Abstract
The theory of intertextuality, which is proposed by Julia Kristeva is not the starting point for the textual interrelations. This paper considers the main traces of intertextuality through literary development. The intertextuality is being discussed in variety of viewpoints and Kristeva’s model is applied for studying Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth as the contemporary play which is made on its Shakespearean bases. There are many traces that all together prove the Kristevan theory of Intertextuality, asserting text as “mosaic of quotations”. Tom Stoppard uses different techniques in producing this play. Stoppard, in Cahoot’s Macbeth restates the story of Macbeth, for his political and satirical intentions in the totalitarian social and political context of Czechoslovakia in the second half of the twentieth century in the Eastern Europe. There are many ellipses and compressions to make it more qualified for performing in a modern society. This play can be studied based on Kristevan notion of intertextuality in two levels. There are processes of deconstructing and reconstructing meanings in horizontal level between the play and the audience while in vertical level, this play is enrooted in Shakespeare’s works. Intertextuality causes the literary productivity and the excessiveness of interpretations due to the dialogic nature of language.
Highlights
Tom Stoppard has dedicated the play to the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout
In the preface to the play, expresses some events that he has been inspired with in writing the drama. He travels to Prague, his homeland, in January 1977 when the Czech dissidents have published Charter 77, in favor of their civil rights, meeting the Czechoslovakian playwright, Pavel Kohout who as many writers and actors had been forbidden to do his career and Pavel Landovsky, a prominent ex-actor
Jonathan Culler (1976) names the notion of intertextuality as: The paradox of linguistic and discursive systems: that utterances or texts are never moments of origin because they depend on the prior existence of codes and conventions, and it is the nature of codes to be always already in existence, to have lost origins. (1382)
Summary
Tom Stoppard has dedicated the play to the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout. He, in the preface to the play, expresses some events that he has been inspired with in writing the drama. A year later, in a letter that he receives from Kohout, it was written that he could not live without theatre and has tried to find any possibility to perform drama in spite of situations; he has gathered a Living-Room Theatre group what he calls: LRT They perform privately Macbeth at any request in the home of the spectators, the band consists of two outstanding banned Czech actors, Pavel Landovsky and Valasta Charmostova who starring Macbeth and Lady, a prominent forbidden singer Vlastimil Tresnak who plays Malcolm and makes music beside two others. The playwright enters Easy and Dogg’s language from Dogg’s Hamlet to the second Stoppard in these two plays entangles the arbitrary role of language; he, in these political plays deals “more directly with overtly political issues... In Cahoot’s Macbeth, Stoppard as a Western European author looks on the Eastern European sense of absurd living in a restricted society
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