Shakespeare and Tyranny: An International Symposium

Abstracts

In the twilight of the Franco regime: (Do) What you will but censors will still be watching you

  

 Elena Bandín (UNED, Spain)

  

 The period of openness that characterised the Francoist policy of the decade of the sixties came to an end at the beginning of the seventies when, in view of the changes that the Spanish society was experiencing, the old guard took charge of the government in an attempt to recover the values of the National Movement.  In 1969, the Ministry of Information and Tourism, under whose authority the Censorship Office fell, and which had previously been headed by the ‘moderate’ Fraga Iribarne, was now in the hands of Alfredo Sánchez Bella, a veteran diplomat of ultra-right-wing Catholic leanings who was imposed personally by Franco.

 This paper explores how this turn to repression becomes evident by examining the censorship file of a new production of the ‘Teatro Experimental Independiente’ (TEI) (Experimental Independent Theatre) of Madrid directed by José Carlos Plaza: Haz lo que te dé la gana (Do what you will), an adaptation of the rock-style musical comedy by Hal Hester and Danny Apolinar with the book adaptation by Donal Triver, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  Although tolerance towards Shakespeare’s plays was a norm of behaviour on the part of the censors, the script submitted to the censorship office on 16th April 1971 was thoroughly examined. The censorship report authorised the performance for an audience over 18 years old, with suppressions and conditional on the viewing of the dress rehearsal. The textual marks present on the theatre script regarding the main taboo topics of the period—sexual morals, religion, politics and improper language—show how the repressive force of official censorship was exerted as in post-war times in its zeal for protecting the morals of Spaniards.

  

  

  

 The Merchant of Venice in Budapest and Cluj-Napoca during the Habsburg Neo-Absolutism

  

 Katalin Ágnes Bartha (U. Babeş-Bolyai, Romania)

  

 The presentation will focus on a very specific period of Shakespeare’s Hungarian reception, when, in the context of the coercing and oppressing neoabsolutism, classic plays were underrepresented in the Hungarian theatre repertoire. The structure of Hungarian theatre disintegrated and changed a lot after the breakdown of the1848/49 Revolution, while German acting gained territory once again. The so-called Theaterordnung(Decree on theatre) which came in force on 25 November 1850, was quite severe; accordingly, every theatrical performance or act was banned if endangered public order or the monarchy itself, or if it could cause a protest or set different nationalities, social classes or religions against each other. The plays which had been already put on stage in Vienna constituted an exception in this regard.

             However, the Shakespeare canon survived the period; by taking the staging of the Merchant of Venice in Budapest (1852) and Cluj-Napoca (1853), the presentation will reveal the contradictory nature of censorship practices, the cultural politics of the Hungarian theatre management which favored plays about the Hungarian nation and history but disregarded the disruptive potentials of Shakespeare’s work. The analysis is based on the prompt-books, playbills, reviews and recollections on the Merchant of Venice productions of the two Hungarian theatre centres.

  

  

  

 Aspects of Tyranny in Shakespeare’s last plays

  

 Mário Vítor Bastos (U. Lisbon, Portugal)

  

 Tyranny is a pervading theme in Shakespeare’s writing. It is almost tempting to say that without “tyranny” Shakespeare dramatic universe would not be possible. Great Shakespearean characters are themselves dictators or deal directly with the problem of political tyranny. The world has changed a lot since Shakespeare’s time. Yet many of his political insights are still alive and make sense not only in dramatic terms but also as political insights. Easily it is concluded that Shakespeare’s handling of tyranny is not a thing of the past, and that his notions of “good government” are as essential and important to the impact of his plays in the past as they are today.

             In Shakespeare we find examples of “good” and “bed” tyrants. But are there “good tyrants” today? Or does this concept make any sense? Is Kant’s notion of the “enlightened aristocrat ruler”, he is the bastion of freedom, and close to Shakespeare’s “good” kings. Shakespeare’s life and work are still far from any notion of modern democracy, yet the American influence and the modern media helped to adapt the Bard’s use of “tyranny” (among other issues) to our “horizontal”, democratic but chaotic times.

             This paper addresses aspects of this complex question, taking Shakespeare’s last plays as point of departure, in particular the use made of “tyrants”, and in particular in adaptations of his work  (on stage, film, dance, music and plastic arts), in countries with political traditions as diverse as England, the USA, Japan and Russia. The final question to be dealt with will be, how far or near is Shakespeare from the modern political democratic theory.

  

  

  

 Pyramus and Thisbe 4 Youor a ‘Wondrous Strange’ Tale of Shakespeare in Romania

  

 Nicoleta Cinpoes (U. Worcester, UK)

  

 Borrowing the story from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (itself on loan from Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Alexandru Dabija’s 2009 production at the Odeon Theatre, Bucharest, stages Pyramus and Thisbe not once but four times in a one hour and 28 minutes show. Set on a train platform, with a mock track separating the actors from the spectators (who are seated on the stage throughout), the production, I argue, puts forward a close and cross examination of Shakespeare making.

  

 Coming out of the station cabin (stage right), a bored Theseus launches the invitation:

  

 Let’s see […] How shall we beguile   

 The lazy time, if not with some delight? [He examines the place]

 Let’s see what masques? [Sits down on the platform bench facing the audience]

 What dance we can concoct

 To pass three never-ending hours

 Between desert and bed?

 I want to see this play.

  

 This Theseus doubles as the cynical theatre man – director, actor, spectator and critic – who’s seen it all, done it all. His invitation, like the production, at once aims to tease past and recent Romanian endeavours and to tease out the stage potential a Shakespeare play holds today. My examination of Pyramus and Thisbe 4You re-constructs the local cultural contexts the production plays with and against, referring to the Romanian ways of making Shakespeare this production enters into dialogue with.

  

 Take 1, an all female version casting the mature stars of the Odeon, I read against both Elizabethan all male stage practice and Andrei Şerban’s all female Lear at the Bulandra (2008). Take 2, ‘an old device’ (5.1.50): a teacher—student “devising” session at the Academy of Theatre and Cinema, I read against critics’ ‘more strange than true’ (5.1.2) parlance on “theories of perception and reception” and against hi-tech Shakespeare dominating the Romanian stages in the first decade of the third millennium. Take 3, local political banter on ethnic discrimination, I read as ‘satire keen and critical’ (5.1.54) on both communist censorship and the recent rise of nationalism in Romania. Take 4, a “cold” reading-cum-improvisation performed by the technical crew – this production’s mechanicals – I read as ‘palpable-gross play’ (5.1.376) on both acting and spectating practices. What I argue is that Dabija’s production goes beyond its local context and mores, and proposes a re-assessment of Shakespeare’s cultural currency in (European) Romania (and Europe at large?) by exposing current tyrannies in Shakespeare studies: from translation/adaptation, through directing and acting, to viewing and reviewing.

  

  

 Shakespeare and the political Awakening in the Arab world: An Analysis of some Arab Adaptations of the English Bard.

  

 Rafik Darragi (U. Tunis, Tunisia)

  

 The theatrical tradition in the Arab countries is generally considered as a foreign artefact, with no relation whatsoever with their past. By the end of the 19th century, the appearance of this type of Western art in the Arab world was a simple form of entertainment of an elitist fraction of the population, showing no links with the social and popular preoccupations of the period. Then a change took place. With the First World War and the English mandate over Egypt, the Arab intelligentsia as a whole came to realise the powerful role of the theatre in the political awakening of the people.

             The best example of this political awakening is, without contest, Ahmed Shawky’s Masra' Cleopatra (The Death of Cleopatra).Appearing in 1927, at a very crucial period of Egyptian history, this playincluded  many barbs levelled at the British occupation of Egypt.

             In addition to this important work in Arab literature, I will examine some modern adaptations of Shakespeare by outstanding Arab producers, who, each in his way, marked a determination not to follow the English Bard literally but rather to appropriate him to clear-cut, well defined political or religious aims.  I shall underline in particular two works, Richard III by the Tunisian Mohamed Kouka and Richard III, An Arab Tragedy by the English-Koweiti Soulayman Al-Bassam. These two contemporary Arab theatrical figures have forged a new model of what to expect from a great Shakespearean classic on tyranny, one that includes high-profile interpretations and provocative speeches. Their respective works are remarkable, powerful signs that they are intent on speaking their minds on off limits issues. They bothshow clearly that the stage may be viewed as the indirect critique of this period, from which valuable conclusions can be drawn.

             The Arab directors who dared to adapt Shakespeare, that iconic Western literary figure, are certainly endowed with a highly original sense of creativity and emancipation. Their respective works did not appear by chance. Rather, they were the bubbling up of an open minded, liberal undercurrent which is, in fact, increasingly evident in Arab societies, as shown through the recent democratic surge.

  

  

  

 Crossing the Rubicon in fascist Italy:

 Mussolini and theatrical Caesarism from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

  

 Michele de Benedictis (U. Cassino, Italy)

  

 During fascist Ventennio took place an unprecedented popularity for theatrical productions and new translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play usually disregarded in Italy before then. The rhetorical appropriation of Roman glorious past seems inevitably to invest even the Bard as instrumental co-partner for Mussolini’s ideological appropriation of Caesar’s myth, once transposed – and revised – in media different from propagandistic historiography.

             My paper will focus on the way these new readings of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy weren’t simply circumscribed as extemporary dramatic agenda to be officially imposed by a totalitarian regime. Apart from contributing to emphasize the importance of national identity within an autarchic government, the very Duce found in Shakespeare’s solemn verses a way to re-articulate his personal figure before the “theatre” of national (and international) politics. Mussolini declaredly acknowledged Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as ‘a great school for rulers’, an inspiring pre-textual pattern to rehearse or quote showing his mastery of English language but, above all, an illustrious model of identification for legitimizing his despotic heroism for the “benefit” of Italian citizens. How much Shakespeare’s theatrical image/rendition of the Roman consul did affect Mussolini’s perception of the real/historical Caesar? How, conversely, Mussolini’s interpretation did divert from the original Elizabethan character, manipulated to cope with his contingent exigencies? Was Caesar’s gory demise envisioned as a necessary – and prophetic – sacrifice to restore order?

             On the other side of the Ocean, in 1937, Orson Welles’ famous production of the play subtitled The Death of a Dictator seemed to satisfy – on a figurative plane as well – Mussolini’s militant enthusiasm for self-identification, but deliberately in order to counteract it and pre figure the suppression of fascist dictatorship through intestine subversion, by associating a decadent and tyrannical Caesar with the titanic historical-ego of the Italian Duce.

  

  

  

 Cymbeline and the display of empire, 1536-1649

  

 Hywel Dix (U. Bournemouth, UK)

  

 Two of the major developments in British cultural theory over the last twenty-five years have been the advent of New Historicism and of Cultural Materialism. Each approach focuses analytic attention on the historical, cultural and political contexts in which literary works were produced, especially during the renaissance. These kind of analyses directed attention onto different subject positions, notably those of race, gender, class, dissident sexuality and alternative nationalisms in Scotland and Wales, which placed the imagined unity of the British state in symbolic jeopardy.

             It is no co-incidence that these approaches have coincided with the period since Tom Nairn published The Break-Up of Britain in 1974, a period which has been characterised by the break-up of consensus in Britain’s public cultural and political affairs. That contemporary environment inevitably impacts on the nature of work produced within the literary academy, so that questions of state, nationhood and citizenship have been retroactively applied to readings of canonical texts such as Shakespeare’s Henry V, King Lear and Macbeth (Loomba 1998; Hadfield 2005).

             Less successfully analysed in critical work of this kind is Cymbeline, a play in which Celtic difference poses a symbolic threat to the ideal unity of the British monarchic state. Cymbeline is composed in the form of a tableau, where the drama overcomes the threat posed by Celtic otherness to an idealised British whole, and drives towards the final presentation where the flags of Rome are displayed conspicuously alongside those of the nascent British Empire. In other words, the play cultivates a strong imaginative association between imperial Rome and the new British Empire at the very historical moment of the latter’s inception. It does this specifically by subsuming Welsh difference.

             To read alterity back into this display of power is to refuse the appeal to emotional loyalty and unity demanded by the play’s conclusion and hence to open up the very questions of empire, state and citizenship that appear to be foreclosed by the play’s conclusion. In this sense, the proposed analysis of Cymbeline will add to current New Historicist and Cultural Materialist scholarship by exploring how questions of burgeoning imperial ideology impact upon our understanding of how the nation state interpolates between the individual subject and society.

  

  

  

 Wajda’s Hamlet IV: a compromise or confrontation?

  

 Jacek Fabiszak (U. Poznan, Poland)

  

 Andrzej Wajda in his Hamlet IV (1989) addresses significant issues of censorship in the late communist Poland. The production was staged at a most sensitive moment in Poland’s history: June 1989, in the wake of the establishment of the first non-communist government after 1945, following the 4thof June semi-democratic elections. Wajda worked on his fourth version of Hamlet, perhaps the most politically-exploited play in the communist regime, aware of the significant political changes that were taking place in the first half of 1989, especially the so-called Round Table talks, which eventually led to the elections. As one may suppose, censorship at that time was slacker than before; furthermore, it is generally assumed that out of all the communist countries in Europe, Polish censorship could not and was not so strict as elsewhere, for a number of reasons, which will be explored in the paper. Therefore, the paper will focus on the image of censorship in 1989 on the one hand, and ways to get round it at a time when power was allegedly slipping out of the hands of ancient regime, who – at the same time – needed to secure a future for itself. In other words, questions whether the director compromised with the old system (having been one of the most celebrated Polish film artists ever since the 1950s), or boldly revealed the system’s evil and wrongdoing, albeit in a veiled manner, will be of utmost importance.

  

  

  

 Analysis of the first Galician translations and adaptations of William Shakespeare’s works in the XXth Century and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in Galicia.

  

 Rubén Jarazo Álvarez (U. A Coruña, Spain)

  

 The role of William Shakespeare in the Galician literary canon and the construction of Galician identity has recently dominated Galician cultural sphere and yet, there is still much work to do. With many productions and adaptations staged on Galician theatres after the sixties and seventies, few scholars and playwrights have entered on the plays, either staged or commissioned, on the pre-Civil war period as well as on the initial years of Francoism. With this paper, our intention is to:
<ol>
 <li>
 To catalogue the main translations and adaptations of William Shakespeare’s works in Galicia from 1900 to 1940.</li>
 <li>
 To analyse those translations and adaptations in terms of censorship as well as economic limitations suffered on the Galician cultural realm.</li>
 <li>
 To determine the role of Shakespeare and his plays in the configuration of the national literary canon in Galicia during the first half of XXth century.</li>
</ol>

  

  

  

  

 Victor Hugo’s Cromwell: Modern Tyrannicide and Romantic Freedom.

  

 Julián Jiménez Heffernan (U. Córdoba, Spain)

  

 Hugo’s “Preface” to his verse drama Cromwell (1827) is regarded as “the main critical text of the French romantic debate” (Wellek). In it, Hugo argued that Shakespeare, an anti-Neoclassical spirit playing out all sorts of normative transgressions—the blending of comedy and tragedy, the sublime and the grotesque, and the violation of the dramatic unities—, represents the modern age. To be sure, other intellectuals like A.W.Schlegel and Coleridge also instrumentalized Shakespeare in the service of a Romantic agenda. Still, Hugo’s emphatic underscoring of the necessary connection between Shakespeare and freedom deserves some attention. To start with, his argument is advanced as the preface to a play centered on a palpable instance of emancipatory tyrannicide drawn from English modern history. No English writer had given direct thematic treatment to this historical episode. Yet French writers like Balzac and Hugo were powerfully drawn to it because they read it as an anticipation of the French Revolution. When Hugo wrote Cromwell, France was under the repression of the Bourbon Restoration. The fact that Cromwell grew into an impossible play, unfit for performance, was an effect of Hugo’s internalization of the pervasive censorship enforced by the monarch. There seems to be thus a resurrectionary logic governing this process of literary appropriation by means of which a prominent French exponent of Romantic freedom decides to reactivate Shakespearean transgression in order to deploy an English historical drama of tyrannicide. Romantic freedom of total expression is thus construed as the belated effect of a historical revolution that has been twice enacted. In this paper I will explore the extent of this Shakespearean influence. In general, critics remain satisfied with Hugo’s declared indebtedness to Shakespeare, restricting their attention to the “Preface”. But this indebtedness can only be assessed by examining the extent to which Hugo’s elaboration of English revolutionary consciousness relies on a republican poetics informing some of Shakespeare’s plays.

  

  

  

 Analysing  shakespearian models of tyranny in communist regime:

 some Slovene theatrical examples

  

 Denis Poniž (U. Ljubljana, Slovenia)

  

 Although Shakespeare was with all his mind and body a man of Renaissance period, the echoes of Middle Age have been still alive in the whole period of his creative life. Many sorts of cruelty and superstition, «black» magic and  other kinds of  repression had determined  the middle age colective mind and its treatement of human life and hunman integrity. A «dark» Middle age was in reality a period of  abstract  and practical collective tyranny against individuals, especially those who were surpassed the «allowed» frames of above mentioned collective mind. Many of those ideas came to «liberal» Renaissance and Shakespare used them to descibe theatrically the dichotomy between open minded ideas of his (renassaince) time and opposite ideas on which the state of tyranny was based not only as a political power but also as a practical tool of rulling ideologies. A great number of his tragedies and histories (but also comedies) are full of supranatural phenomena (whiches, ghosts) with one single purpose: to show how unimportant is a single human life and how important is to obey the collective ideology. The resistance against collective mind was always punished and punishement was a constituent part of tyranny against the «rebels» of all proviniencies. The identical social model was used in comunnist ruled states.

             The «renaissance model» of theatrical expression of tyranny wil be shown on some Shakespere production in Slovene theatres between 1945 and 1990 e.i. in the period of communist totalitarian regime. For the paper selected productions had used Shakespeare's expressions of tyranny to make alusions on contemporary situation in different ways: from very covered theatrical metaphores to open and provocative ones, showing that there is no a big difference between tyranny of renaissance and contemporary time.

  

  

  

 Stalin, after Shakespeare:

 Writing about Stalinism in Heiner Müller’s Macbeth

  

 Miguel Ramalhete Gomes (U. Porto, Portugal)

  

 This paper means to explore the depiction of Stalinism in Heiner Müller’s 1972 adaptation of Macbeth: Macbeth, after Shakespeare. By 1972, almost 16 years had passed since the denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the 20thCongress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the direct artistic representation of the crimes of Stalinism was not to be attempted in the Eastern Block. The history of East German theatre contains several examples of playwrights and directors who were punished for considerably less. When Müller’s Macbeth premiered and was published in 1972, the play was the object of an unusually prolonged press polemic which focused on such diverse topics as authorial parasitism and a distorted depiction of the Middle Ages. The theme of tyranny was indeed broached, but in an offhand manner which consistently left out the name of Stalin. However, some ten years later, Müller was to suggest that Macbeth, after Shakespeare had been, among other things, a play about Stalinism.

 In this paper, I will, therefore, focus not only on the allusions to Stalinism in Müller’s Macbeth but also on its immediate reception in the German Democratic Republic. This reception will be briefly contextualised by pointing out the often unexpected ways in which performances of repertoire plays and rewritings of these plays were received in the GDR. In the conclusion, I will refer to Müller’s return to Macbeth as a figuration of Stalin both in his 1988 speech to the East German Shakespeare Society and in his last play, Germania 3 Ghosts at the Dead Man (1995).

  

  

  

 A tale signifiying nothing? Macbeth under the Portuguese dictatorship

  

 Francesca Rayner (U. Minho, Portugal)

  

 Staging a play about the rise and eventual destruction of a tyrant under a dictatorial regime might seem something of a risky venture. Yet none of the three performances of Macbeth under the Portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974) appear to have aroused the wrath of the regime’s censors. Even the most radical of these, a somewhat shambolic version entitled, Macbeth, what’s going on in your head?, directed by the Argentinian exile Adolfo Gutkin for the Coimbra University Theatre Group (CITAC) only attracted the attention of the Secret Police (PIDE) when some of the students insulted pilgrims travelling to the religious shrine of Fátima on a train. Did the regime simply misrecognize itself in the play or are other factors at work in explaining the apparent equanimity with which the regime looked on the play?

             This paper explores how potentially inflammatory dramatic materialintersected with notions of Shakespeare’s national and international cultural currency in these three performances. It also challenges what has tended to be an absolute separation between the main national theatre, the D. Maria II, as a theatre of the regime and the oppositional experimental theatres, by pointing to a degree of theatrical transit between them during this period. The actor João Guedes, for instance, played Macbeth in both the 1956 Teatro Experimental do Porto performances and the 1964 D. Maria performances. However, if this would seem to negate any radical charge in performances of the play, the paper also illustrates how both theatrical contexts created an oppositional space where questions of the abuse of power and eventual regime change could be debated and which led to an emphasis on the play as one of the most political of Shakespeare’s dramas in the post-revolutionary period.

  

  

  

 Unexpected Change,  Powerless Magicians – Brave New World?

 TheTempest in the late 1980s: Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary

  

 Gabriella  Reuss (Pázmány Péter U., Hungary)

  

 Shakespeare’s The Tempest was staged throughout the Socialist era in Hungary: since after the second world war, it was staged seven times, practically in every seventh year. A longer pause occurred after 1946 as the decadence of the tale did not fit into stahanovist reality. Nonetheless, later the play was usually put on stage without serious intervention on the part of the socialist state. As soon as the play was presented as a fairy tale it appeared comfortingly apolitical.

             Interestingly however, the end of the Kádár regime (1989) saw three productions following one another in two-year periods: in 1986, 1988 and, in the non-socialist era, in 1990. Such a frequency is an obvious sign of the cultural significance the play gained in Hungarian politics. This paper intends to map what I call the The Tempest-phenomenon in which the cultural context the creators trigger into the production is just as important as what happens on the stage. The two before-1989 productions may reveal something about the nature of censorship and the slow dying of the regime.

  

  

  

 Writing between the lines:

 Reviewing Shakespeare productions in Socialist Hungary

  

 Veronika Schandl (Pázmány Péter U., Hungary)

  

 The proposed topic of my essay concerns itself with sources – that is the sources a researcher has at hand when discussing Shakespeare productions under a tyrannical regime, in my case in Socialist Hungary. Surveying several trends in contemporary reviewing I would like to walk around the question of what and how we can use as historical sources or as data for possible performance reconstruction even, or whether contemporary reviews only serve as example when wishing to analyse the discourse, as well as the censorship – self-censorship practices of dictatorial regimes.

             My paper is going to concern itself with Shakespeare productions from Stalinist as well as from later, Kádár-regime Hungary, especially their changing representations throughout the past few decades. My aim is offer certain strategies in discussing these reviews but also to offer further points of discussion in the topic.

             My research into Shakespeare reviewing in totalitarian regimes wishes to serve several purposes – besides investigating Shakespeare reception under Socialism I hope it will also shed some light on lingering tendencies, still visible in contemporary theatre reviews of Hungary.

  

  

  

 Shakespeare and Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Italy

  

 Mariangela Tempera (U. Ferrara, Italy)

  

 In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s ‘greatest hits’ were read and (very seldom) performed in Italian translations of Jean François Ducis’ adaptations. In 1847, on the eve of uprisings and wars that would eventually free the country from foreign rule, Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth, triggered a new interest in translations and performances of the works that Shakespeare had actually written.

 With examples taken from translations, librettos, and playscripts, the paper will investigate how self-censorship and the demands of the censors in the regions controlled by the Habsburg, the Pope and the Borbons shaped the form that Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear took in Italy up to 1870.

  

  

  

 Transcontinental Shakespeare: Macbeth and tyrannies in Glauber Rocha’s Severed Heads

  

 Noemí Vera and Francisco Fuentes (U. Murcia, Spain)

  

 Considering Shakespeare as moderate or prudent in politics, his afterlives, however, are far from being neutral. The playwright has been used in favour of different kinds of tyrannical governments, but has also become the vehicle to criticise them. This is the case of Severed Heads (1970), a joint Spanish-Brazilian adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Brazilian Glauber Rocha, which portraits the downfall of a despotic ruler who, in Rocha’s words, “might be the apocalyptic encounter of Perón and Franco in the ruins of the Latin-American civilisation.”

 
 This paper studies the reception and role of Shakespeare within a tyrannical context through the eyes of Glauber Rocha, who witnessed the censor character of Brazilian military government and exiled to Spain in 1970. It also aims to show how the filmmaker positions himself against tyrannies, particularly dictatorial ruling mechanisms, making use of Shakespeare to express his views concerning the political situation of Latin America and Spain at the end of the 1960s.

 
 In this plea against dictatorships, Rocha resorts to metaphor and allegory, typical characteristics of the Cinema Nôvo movement, to which the director himself belonged. Severed Heads also echoes other Shakespearean plays such as Richard III or King Lear to show the audience the consequences a tyrannical rule may entail. Rocha focuses on Severed Heads’s main character’s fear that people might want to avenge on him and explores his delirium after realising his power is gone.

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Shakespeare and Tyranny: An International Symposium