Abstract

The article focuses on Davide Ferrario's "Tutta colpa di Giuda" (2008), a film set in an Italian prison referencing Hamlet; Alfredo Peyretti's "Moana" (2009), about the life of Italian porn star Moana Pozzi, incorporating lines from "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; and Connie Macatuno's "Rome and Juliet" (2006), a Filipino experimental film that turns Shakespeare's tragic love story into a lesbian romance. It argues that "Shakespeare" is a fragmentary but significant presence in each of these films, a foreign body within the body proper of each film, simultaneously marginal and central. It is a "Shakespeare" involved in the continuous drawing and redrawing of boundaries: between high and low culture, high art in the form of theatre and (porn) cinema, heterosexual normativity and the "naturalness" of homoerotic desire. From a theoretical point of view, the article draws attention to a more general (Shakespearean) citationality without any clear beginning or predetermined end, a field within which forms of Shakespearean afterlife situate themselves as variables that cannot be so easily separated from one another.