Possible dialogues: other looks at early modern Portuguese theatre

Abstract

This project is part of the post-doctoral research "Ao gosto português: popular culture in dialogue in comic reinterpretations of the European theatre in the second half of the 18th century" ["Ao gosto português: popular culture in dialogue with comic reinterpretations of European theatre in the second half of the 18th century"]. The main objective of the post-doctoral research is to examine Portuguese adaptations of European serious plays produced in the second half of the 18th century - with a focus on how servants modify the texts, in order to make them more accessible to a popular Portuguese audience. By reading the texts from this era through the lenses of the dialog perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle, my hypothesis is that the mechanism used by the writers who adapted these plays creates an effect of carnivalization that subverts official culture. For this research internship abroad, my main objective is to pursue dialogue between the corpus, the so called teatro de cordel (literally "string theatre") and theory, in order to promote the analysis of Portuguese "teatro de cordel" under Bakhtinian optics. The interest of this internship lays on meeting another exotopic perspective - as mine is - about early modern Iberian literature. Furthermore, being at the renowned Cambridge University includes the opportunity of exchanging ideas with other researchers interested in similar research topics and of accessing important study centres focused on Bakhtinian theory. Also, the access to Portugal and, therefore, to Portuguese national archives is considerably easier from the United Kingdom than from Brazil. Beyond contributing to our understanding of a neglected literary-historical period in Portuguese drama, the importance of this research also lies in its analysis of the mechanisms which have historically affirmed (and repressed) folk culture within the context of the Iberian Peninsula. (AU)