro of Castile, commonly called the Cruel.”
[90] “The Knowledge of Nations; by Antonio Pérez, formerly Secretary of State to
King Philip II.: A political discourse founded on reasons of state and government,
and addressed to the King our Lord, Don Philip III., concerning the condition of
his realms and dependencies, and those of his friends and his enemies, together
with some hints on the mode of procedure and government to be adopted
towards both.”
[91] “Maxims of Antonio Pérez, Secretary to King Don Philip II., addressed to King
Henry IV. of France.”
[92] “Brief Notice and Eulogium of the Life of King Philip II.”
[93] It may not be unnecessary to explain, for the information of the English
reader, that the Spanish word capilla, chapel, signifies also a monk’s cowl or hood.
This double meaning is implied in the observation attributed to Constantino. The
words, Me robaban la voz estas capillas might be interpreted two ways, viz: These
chapels drown my voice, or these monks cowls prevent me from speaking out.
T. R.
[94] A wolf’s head, invented by the monks in order to obtain food for their own
rapacity.
[95] The impeachment of Constantino by the Inquisition spread the utmost
dismay throughout Spain. When the event reached the ears of the Emperor
Charles V., in his retirement in the monastery at Yuste, he observed:—“If
Constantino be a Heretic, he is indeed a great Heretic.” (Si Constantino es hereje,
es grande hereje.)
[96] The original passage may be transcribed here, as it affords a good specimen
of the Spanish octava rima.

“Sobre gruesas columnas levantadas

De cristal más que el vidrio transparente,
Basas y capiteles de apurada
Plata, que siempre está resplandeciente
Sobre todos los arcos fabricada
Estaba una alta puerta y eminente,
Por donde ningún hombre entrar podía
Sino quien los secretos entendia.”

The Toledana Discreta is written throughout in the octava rima, a form of Spanish
verse which originated with Boscan, who first introduced the Italian style into
Castilian poetry.
ERRATA.