Riformulazioni e reinterpretazioni transmediali di "Romeo and Juliet"

This chapter examines a selected corpus of multisemiotic reformulations of Romeo and Juliet, which is subject to multimodal processes of re-narration and re- interpretation that are meant to make Shakespeare’s tragedy more accessible to different types of implied receivers, according to their age, gender and familiarity with the media hosting the retextualizations. Three case studies shall be explored: a short clip produced for the British Council and available on the Internet in the context of the Shakespeare Lives! festival; an online video game commissioned by ‘Shakespeare Country’ in order to promote Warwickshire county to international tourists as well as to introduce children and younger receivers to the basic story of Romeo and Juliet; an amateur video game that resorts to discourse hybridization between the original text, intralinguistic simplification and the style of ‘Japanese role-play games’ in order to foster an interactive re-enactment of the play. By means of multimodal analyses of the selected corpus of extracts, this chapter will enquire into the cognitive-functional nature of the ‘transmedial reformulations’ under discussion, revealing the influence of the authors’ expectations concerning implied receivers on the verbal and multimodal aspects of target versions, and the pragmatic inferences that senders wish to prompt in viewers and players through the associations between register features, lexical and structural dimensions, and non-verbal characteristics.