Luís Fernando Veríssimo, the Shakespearean, and his Twelfth Night

Abstract

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare wrote, in addition to other dramas, three comedies, which explore the inebriating and complicated experience of being in love - Much ado about nothing (1598), As you like it (1599-1600) e Twelfth Night (1601). In the three texts, female characters play leading roles, and become the driving force of the plot, overcoming challenges. In 2006, Editora Objetiva published the novel A décima segunda noite, by the writer, cartoonist, translator, screen play writer, and dramatist Luís Fernando Verissimo (1936-), a humorous rewriting of the Shakespearean comedy, Twelfth Nightor What you Will. The new text confirms the relevance of the female characters of the English comedy, and allows the reader to enjoy the mixed identities by means of gender disguising. That fifth novel by the gaucho writer is the second one in the collection ‘Devouring Shakespeare’, which intended to publish recreations of the English dramatist’s works. Here, in a movement of convergence of two of his passions – both the French capital and the English playwright’s production – Veríssimo shifts the Illyria in the Balkans, to the city of Paris in the 1970s, where the hybrid is built, and the cross roads of places truly lived in by different people coming form various social backgrounds get together by means of a feeling of group solidarity proper to the condition of the exile. Sensitively and in an intelligent manner, the writer inserts in his text a particular narrator: Henry, the parrot, who builds his narrative from the perch, where he is placed, in Ilíria, a beauty saloon owned by Orsino.