engleski

Shakespeareova ilirska Viola

Recent anglophone scholarship on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has increasingly recognized the interest of Illyria as a concrete historical space that would have been familiar to early modern publics across Europe. Instead of being interpreted as an almost mythical place, filled with alluring sounds and rich in erotic fantasy, Illyria has come to be perceived as a specific site whose complex cultural identity, forged along the borders of the Ottoman Empire, may help us see Shakespeare’s familiar dramatic masterpiece in a new light. Extending somewhat this recent scholarly trend, I shift the focus from Illyria as a space that is observed by those who travel through it or are shipwrecked on its coast and look instead at Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from the Illyrian perspective. I do so by discussing the life of an Illyrian woman from the early seventeenth-century whose movement across borders of different early modern polities was enabled by repeated instances of crossdressing. For this Illyrian Viola, just as for Shakespeare’s Viola, performing a different gender identity was a means of surviving in a hostile world.

Shakespeare ; Illyria ; transnational studies ; early modern drama ; early modern biography

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