The Boundaries of Citation: Shakespeare in Davide Ferrario’s Tutta colpa di Giuda (2008), Alfredo Peyretti’s Moana (2009), and Connie Macatuno’s Rome and Juliet (2006)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on three films that include Shakespearean fragments: Davide Ferrario’s Tutta colpa di Giuda (Blame it on Judas) (2008), which is set in an Italian prison with some inmates playing themselves, and 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; and Connie Macatuno’s Rome and Juliet (2006), an experimental film that turns Shakespeare’s tragic love story into a lesbian romance. “Shakespeare”—often a “spectral entity” in our contemporary mediascape—appears “in tatters” in each of these films and in different ways. These case studies show that the “Shakespeare” of these films—a “Shakespeare,” therefore, that is simultaneously marginal and central—often touches upon the question of boundaries. This self-reflexive aspect prompts the chapter’s more general, theoretical discussion about the boundaries of the “properly” Shakespearean: Is there a clear-cut dividing line between (mere) citation and (full-blown) adaptation? The chapter suggests that to speak of “Shakespeare in tatters” is to speak of Shakespearean citationality, a field within which citation and other forms of Shakespearean afterlife situate themselves as variables that cannot be so easily separated from one another.