|
Fernando Pessoa's Duke of Parma
an unpublished Shakespearean tragedy
Fernando Pessoa was a bilingual writer, who, upon his death at the age of 47, left behind many incomplete and unpublished works. Traditionally, the study of his works has focused on his poetry. One area of his work that has generally been overlooked by philologists and scholars until recently is his dramatic output. However, Pessoa defined himself as a “dramatic poet”; therefore, despite being produced in a fragmented way, drama should be considered a key to understanding his creative process and his entire body of work.
Among his dramatic works, one title links Fernando Pessoa to the city that is home to the university funding the project: The Duke of Parma, a fragmentary Shakespearean drama written in English, on which he worked from 1908/09 until his death in 1935. Of all his theatrical works, The Duke of Parma is the most significant, at least in quantitative terms. This large literary project is disseminated across at least 172 documents, which are stored in two separate folders at the National Library in Lisbon, in the Fernando Pessoa estate. Clearly inspired by the language, form, and motifs of Shakespearean drama, it is more than just an exercise in style. Pessoa worked on it (although irregularly) for a long period; therefore, this five-act drama has undoubtedly played a significant yet unfulfilled role in the literary expression of his fragmented self.
 However, no researcher has yet demonstrated the necessary perseverance to analyse, read, and transcribe all of the manuscripts. It is evidently a challenging task, given the fragmentary nature of the drama and the complexity of the manuscripts. Apart from the ecdotic difficulties, this text raises a series of problems and issues that require the expertise of several specialists from a variety of fields.
 Therefore, an edition of The Duke of Parma should be the work of a team, comprising:
a) a small, select group of researchers who will be assigned a grant in order to work directly on transcribing and digitally encoding the documents;
b) a team of philologically knowledgeable consultants with solid experience of editing Fernando Pessoa’s works to jointly establish the edition’s structure and organization;
c) an expert in English literature and Shakespearean drama not only to support the fixing of the text and research the sources of Pessoa’s English drama;
d) a specialist in Scholarly Digital Editions;
e) a historian of Parma during the early modern period, to study the setting of this work.
The very first outcome of this project was a day conference entitled Fernando Pessoa: The Duke in Parma (17-03-2023) in which the preliminary issues raised by the study of this play were presented and discussed.
|
