Text and intertext in Shakespeare plays by Don Nigro

Abstract

The contemporary American postmodernist playwright Don Nigro engages in a dialogue with Shakespeare, deconstructing the texts of his plays. Nigro uses transtextuality and intertextual references, expanding the dialogic field to new meanings. At the same time, the author explains his (and not only) creativity irrationally, since he expresses ideas about the writer’s inability to control what happens in his work. The article attempts to scientifically substantiate the enigmatic emergence of images and plots in the writer’s head and gives a brief overview of the understanding of intertextuality in scientific consciousness. The terminological apparatus used is the concepts introduced by the French literary critic and philosopher J. Genette. As an example of Nigro’s palimpsest, we analyzed his play “The Boar’s Head”, supplementing Shakespeare’s historical chronicle “Henry IV” in two parts. The characters of the work, written by Shakespeare, continue to exist in Nigro’s play “autonomously”, according to the modern play-wright, however, their personalities and destinies fully correspond to the original text. This irrational, at first glance, process is determined by the professional experience of the playwright-philologist Nigro, which allows generating transtextual space in a natural way.