This article discusses The Duke of Parma, taking its cue from Richard Zenith’s definition of it as a Shakespearean exercise. It develops the idea of exercise by studying the relationship Pessoa had with his literary sources, focussing in particular on the analogies between this play and the nineteenth-century vogue of neo-Renaissance drama, and using as its main example Oscar Wilde’s The Duchess of Padua. It then suggests that the copious notes and fragments that make up the Duke of Parma project constitute an intermediate moment between Pessoa the reader and Pessoa the writer. In the second part, the article focusses on a comparison between Pessoa’s play and William Shakespeare’s Othello, also offering reflections on the possible derivation of some tropes from Sonnet 129.
The Heteronymous Reader
petrina
2026
Abstract
This article discusses The Duke of Parma, taking its cue from Richard Zenith’s definition of it as a Shakespearean exercise. It develops the idea of exercise by studying the relationship Pessoa had with his literary sources, focussing in particular on the analogies between this play and the nineteenth-century vogue of neo-Renaissance drama, and using as its main example Oscar Wilde’s The Duchess of Padua. It then suggests that the copious notes and fragments that make up the Duke of Parma project constitute an intermediate moment between Pessoa the reader and Pessoa the writer. In the second part, the article focusses on a comparison between Pessoa’s play and William Shakespeare’s Othello, also offering reflections on the possible derivation of some tropes from Sonnet 129.
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