The Duke of Parma Revisited: Shakespearean Echoes at LSU International Conference

Fernando Pessoa’s unfinished play The Duke of Parma was the focus of a paper presented at the international conference “Language and the Ineffable: Expressing the Inexpressible,” organized by the Comparative Literature Graduate Association at Louisiana State University and held online on 27–28 March 2026. The presentation took place within the panel “Literary Tradition and Resonance” and was delivered by Carlotta Defenu, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Parma, as part of her research project The Unveiling of Fernando Pessoa’s Literary Legacy: The Duke of Parma (THEDUKE).

Entitled A Shakespearean Drama within the Portuguese Avant-Garde: Fernando Pessoa’s The Duke of Parma, the paper examined how Pessoa sought to emulate and reinterpret Shakespearean drama in the conception of The Duke of Parma.

The presentation highlighted the origins of Pessoa’s fascination with Shakespeare, tracing them back to his years in Durban, South Africa, where he began composing English sonnets strongly influenced by Elizabethan poetry. The Duke of Parma, however, represented the author’s most extensive and ambitious attempt to engage directly with Shakespeare’s legacy. The play adopts a markedly Elizabethan English rich in archaisms and reproduces the rhythmic structure of Shakespearean verse through the consistent use of iambic pentameter. Archival documents further demonstrate Pessoa’s meticulous study of Shakespeare’s tragedies: he compared the length and number of lines of plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar in order to model his own drama on them as closely as possible.

The paper also situated The Duke of Parma within the broader neo-Elizabethan revival that shaped nineteenth-century dramatic production across Europe and beyond. In this context, Shakespeare functioned for Pessoa both as an authoritative literary model and as a creative source of emulation. The play stages a world marked by corruption, betrayal, and political intrigue, echoing the atmosphere of Shakespearean tragedy while simultaneously filtering it through the sensibility of the Portuguese avant-garde. 

Finally, the presentation focused on the figure of the Duke himself, whose characterization reveals striking affinities with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Hamlet, Pessoa’s protagonist embodies introspection, erratic behaviour, and an almost ineffable psychological complexity. By examining these parallels, the paper sought to illuminate how Pessoa transformed the Shakespearean model into a deeply personal and modern exploration of dramatic identity, revealing once more the richness and originality of his engagement with the English literary tradition.