SEMIOSPHERIC REINSCRIPTION AND CULTURAL ADAPTATION: ROMEO AND JULIET IN THE CHILDREN’S UNIVERSE OF MONICA’S GANG

Abstract

The adaptation of Romeo and Juliet into the children’s television production Monica and Jimmy Five in the World of Romeo and Juliet demonstrates that intersemiotic translation, in complex cultural objects, goes beyond the mere transfer between sign systems. In addition to shifts in language, it involves transformations in medium, audience, cultural function, and reception regimes, thus requiring a broader conceptual framework. From the perspective of the semiotics of culture, this process can be understood as semiospheric reinscription, that is, a boundary operation through which a text, when crossing languages, media, and interpretive communities, reorganizes its expressive materiality, legibility, and meaning effects. The analysis is based on the script published by Silva in 1988, distinguished from the television broadcast of the production in 1979. The corpus shows that the adaptation does not function as a parody of the Shakespearean text, but rather as a ludic rewriting and cultural appropriation that preserves its structural memory while reinscribing it within the children’s universe of Monica’s Gang. In this process, key transformations include the attenuation of the tragic mode, the musicalization of speech, the increased use of rhyme, the axiological reconfiguration of the ending, and the spatial relocation of the narrative to Ouro Preto, understood as a Brazilian mediation of Verona. The adaptation thus constitutes a paradigmatic case of intersemiotic translation as semiospheric reinscription.