“‘These Wild Shows’: Shakespearian Wit in The Duke of Parma’

The essay addresses Fernando Pessoa’s The Duke of Parma in light of the pervasive Shakespearean and early modern dramatic features shaping its construction of the Duke’s own “nature”. Beginning from the early observation that “The Duke’s nature is other”, resonating with issues of alterity and insanity, the paper argues that – in line with early modern dramatic traditions – Pessoa fashions the Duke’s identity through a sustained investment in linguistic excess. Central to this exploration is wit, viewed both as a Renaissance category and as part of Romantic and post-Romantic theories of irony. In Duke, Pessoa mobilizes wit as a multivalent dramatic force: it constitutes, variously, a discursive strategy, a thematic concern, a performative act, and an object of meta-reflection. Through rhetorically intricate soliloquies, courtly debates, and fool figures, wit becomes the medium through which characters exert or negotiate power, probe sanity, and interrogate reality. Language drives the drama, with wit functioning as both a perlocutionary trigger and a heuristic tool that, however, does not ensure epistemic closure. Thus, at the same time, Pessoa ironizes wit’s capacity to grasp or “fix” reality, repeatedly staging its failure or reduction to “exterior wit.” This tension aligns Duke not only with Renaissance court drama but also with Romantic (Schlegelian) and post-Romantic reconfigurations of wit and irony. In conclusion, this essay suggests that Pessoa’s play functions as a textual apparatus for endless questioning, in which language delivers only a partial, deferred purchase on the real. In turn, wit emerges as both the play’s structural engine and its tragic limit, encapsulating Pessoa’s neo-Renaissance engagement with alterity, the instability of meaning, and the endlessly elusive natures of the self and the real.