ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a film, My Own Private Idaho, as fragmentation of textual and physical bodies, both Shakespearean and its own, focusing particularly on the appropriation of 1 and 2 Henry IV's marginal characters and its carnivalesque reversals and corporeal tropes. It also explores the body trope in Idaho and its relationship to Shakespeare and to the Henry IV plays specifically. My Own Private Idaho's focus on time, sex, death and rebirth is presented as pure carnival, culminating in the festive funeral of its Falstaff, Bob Pigeon. Notions of a sexualised Shakespeare Character should be differentiated from the figurative text-as-body approach to appropriation. The inversion of Shakespeare's cultural capital is mirrored in the carnival world in the film, in which the anachronism Shakespeare provides becomes part of a moment of festivity and in which carnival bodies, both corporeal and textual, is like treasured relics at once fragmented, hilarious and adored.
