Introduction: Sailing along Intermedial Rivers

Abstract

When considering the differences between Shakespeare’s Othello and Verdi’s operatic restyling Otello, following Arrigo Boito’s drastically-reduced libretto, scholars have asked how the opera was fully able to set to music Shakespeare’s manipulation of words in the play-text. Examining how Verdi transforms Shakespeare’s dramatic process into the medium of music, in “The Iagoization of Otello: A Study in Verdi’s Musical Translation of Shakespeare’s Linguistic Dramaturgy,” Jeffrey Kurtzman explains that Verdi’s solution was “to create a musical language for Iago, a different musical language for Otello, and then cause Iago’s musical language to invade and transform that of Otello in a manner directly analogous to the way in which Shakespeare uses words” (72). Extrapolating this idea to the multiplicity of intermedial appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays, we would say that a different language system is involved in representing the canonical plays and a different end-result is obtained. Bryan Reynolds describes this process in a unique manner in his Introduction to Intermedial Theater: Performance, Philosophy, Transversal Poetics, and the Future of Affect (2017):