Othello across borders: on an interlocal and intermedial exercise

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2014

Authors

Homem, Rui Carvalho (Author) FLUP

Book

Title: Shakespeare Survey 67: Shakespeare's Collaborative Work

Pages: 327-334

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Scientific classification

FOS: Humanities

Other information

DOI: 10.1017/SSO9781107775572.023

Abstract (EN): This article discusses an appropriation of Shakespeare that is defined by a sense of liminality and transit in both its semiotic status and its referential range. Bandanna (1999), an opera by Daron Aric Hagen with a libretto by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, dislocates the plot of Othello to the fraught setting of a town on the border of the US and Mexico in the internationally momentous year of 1968. As argued below, this borderline circumstance, its territorial perplexities compounded by the plight of illegal immigration and played out against a background of international tension, enhances the tragedy’s dimension of conflict. Muldoon’s concise libretto is undoubtedly a much less complex dramatic construction than the Shakespearian text of which it offers a starkly abridged rewriting, but the very need for compression sets out with particular sharpness the clashes of perception and will, and the corresponding lineaments and delineations, that inform the plot of Othello. Bandanna constantly foregrounds the notion of the boundary, both at the level of representation and in its formal enactment: indeed, this article will look into the relations between this pervasive theme and the encounter of text and music in this opera, and will hence query the extent to which a nexus of conflict can pervade and disturb the collaborative rapport between Muldoon’s libretto and Hagen’s score. Paul Muldoon’s decision to carry out a rewriting of Othello is hardly a surprise, since he has long been noted for a poetics of appropriation. His poetry collections are punctuated by translations, often of an iconoclastic nature – a tendency that brings them notoriously close to his sustained practice of pastiche, parody and truncated quotation. A defiant but learned confrontation with the shadow of canonical predecessors has also proved persistent in his work, as in the title sequence of his collection Madoc (1990), a long intertextual ramble in which each short text is placed under the aegis of a major figure in western intellectual history. Further, his appropriations have occasionally included drama, as with his version of Aristophanes’s The Birds (1999), which translates this satirical comedy into the still anxious and sometimes perplexing scenarios of post-Troubles Belfast.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific