НАУЧНИ ТРУДОВЕ НА РУСЕНСКИЯ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ - 2013, том 52, серия 6.3 - 216 - Prolonging the Lifespan of the Shakespearean Archetypes in Postmodernism Felix Nicolau Abstract: Postmodernist understanding of femininity allows for new approaches of Shakespeare’s plays. Cinematography offered two such samples: in 1996 with Baz Luhrmann’s version of Romeo+Juliet, and in 2005 with BBC series of ShakespeaRE-Told, The Taming of the Shrew, directed by David Richards. Both movies interlace femininity with the will to power, but in a system permeated by humour, kitsch and carnival. The conflict of sexes and families becomes a chance to perform a satirical show. Shakespeare proves to be an inexhaustible transcultural and transfashion author. Key words: Cinematography, Conflict, Femininity, Kitsch, Politics. “Sergius: give me the man who will defy to the death any power on earth or in heaven that sets itself up against his own will and conscience: he alone is the brave man” [Shaw 2003: 74] INTRODUCTION For many of us William Shakespeare has remained the most vivid author during these four centuries since his death. Such a posthumous vivacity cannot be explained solely by the quality of his work. In terms of communication with our contemporaneity, the Renaissance and baroque writer is not the friendliest example. Not only that the language he used moved to other meanings and collocations, but even the style of his discourse, especially his verbosity, became points of interests only for scholars, snobs and elite. The explanation for Shakespeare’s message being so well-preserved lies in his capacity of creating myths, legends and archetypes. These types of creations are appealing to those involved in intersemiotic translations. By maintaining Shakespeare alive we legitimize our own creations and belittle the narcissistic guilt Linda Hutcheon speaks about: “postmodernism in its broadest sense is the name we give to our culture’s ‘narcissistic’ obsession with its own workings – both past and present” [Hutcheon 1988:23]. When we attach new significations to a system of signs, we absorb the diachronic view into the synchronic one. The message of the new creation becomes palimpsestic and the archetypes used preserve their vitality. The fact that an archetype includes visual, audio and verbal elements allows for improvisations and additions or eliminations. Intersemiotic translation participates, in this way, to the condition of historiographic metafiction, which “questions the nature and validity of the entire human process of writing – of both history and fiction. Its aim in so doing is to study how we know the past, how we make sense of it” [Hutcheon 1988:22]. Only through an uninterrupted translation the symbolic nature of a masterpiece can be incentivized. As Gregory Rabassa remarks: “When we translate a curse, we must look to the feelings behind it and not the words that go make it up” [Rabassa 1989: 3]. The writers, the stage directors, the painters, the graphic designers and the composers who realize intersemiotic translations, or programmatic works of art, as they are named, transfer a system of signs into a different one: letters into sounds, letters into images, or into sounds. Of course, the reverse way is possible, too. They trigger a “process of negotiation between texts and between cultures” and approach “translation as an act of creative writing” [Bassnett 2008:6]. Intersemiotic translations generate polysystems wherein diachronicity is absorbed into synchronicity. In my paper I shall study the effects of intersemiotic translation on two of Shakespeare’s famous plays: Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew. The analysed examples are the correspondent postmodernist movie versions of the plays: