Migrating Shakespeare

First European Encounters, Routes and Networks

Janet Clare, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, David Schalkwyk, Silvia Bigliazzi, Janet Clare, Dominique Goy-Blanquet

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350103290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Migrating Shakespeare offers the first study of the earliest waves of Shakespeare's migration into Europe. Charting the spread of the reception and production of his plays across the continent, it examines how Shakespeare contributed to national cultures and – in some cases – nation building. The chapters explore the routes and cultural networks through which Shakespeare entered European consciousness, from first translations to stage adaptations and critical response. The role of strolling players and actors, translators and printers, poets and dramatists, is chronicled alongside the larger political and cultural movements shaping nations. Each individual case discloses the national, literary and theatrical issues Shakespeare encountered, revealing not only how cultures have accommodated and adapted Shakespeare on their own terms but their interpretative contribution to the texts. Taken collectively the volume addresses key questions about Shakespeare's naturalization or reluctant accommodation within other cultures, inaugurating his present global reach.

1

‘Michelangelo of tragedy’

Shakespeare’s tortuous Italian routes

Maria Luisa De Rinaldis

Approaching Shakespeare’s migration to Europe through the idea of the nation state can be anachronistic. Indeed a nation state did not exist in Italy until unification in 1861. In Shakespeare’s time Italy was fragmented, a fact capitalized upon by early modern playwrights in their use of diverse city states as locations. When Bonaparte presented himself as a liberator from reigning powers in 1796, the country was still composed of various states: Milan, which was part of the Austrian Empire, the Republic of Genoa, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Modena, the Duchy of Parma, the Grand-Duchy of Tuscany, the Republic of Lucca, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples. This chapter aims to reconstruct the early stages of Shakespeare’s migration to Italy through critical responses, performance and translations – trajectories which rarely overlapped – before he became firmly established and even hailed by the translator Michele Leoni as a ‘Michelangelo of tragedy’.

Early modern Anglo-Italian communications were limited. Observations on English theatrical performances written in 1618 by Orazio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian Embassy in London, and by Gregorio Leti in his Teatro Britannico (1683) reveal an interest in the sophistication of spectacles and in theatrical architecture, but no playwright was mentioned by name (Collison-Morley). In part this was because, with such a highly developed literary culture of their own, Italians were hardly receptive to migrant literatures, especially one from a predominantly Protestant nation. A major exception to this generalization was Venice, where a number of political tracts, including a proclamation by Elizabeth I and works by Robert Cecil and James I, were translated for the Venetian élites when there were hopes Venice could be won to the Protestant cause (De Rinaldis). Moreover, as a centre for trade, Venice was more open and receptive than the rest of Italy to foreign cultural influences.

Critical work

One of the earliest Italian engagements with Shakespeare was in the early eighteenth century when the Paduan Antonio Schinella (1677–1749), better known as abbot Conti, wrote his work Il Cesare, which circulated in manuscript form before it was published in 1726.¹ Conti, translator of Racine and Pope, had earlier visited England in order to meet Isaac Newton, and there had read John Sheffield’s neo-classical re-writings of Julius Caesar in two plays, Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus. Inspired by these plays, he wrote Il Cesare (1726a), shortly before translating Voltaire’s Mérope; like Voltaire, he would dedicate another Roman play, Giunio Bruto (1743), to the founder of the Republic. In the text which prefaces Il Cesare, ‘Risposta al Sig. Iacopo Martelli’, Conti refers to Sheffield’s work as ‘Sasper’s Caesar cut in two’ and, although he does not acknowledge Shakespeare as a direct source, he discusses his value: ‘Sasper è il Cornelio degl’Inglesi, ma solo più irregolare del Cornelio, sebbene al pari di lui pregno di grandi idee, e di nobili sentimenti’ (1726b: 54, ‘Shakespeare is the English Corneille, only more irregular than Corneille, although similarly full of great ideas and noble feelings’). He finds faults in Shakespeare’s plot, nevertheless he acknowledges that tragedy had to ‘please’, and that Shakespeare’s plots, as in Spanish tragedies, were a rich combination of events that appealed to seventeenth-century readers. Conti’s response neatly exemplifies the pattern of attraction and repulsion through which Shakespeare was approached in the eighteenth century. In his dramatic hierarchy, it was Addison’s Cato that he valued as ‘la prima tragedia regolare degl’Inglesi’ (55, ‘the first regular English tragedy’). In the ‘Risposta’ he defends his version against those who were critical of his aesthetic distance from tragic pathos, intimating that Shakespeare has his admirers in Italy who appreciate the emotional power of his texts. Nonetheless, Conti insists on the serious quality of his own material, that is, the story of the greatest Republic, and the death of the most celebrated man the Romans ever had. He wrote his own play according to neo-classical standards, limiting the passing of time to the report of Caesar’s assassination and respecting the unity of place in locating action in the courtyard of Caesar’s house. The extent to which Conti was directly influenced by Shakespeare has been the subject of critical debate, obviously complicated by the fact that he uses the same sources as Shakespeare. Conti’s text echoes moments of Shakespeare’s dramatic intensity. In Julius Caesar Caesar reports Calpurnia’s premonition of his death: ‘She dreamt tonight she saw my statue, / Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts, / Did run pure blood’ (2.2.76–8), a reference to the bleeding statue of Pompey which Plutarch does not put in the mouth of Calpurnia. In Conti’s text, Caesar’s wounds are ‘cento’ as in Shakespeare’s image: ‘Squarciata è la tua toga, e da ben cento / Ferite sgorga in larga copia il sangue’ (4.1, p. 158, ‘Your toga is ripped, and blood gushes in abundance from a hundred wounds’). In re-adapting his sources, Conti appears to have been in some contact with Shakespeare (Sestito).

The abbot was part of a circle of cosmopolitan intellectuals, in England he knew Newton, Sheffield and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, among other aristocrats and scientists; in France he was in contact with philosophers, mathematicians, with writers like Fontenelle (Conti 1726b; Toaldo; Dorris; Petrone Fresco), and Voltaire who mentions him in his correspondence. He also travelled to Germany and Holland. Notably, it was through Conti’s writings that the Swiss critic Johann Jakob Bodmer developed his appreciation of Shakespeare (Orsini). Conti’s comparison of Shakespeare and Corneille in his ‘Risposta’ expresses the ideological framework in which his vision of Shakespeare took shape; it was French classicism as codified by Voltaire that dictated current literary parameters.

Paolo Rolli’s (1687–1765) comments on Shakespeare were published a few years after Conti’s. In his ‘Life of John Milton’, prefacing his Italian translation of the first six books of Paradise Lost (1729), and in his ‘Osservazioni’ (remarks), published in the Veronese edition of the translation of Milton (1730), Rolli dismissed Voltaire’s approach. While, in his Essay upon the Epick Poetry of all the European Nations (1727), Voltaire had admired the genius of Shakespeare he had emphasized his aesthetic ‘absurdities’, negative judgements which were reiterated in subsequent work. In ‘Life of John Milton’, Rolli, instead, praised Shakespeare as a genius and an interpreter of national history, who elevated the English theatre to ‘insuperable sublimity’ (11). In his tragic histories, Rolli writes, ‘i fatti ed i caratteri de’ Personaggi interlocutori sono così viva [sic] e poeticamente e con adattissimo stile espressi; che nulla più’ (‘the facts and the characters of the protagonists are so vividly and poetically expressed and in a most proper style; as cannot be bettered’). Shakespeare is presented as a model, even of style, for other nations, while inelegancies and passages judged un-Shakespearean are disregarded on the supposition that they were ‘added’ by contemporary actors (12).

Rolli’s highest accolade is to compare Shakespeare with Dante (12): ‘di lui dico quel che asserisco del Dante; cioè ch’eglino due soli me fanno altamente meravigliare d’aver i primi tanto sublimamente poetato nella loro lingua’ (‘I can say of him what I say of Dante: they are the only two who astound me with the sublime poetry they were the first to produce in their languages’). His defence of Shakespeare from Voltairean criticism led him to translate Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ in order to illustrate how much Voltaire had deviated, in his own translation, from the style and sentiment of the original. In place of Voltaire’s anti-clerical comments:

On nous menace, on dit que cette courte vie,

De tourments éternels est aussi-tôt suivie.

O mort! moment fatal! affreuse éternité,

Tout cœur à ton seul nom se glace, épouvanté.

Eh qui pourroit sans toi supporter cette vie,

De nos Prêtres menteurs b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: ‘Migrating Shakespeare’
• 1 ‘Michelangelo of tragedy’: Shakespeare’s tortuous Italian routes
• 2 ‘No stranger here’: Shakespeare in Germany
• 3 Shakespeare at cultural crossroads: Switzerland
• 4 Opening the book: The disclosure of Shakespeare in the Netherlands
• 5 Jean-François Ducis, global passeur: Shakespeare’s migration in Continental Europe
• 6 ‘No profit but the name’: The Polish reception of Shakespeare’s plays
• 7 From migration to naturalization: Shakespeare in Russia
• 8 Trade routes, politics and culture: Shakespeare in Sweden
• 9 The mirror and the razor: Shakespeare’s arrival in Spain
• 10 Migrating with migrants: Shakespeare and the Armenian diaspora
• 11 Shakespeare in Greece: From Athens to Constantinople and beyond
• Index
• Copyright