Shakespeare's Italy and Italy's Shakespeare. Place, "Race," Politics

Abstract

This book investigates the cultural difference of Italy in and through Shakespeare. It looks at the encounter, collision, intermingling of the 'country dispositions' represented respectively by Shakespeare and Italy, both understood as vast constellations rather than fixed stars. The obvious premise is that several plays by Shakespeare are adaptated from Italian sources; the additional context is the constant presence of Shakespeare in Italian culture from the mid-nineteenth century on. The classical topic "Shakespeare and Italy" is here revisited from a new perspective, focussing on the playwright's Italian afterlife through the lens of the three categories that structure this book: place, 'race', and politics. My twofold and chiastic objective is to ask how Italy explains Shakespeare and how Shakespeare explains Italy, seeking possible answers in various texts, events, sites: a Victorian racialist interpretation of Shakespeare that casts Iago as the archetypal Italian specimen; a Romantic adaptation of Othello written in Venice under Austrian rule; the Fascist appropriations of Shakespeare; the disparate uses of Machiavelli in recent Shakespearean criticism; the absence of Giordano Bruno in Shakespeare studies after Frances Yates; an essay on Hamlet by a prominent Italian philosopher and politician; monuments and sites associated with Shakespeare in Verona and Venice; the Taviani brothers' filmic version of Julius Caesar.