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Teaching Shakespeare through Dystopian Fiction: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium
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Reappropriating Romeo and Juliet : the Play restored to Italy
Full text linkThe story of Romeo and Juliet has been reinvented in a number of musical adaptations. One of the boldest and most sophisticated attempts is Giulietta e Romeo (2007), a two-act Italian production with the music of the French-Italian singer and composer Riccardo Cocciante and with a libretto by the poet Pasquale Panella. As Cristina Paravano argues in this article, the work offers a unique opportunity to rethink Shakespeare and Italy from a suggestive contemporary Italian perspective. What distinguished this production from other musical adaptations was its strong intertextuality on a musical and textual level. By embracing forms of re-creation and re -vision, it created a profoundly and intrinsically Italian version of the story, drawing on and combining Italian musical, literary, and cultural traditions. The result was a combination of Cocciante's pop-rock background, contemporary pop-electronic music, operatic conventions and techniques, and Italian musical tradition, all filtered through the memory of Nino Rota's tunes written for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, Panella's libretto taps into Shakespeare's Italian sources: while keeping to the Shakespearean plot line, the author adds interpolations from Luigi da Porto's Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1530) and Matteo Bandello's novella (1554, 2: IX). The present paper evaluates how this innovative rendition enacts a further exchange between England and Italy so that metaphorically Italy 'reappropriates'' its own story
Discourse is heavy, fasting : Food Imagery in Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline
No full textThis essay explores how Shakespeare developed his re-envisioning of the myth of the Roman empire and its civilization through recourse to food images in Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline. Both plays are punctuated by references to foodstuffs, animals and mutilated body parts, while at the same time featuring moments of conviviality. Within the conventions of different genres, Shakespeare exploited such elaborate food imagery to discuss, from a specular perspective, the same issues, while simultaneously conveying his vision of Rome. In Titus Andronicus the recurring bodily parts are the epitome of the fragmentation of the body politic of “headless Rome” (1.1.186) and of the disintegration of the traditional Roman values and principles under the threat of barbaric invasion. On the other hand, in Cymbeline, set at the time of Emperor Augustus, Shakespeare seems to take stock of his previous works, many of which powerfully resonate in this play, shaping an ambiguous and fascinating image of Rome
Youle zee zuch an altrication in him as never was zeen in a brother : Somerset dialect in Richard Brome’s ‘The Sparagus Garden’”
No full textThe paper proposes to explore the use of south-western stage dialect in The Sparagus Garden (1635) by the Caroline playwright Richard Brome. This dialect has a long tradition on the early modern stage, from Shakespeare and Jonson to Brome. In The Sparagus Garden the dramatist had recourse to south-western stage dialect for multiple reasons:
for comic purposes, to portray rustic characters and provide the play with a touch of local colour, but also to discuss social and political issues and to explore questions of identity. What will emerge is how Brome contributed to the development of this stage dialect providing it with a more profound artistic formulation
Maritime adventures : the example of Apollonius of Tyre and Sydney's Arcadia
No full textMaritime adventures: the example of Apollonius of Tyre and Sidney’s Arcadia.
In the paper I investigate two plays deeply concerned with shipwrecks and maritime adventures, The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Despite belonging to different genres and periods of Shakespeare’s dramatic production, they are respectively a comedy of the first phase and a romance of the last, they show significant similarities and common sources, such as an Alexandrine romance called Apollonius of Tyre and Sidney’s Arcadia, which both revolve around shipwrecks and sea adventures. I will analyze how Shakespeare has recourse to these works as a source, considering the influence of each of them and evaluating the different impact of the sea on the dynamics of the plays. In The Comedy of Errors they both represent the starting point for the development of the story: they offer character names or situations and are combined with the marked influence of Plautus’s Menaechmi which shapes the plot of the comedy. Instead, in Pericles their influence is so relevant that they become a key element of the romance. Actually, on the one hand, the poet John Gower, who put the story of Apollonius of Tyre into verse in his Confessio Amantis, is the chorus of the play; on the other hand, Pericles embodies the spirit of Sidney’s work so that the story is turned into an acute analysis of human condition also in terms of politics
Richard Brome and the Middle Temple : the triumph of justice?
Full text linkThroughout the centuries, the Middle Temple attracted the attention of many writers who exploited its multiple spots as starting points for their plots. Among them stands out the Caroline playwright Richard Brome, who used the location as a setting for two of his works, The Demoiselle (1638) and A Mad Couple Well Matched (1639).The article purposes to discuss the different functions of the location in the two plays and investigate the different ‘faces’ of the law at that time. In these plays he develops the much-discussed issue of justice in the place where laws should be applied, the Temple Walks of the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court, thus revealing the many contradictions of the contemporary legal system in an ironic and subversive way. The location provides both the plays with a background rich in resonances and social and political implications, and contribute to emphasize the strong presence of the law in London life and its ineffectiveness at the same time. If in The Demoiselle, the setting of the Temple Walks is used as a vehicle to discuss the issue of justice and reflect on the political situation, in A Mad Couple Well Matched, in which the protagonist lives in the notorious Ram Alley, it represents the lack of any kind of law in the moral, sexual or legal field. The Temple Walks stand out as the place of justice, a no man’s land for illicit dealings, a space where honesty and dishonesty coexist, where to assert one’s rights and to avoid discharging one’s duties. This contradiction clearly emerges in these two plays, in which Brome stages both the search for justice and its absence
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