The episode is "Amok Time", season 2 episode 1 (by release order, not production order).
Nowadays this is such a common contrivance that it's been mostly dropped I think for being pretty cliché. It's in the Marvel movies; it's in the Metal Gear franchise; it's in Chuck. I've always assumed it was a relatively recent (say, the last thirty years) development in Hollywood storytelling. It's dramatic, it's convenient, it's fantastical. It feels like a product of contemporary blockbuster writing.
And yet, here it is in 1967. Was this one of its debut uses in fictional writing? If not, what was the earliest identifiable use? And (most interestingly) can we trace a sort of lineage from an "original" use through copycats and copycats of copycats up to today? Or is it more likely that this is just a case of parallel thought?
edit, thank you to the literally more than 100 people who messaged me telling me about Romeo and Juliet. The first message came through not ten minutes after I posted. Most of them were really nice so thank you :) I get it now lol :)
Thank you also to the mods for deleting all the comments to that effect and ensuring that my inbox is absolutely wrecked for days to come.
To answer the questions: yes, I read it in university. Yes, I forgot. Sorry?
In any case, if anyone has anything else to add in terms of earlier uses and/or tracing a lineage from an "original use" onwards that would be awesome.
edit 2: the answers that haven't been deleted have done a magnificent job of tracing the early roots of the trope. What about its reemergence? Has it more or less always been in use since the 16th century? If not, what's the story of its rise to ubiquity in contemporary blockbuster screenwriting?
This trope actually has a long history in European literature and poetry (I’m not as well-versed in other literary traditions, so it may exist in those too).
The earliest use I can think of is in the “Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes” by Ancient Greek writer Xenophon of Ephesus, which was written some time before the 2nd century BC. In Book III, Anthia, who has been separated from her lover Habrocomes and fears he is dead, is set to be married to another man. She refuses to be married, and goes to a physician named Eudoxos and buys poison, intending to commit suicide. However, the physician, instead of giving her poison, gives her a drug which will make her appear dead, though Anthia is unaware of this. After her wedding she takes the drug intending to die, and her husband, Perilaos, believing her to be dead, pats her body to rest in an ornate tomb. She wakes up eventually, surprised and dismayed, and decides to let herself starve to death rather than leave, but a group of robbers break into the tomb looking for riches and abduct her. Habrocomes eventually finds out about the tale, but, as nobody knew she was alive, believes that the robbers had stolen her corpse, and ends up going on a journey to recover her body, and the two lovers are eventually reunited.
If that sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because it has strong parallels with the most famous use of the trope, namely William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” published in 1597 CE. In the play, Juliet fakes her death (purposefully) with the help of Friar Laurence to avoid marriage to Paris, whom she does not love. Unlike “Ephesian Tale,” Shakespeare’s play is a tragedy, and Romeo commits suicide when he sees Juliet’s body, and Juliet wakes up to find Romeo’s body and also commits suicide.
Shakespeare didn’t base the story directly on “Ephesian Tale,” however. He actually based it on “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” a narrative poem by English writer Arthur Brooke, published in 1562, which itself was based on the writings of Italian author Matteo Bandello (1480-1562). Several of Shakespeare’s plays were indirectly inspired by Bandello, including “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Twelfth Night.”
Bandello himself, and therefore Shakespeare, may have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by a story from Masuccio Salernitano’s “Il Novellino”, which was written in the mid 1400s. One of the stories in the collection, “Marrioto e Ganozza,” was an inspiration for Venetian writer Luigi Da Porto, who adapted it as “Giulietta e Romeo,” which is the origin of the famous character names.
In conclusion, this trope dated back at least to Ancient Greece, and was used in prominent Renaissance Italian works as well as one of the most famous Elizabethan plays. I don’t know exactly where Theodore Sturgeon (the writer of “Amok Time”) got his inspiration from, but given the ubiquity of Romeo and Juliet in the western canon, it’s possible that he, consciously or not, drew from that use of the trope, although there’s no way to know as he (afaik) never talked about his inspiration, so it could very well be a coincidence.
Perhaps the best-known early use in English language fiction is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Friar Lawrence confesses in the final scene,
Then gave I her, so tutor'd by my art, A sleeping potion; which so took effect As I intended, for it wrought on her The form of death
Romeo and Juliet was first published in quarto in 1597, a good 370 years before that Star Trek episode.
Dating before this, Arthur Brooke published The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juilet in 1562. On pages 127-128 (of the 1895 reprint by Cassell and Company), Juliet muses about the danger of sleeping in the family tomb due to the Friar's potion:
The sleepy mixture made, fair Juliet doth it hide / Under her bolster soft, and so unto her bed she hied; ... And what know I, quoth she, if serpents odious, / And other beasts and worms that are of nature venomous, / That wonted are to lurk in dark caves under ground, / And commonly, as I have heard, in dead men's tombs are found, / Shall harm me yea or nay, where I shall lie as dead? [Emphases mine]
Brooke and Shakespeare were inspired by the Italian versions of the story. Matteo Bandello published Novelle in 1554. Bandello includes the same story of Juliet's fake death:
That morning, Fra Lorenzo wrote a long letter to Romeo, informing him of the potion scheme and of what had occurred; telling him also that on the following night he would go and bring Giulietta out of the tomb and take her back to his chamber.
Luigi da Porto published his tale in 1530 under the name Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobii amanti. Luigi da Porto mixed elements of his own life with a story he may have heard before from another Italaian: Masuccii Salernitano. Before we go there, let's see if da Porto faked Juliet's death. On page 37 of the 1868 Cambridge translation, we read from the friar:
I shall give you some powder, which, if you take it, will make you sleep in such a manner for eight-and-twenty hours, more or less, that any man, let him be ever so great a physician, will consider you as quite dead;
Masuccii Salernitano published his version as a short story in an anthology called Novellino in 1476. The "novel" in question is numbered XXXIII in the set of 50. The particular book I'm using here has every instance it was ever reprinted from and all of them are in Italian, so I'm not sure how to cite it properly. If you have a digitized version, search for "il frate andò prestissimo," and I translate up to "e alla donna mandata" on the same page. You are going to have to forgive my Italian translation, but I render it thus:
The Friar went very early, and he himself (as an expert in the trade) composed a certain water with a certain composition of different powders and completed it in such a way that when drunk, one would not only be made to sleep for three days but must be judged by everyone for a real death, and sent it to the woman.
If Salernitano based his stories from anything, we don't know for sure about it. But the trope has existed since at least 1476.
I’m not sure I can trace the full lineage of this trope but…might I suggest a return to a high school favorite -- Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare?
First published in 1597, the play culminates in a dramatic scene in which Romeo, believing his beloved Juliet to be dead, drinks poison and dies next to Juliet in her family crypt. But wait! Juliet then awakens from her "death" to discover that Romeo is actually dead, so she stabs herself with a dagger. (Ah, young love.)
Juliet's "faux death" was orchestrated by the friar that married her and Romeo. Unfortunately for the newlyweds, Romeo was exiled from Verona for killing Tybalt. (Juliet is also being forced into a marriage with Count Paris...) Friar Laurence offers Juliet help in the form of a potion that will put her in a death-like coma. While she appears dead, the friar promises to send a missive to Romeo explaining everything and that the two can be reunited once she wakes up. Romeo never gets the message and instead hears that Juliet is actually dead.
We can see the trope of an "injection" / "drug" in how Friar Laurence explains his potion plan:
"Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy eyes' windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;
Each part, deprived of supple government,
Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:
And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep." (Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene I)
Outwardly, Juliet will have all the hallmarks of death—no heartbeat, ashy skin, rigor mortis—but is assured by the friar that she will awaken in just under two days’ time (42 hours).
Unlike modern movies, Juliet and Romeo have no happy ending with this “faux death.” I don’t know the examples listed in the question, but I can think we can go further back in time with this trope.
Shakespeare, like any good artist, was heavily inspired by other work. Tragic love stories are a timeless trope. It is likely he was inspired by Ovid’s "Pyramus and Thisbe," in which Pyramus falsely believes Thisbe to be dead after finding a lioness has torn a part his lover’s cloak and left behind traces of blood. Pyramus kills himself with his sword, and, of course, Thisbe finds him and stabs herself with the same sword. Ovid’s tale, found in his massive Metamorphoses, was published around 8 AD. In the late second century AD, there is the Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes. Once again, Anthia believes her beloved Habrocomes to be dead and tries to obtain poison from a physician. (She promises him valuables and that she won’t take the poison until he leaves the city). However, despite the physician agreeing to her plan, he gives her a hypnotic, not lethal poison. She takes it and is displeased to awaken later in a tomb. The story gets a bit wild after that (grave robbers, slavery, more near death experiences). Eventually, the two are reunited, so at least this one had a happy ending.
Perhaps, the “faux death” trope that lingers in popular media can be traced to fairy tales. Take for example, "Sleeping Beauty" or "Snow White." In the first, she pricks her finger on a spindle to fall into a death-like state. In the second, a poisoned apple appears to kill her, and the dwarfs place her in glass coffin.
In one version (“Sun, Moon, and Talia” by Giambattista Basile), Sleeping Beauty awakens because “[her twin babies] sought the nipple, and not finding it, began to suck on Talia's fingers, and they sucked so much that the splinter of flax came out (Ashliman). (This is the version in which she’s raped and then bears children while asleep).
In the Grimm’s version of “Little Snow-White,” she awakens after being discovered by a prince but not by true love’s kiss. Instead: “The prince had [Snow White’s coffin] carried to his castle, and had it placed in a room where he sat by it the whole day, never taking his eyes from it. Whenever he had to go out and was unable to see Snow-White, he became sad. And he could not eat a bite unless the coffin was standing next to him. Now the servants who always had to carry the coffin to and fro became angry about this. One time one of them opened the coffin, lifted Snow-White upright, and said, ‘We are plagued the whole day long, just because of such a dead girl,’ and he hit her in the back with his hand. Then the terrible piece of apple that she had bitten off came out of her throat, and Snow-White came back to life” (Ashliman).
I encourage you to read the other versions of these tales to see how people (most often women) are brought back from these “faux deaths.” I love fairy tales and myths and how we keep coming back to them even now. I’m sure, in addition to the examples you listed, there are many, many retellings of not only these fairy tales, but also Shakespeare’s tragic star-crossed lovers.
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