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Fernando Pessoa's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Heteronyms by Mariana Gray de Castro

2017; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/port.2017.0008

2222-4270

Miguel Gomes,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Reviews 126 The final four chapters of this section are devoted to the brotherhood’s organization, its finances and how it provided a space for professional collaboration and knowledge exchange. A key issue addressed is how during the seventeenth century the brotherhood fostered painters’ professional identity, founded on the notion of painting as a liberal art. Over the course of the eighteenth century in Europe painting academies had fostered both a distinctive cultural identity for painters and models for professional practice. However, efforts to emulate such precedents in Lisbon failed, as Cyrillo Volkmar Machado, one of the brotherhood’s last members, recorded, and his reflections on the reasons for this conclude this account of the fraternity’s activity. The appendices form the majority of this book, and they provide a valuable research resource. They record the names and roles of all the painters listed in the various archival sources during the brotherhood’s existence. Short biographies are also provided for prominent individuals, further enhancing this documentation. In addition to this the texts of the 1681 and 1706–07 regimentos are provided along with information on the funding of the brotherhood. Given the wealth of material discussed in this second section it would seem that there is scope for further study of the Irmandade and its cultural significance, whereby this book provides not only a much-needed updated study on the Irmandade, but also a foundation for future research. Mariana Gray de Castro, Fernando Pessoa’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Heteronyms (London: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2015). 270 pages. Print. Reviewed by Miguel Ramalhete Gomes (Universidade do Porto | Instituto Politécnico do Porto) Once a visible star on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages, Shakespeare later became a black hole, in Gary Taylor’s famous formulation of how the sheer amount of work done on and around Shakespeare ultimately trapped him behind his own reputation: ‘We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values’.1 The study of Shakespeare’s afterlives, which has proved to be one of the most fascinating and fruitful areas within Shakespeare studies, has therefore focused on how and why critics, creative writers, artists, and many others have fashioned Shakespeare for their own purposes and sometimes in their own image. In Fernando Pessoa’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Heteronyms (2015), Mariana Gray de Castro makes a fundamental contribution to this field by proposing to look at ‘Shakespeare as Pessoa read, understood, fashioned, cited, assimilated and appropriated him’ (p. 17). This monograph, bringing together two such towering figures, might indeed have been considered long due, were it 1 Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: The Hogarth Press, 1990), p. 411. Reviews 127 not for the specific circumstances of the publication of Pessoa’s works, most of which were left in a fragmentary and unpublished state upon the death of their author in 1935. Their study and ongoing publication has therefore allowed for a continuing discovery of different sides to a figure that is arguably the most many-sided author of Modernism. Castro’s book argues precisely that Pessoa’s reception of Shakespeare’s work and biography was central to the development of his heteronymic project; in Castro’s words, ‘Pessoa pitched himself against Shakespeare in the impersonal creation of dramatic others’ (p. 27). In fact, the book presents a carefully arranged complex of ideas which coalesce into an image of Shakespeare as an imagined ‘super-Pessoa’ (p. 223); Pessoa’s perhaps disappointing Bardolatry does not however take the form of uncritical admiration, but rather elicits several instances of challenging and sometimes startling pronouncements about his fantasized early modern predecessor. Opening with a foreword by Helder Macedo, the book is divided into five chapters, each devoted to a specific aspect of Pessoa’s hypothesized Shakespeare. Castro begins by tracing Pessoa’s interest in Shakespeare’s genius as a dramatic poet, which he himself attributes to the playwright’s authorial impersonality, in a characteristically Modernist (and autobiographical) argument that is nevertheless deeply rooted in Romantic character criticism and biographical readings. This leads, in the second chapter...