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SPECIAL ISSUE YEARS SHAKESPEARE& CERVANTES 4 1616-2016 Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi http://literaturacomparata.ro/Site_Acta/index.html Acta Iassyensia Comparationis SPECIAL ISSUE 400 Years with Shakespeare & Cervantes 400 años con Shakespeare & Cervantes uring the 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, their works Dhave lived on, inspiring generation after generation, age after age and culture after culture, crossing spatial and temporal boundaries, being appropriated, used and sometimes even abused in various attempts to justify different ends. Thus, Shakespeare has become more than a Renaissance English playwright and poet, in the same way that Cervantes has become more than the one true father of Spanish prose. They are now seen as cultural phenomena and their writings have been refashioned, re-written, re-interpreted and re-contextualized in a variety of texts ranging from literature to visual arts, music, film, cartoons, on-line documentaries, advertisements, etc. The ever- new ways of reading the Bard’s, as well as the Prince of Wits’ works, do not necessarily bring new insights into or understanding of their characters, but reveal more about ourselves, about the way we see the world and internalize certain feelings, attitudes, choices or reactions. In order to celebrate both writers and their works, but also all those who have been interested in their cultural afterlives for four centuries, we have gathered in this anniversary issue a selection of articles on a variety of Shake- spearean and Cervantian topics, ranging from literary theory and criticism or comparative literature to cultural, translation or performance studies. n Issue editors: Iulia Andreea Milică,Gabriela-Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu & Alina Ţiţei os 400 años que transcurrieron desde la muerte de William Shakespeare y Miguel de Cervantes han Lvisto pervivir sus obras, inspirando generación tras generación, siglo tras siglo y cultura tras cultura, trascendiendo los límites espaciales y temporales, siendo apropiadas, utilizadas y a veces incluso abusadas en un sinfín de intentos por justificar diferentes fines. Así, Shakespeare se ha convertido en más que un dramaturgo y poeta renacentista inglés, de la misma manera que Cervantes se ha convertido en más que el único y verdadero padre de la prosa castellana. Hoy en día ambos son considerados fenómenos culturales y sus creaciones han sido remodeladas, reescritas, reinterpretadas y recontextualizadas en una variedad de textos que van desde la literatura a las artes visuales, música, cine, dibujos animados, documentales, anuncios publicitarios, etc. Las siempre nuevas maneras de leer las obras del Vate, así como las del Príncipe de los Ingenios no nos ofrecen necesariamente la opor- tunidad de comprender mejor a sus personajes, sino que revelan más sobre nosotros mismos, sobre nuestra forma de ver el mundo e internalizar ciertos sentimientos, actitudes, opciones o reacciones. Para celebrar a estos escritores y a sus obras, pero también a todos aquellos que se han interesado en sus vidas culturales posteriores durante cuatro siglos, hemos reunido en este número conmemorativo una selección de artículos sobre una variedad de temas shakesperianos y cervantinos que van desde la teoría y crítica literaria o la literatura comparada hasta los estudios culturales, teatrales o de la traducción. n Editoras del volumen: Iulia Andreea Milică, Gabriela-Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu & Alina Ţiţei AIC SPECIAL ISSUE ©2017 AIC Cuprins/Contents/Contenu Elena Ciobanu “A Pound of Flesh as Forfeit”. Deconstructive Patterns in The Merchant of Venice.................................................1 Ileana Oana Macari Considerations on the Translation of Shakespeare’s Titles into Romanian...................11 Silvana N. Fernández De mapas y espacios en The Tempest (1611/1623) de William Shakespeare y Lord Jim (1900) de Joseph Conrad...........................................................................25 Veronica Popescu Japanese Romeo x Juliet as Site of Cultural Cross-Pollination ................................33 Estella Antoaneta Ciobanu Divine (with) Shakespeare: Two Postmodern Case Studies of Divination....................43 Joseph P. Haughey United States College Literary Soctiety Shakespearean Afterlives in the Nineteenth Century: James Cadman and Kalamazoo College’s Sherwood Rhetorical Society...........53 Monica Matei-Chesnoiu Space, Place, and Shifting Worlds in Shakespeare and Cervantes.................................61 Harry Berger JR Canon Fodder: A Study of Don Quijote.................................................................73 Andrei-Iulian Din El Camino de Don Quijote.........................................................................................91 Laura Carasevici Don Quijote de la Mancha e Ignatius Reilly: dos locos cuerdos. Un encuentro entre Miguel de Cervantes y John Kennedy Toole...................................................................97 Lavinia Similaru El mundo contemporáneo en los Entremeses de Cervantes.......................................103 Alin Titi Călin La riqueza paremiológica del Quijote: características y valoración.............................113 Lavinia Ienceanu Don Quijote en el Nuevo Mundo. Las picardías, candideces z quijotadas de un hidalgo disoluto......................................121 Dana Mihaela Giurcă El Quijote universal. Siglo XXI..........................................................................129 AIC SPECIAL ISSUE “A Pound of Flesh as Forfeit”. ©2017 AIC Deconstructive Patterns in The Merchant of Venice ELENA CIOBANU Universitatea „Vasile Alecsandri”, Bacău Shakespeare’s ‘anti-Semitism’, as manifested in one of his most ideologically con- troversial plays, The Merchant of Venice, has been intensely debated throughout the centuries and continues to be, now more than ever, a most intriguing issue. Analyti - cal approaches have variously inclined towards one or the other side of the debate, by constructing Shylock sympathetically or by condemning him for his excessive hatred. Critics like Harold Bloom, James Shapiro and John Gross believe that the play is rampantly anti-Semitic. In the opposite camp, a recent study by Martin Yaffe proposes that, on the contrary, the play should be seen as pro-Jewish, since Shylock is nothing more than a bad Jew who cannot be representative for his race. Everybody agrees on the fact that we can hardly speculate as to Shakespeare’s own attitude towards Jews, for his personal views are notoriously absent from his texts. Yet he could not have constructed such a character without taking into account all the prejudices and clichés of his time, which he re-moulds in his play until they are turned into uneasy questions haunting the minds of readers and audiences. Our linguistic and stylistic analysis focuses on the ways in which religious enmity is transmuted and taken to a climactic development through a financial and legal dis- pute based on an intransigent logic of usury fuelled by an inexpressible spite. Jew- ishness and Christianity confront each other through a secular law that is indifferent to their spiritual tenets and that equally menaces them both. It is the blind rejection of the other that deconstructs both perspectives and paves the way for a future transcending synthesis which, like the pale lead praised by Bassanio, no longer hides errors beneath deceiving ornaments.. Keywords: Jewishness; Christianity; discourse; identity; law; subversion. he Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s “problem play”, has been a continual source of critical controversy over the centuries. This controversy reached its climax in the sec- Tond half of the 20th century, after historical tragedies like the Holocaust. In the wake of mass killings of Jews by the Nazis, a text such as that written by Shakespeare has been per- ceived, especially by Jewish analysts, as a prefiguration of the anti-Semitic doctrines that wrought havoc in the Jewish community. Most prominent among such literary critics is Harold Bloom who, for all his openly declared veneration of Shakespeare as centre of the western literary canon, identifies in The Merchant of Venice an uncharacteristic mentality which convinces him that, “[i]n this play alone, Shakespeare was very much of his age, and not for all time” (1998: 205). “One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb”, Bloom asserts, “not to recognize that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work” (2008: 171). Other critics, on the contrary, feel that “Shylock is no more a mere means to exemplifying the Semitic problem than is Othello for the raising of the colour question” (Granville-Barker, 2005: 351). 1 2 AIC Admittedly or not, the entire dispute originates in what Bloom considers “Shakespeare’s dis- concerting addition to the pound of flesh story: the forced conversion” (1998: 175). The Ame - rican critic believes it is dramatically unmotivated, which demonstrates, for him, that the author must have been contaminated with racial hostility against a disadvantaged ethnic group in a period when the world was not yet dreaming of tolerance and political correctness. Simple logic would suggest that dramatic inconsistencies can only prove an author’s creative awkwardness or failure. However, general critical thought (Harold Bloom included) finds it hard to accept that Shake- speare, an author so attentive to all sorts of details and shades of meaning, could have committed such unconscious blunders.