The boundaries of citation and allusion: Shakespeare in Davide ferrario's Tutta colpa di giuda (2008), Alfredo Peyretti's Moana (2009), and Connie Macatuno's Rome and Juliet (2006)

The paper focuses on the following samples of media material: Davide Ferrario’s Tutta colpa di Giuda (2008), a film set in an Italian prison that references Hamlet; Alfredo Peyretti’s Moana (2009), which is about the life of Italian porn star Moana Pozzi, and incorporates lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; a 2001 episode of Crime Scene Investigation entitled “Caged” that makes citations from Othello interact with an investigation into what looks like a murder; and Connie Macatuno’s Rome and Juliet (2006), a Filipino experimental film that turns Shakespeare’s tragic love story into a lesbian romance. The paper argues that “Shakespeare” is a fragmentary but significant presence in each of these media products, a “foreign body” within the “body proper” of each sample, simultaneously marginal and central, an indeterminate spectral “Thing” (Derrida). It is a “Shakespeare” that is involved in the continuous drawing and redrawing of boundaries: between high and low culture, between high art in the form of theatre and (porn) cinema, between heterosexual normativity and the “naturalness” of homoerotic desire, between the “real life” of characters and a pre-determined script that repeatedly threatens to take over and expropriate this life. From a theoretical point of view, the article draws attention to a more general (Shakespearean) citationality—simultaneously a textual and media phenomenon--without any clear beginning or predetermined end, a field within which forms of Shakespearean afterlife situate themselves as variables that cannot be so easily separated from one another.