| Summary: | The talented playwright Martin Crimp, one of contemporary British drama’s best-kept secrets, has shaped a singular transtextual territory, also known as Crimpland. Indeed, his output is a cross-pollination of various dramatic styles which fruitfully intermingle. Remarkably, Crimp’s corpus reworks the almost entire range of textual transcendences mentioned by Genette: intertextuality, paratextuality, and hypertextuality. Moreover, critics have noted an interesting form of intra-authorial intertextuality in his highly original output. This article focuses in particular on Crimp’s hypertextual strategies by examining The Misanthrope (1996), an entertaining rewriting of Molière’s homonymous play, and Cruel and Tender (2004), a brilliant contemporary version of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis. The analysis of these diegetic transpositions, based on the comparative reading of the hypotext and its hypertext, shows how a plot derived from past dramatic traditions can be successfully transferred into a modern setting, and how such materials can be effective sources for current dramatic reflections on contemporaneity.
|
|---|