A popular image of Hamlet is the title character holding up a skull while reciting “To be, or not to be…”. In fact, the skull doesn’t appear until two acts after the monologue.
Not necessarily without the knowledge of how his audience would react, since he was the consummate pop writer of his day. While it’s true that the textual reading supports lawyers, I imagine audiences went wild with approval when they actually heard it.
Well, no, not a lot more.
And the second thing they want to do is kill everybody who can read and write.
Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2:
Is it really? I’ve never connected the two scenes in my mind. Is this an actual image that is out there?
Can’t think of any film/TV clips offhand, but here’s an actual image.
ETA: see also
This one’s a little more minor, but the Monster isn’t just a collection of gross pieces of anatomy sewed together. In the book, it describes how Frankenstein creates him (it?) at a much smaller scale. I forget the verbs used, but he basically recreates the tissues.
For my part, I can suggest the bumbling supporting characters of detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Poirot on film aren’t really fair. In the books, they’re intelligent and capable.
sad face
Hastings? I’m not seeing it.
I wrote a paper for a class on Film Noir about how nobody ever gets Philip Marlowe right. Generally, they just attach the name to a stereotypical hard-boiled detective, cynical like Marlowe, but without the romanticism that underlies it. Judgmental like Marlowe, but without the bitter self-recrimination that I would argue stems from his struggle with bisexual feelings. Tough, like Marlowe, but dishing out punishment where the real Marlowe is generally the one taking the lumps. I actually think that Robert Altman’s somewhat dippy Marlowe is the closest anyone’s gotten to the character in the books.
It’s also a pretty natural conflation of the book’s most memorable scene - the staking of Lucy Westenra, which establishes almost all of the “staking a vampire” tropes - with the book’s most memorable character, the titular count.
You’re quite right. UI think of the creation more like that described by Clark Ashton Smith in his underappreciated story The Colossus of Ylorgne, where bodies are rendered down into constituent biological materials from which his “Frankenstein”-like creature is constructed.
In Shelley’s book, in fact, it explicitly says that Frankenstein used animal tissue as well as human tissue
The popular depiction of Tarzan is that of a strong wild man who can barely make out words with more than three syllables. This is almost the polar opposite of the original novels. In those Tarzan is rather intelligent, speaks several languages fluently, and integrates into society quite well.
There’s also a significant difference in the portrayal of his relationship with Jane. Most of the films have her running away from her life to life in the jungle. In the novels the opposite occurs. When they do get married (which did not actually occur at the end of the first story) they both go to live in England. He spends a number of years in civilization with her raising their son. They do later move full time to Africa. But they live on a large estate, not in a treehouse.
I dunno. It seems pretty ambiguous. It does strongly imply that the “fiend” is being “created,” and from that we can infer that [in some undisclosed way] he is creating the tissue, but I don’t see where he mentions anything meaningful. He does mention collecting bones to study the human body, and probably from there we get the idea of grave-robbing to stitch them together–but I think Shelley (as Frankenstein) left out the details on exactly how he made his creation deliberately.
I have to admit I’d really like to see Grude face the music in this thread…
Hamlet’s speech at the grave yard has to have one of the most misquoted lines out there. Most people seem to think that it begins, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,” when it’s actually, “. . . I knew him, Horatio . . .”
And I should know. 
Who are you, Leslie Fiedler Junior? Where do you possibly derive the idea that Philip Marlowe struggles with bisexual feelings?
I’ve given this example before, but what the heck- I’ve been known to beat dead horses before.
Nobody reads Eugene Burdick’s 1958 novel The Ugly American any more, but the phrase “The Ugly American” is used all the time. Generally, the phrase is applied to any stereotypical loud, boorish American tourist, the type of ignorant yahoo who doesn’t know or care about foreign cultures, and expects everything to be like it was back home.
In the novel, the “ugly American” in the title is Homer Atkins, an American engineer. He is NOTHING like the aforementioned stereotypical American jerk. He is idealistic, intelligent, and respects the Asians he lives and works with. He’s called “ugly” because, despite his good heart, he’s not at all good-looking.
If I remember the book correctly, Tarzan learns to speak French before he learns to speak English; his first human friend is a shipwrecked French sailor.
And sunlight didn’t make him dissolve or burn. That started with Nosferatu.
Another – Randall McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest raped a woman. So he wasn’t merely a free spirit unjustly incarcerated in a mental institution – he actually harmed at least one person before being admitted.