“Shakespeare in love” / In love with Shakespeare: metatextual potential of John Madden’s fictional biopic

The paper focuses on the specificity of metatextual potential of John Madden’s fictional biopic “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), viewed as a complex metatextualintermedial construct. The metatextual resources of the film are being analysed on three key levels: intratextual (metatextual fragments), intertextual (allusions to the other works of the canon) and extratextual (text as an intersemiotic metatext). On the intratextual level four main forms of metatextual commentary are singled out: a) the paratextual commentary; b) the leitmotif; c) the self-referential fragments; d) the allusions to the present-day realia. In relation to the intertextual level of the film’s metatextual potential references to Shakespeare’s works are discussed as a metatext which offers an explanation of the sources of Shakespeare’s inspiration. Within the extratextual level, “Shakespeare in Love” is viewed as an intersemiotic metatext which comments upon two major semantic fields: the figure of Shakespeare and the epoch of the English Renaissance. The authors also put forward the suggestions for the practical application of the research results.

«Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill

Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.

Renaissance And Renaissance Philosophical Texts Through The Prism Of Historical Approach

The article is devoted to some aspects of the functional specificity of lexical borrowings - neologisms - that have found their vivid reflection in the works and philosophical thought of the European era and, in particular, the English Renaissance, represented by its brightest representatives such as Thomas More, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Shakespeare and others. The authors consider this problem in a synchronous-diachronous cut and in the light of the new socio-political situations of the century of the English Renaissance and in the light of the evolutionary process of the formation of the English nation and the norms of the literary English language, which continued intensively in the 11th century, which led to the further growth and spread of both oral, and written national literary language.

The Play in the Mind’s Eye

Anglophone criticism of English Renaissance drama largely assumes the irrelevance of sixteenth-century continental critical debates on how to achieve verisimilitude. This chapter argues that English dramatists’ rejection of the Aristotelian unities was not in itself a solution to the problems of making theatre imaginatively compelling: all the challenges discussed by Italian critics were also challenges for English dramatists. Their plays manipulate what we might call the ‘unscene’, whereby the audience infers and imagines characters’ past histories, motives, offstage locations, and inner lives. Shakespeare and other dramatists invite us to supplement and make sense of what we actually see onstage by their use of the topics of ‘circumstance’: topics of time, place, cause, and manner which, in the period’s rhetorical and dialectical traditions, were used to give narratives and descriptions an imaginative liveliness known as enargeia or evidentia. This account is supported by the contemporary critical witness of William Scott.