Intimate Tragedies: Body Politics and Narrative Interruptions in Contemporary Rewritings of Shakespeare’s ‟Richard III”

"When they set Shakespeare’s Richard III into one night and eliminate most of the male characters, Italian actor playwright Carmelo Bene’s or Terrible Night a Man War (1977) Flemish dramatist Peter Verhelst’s (2004) turn Richard’s story an intimate, private tragedy. This article argues that, influenced by ideas concepts developed theorists historical avant-gardes, both practitioners condense, fragment, atomise borrow from Shakespeare, shifting focus events themselves to characters’ perception events, foregrounding image suffering disabled body. Keywords: III, rewriting, body, narrative, avant-garde, women. "