Presentation of the Special Issue on Fernando Pessoa’s Duke of Parma and Its Edition Project

Studies of the works of bilingual writer Fernando Pessoa, who left many unfinished and unpublished documents at the time of his death at the age of 47, have traditionally privileged his poetry. A part of Pessoa’s production that has been generally overlooked by philologists and scholars until recently is his dramatic production. In a letter to João Gaspar Simões, however, Pessoa defined himself as a “dramatic poet” (as Nicolás Barbosa duly emphasizes in his essay); therefore, drama—even if produced in a fragmented fashion—should be considered a key to a full understanding of his creative process, and thus of his entire corpus. Pessoa’s dramatic works in English remain largely unpublished, and little has been written about them. Apart from a few loose sentences from Prometheus Revinctus (published by Anabela Mendes in 2018), only Marino was edited and published in two parts by Carlos Pittella in 2020/2021.

Among Pessoa’s dramatic works, one title stands out: The Duke of Parma, a fragmentary Shakespearean drama in English that he worked on from 1908/09 (perhaps earlier, as Jerónimo Pizarro suggests) until his death in 1935. The Duke of Parma is quantitatively the largest of Pessoa’s theatrical works. It is a sprawling literary project, divided into at least 172 documents in two separate files, which are part of Fernando Pessoa’s literary estate kept in the Portuguese National Library. It is clearly a Shakespearean play: not only does the tragedy’s language reflect the archaic English of the Elizabethan era, but the form and motifs are also modeled on Shakespeare’s dramas. In fact, as a document in the archives (BNP/E3 114D-51v) reveals, Pessoa counted the lines of King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar on a piece of paper alongside a scene from The Duke of Parma because he wanted to make sure that the number of lines in his own tragedy were about the same as those in Macbeth and Hamlet.

These two pieces of information—the obvious imitation of Shakespearean forms and language and the long period over which Pessoa worked on his project—lead to an interesting conclusion: The Duke of Parma is not just an exercise in style, a youthful experiment by an author still searching for his own expression, imitating the work of the most authoritative model in a phase of literary apprenticeship, as one might have thought if the manuscripts were undated. On the contrary: Pessoa continued to work on a play in the Shakespearean style well into the twentieth century; he began before he had fully discovered his heteronyms and continued through the years when he was at the forefront of Orpheu’s modernist movement, then as director of Athena, and finally when he began to gain some recognition through the critical activity of Presença magazine. Therefore, this project must have meant something important to him; it must have played an important but unfulfilled role in the literary expression of his fragmented self.

However, no researcher has yet conducted a thorough analysis, reading, and transcription of all of these manuscripts. This is obviously a challenging task, given the fragmentary state of the drama and the complex nature of the manuscripts. Nevertheless, some scholars have been interested in working on The Duke of Parma. Carlos Pittella has studied Pessoa’s English dramatic works, including this tragedy, which he intended but was unable to edit in 2014, as Jerónimo Pizarro explains in his article. During an online presentation of Richard Zenith’s biography, I also had the opportunity to hear Patricio Ferrari reveal that Patrick Quillier, the French translator of Pessoa’s works, repeatedly told him, “You have to work on The Duke of Parma!” But nothing came of that.

Knowledge of The Duke of Parma, among the many incomplete and fragmentary works listed by Pessoa, dates from 1966, when Georg Rudolf Lind wrote about his findings in Fernando Pessoa’s literary estate, mentioning this tragedy for the first time, along with another of Pessoa’s English dramas, Prometheus Rebound (1966: 59). In the late 1970s, both Teresa Rita Lopes ([1977] 2004: 495) and Anne Terlinden (1978: 68) drew attention to the fact that these works remained unpublished. In 1993, João Dionísio, introducing his edition of Pessoa’s English poetry, referred to a collection of lists in which the poet considered various arrangements for his English works, including both Prometheus Rebound and The Duke of Parma (Pessoa, 1993: 17). These documents are now available in the Digital Edition of Fernando Pessoa: references to The Duke appear in lists dating from 1913 to 1933. Dionísio also informed us, in the aforementioned edition, that Fernando Pessoa’s literary estate preserves at least four dated versions: a manuscript dated 4/8/1918 (BNP/E3 115D-8), a typescript dated 6/22/1919 (BNP/E3 115D-5), a manuscript dated 10/18/1922 (115D-57r), and another one dated 1/4/1935 (115D-71). In 2004, Lopes presented a facsimile version of a page from the drama, dated 4/8/1918 (2004: 496), and in 2012, Patricio Ferrari in his doctoral thesis, “Meter and Rhythm in the Poetry of Fernando Pessoa,” transcribed a line in this paragraph:

The meter of Shakespeare’s drama was the iambic pentameter while its form was blank verse . . . Since Pessoa’s dramatic works in English still need to be transcribed and published, it is too early to ascertain whether he followed Shakespeare (and if so to what extent) in the production of his English drama. See, for instance, a fragment for the “Duke of Parma” where Pessoa employed the English long-line canonical meter: “All this is mere philosophy, my lord. // I spoke of real things, of living [↑ actual] things./” (114D-55^r). The Duke of Parma appears as the “example of drama” in a loose sheet where several other works are listed (48B-25). (Ferrari 2012: 229)

Regarding meter, in an essay on Pessoa’s dramatic production in English, Carlos Pittella makes the following observation:

However little we know about Pessoa’s three English dramas, they seem to have been written primarily in iambic pentameter—or in Pessoa’s particular version of iambic pentameter, which sometimes allows itself uncanonical stresses (such as on the 3rd syllable, uncanonical in English but perfectly acceptable in Portuguese). Pessoa seems to blend the traditional pentameter with elements of Portuguese decasyllabic verse. (Pittella 2020: 598–599)

In 2021, Richard Zenith added more information about The Duke of Parma to his extensive biography of Fernando Pessoa. Zenith wrote that he spent a couple of weeks going through manuscripts of The Duke. Despite the fragmentary and disjointed state of the play’s development as revealed by the manuscripts, Zenith was able to identify a plot in which “madness, sex, and sexual abstinence were prominent themes” (2021: 303). In his reconstruction of the Duke’s character and aversion to female sexuality, the American scholar quoted a dozen words and phrases from the play. The Duke of Parma constructed by Pessoa, according to Zenith’s account, is “intense, psychologically unstable, and philosophically restless” (2021: 303). Regarding the Duke’s instability, Zenith quotes him saying “That every face is ugly looked at close / And every soul studied closely has some madness” (BNP/E3 114D-16v; 2021: 304). The Duke’s father was himself insane and impotent, a trait he apparently passed on to his only biological son, the then-reigning Duke.

But the latter, though childless, is not really impotent, only chaste. Although he renounced sex, he cannot shake its attractive power, even as it disgusts him and he seems repelled by the female body and sexuality. He asks a doctor among his counselors: “which is dirtier: the conception of a man or his birth.” And a few lines later, he asks: “Which is the viler: a virgin or a whore?” The answer to this question, according to the Duke, should not be “a whore” but “a virgin, for one lies with men, and the other with her imagination, which is as if she lay with a monster” (BNP/E3 114D-80v). Zenith’s quotes from the manuscripts include some words and expressions related to the Duke’s aversion to sex, such as “insane delight” (BNP/E3 114D-16v; 2021: 304) or “All’s dirty in the world—all, all!” (BNP/E3 115D-38; 2021: 304). In addition, in another document cited by Zenith, we can read some other lines that seem to me equally significant in this matter: “Lust owns at our hearts, and all the bent / Of our life’s to forget it and to force / Our very forgetfulness to be fo[r]gotten // The self unconscious filth of maiden’s minds / The closet talk of between-wives, the dirt” (BNP/E3 115D-42).

Zenith even points out a paratextual element, an explanatory note added by Pessoa at the end of one of the Duke’s speeches: “The Duke’s constant sexual allusions and their purpose. They are not the author’s; they belong to the author’s conception of the character of the Duke” (BNP/E3 115D-83). Zenith points out that Pessoa rarely bothered to include this kind of disclaimer in his literature, so it almost seems like a sneaky admission. Zenith suggests that this tragedy could add interesting elements to the study of its author, even from a biographical point of view. Zenith also links this note to an isolated phrase that was written down in 1912 on a page of a memo-book (kept at the Casa Fernando Pessoa) reproduced and transcribed by Pizarro, Ferrari, and Cardiello in Os objectos (2013: 150): “Preface to Duke of Parma. I have never shown what I am.” In fact, this preface was never written, another interesting piece of information that adds to the puzzle. In fact, the way Pessoa wrote down this note may suggest that the phrase could serve as a title for the intended preface, or at least that it could be seen as a key to reading The Duke of Parma. We should ask ourselves who is speaking: is it the Duke or Fernando Pessoa himself the one who has never shown what he is? Or is the author speaking through his character? The same author who, as a “dramatic poet,” insisted on distancing himself from the heteronyms that speak through their literature?

To date, of the approximately 1,000 documents in Pessoa’s literary estate relating to his dramatic production (both in Portuguese and English), 59% have been published, mostly in recent years and mostly in digital editions. With the publication of The Duke of Parma, the percentage of published drama would rise to about 75% (+16%), a figure that signals how crucial this tragedy is within Pessoa’s overall dramatic writings. The revelation of The Duke of Parma will also have significant critical implications for Pessoa studies and modernist literature as a whole, and it will open up new critical perspectives in the field of comparative literary studies. In all honesty, I must admit that the coincidence between the city whose Duke is the protagonist of Pessoa’s tragedy and the location of the University where I have the honor to work was part of the interest that personally attracted me to plan a hypothetical edition of The Duke of Parma. To this end, a project involving scholars from different universities and fields of study was developed and has been funded by the University of Parma.

Editing this play would be a particularly challenging task. In addition to the related papers already identified and cataloged, it would be imperative to revisit Pessoa’s literary estate in order to edit The Duke, since relevant fragments may be found anywhere in Pessoa’s papers, as the critical edition of Pessoa’s Fausto (2018) amply demonstrates. Pessoa’s archive may contain not only fragments of the same play, written on documents that also contain materials related to other works, but relevant lists and plans may also be found that could shed light on the origins of this tragedy.

This is extremely complex material, mostly written hastily, making the basic task of dating all the documents by analyzing their contents, the papers, and the inks used by Pessoa even more difficult. Even after deciphering and possibly dating all the documents, it would not be an easy task for an editor to try to reconstruct a play that was written in fragments, often chaotically and incoherently, with scenes written here and there, unfinished and out of sequence. Any editor who attempted to put it all together, to organize such material into a coherent whole, would run the risk of becoming a coauthor.

Any edition of The Duke of Parma should never be presented to the public as a new masterpiece by Fernando Pessoa. In fact, it does not strictly belong to the works of Fernando Pessoa, since its author never finished or published it. Nevertheless, it has more or less the same status as other works by Pessoa that were published after his death, such as O Livro do desassossego, considering his oeuvre as a whole. Finding the right solution—an editorial model suitable for reconstructing a play written in a fragmentary and chaotic manner—is crucial in order to avoid what Jerónimo Pizarro calls “the fear of unity.” Any proposed edition must emphasize the nonlinear nature of the texts by showing not only the critically established text, but also its other potential forms testified by rejected or alternative variants. The creation of a digital archive of The Duke of Parma could greatly facilitate this approach and would also make all the information on the play’s dossier available for the development of studies of all kinds.

The series of problems and questions raised by this text require the know-how of a number of experts in a variety of multidisciplinary fields. Therefore, an edition of The Duke of Parma will necessarily require the work of a team that includes researchers with a strong knowledge of and experience editing Fernando Pessoa’s manuscripts, as well as expertise in Elizabethan English, meter, and philology. The creation of a digital archive would obviously require a number of specific skills and experience. For example, a digital edition consultant can assist with encoding and uploading texts, as well as designing a digital platform to host the archive.

Although written by a Portuguese author, The Duke of Parma has more to do with Anglophone literature than with Portuguese literature. Therefore, it is clear that the project team must include expertise in this field, not only to assist in the fixation of the text but also to research the sources of Pessoa’s English drama; not only must this particular consultant be familiar with the Shakespearean theater that served as the model for The Duke of Parma, but they would also play a key role in identifying other possible influences, such as Shelley, Byron, Wilde, or Browning, authors that Pessoa knew very well, given his education. A researcher with broad knowledge of Pessoa’s private library will be crucial to understanding which readings may have inspired the conception and the composition of this tragedy. Possible marginalia in Pessoa’s own books would be very valuable to study the genesis of The Duke of Parma, not only as far as the British sources are concerned, but also in relation to its setting. Perhaps his library contains the reason Pessoa decided to write The Duke of Parma in the first place, how much he knew about the history of Parma, and whether the Duke and the other characters have any historical inspiration or are merely symbolic figures. Specifically in order to address these last questions and, more generally, to offer expertise on the drama’s historical background, a specialist in the history of the city of Parma would be a valuable member of the team. All these experts would not only contribute to the edition of The Duke of Parma, but they would also be able to develop parallel studies in their own fields.

The main goals of the edition project are to identify, describe, transcribe, and encode all manuscripts relating to The Duke of Parma; to create a digital archive of this tragedy; to present a critical text and define the best editorial model for presenting it to scholars and the public; to study the play from different perspectives and disciplinary approaches, such as Pessoa Studies (both dramatic and English production), Portuguese Modernism Studies, Theater History, English Literature, Comparative Literature, Textual Criticism, Critical Genetics, and History of the Italian Renaissance; to disseminate the results of the project through an international conference and the publication of articles and books. The philological part of the project will apply the following methodologies: manuscriptology to analyze, describe, and date the manuscript documents; digital philology to define the criteria for encoding the text in the TEI-XML language and to create a model for the digital presentation of the dossier; textual criticism to establish the chronology of the writing process and to define the general coordinates for a critical edition of the tragedy; and critical genetics to study the authorial interventions and to shed light on the compositional process of the play. Other disciplinary approaches will apply their own methodologies to study the tragedy from their specific point of view.

The heterogeneous results of this multidisciplinary project will have a significant impact on the study of Fernando Pessoa’s work and personality, shedding light on an important piece of his dramatic work that has not been published or studied. It will also provide insights into Pessoa’s creative process and make a crucial contribution to the study of the genesis of his English writings and his dramatic production. It will also be a valuable contribution to comparative literature. The Duke of Parma’s digital repository will make all the data in the play’s dossier accessible for the advancement of all types of study.

The multifaceted nature of the edition project is reflected in the contributions presented in this dossier, which sets out to coherently and sequentially present and explore the preliminary questions raised by the study of this play. First, Anglistics aspects of the text are explored with a focus on the classification of The Duke of Parma as a Neo-Shakespearean play. Diego Saglia’s “Neo-Renaissance Drama in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Notes for a Backdrop to Fernando Pessoa’s The Duke of Parma” opens the series of articles by illuminating, contextualizing, and problematizing this hasty designation. He refers to the widespread slow rediscovery of early modern drama in the nineteenth century, which resulted in the consistent production of plays inspired by the Renaissance and Tudor periods, deliberately imitating the language and diction, style and meter, themes, settings, circumstances, types, and staging devices of sixteenthand early seventeenth-century drama and theater. Saglia identifies plays from the Romantic to the late Victorian periods in British drama and theater that were influenced by Renaissance drama, with an emphasis on poetic language and the development of psychologically complex characters, as opposed to the typical melodramatic types. He proposes a possible explanation for the spread of this fashion in the consonance between certain aspects of Elizabethan theater and Romantic aesthetics, but also in the attempt to restore the prestige of the theater by clinging to an authoritative tradition as an antidote to the fashion for melodrama. In addition, he examines the opinions of eminent critics on this theatrical trend. Although generally ignored by critics and historians of nineteenth-century theater, the duration and scope of this neo-Elizabethan fashion (especially, the particular series of plays set in Italy) make it part of the plausible context for Pessoa’s equally neo-Renaissance Duke and its Shakespeareanism, which may have been heavily mediated by nineteenth-century reimaginings of early modern drama and theater. Thus, Diego Saglia’s study aims to provide a probable background for Fernando Pessoa’s Duke of Parma as an additional contribution to its contextualization within the development of British drama and theater in the nineteenth century.

Somewhat related to Saglia’s analysis is Teresa Filipe’s article, “Pessoa’s Duke of Parma: Readings from the Library.” Starting from the aforementioned reuse of formal structures and themes of Shakespearean drama in nineteenth-century English theater—especially the Italian references and settings—she identifies the English and Italian literature available in Pessoa’s private library in order to find potential materials that might have had some influence on the creation of The Duke of Parma. The tragedy’s clear Shakespearean overtones are reflected in its dated but stylish English. Filipe also emphasizes the use of French and Italian references resulting from the Elizabethans’ rediscovery of classical references and forms. Filipe points out that one of the most important revivals of Elizabethan theater in the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde, may have been responsible for Pessoa’s own reading of Shakespeare, with all its moods, atmospheres, and Italian lines and settings. She suggests that Pessoa possibly read the Irish author and wrote the Duke’s tragedy at about the same time. She also argues that, in addition to possible sources in the works of other authors, Pessoa’s own works may have served as influences. The Duke of Parma, like previous works, took Pessoa a long time to write, and he was also working on other writings at the same time. Therefore, there could have been some interference and contamination between these texts, including in the choice of names for the characters. Another aspect highlighted in Filipe’s article—through the observation of the private library and marginalia—is Pessoa’s attention to the analysis of formal aspects of language, revealing his interest in puns and double meanings, and the possible influence on Pessoa of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s theories about the link between language (with its structures and signs) and the acquisition of human knowledge and ideas.

As to be expected, theater is at the center of this dossier. Nicolás Barbosa’s “The Dawn of a Duchy: The Duke of Parma in Fernando Pessoa’s Dramatic Corpus” focuses on Fernando Pessoa’s theatrical production. Barbosa assesses the position of The Duke of Parma within the author’s dramatic corpus, which has only been partially published and researched. The Colombian scholar demonstrates the extent to which Fernando Pessoa’s dramatic works have been unjustly or, at least, arbitrarily excluded from the study, edition, and publication of Pessoa’s literature, when in fact they should be considered a key to a thorough understanding of Pessoa’s entire corpus. For Pessoa, the act of writing was itself a dramatic act, performed through a process of depersonalization that creates characters/creators who act in a stage dimension and in a “pretend play” dynamic. In addition, according to Barbosa, Pessoa’s earliest dramatic period is thematically and chronologically related to the emergence of heteronymy. His article maps Pessoa’s dramatic production, comparing The Duke of Parma and other dramatic works on the basis of their qualitative and quantitative characteristics.

João Dionísio’s “What’s in a List? On Fernando Pessoa’s Duke of Parma as an Item in Enumerative Writing” moves from the sources of the tragedy to its planning. Fernando Pessoa always had a systemic view of his literary work, partly due to its complexity, heterogeneity, and multifaceted nature. In addition, he always tended to plan his work, to conceive it as a complete literature to be presented to the public as a unified masterpiece. Unfortunately, this day never came, and Pessoa produced far more lists of works to be written than texts ready for publication. What stands out in Pessoa’s works is its prospective character and the constant tension between an architecture conceived as an editorial project and its limited existence as an idea still in the conceptual stage. Starting from the observation that Fernando Pessoa published only a minimal part of what he wrote—especially true of his dramatic production—Dionísio analyzes lists that include the title of The Duke of Parma in order to profile this text both in relation to its chronology and to provide context with Pessoa’s other works included in similar lists. This article compiles and analyzes all the mentions of this tragedy in the lists available in the Pessoa Archives in two stages: first, a preliminary reevaluation of the list-type documents in accordance with Pessoa’s views on his work; second, a study of the available material’s chronology, organization, and function. In the end, Dionísio’s analysis concerns the objective interpretation of The Duke of Parma’s references, which suggest that this drama occupies a unique place within Pessoa’s oeuvre.

The dossier then addresses questions related to the play’s genesis and the author’s method of working on his manuscripts. Carlotta Defenu’s “Authorial Interventions in the Manuscripts of Fernando Pessoa’s Duke of Parma” presents an overview of the material characteristics and authorial interventions revealed by the documents contained in The Duke of Parma file. Contrary to what has typically been done, Defenu proposes studying the authorial variations in Fernando Pessoa’s manuscripts for hermeneutic analysis rather than for editorial purposes. In other words, the genetic process can be studied in order to consider the text as the result of a potential verbal construction and not only with a teleological approach that necessarily points to its supposed final version. In fact, the methodology of genetic criticism offers the possibility not only of analyzing the manuscripts and establishing a timeline of authorial variants—that is, a chronology of the writing process essential for establishing the critical text—but also of uncovering a usus scribendi in the author’s work, his modus operandi in the genetic process of The Duke. To achieve the latter goal, Carlotta Defenu proposes using existing data in the genetic apparatus, which is mainly used as a simple repository of variants, a particularly relevant approach in this case since Pessoa’s theatrical production has rarely been studied from the genetic perspective. Thus, after thoroughly analyzing the writing materials and tools, Defenu examines the number and type of revisions made during the play’s composition, the types of author interventions, the presence of alternative variants about which the author made no definitive choice, paratextual annotations, imprecise authorial clues about the order of the dramatic episodes, and “exogenetic” documentation, that is, all the external materials that refer to the sources of this Shakespearean play. This analysis leads Carlotta Defenu to assert that Pessoa never reached a level of textual elaboration that would allow him to consider his tragedy complete and publishable. Moreover, this study allows us to delimit the universe of possibilities within which the author operated in making his choices and to understand the mechanisms and dynamics by which he arrived at them.

The final two articles of this special issue of the Luso-Brazilian Review are devoted entirely to ecdotic issues. First, Simone Celani’s “The Duke of Parma: Intersections” reflects on the nonlinear nature of Pessoa’s writing—wherein texts often defy the conventional notion of the work as a closed entity with clear boundaries—and the need to use philological tools and editorial methodologies that do not necessarily follow the expected paths. As Celani points out, Pessoa’s work cannot be fully condensed into a single edition because his work, due to its irreducible fragmentary nature and overflowing incompleteness, can hardly be reduced to discrete, finite, separate things. Celani also observes how, diachronically, Pessoa’s work unfolds as a series of synchronicities that link different works into a larger network. In this case, The Duke of Parma serves as a central axis or “geological core” around which to reconstruct the synchronic layers of Pessoa’s writing, along with other works that have a broad diachronic projection. From this point of view, an edition of The Duke of Parma could be a testing ground for the application of a new model aimed not only at achieving an internal reconstruction of the text, but also connecting it diachronically with the other texts that Pessoa was working on at the same time—a new editorial model based on the concept of the network, showing the intersections, nodes, and links with other works and their editions. In particular, Celani proposes a model (that has already been applied to Pessoa’s O Caso Vargas) designed to facilitate the dialogue between archaeology, mathematics, geography, linguistics, and philology, a model that works at both epistemological and methodological levels. The model is based on a database that makes it possible to register and classify all the material characteristics of the documents contained in the file and to display them graphically in a map (or network) that highlights all the links and connections that exist between the documents. The same principle can be applied to similarities between documents related to different works written at the same time; digital tools can be of great help in this regard, as the Digital Edition of Fernando Pessoa Projects and Publications site clearly shows. Such an edition, Celani suggests, should have three basic characteristics: it should be digital, collaborative, and networked, an open and shared edition in the many senses of these words. The Duke of Parma thus presents an opportunity to create “a new standard of communication between editions.”

Finally, Jerónimo Pizarro’s “Editing The Duke: Some Clues and Challenges” continues the philological debate by reflecting on some editorial issues raised by Pessoa’s English dramatic work. Pizarro begins by highlighting the recent and renewed critical and editorial interest in Pessoa’s English works and in his dramatic production. Nevertheless, he points out that The Duke of Parma, Pessoa’s most extensive dramatic work in English, still awaits study and edition. Pizarro suggests that a first phase in the tragedy’s composition was completed in 1913–14, an assertion supported by a 1912 note referring to a “Preface to the Duke of Parma,” suggesting that the tragedy was already at a fairly advanced stage of elaboration by then. Pizarro also suggests that the first group of manuscripts (114 D) of The Duke of Parma contains documents from this first phase, while the second group (115 D) contains manuscripts from after 1913. This was a time when Pessoa intended to submit some of his English poems, mostly written in an Elizabethan style and language (just like The Duke), to the attention of many authoritative and respected British critics of the time. Therefore, his tragedy must be placed in the broader context of his English poetry, at a time when he was still trying to become a recognized poet in that language. Pizarro then analyzes some of The Duke’s fragments, as he writes, “with a detective’s soul, following the clues that some of them offer.” The first goal is to establish some chronological landmarks in The Duke’s manuscripts by examining the papers in terms of their materiality, but also by reading their content. For example, he hypothesizes that the tragedy began to be written in 1906/07, based on annotations in some documents that refer to possible sources of inspiration for the tragedy or enter into a dialogue with them. He also suggests that there may be evidence of two distinct periods of more intense work on The Duke of Parma, one between 1906 and 1910 and another between 1918 and 1922. Pizarro seems to take up the challenge posed by Simone Celani’s proposal of a network of intersections when he speaks of the need to adapt concepts and methodologies to the reality of a work “that does not grow in an orderly way, but in a rhizomatic way” when it comes to the edition of a text such as The Duke. Finally, Pizarro appends to his article eight short, unpublished texts from The Duke of Parma.

This, then, is a preliminary overview—the result of a first approach—of the themes, questions, and problems that a work such as The Duke of Parma presents to those who approach it with the intention of delving deeper into what the mysteries of this text are today. At the same time, it is the most comprehensive dossier on this Shakespearean tragedy by Fernando Pessoa, the first step in a project that will be the main source of knowledge on The Duke of Parma. Finally, all that is left to me is to invite you to read the articles in this dossier and enjoy the contents that I have attempted to summarize here.