A Popular Shakespeare in the 21st century in Brazil – Notes Around Richard III’s appropriation by Clowns de Shakespeare

Abstract

The way a foreign text may gain new meanings in different cultures, achieves diverse contours through the work perspective that the group which will search this text as reference has. It is in these terms that the performances of Brazilian theatre groups with popular bias have earned relevance. Their work reflects on the foreign text the source-culture, from where the text is picked up from like basis to their productions, as much as the target-culture that will compose the main reception context of these works. In this movement, we often see the status of the canon questioned through a popular bias. This work proposal may be recognized as intercultural appropriation (PAVIS, 2015), a useful proposal of work with necessary updates to achieve a better comprehension of classic texts, mainly those deriving from other cultures. To correspond to these statements, in this work, like an example of the contemporarily use of foreign literature in Brazil, we analyze the theatrical performance of Sua Incelença, Ricardo III, made by the potiguar group Clowns de Shakespeare.