The presence of Shakespeare in the writing of Nuno Bragança

Abstract

Nuno Bragança includes Shakespeare in the group of creators who were very important for him, so it is normal that English playwright’s work appears in his writing. In this paper, we present in the first place the review of the Orson Welles’s film Macbeth, where Bragança analyzes the characteristics that make the Shakespearean work timeless, noting that these coincide with those which are defended and practiced by the author and his characters writers. Secondly, we analyze the presence of some Shakespeare’s plays in the Bragança’s fiction, which is concretized through various processes of intertextuality, a procedure that requires the reader to have a permanent active cooperation, in order to identify the presence of the text summoned and to interpret its recontextualization. As far as Shakespeare is concerned, the presence of his texts can be seen in the Nuno Bragança’s three novels, where Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth can be identified. The first two plays appear fleetingly in the first two novels, but in Square Tolstoy this dialogue with Shakespeare gets another dimension and scope, assuming a decisive relief in the production of senses of the novel in two lines of action.