1st Edition

Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange Early Modern to Present

Edited By Enza De Francisci, Chris Stamatakis Copyright 2017
    326 Pages
    by Routledge

    326 Pages
    by Routledge

    This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

    CONTENTS





    Acknowledgements





    Notes on Contributors





    Foreword, Susan Bassnett





    Introduction, Enza De Francisci and Chris Stamatakis





     



    PART I:



    Early Modern Period



    Dialogues and Networks





    1. Shakespeare, Florio, and Love’s Labour’s Lost



    Giulia Harding and Chris Stamatakis





    2. A Tale of Two Tamings: Reading the Early Modern Shrew Debate from a Feminist Transnationalist Perspective



    Celia R. Caputi





    3. Shakespeare and the Commedia dell’Arte



    Robert Henke





    4. The Unfinished in Michelangelo and Othello



    Rocco Coronato





    5. Shakespeare and Italian Republicanism



    John Drakakis





    6. "A kind of conquest": The Erotics and Aesthetics of Italy in Cymbeline



    Subha Mukherji







    PART II:



    Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries



    Translation and Collaboration





    7. The Eighteenth-Century Reception of Shakespeare: Translations and Adaptations for Italian Audiences



    Sandra Pietrini





    8. Shakespeare’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Giulio Carcano’s Translation of Macbeth



    Giovanna Buonanno





    9. Verdi’s Shakespeare: Musical Translations and Authenticity



    René Weis





    10. Eleonora Duse as Juliet and Cleopatra



    Anna Sica





    11. Representations of Italy in the First Hebrew Translations of Shakespeare



    Lily Kahn





    12. Through the Fickle Glass: Rewriting and Rethinking Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Italy



    Matteo Brera





     



    PART III:



    Twentieth Century To The Present



    Origin

    Biography

    Enza De Francisci is Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow.



    Chris Stamatakis is Lecturer in English at University College London, UK.

    "Perhaps the most theatrical section of the book is “Shakespeare, tradition, and the Avant-Garde in Chiara Guidi’s Macbeth su Macbeth su Macbeth” since there is an interview conducted by Sonia Massai and while Chiara Guidi is answering the questions she reveals an innovative approach to Shakespeare and especially to his texts (his words, his language)." -- Necla Cikigil, Middle East Technical University