Romantic Comedy

That the plots found in Shakespeare's works were not originally his own has become an accepted fact, and common knowledge, of the history of English literature. However, the fact that Shakespeare's plots were not his own creations does not make them plagiarized, in the legalistic sense of modern academia. What is means, actually, is that the plots of his plays exist within a tradition, in which certain stories can be and are continuously retold, with different characters, in a different time and place, but with the same basic idea in mind. In essence, those plots are themselves archetypes, and many of the characters, events, and attitudes presented therein have archetypal qualities, as well. One of those archetypal plots, fitting into the milieu of romantic comedy, is the plot of Much Ado about Nothing, and what may be considered on of its many modern counterparts, You've Got Mail. In the latter, the romantic comedy archetype-plot, as it were, is carried out between two business rivals in the retail book industry, Joe (an executive in a corporation designed to analogize such real-life companies as Barnes & Noble) and Kathleen (who operates a privately-owned bookstore). The basic concept of the film is that Joe and Kathleen detest one another in their relations as booksellers, since Joe's company is trying to purchase Kathleen's store, but fall in love on the Internet, under the guise of pseudonyms, which reality is, of course, eventually revealed.