Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, Arts and Humanities

From Cipriani’s Portrait to Bond’s Play: Shakespeare in Majoritarian and Minoritarian Conflict

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Mahdi Javidshad

PhD Graduate in English Language and Literature, Department of English Language and Literature, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

10.22077/islah.2026.9695.1679
Abstract
Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s eighteenth-century portrait entitled Shakespeare Striding through a Storm-Ridden Landscape and Edward Bond’s twentieth-century play entitled Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death each represent a unique picture, rooted in their contemporary concerns and iconization, of William Shakespeare. Cipriani and Bond’s works can be taken as the representatives of two opposing approaches, namely conservative and radical, to Shakespeare: The former appropriates “the bard” politically for the maintenance of the ruling class’s interests, while the latter appropriates Shakespeare socially to oppose the avaricious nature of the capitalist system. In this article, these works are incentives to discuss class struggle in Shakespearean appropriations. To this end, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of “minoritarian” and “majoritarian” and Roland Barthes’ notion of “naturalization” are applied as the theoretical framework of the study to help understand the possibility of appropriation and also deconstruction of the author for political and social aims.

Keywords

sign
timelessness
naturalization
deterritorialization
Bingo
Subjects
Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, Arts and Humanities

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 12 October 2026

  • Receive Date 06 July 2025
  • Revise Date 30 January 2026
  • Accept Date 12 October 2026

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