Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Sleep No More Again

Intertextuality and Indeterminacy at Punchdrunk's McKittrick Hotel

Authors

  • Alice Dailey Villanova University

Keywords:

Macbeth, Performance Studies, Film Studies

Abstract

This essay examines Sleep No More's citationality to consider which of its many intertextual references are mere Macguffins and which, by contrast, open up substantive interpretive potential. The essay focuses on the production's appropriation of Hitchcock and of early modern Scottish witch trials, concluding that its most suggestive citation is of Vertigo's McKittrick Hotel, a site which, like the McKittrick frame-fiction of Sleep No More, decidedly frustrates hermeneutic closure.

Author Biography

Alice Dailey, Villanova University

Alice Dailey is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. Her principal research interests are Shakespeare and devotional, hagiographic, and martyrological literature. She is the author of The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (Notre Dame Press, 2012), and her published work includes articles on Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the execution of Father Edmund Campion, and Chapman's The Widow's Tears. Her work on Shakespeare includes an article on Shakespeare's history plays in Shakespeare Survey.

ssue Cover text: B&L, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2012. Image: Lady Macbeth cradles Macbeth who sits naked in a bloody bathtub. Masked figures look on.

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Published

2020-06-25

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 2 (2012): Fall/Winter

Section

Articles