XXXIV Aedean Conference (Almería 2010)
PANEL: MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE (Coordinator: Manuel Gómez Lara)
SESSION 1
Poetry and Textual Transmission in Elizabethan England: Two Sonnets by Henry Constable
María Jesús Pérez Jáuregui (University of Sevilla)
Communicative Strategies in the Restoration Stage: Politically Allusive Prologues and Epilogues of the Popish Plot Period
Jorge Ramón Blanco Vacas (University of Sevilla)
SESSION 2
Quitting India, 'Quitting' Shakespeare? The curious case of 1942: A Love Story
Rosa María García Periago (University of Murcia)
Resisting the Past: Claude Chabrol's Nouvelle “Ophelia”
Remedios Perni Llorente (University of Murcia)
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE
ABSTRACTS
Poetry and Textual Transmission in Elizabethan England: Two Sonnets by Henry Constable
María Jesús Pérez Jáuregui (University of Sevilla)
The poet Henry Constable (1562-1613) wrote a number of secular sonnets in the 1580s and 1590s, which are preserved in two printed editions (1592 and 1594) and various manuscript sources ranging from 1588 to the early 17th century. Many of the sonnets were involved in a process of transmission which produced numerous textual variants and, in some cases, significant revisions. Out of Constable’s vast poetic production, I have selected two sonnets which are preserved both in manuscript and printed versions. The first of them, “Falselye doth envie of your prayses blame”, underwent a process of censorhip and modification that transformed a poem with markedly religious allusions into a very different, much more conventional one. The second, “Myne eye with all the deadlie sinnes is fraught”, was revised and improved until it was perfected in metre and meaning. My paper intends to analyse the most relevant textual differences and their importance as traces of the processes of literary transmission.
Communicative Strategies in the Restoration Stage: Politically Allusive Prologues and Epilogues of the Popish Plot Period
Jorge Ramón Blanco Vacas (University of Sevilla)
Prologues and epilogues enjoyed great popularity during the Restoration, actually becoming popular entertainments in themselves. Delivered from the forestage, they established a communication channel where all performance elements where put in contact in order to create a participation zone which most of the times was thematically independent from the play itself. In an environment with a form and a function of its own, they provided a space which separated stage and audience but at the same time fostered a dialogue between them. They were, in fact, the likeliest setting for state and political problems to be discussed after the advent of Oates’ revelations from 1678 to 1680, and authors fully exploited their permeable features in order to put forward their own partisan views or to comment on the sad situation of the stage.
Keywords: Restoration drama; theatrical production; prologues and epilogues; communicative strategies; political writing.
Quitting India, 'Quitting' Shakespeare? The curious case of 1942: A Love Story
Rosa María García Periago (University of Murcia)
Colonialism in India immediately encompasses Shakespeare. The Education Act of 1835 by Thomas Babington Macaulay enforced the compulsory education of Shakespeare for a class of elite Indians – those constituting the Indian intelligentsia. His works were performed either in English or in the vernacular Indian languages – depending on the target audience, and were part of the entertainment programme for the English colonizers and, later, for the educated Indians. 1942: A Love Story (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1994) emerges from the emphasis on the connection between the British Raj and Shakespeare in India. Set in the ‘Quit India’ movement in 1942, the movie revolves around a national crisis through a love story. Following a postcolonial approach, the aim of this paper is to show how the film harbours contradictory attitudes towards the Bard. On the one hand, the Romeo and Juliet performance-within-the-film contributes to reinforce the connection between Shakespeare and colonialism. Advertised as an anticolonial film, 1942: A Love Story testifies the necessity to depart from Shakespeare and what he implies half way through the movie in order to defeat the British and promote a nationalist discourse as understood in the right-wing Hindutva doctrine. However, on the other hand, the movie cannot be deprived of Shakespeare so easily, and the whole plot is based on and structured around the famous Shakespearean tragedy, and the lovers – Naren and Rajjo – are modelled on the celebrated Shakespearean characters. In transforming the tragic ending into a happy ending and in constructing Shakespeare as an unacknowledged and hidden presence, the movie follows in the footsteps of previous Bollywood Romeo and Juliet offshoots. The analysis of the movie demonstrates how an alternative, free, rewritten, or even ‘cannibalized’ Shakespeare is the only possible approach to the Bard during the postcolonial period in India.
Keywords: Shakespeare, India, Bollywood, film adaptations, postcolonialism.
Resisting the Past: Claude Chabrol's Nouvelle “Ophelia”
Remedios Perni Llorente (University of Murcia)
The purpose of this paper is to reveal the dilemma brought about by the longing for a past capable of providing what the present lacks, particularly in the Shakespearian visual field. In order to do so, it tries to reformulate the idea of nostalgia, which has been often related to a series of imagined and mythical qualities capable of amending the present as a promising missing land. In relation to this conflict between past and modernity, this paper focuses on the questions brought forth by Claude Chabrol in Ophélie (1962), a film that was condemned to oblivion for a long time. In his adaptation of Shakespeare, Claude Chabrol partially recaptures the text but diverges from the traditional ways in which the play has been adapted on screen. Taking into account the unattainable nature of things past, he understands adaptation in terms of dialogue and negotiation with the previous text. Thus he takes the Shakespearean themes related to his actual Weltschaaung, and elaborate on specific aspects with no hesitation about suppressing others. Ultimately, Chabrol presents an unexpected Nouvelle Ophelia, a woman who challenges the traditional codes of representation linked to the Shakespearian female character.