rmulae, model rhythms, bits of social discourse pass into the text and are redistributed within it. [...] The intertext is a field of anonymous formulae whose origin is rarely recoverable, of unconscious or automatic citations without speech marks.
             The intertextuality of Marat/Sade is embedded in the historical facts that it draws on and adheres to and the framework of text, being a play about a play. Patterned as a kind of theme and variations on Virginia Woolf's classic modernist text Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham in The Hours has created a profoundly original work that both illuminates Woolf's novel and stands on its own much in line to what intertextuality is.
             Drawing on and generally adhering to historic facts of the French Revolution and incorporating characters based on prominent figures, Weiss in 1963 thought up a play (Marat/Sade) that takes place in the Charenton Hospice on 13 July 1808. More accurately, Charenton in 1808 forms the framework for a play that takes place fifteen years earlier. In the Plot of the framework the inmates and the hospice director Coulmier, along with his family, gather in the hospice's bath house to watch some of the inmates perform a play about the murder of Jean Paul Marat. During the Performance Coulmier and his family from time to time intervene to critique opinions expressed by the characters or to restore order among the inmates who are getting restless. This Brechtian technique of 'alienation' is "the art of placing an action at a distance so that it can be judged objectively and so that it can be seen in relation to the world-or rather, worlds-around it." The 'Interruptus' in which the herald
             Now it's a part of Sade's dramatic plan
             to interrupt the climax so this man
             Marat can hear and gasp with his last breath
             at how the world will go after his death
             ...